When democracy goes haywire

By Dieter M. Zube
Special to The Seattle Times 18 September 2004

When I received my U.S. citizenship last year, one of the questions I could have been asked by the INS officer was "What is one of the benefits of citizenship?" The correct response would have been, "The right to vote." So Tuesday I exercised for the first time my new right to vote in the U.S., in our state's primary election.

But what I read about the election process and some of the problems encountered in some polling stations led me to conclude that the elections as held don't pass muster for being all that democratic. (See "Nonpartisan voters baffle ballot machines," Times, Local News, Sept. 15.)

When I grew up in West Germany in the 1970s, one of the things we learned in civics class was that democratic elections are defined as: 1) free (nobody influences your decision); 2) equal (everybody's vote has the same weight); 3) secret (if you don't want to, you don't have to tell anybody for whom you voted).

And when I lived in former East Germany in the early 1990s, I was the volunteer supervisor in one of the polling stations during one of the first elections after reunification. And, believe me, those East Germans took their new-found right to free, equal and secret elections seriously. A large group of people watched us counting the votes after the polling station had closed. And, yes, those were all hand-marked paper ballots, and we did not have the help of voting machines.

But now I hear that during Washington's primary on Tuesday, voters were told to leave their ballot sheets open until a problem with the polling machine was fixed, and that the polling machine has an "override button"! Doesn't sound like much of a secret election to me, if stacks of ballots are left in the open, or if the counting machine can be overridden.

Now I also hear that some of the new voting machines to be used in California and other states (Florida somehow comes to mind ... ) don't even have a way to create an audit trail. And the state election offices are willing to accept this with the justification that retrofitting those machines would take too much time.

Perhaps we should go back to the old paper-and-pencil ballot system. It would take longer to count the votes, but at least there is less concern about interpreting hanging chads and manipulated machines.

Democracy is too precious to do it just half-right. We need to be willing to make no compromises in this matter or lose credibility altogether.

Dieter M. Zube lives in Redmond