Progressive Democrat Issue 99: VOTING REFORM: Machines and Beyond

I am taking this partly from a diary by Michael Bouldin on Daily Gotham, and partly from my own stuff.

Our elections are the basis of our democracy. Since 2000 our faith in our elections have been shaken repeatedly until it has become almost accepted that we may never really know who won an election. It is time to restore our faith in our elections, and I call upon all Democrats to fight for election integrity. It isn't just about who wins, it is about having faith in our democratic system.

Salon.com has a good run down of the Republican's dirty tricks in 2006 alone. Some excerpts:

In some states, like deep-blue Maryland, being a Republican is a political liability. Still, it's not often that you see Maryland's top Republican candidates actually pretending to be Democrats -- but that's exactly what Gov. Bob Ehrlich and Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who was running for the state's open Senate seat, did.

A flier distributed in majority black Prince George's County, and unsubtly hued red, black and green, featured three prominent black Democrats -- Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and former head of the NAACP; Wayne K. Curry, the former county executive in Prince George's County; and Jack B. Johnson, the current Prince George's county executive -- stating that each endorsed Steele for the U.S. Senate and Ehrlich for governor. In reality, none of them had endorsed Ehrlich, and only Curry had endorsed Steele. On the back of the flier was a "Democratic Sample Ballot" that endorsed Ehrlich for governor and Steele for Senate...

It's not illegal to be registered to vote in two places, as long as you don't vote in both. But that's not what Timothy Daly, of Clarendon, Va., was told. Daly got a message on his answering machine that told him that the nonexistent "Virginia Elections Commission" had "determined you are registered in New York to vote."

"Therefore," the message said, "you will not be allowed to cast your vote." It ended by promising Daly, who has voted in Virginia since 1998, that if he did come to vote, he would "be charged criminally."

Daly wasn't the only Virginia resident to receive such a message; enough similar calls were made, in fact, that the FBI has opened an investigation into the allegations. It's not yet known who was behind the calls, but it seems likely they would have taken an organized effort, or at the very least no small investment of time -- whoever called Daly and the other victims of the scam would have had to comb through voter registration data to find voters registered in multiple states...

Voters in New York, New Mexico and Virginia were told by anonymous callers that their polling places were changed and they were given erroneous directions to new polling places that didn't exist. In New Mexico, at least one call giving incorrect information about a polling place was actually traced back to the local Republican Party. Republicans claimed it was a mistake, but in response the state's Democrats unsuccessfully petitioned a judge to enjoin the state GOP from calling any more Democrats at all...

[A group in Tucson, AZ], which was three strong, and allegedly composed of two anti-immigration activists, Russ Dove and Roy Warden, carried a camcorder, a clipboard -- on which, they said, was information about a proposed law to make English the state's official language -- and a gun. While one man would approach a voter, holding the clipboard, another would follow, pointing the video camera at them. The third would stand behind, holding his hand to the gun at his hip in what activists on the other side called classic voter intimidation tactics in a precinct one local paper had previously declared the bellwether of the area's Hispanic vote.

These are disgusting actions taken by the Greedy Oil Party. It is just one piece of Republican efforts to lie, steal and cheat their way to victory. As one reader puts it "...if you can only win with BS tactics, maybe your politics SUCK!" Well, Republicans suck on the issues, so they have to resort to BS tactics.

One main thrust of our fight to restore integrity to our elections has been voting machines, opposing unreliable electronic voting machines in particular. You have heard me discuss this at length. That is an ongoing fight. But as the above examples show, there is more to he fight than just voting machines.

From Michael Bouldin's diary:

...there should be little doubt that, in the interest of government transparency and to further confidence in the vote, private systems not open to public inspection, and lacking means of verification, should not be acceptable to the electorate. Those who believe that partisans insidiously manipulate every perceived means to skew results can point to examples of just that. But there is far more that is wrong with our democratic process.

