Election Day leftovers

Editorial/Opinion   USAToday   28 December 2004
Compared with the presidential election in Ukraine, this year's elections at home went off smoothly. Certainly no candidate here had to overcome massive fraud or a bizarre face-disfiguring poisoning. But eight weeks after Election Day, several U.S. races are still unresolved because of glaring human errors, machine malfunctions, disputes over vague or contradictory election laws and other echoes of the mess that tied up the presidential race four years ago.

They are a reminder of how close the nation remains to a repeat of the contentious 2000 fiasco, and a monument to the failure of states to attack the problem.

In Washington state, the gubernatorial election has been through three recounts and stands a mere 130 votes apart. Democrat Christine Gregoire is on top in the final tally, a reversal of the original result, and Republicans are weighing their next steps, with legal challenges in the offing. In dispute are votes overlooked or disqualified earlier.

Puerto Rico's gubernatorial election is tied up in federal and commonwealth courts with battles over "mixed" ballots, in which voters indicate a preference for one political party overall but may then vote for another party's candidate in a given race.

San Diego's mayor, already sworn in for a second term, ran second among those who went to the polls Nov. 2, but more than 5,500 write-in votes for a challenger were disallowed. A recount has been requested, and a court challenge is likely.

Ohio's votes for president are being recounted. And two court challenges, involving the presidential race and a major statewide race, seek to have the election thrown out altogether because of machine malfunctions, the double-counting of some ballots and a failure to provide adequate numbers of voting machines, particularly in predominantly minority precincts. The evidence, however, does not suggest that the discrepancies would give John Kerry enough votes to overtake President Bush in the state that decided the race.

Presidential recounts are also being sought in New Mexico and Nevada. A scattering of legislative races from Texas to New York are still in dispute. And one North Carolina county has to vote again next month because 5,000 votes were wiped out by a computer.

Thankfully, the 2004 presidential race wasn't close enough to be within the "margin of litigation." But voters are routinely being disenfranchised by an assortment of failings. Among them:

?Counting errors. A review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. When the mistakes were pointed out to local officials, some were chagrined; others said they didn't want to be bothered correcting mistakes.

?Machine malfunctions. In Ohio, 92,000 ballots failed to record a vote for president, most of them in areas still using discredited punch-card technology, and an unknown number were counted twice. Optical-scan systems failed to record votes in parts of Arkansas. Glitches in new high-tech electronic machines gave Bush extra votes in at least one Ohio county and wiped out thousands of votes in others across the country.

?Registration confusion. Four-fifths of the states went into the election without computerized statewide voter databases. Congress mandated those databases to address the registration issues that arose four years ago. Standards for issuing and counting provisional ballots, cast by people whose status is challenged, vary widely among states and even within states.

?Legal uncertainty. From Seattle to San Juan, the ongoing disputes dramatize how many jurisdictions need to clean up the contradictions and disparities in their patchwork election laws. The objective should be for every vote to count, instead of for every vote to be open to legal manipulation.

?Lack of respect for voters. Reports of hours-long lines, too few voting machines and attempts to discourage voters through the ive enforcement of regulations suggest that too many officials treat the electorate as a nuisance to be kept at bay, not as the foundation of democracy.

Elections in this country are largely state and local responsibilities, and for most of the USA, the 2004 election was over nearly two months ago. But the widespread evidence of still-unresolved problems is a reminder of how much state and local officials have yet to do to make the most basic exercise of democracy work as it should.

It's not Ukraine, still just a fledgling democracy. But two centuries of experience should have taught us to do better.