Election reform needed: U.S. system would fail certification elsewhere

A Eugene, OR Register-Guard Editorial   11 December 2004

 If President Bush wants the United States to be a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world, he's going to need to spend part of his political capital to replace some burned-out bulbs in this country's democratic process.

More than 38,000 Nov. 2 election irregularities nationwide have been logged in the Verified Voting Foundation's election incident reporting system, most of which favored Republicans. Coincidence? Probably, but it's the kind of coincidence Americans typically associate with a banana republic, not with the Best of All Possible Nations.

But that's not the most important point. Ever since the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, Americans have been forced to confront the myth that U.S. elections are squeaky-clean manifestations of representative democracy. The reality, confirmed again in the 2004 national elections, is much messier.

Former President Jimmy Carter - a veteran international elections monitor - pointed out that the Nov. 2 election in the U.S. would not have passed his certification in a Third World country. The United States has no nonpartisan national elections commission to ensure fair and equal treatment of all voters. Voting procedures vary wildly throughout the country. Worst of all, in some jurisdictions there is no voter-generated paper trail on which to base a recount in a contested race.

The fact that the nation avoided the kind of embarrassing meltdown that occurred in the 2000 presidential election is no reason for celebration. Ohio may have officially certified that President Bush won the state by 119,000 votes, but lawsuits have already been filed asking the Ohio Supreme Court to void the election results and declare John Kerry the winner.

Critics of the Ohio vote tally cite widespread, though inadvertent, "migration of votes from one candidate to the other." A computer error in the Columbus suburb of Gahanna created an extra 3,893 votes for Bush in a precinct that recorded only 638 people casting votes on Danaher electronic voting machines.

Even though charges of partisan manipulation dominate criticism of the Nov. 2 voting, evidence from around the nation shows problems occurred in red and blue precincts. Voters complained about inaccuracies with new-fangled electronic machines in counties that voted overwhelmingly Democratic, and they groused about old-fashioned punchcard problems in GOP strongholds.

Thousand of voters stood in long lines for hours, often in the rain, waiting for a chance to use one or two voting machines in ridiculously understaffed polling places. Minority voters, young voters and first-time voters across the country complained about inappropriate challenges and bogus identification requirements.

Imagine if Washington state residents had used paperless touch-screen machines in more than two of the state's 39 counties in the Nov. 2 gubernatorial vote. Instead of a hand recount and visual examination of 2.9 million ballots to verify the winner in the closest governor's election in state history, county elections officials would be relegated to hitting the "print" command and accepting whatever the electronic machines spat out.

Tackling these problems won't be easy for a president who was unquestionably the beneficiary of a dysfunctional Florida election system in 2000. Election reform is never atop newly elected politicians' to-do lists. The existing system is what put them in office.

But the reforms enacted in 2002's Help America Vote Act prove that progress can be made. It's time to make more.

Elections in the United States ought to follow the same rules the U.S. would impose on, say, Ukraine, for free and fair voting. Partisan officials shouldn't determine which votes count and which don't - or who is qualified to vote.

Leaving the process of ing a U.S. president up to overburdened, underfunded, partisan officials in more than 3,000 counties throughout the nation ensures that inconsistency, arbitrariness and suspicion will continue to cloud election results and undermine voters' faith in our democracy.