Election reform NOW!

We need election reform now. The integrity of the process is critical if our elections are to be trusted by the voters. The NY Times tackles the issue with a review of what went on in Ohio. Some of it is simply outrageous.

"Although the turnout was not as large as the secretary of state had predicted," he said, "in quite a widespread number of precincts around the state, lines were horrendously long. At one time, one of them was estimated to be 22 hours."

By any standard this is completely unacceptable. The entire election is only 12 hours long. Before we allocate money for anything else, enough money should be budgeted to run an election that allows every person to vote within one hour of arriving at the polling place. Anything worse than that is not acceptable.

1) We need a national law that defines what the maximum acceptable waiting time at a polling place is and provides appropriate compensation (such as being able to vote no matter what time the polls close) for failure to meet the legal requirement.

Although the overall tenor of the article is reform-based, the Times couldn't resist a little bias.

Most scholars and lawyers agree the main problems in Ohio resulted from technical failures and inadequate resources rather than partisan bickering in polling places or intentional disenfranchisement. But they said poor and minority voters may have suffered disproportionately.

"There is a feeling here that the long-line problem was a problem of disparity that fell along socioeconomic lines," Professor Foley said. "There were isolated instances of long lines here in the seven- to nine-hour range, and the common lines were two to three hours. When your line gets to two or three hours, it's system failure."

Even if the waits were comparable in poorer and richer precincts, legal scholars said, they might have had a disproportionate impact. If time is money, a long wait is a sort of poll tax, and the rich may be more able to pay it.

These claims are outrageous. While admitting that the problems were caused by "technical failures" and "inadequate resources" and not "intentional disenfranchisement", they make the claim that "poor and minority voters may have suffered disproportionately. Then from there they leap to the completely unjustified conclusion that this disenfranchisement (which they haven't even proven occurred) might amount to a "poll tax", a reprehensible reference to a despicable practice that never should have been inserted into this article. (Thank God this didn't happen in Texas, or we'd be hearing references to dumb, bigoted rednecks from these "scholars".)

Is it not enough to dispassionately study the problem and suggest reasonable solutions? Is it really necessary to use inflammatory language that will confuse the issue and make it more difficult to find concensus? Isn't it in the best interest of all of us to have smoothly run elections with trustworthy results?

Long lines were not the only problem in Ohio, however.

The state relies heavily on punch-card balloting machines of the hanging-chad variety. Voting machines in Ohio failed to register votes for president in 92,000 cases over all this year, a number that includes failure to cast a vote, disallowed double votes and possible counting errors. An electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes to President Bush's tally in a suburban Columbus precinct that has only 800 voters.

Officials in Ohio will be able to reject some of the approximately 155,000 provisional ballots cast there, offered to potential voters whose names could not be located on local election rolls, because of the ambiguity of the standards.

Personally I don't understand why we have so much trouble with double votes on punch cards, but the hanging chad problem alone ought to be sufficient cause to eliminate them nationwide.

2) We need a national law that bans the use of punch-card voting systems and defines maximum allowable error rates for voting systems.

I'm not so certain that the "failure" to cast a vote really is a failure. I'd be intrigued to see what percentage of the votes in other systems (such as the optical reader system we use here) are "failures" to vote. I suspect there is some percentage of the population that simply chooses not to vote for President, for a variety of reasons.

While I approve of the provisional ballot idea (because I think we should be encouraging people to vote in every way that we can encourage them), I really think we need to look at how we register people to vote and how we maintain those registrations. Since every citizen of the US (almost?) has a social security number and most of them have to file a tax return every year (even if just to get a full refund), it seems to me that we could use that information to register people to vote.

If you are a US citizen, you should be permanently registered, even if you never vote. If you move to a different precinct or state, you should still be able to vote for national and state, non-geographically fixed candidates (President and Senator). If you've established residency (per the requirements of the state you are in) and you can prove it, you should be able to vote for all offices, including your local elections (Mayor, School Board, etc.)

3) We need a national law that defines how to identify citizens in order to register them to vote. Registration should be two-tiered. There should be a federal registration which is honored nationwide and permits a citizen to vote for all national offices (including Senate seats), and a state registration that defines who can vote for state-specific offices.

Your comments are welcomed.