Latest election troubles show that U.S. system still needs work

Opinion   The Daily Oakland Press

Web-posted Jan 4, 2005

It's now been two months since the national, state and local elections of 2004 and some outcomes have just been resolved.

In North Carolina, the balloting for state agriculture commissioner was so fouled up that they'll hold another election for that office. The rest of the states have successfully whistled past the graveyard, with the ghost of the 2000 presidential fiasco in mind.

But no one can be assured something similar won't happen again. Even after the improvements made before November's voting, there were plenty of glitches.

In six states, voters claimed they'd voted for Sen. John Kerry on touch-screen machines but were recorded as having voted for President Bush.

In New Orleans, incompetent poll workers told early voters to come back because they couldn't figure out how to turn on the voting machines.

An Ohio precinct recorded nearly 4,000 votes for Bush, despite the fact that only 683 voters had shown up. It was a computer error and election workers have not been able to reproduce it.

The most common fix suggested is that at least the presidential balloting be subject new federal standards that would be imposed on all states.

It would seem to be the obvious solution, except voters aren't voting directly for the presidential candidates. Technically, they are choosing electors for the constitutionally required Electoral College. It's the College members who cast the presidential ballot on behalf of the various states, not the voters.

So, someone is bound to argue that it must be the states that voluntarily agree to any voting changes because for Congress to order them would be a blatant violation of the legal reality that the state electors, not the people, make the decision.

We all should know by now that a state gets to count its two U.S. senators, plus its seats in the House, when determining the number of electors it can have. And that means the individual votes in small states count for more than they do in large states.

The electors make a substantive, not technical, difference.

Voting again, as in North Carolina, is no fix because only about 10 percent as many people will turn out for the single office as showed up in November. The difficulty there and in many other states was a problem with electronic voting machines that produce no paper record.

The only sure cure for preventing fraud by whoever is staging the election is to have the device print out a record for the voter of the electronic vote. The voter would verify its accuracy and it would be available for a recount.

Sometime this month the U.S. Election Assistance Commission will report on and make recommendations concerning the 2004 national balloting. It was created after the 2000 debacle.

Expect it to suggest federal funding for federal elections, with procedural strings attached. A state would be free to go its own way, perhaps satisfying the federal-state problem.

We don't know that fraud has occurred. All we know is that no one has been caught at it.