A 'yes' vote for Ohio election reform
Registration, recounts among issues
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Diane Solov and Diane Suchetka
Cleveland Plain Dealer Reporters

The list of complaints about Ohio's presidential election is long.

Voters waited for hours to cast ballots, the state took a month to finalize vote totals and the man in charge of it all, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, was also a Bush campaign leader.

With Bush's inauguration in the rearview mirror, the problem can be addressed before the next election. 
 

No one is saying that Ohio - or any other state - can run a perfect election. Machines break. People make mistakes. Voters don't follow instructions.

Both Democrats and Republicans recognize the need for reforms.

"Americans have to know that the votes they stood in line for, fought for, and strived so hard to cast in an election, are counted," Demo- cratic presidential candidate John Kerry wrote in a recent letter to supporters.

Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said his party's perspective is simple. "We want all legal votes to be counted so every American's voice is heard on Election Day."

Election experts see parallel tracks to reform. One should address flaws that affect the individual voter.

The other takes on the systemwide issues needed to ensure accurate, fair and trusted elections.

"Elections are a process that is societal in nature, and so as concerned as we should be about individual rights, we have to be even more concerned that the process works for the citizens as a whole," said Ned Foley, an Ohio State University law professor and elections expert.

Many election experts, including Foley, target the front end of the voting process. An accurate voter registration list, they say, leads to an accurate tally of votes at the end of the game.

But how, and when, elections formally end is critical to ensuring the integrity of the process. Changing election calendars to expedite verification of the vote and permit timely recounts is on most reform lists. Ohio's recount wasn't finished until after the Electoral College met.

"If the recount had really mattered in Ohio, we would have had a train wreck," Foley said.

A prescription for starting the election reform process is simple: Create bipartisan committees in state legislatures and Congress to review election law every year.

That regular review is critical, said election law expert Dan Tokaji. For years, America's lawmakers have ignored election regulations and procedures. They waited until the frenzied election of 2000 to laws that had been on the books for decades. In their hasty attempt to fix some of the problems that surfaced in that election, they created others. "We're spending billions to bring democracy to Iraq. We need to spend billions, on a continuing basis, to make sure our democracy functions as the world's best democracy should," said Tokaji.