More honest elections

Opinion   Berkshire Eagle   22 November 2004

Was this year's presidential election honest? Did more Americans in more states with more electoral votes really vote for George W. Bush than for John Kerry?

The answer to both questions is an unambiguous "yes" from the Kerry campaign, which had 3,600 lawyers on the alert for any Republican attempts to steal the election as many Americans believe happened in 2000. But were there breakdowns, glitches and weird occurrences that fed feverish Internet theories of diabolical electoral fraud perpetrated by the GOP?

There were, and these problems had better be addressed in a forthright and nonpartisan manner if in 2008 the U.S. electorate wants to think of itself as being significantly different from Iran's.

Three Democratic congressmen have called for investigations of strange Election Day goings-on. The lawmakers are right to do so, for the mechanical and other snafus all seemed to favor President Bush. But both explanations and corrections have been made in most and maybe all cases.

Officials quickly spotted a computer error in Gahanna, Ohio, that gave Mr. Bush an extra 3,893 votes; that number was subtracted from his state total. In Broward County, Florida, many voters who voted for Mr. Kerry on touch-screen devices only to have Mr. Bush's name pop up, complained; the machines were re-set and the Kerry voters had their choices properly credited. This corrective pattern was repeated in several locales, and none of the situations still in dispute would come close to reversing the outcome.

Still, confidence in the electoral process is nowhere near what it should be, and Congress must re-energize efforts begun in 2001 after the Florida debacle to restore integrity in U.S. elections.

One important way would be to follow the examples of Nevada and California, which require paper back-up systems for electronic voting. Nevada's innovations came off without a hitch this year, and California's touchscreen/paper-backup machines will be in operation in 2006. The technology is there; all that's required is the money and the political will to spread these systems across the country and guarantee bipartisan checks to make sure there's no hidden software in these computers that will enable cheating by hackers.

Transparency and reliable vote counts will be easier to come by if election operations are truly nonpartisan. The parties in power now oversee voting, and Republican officials have been caught in Florida and elsewhere constructing barriers in heavily Democratic districts, with slipshod or even intentionally bad record-keeping, understaffed polling places and unreliable voting machinery. Scenes this year and in 2000 of voters in poor, minority, student and largely elderly districts standing in line for eight or 10 hours are unconscionable.

Nonpartisan organizations as insulated as possible from politics should conduct American elections. This might mean taking elections out of the hands of local and state officials and having them run by, say, the federal courts. What's clear is, the present system is an intolerable mess, and it does not inspire the confidence voters should demand of their leaders in a healthy democracy. - The Berkshire Eagle