The fact that the Democrats scored such a huge victory earlier this month should not make us forget that our election system (not just our voting machines) is horribly broken and must be dealt with in a strong and honest manner before November 2008 rolls along.
We certainly know that at least one election was, um, “marred by massive irregularities”, to say the least, costing the Democrats another seat. And frankly, lost in the celebration and euphoria of taking back both houses of Congress, real election reform should still be front and center.
There were over 12,000 complaints about malfunctioning machines or other “irregularities” and we had elected officials even having problems voting. The usual suspects (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia) plus California and North Carolina led the way with the most complaints. Not coincidentally, these states have been “repeat offenders” (Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida in 2004, Georgia in 2002 and Florida in 2000).
It is truly pathetic when a former President, Jimmy Carter, has an organization which has monitored over 50 elections and this organization would refuse to monitor the US elections because we don’t even meet the necessary criteria:
But there’s no doubt in my mind that the United States electoral system is severely troubled and has many faults in it. It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing. We require for instance that there be uniform voting procedures throughout an entire nation. In the United States you’ve got not only fragmented from one state to another but also from one county to another. There is no central election commission in the United States that can make final judgment. It’s a cacophony of voices that come in after the election is over with, thousands or hundreds of lawyers contending with each other. There’s no uniformity in the nation at all. There’s no doubt that that there’s severe discrimination against poor people because of the quality of voting procedures presented to them. Another thing in the United States that we wouldn’t permit in a country other than the United States is that we require that every candidate in a country in which we monitor the elections have equal access to the major news media, regardless of how much money they have. In the United States, as you know, it’s how much advertising you can by on television and radio. And so the richest candidates prevail, and unless a candidate can raise sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, they can’t even hope to mount a campaign, so the United States has a very inadequate election procedure.
Pretty pathetic for a country that is a beacon of freedom and democracy.
But it wasn’t just the Diebold machines or the potential for vote switching or the lack of a paper trail. It is the robocalls that were being done by the GOP. And while there is anti-robocall legislation in a few states, this is something that Congress should take up as part of a comprehensive voter reform initiative.
This article has a number of ideas, some pretty good – including instant runoff voting. There are also bills in the Senate by Clinton and the House by Holt which are good starts (hat tip to lorelynn for those links).
Archaic machines and machines proven to be easily hackable and unsafe. A lack of a papertrail. Partisan participation at the highest levels of the voting and vote counting process. Rampant voter disenfranchisement, dirty tricks and voter suppression. Illegal and false threats to discourage voters. Fraud and illegally discarding voter registrations. All of this was happening again in 2006.
Who knows if there were any other elections whose results were skewed enough to change the outcome? It certainly isn’t like the issue is unheard of. Or that a sitting republican Congressman didn’t say that they would take care of the counting back in 2004. But just because the Democrats took back the House and the Senate, and just because the 2008 Senate picture doesn’t look so hot for the republicans doesn’t mean that all is peachy in our electoral process.
And it doesn’t mean that there won’t be millions of voters disenfranchised, or there won’t be some “strange irregularities” or missing smartcards or attempts to confuse voters into voting the day after election day. Or calls for people to jam the voter protection hotline. Hopefully (and chances are) the republicans will be in more of a disarray as a party, and the Democrats will be in an even better position to add to their advantage in the House or Senate. And the stakes will no doubt be even higher than they were this past voting season.
Which is why it is imperative that we don’t let this issue die. That we don’t find ourselves in the same position we are now come November 2008. That we make sure that comprehensive voter reform – voter reform with teeth – gets implemented as soon as possible. There is much that needs fixing. But the right to vote, and have your vote counted, is the very definition of democracy.
And right now, our country is a worldwide laughingstock when it comes to the very foundation of democracy.
also in orange
What really pisses me off is how Markos refused to entertain stories of stolen elections, until “proven” now to his satisfaction.
But had he let people discuss the issue, we might not have lost Florida 13. Many more people might have joined the election reform movement, perhaps people in that district, and it would have been harder for them to get away with this. But so long as denial was the coin of the realm, most of the activists came from other places.
I’m glad he’s got religion now. But we needed to be working on this four years ago, after the 2002 reversals (six Dems who were polling ahead lost on Diebold machines). And certainly after 2004 and there was more than enough room for doubt.
I would have posted this over in orange, but I’m banned for having called out a front pager for showing a lack of backbone on this issue.
I hope those with an interest in this cause review suggested audit protocols, posted at http://www.countedascast.com/audits.php. The best thing people concerned with our votes can do is help their local, state, and national representatives understand what kind of audits are needed.
There’s a pointless argument in some circles between doing an apples-to-apples vertical audit, such as the one suggested by Holt’s bill – where some precincts, selected at random, are recounted on paper by hand in full as a check against the machines. This audit would give us 100% certainty of the will of the people, but would be limited to certainty in those precincts.
Others say no, what we need is an apples-to-oranges or horizontal audit – a dip into all precincts to see if the final tally seems reasonable. That would not give us 100% certainty in any precinct, but could give us possibly upwards of 90% certainty in all precincts, if the audit sample was large enough.
The argument is pointless because we obviously need BOTH types of audit. And rather than dissing those who are working with us, we should be trying to forge a path TOGETHER to save our vote. We have to be legislators now, citizen legislators, and help forge the legislation we can then ask our Congresspeople, Senators, and Assembly Members to pass.
Note: you have to scroll to the bottom of the page I linked to to find the suggested audit protocols. i haven’t read one that had “everything” in it yet – that’s why so much help is needed to find the right mix from all the proposals.
thx Lisa – I’ll check that link out. And I am with you on this being at least four years too late already.
Now is the time go all-out for deep election reform. People are as disgusted as I’ve ever seen with the electoral process, campaigning, and the money being wasted. Good proposals, well explained, would get a huge majority favoring them. There are no reasonable arguments against having an honest count and campaigns that actually examine real issues.
I have little faith that the Dems will do much reforming without being pushed mercilessly — the advantage is on their side now. I think the great hope is that the independent organizations like MoveOn, the unions, and so forth will put electoral reform on the front burner now in a nonpartisan way and force the pols to follow suit. We need real discussion of options including audits and verifiable machines, criminalizing of election fraud, banning of robocalls (for any purpose, in my opinion), and, ultimately, taking the money out of campaigning by banning political advertising for a period before an election and providing media forums for all qualified candidates, administered by non-political agencies.
This country is in dire need of change in many, many areas, but electoral reform (including heavy lobbying reform) make up the very foundation for all the other issues — without it we can hope for only the most minimal change possible in health care, relations with the rest of the world, minimum wage, and the safety net. The Right has known this for a very long time and worked hard to keep democracy from happening to America. Now’s the time to take our country to the people it belongs to.
And who is MoveOn, CommonCause, BlackBoxVoting? Just us. People like you, and me, who devote some of their lives to the cause.
Most people want to wait for someone else to fix what’s broken. This is one cause that really DOES need ALL of us. Find an election group and get involved. We don’t have nearly enough coverage across the country on this issue. Thanks!
This is an area that needs reforming when majorities are held.