Partisan election administrators: As we saw in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, election administration by partisans is inherently detrimental to the confidence of the public in the results. Elections need to be administered by non-partisan bodies that can engender trust in voters.

Non-partisan redistricting: In the same vein, the districts created in a majority of states over the last decade have taken the partisan protection of incumbents to new heights. The re-election rate in most jurisdictions across the country is in excess of 90%, and not, one could argue, because we are blessed with such a stellar cast of legislators, but because they have rigged their districts to their own advantage.

Reliable technology: No matter how one feels about the claims of the Dieboldistas, it is entirely clear that the technology underlying the voting process is fragile. In this recent election, problems were reported, just off the top of my head, in Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Colorado. By comparison, Microsoft strives for a 99.999% on rate for its computer servers; it should be possible to have a system in place that achieves the same rate of reliability or better, no matter what the underlying technology is...

Poll workers: God bless them, every single one of them. But please, train them. If that costs money, and it does, it should be considered an investment on the par with new highways, schools, and so on – because these poll workers are responsible for the integrity of our most important small-D democratic process.

No right to vote: Arguably underlying the problems with voter confidence in election results is the stark fact that you do not have a federal right to vote. That right is granted to you by the state in which you live, and is exercised through thousands of local bodies that all have their own standards of eligibility and execution. It's worth considering whether that right, and the resulting process, should be federalized, to at least ensure uniform standards and methods; however, that would require a constitutional amendment, and create a new federal administrative bureaucracy, not necessarily palatable options.

Campaign finance: An ongoing scandal, and the proximate root cause of public corruption, lobbying scandals, and so on. In New York state elections, for example, the "limits" are $50,100 for statewide races, there are no limits to giving to family members (Mark Green's brother wound up spending, I seem to recall, $600,000 on that campaign). Federally, the $2,100 primary/general limits seem reasonable; but PACs, for example, can give $5,000 to candidates, and the limits for so-called "independent expenditures" are a mockery. At the least, we should be striving for transparency in reporting requirements.

Voter intimidation: It happens all the time and everywhere. Nor, frankly, is it only a republican problem, as primary voters in, say, Brooklyn can attest. There need to be effective criminal, not just civil, penalties for this; and these penalties should be applied not just to whatever hired thugs do the work, but to the candidates for which they do it.

Outright fraud: Again, something that happens in every cycle. This year, we saw deceptive robocalls depressing the Democratic vote; we saw equally deceptive flyers that falsely called Michael Steele a Democrat; and every two years, regularly as clockwork, printed materials show up in minority neighborhoods advertising false election dates, threatening criminal penalties for voters, and the like. In 2004, republicans shut down the New Hampshire Democratic phone lines. Again, these activities, broadly defined as electoral fraud, need to be prosecuted as felonies.

This is a good program for reform outlined here. I agree with most of what Michael wrote here. Partisan election boards are another thing I have been advocating against for some time. In 2004, the Carter Center, which has been respected the world over for election monitoring, refused to monitor Florida because Florida was found to not meet the Center's minimum standards for a fair election. Partisan election boards was the main issue. Election boards should, at a minimum, be bipartisan...I'd even accept multipartisan. Non-partisan is often a sham, so I'd be wary of that unless I could be really sure it was non-partisan. But having a single party, any single party, decide the validity of elections is un-democratic in the extreme.

As a bare minimum, I have been pushing for people who battle DRE machines to also focus on Secretaries of State. This doesn't solve problems per se, but it puts our people in a position to do something about problems that arise. One organization I HIGHLY recommend we all get behind the Secretary of State Project. They helped in several Sec. of State races around the nation in 2006 and I just talked with them and they plan on forging ahead for future elections.

I urge everyone to consider these reforms, then write your opinion on voting machines and election reform to the media, and to your state and Federal reps, urging them to take action. Now that we have swept state and National legislatures, the Democrats need to take the lead in this.


Click here to go back to THOUGHTS section and Table of Contents for this issue.