Twelve years after a too-close-to-call presidential contest imploded in a hail of Florida punch card ballots and a bitter 5-to-4 Supreme Court ruling for George W. Bush, the country’s voting systems remain as deeply flawed as ever with any prospect of fixing them mired in increasing levels of partisanship. The most recent high-profile fights have been about voter identification requirements and whether they are aimed at stopping fraud or keeping minority group members and the poor from voting. But there are worse problems with voter registration, ballot design, absentee voting and electoral administration. In Ohio, the recommendations of a bipartisan commission on ways to reduce the large number of provisional ballots and long lines at polling stations in 2008 have come to naught after a Republican takeover of both houses of the legislature in 2010. In New York, a redesign of ballots that had been widely considered hard to read and understand was passed by the State Assembly this year. But a partisan dispute in the Senate on other related steps led to paralysis. And states have consistently failed to fix a wide range of electoral flaws identified by a bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III in 2005. In Florida, for example, the commission found 140,000 voters who had also registered in four other states — some 46,000 of them in New York City alone. When 1,700 of them registered for absentee ballots in the other state, no one investigated. Some 60,000 voters were also simultaneously registered in North and South Carolina.
The panel suggested changes including impartial election administration, better voter list maintenance, uniform photo ID requirements and paper trails for electronic voting machines. But Republicans in some states liked the ideas that fit their notion of what was wrong — potential for fraud. And Democrats preferred others — increasing voter participation. Little was done. “This has all become incredibly politicized in recent years,” noted Daniel Tokaji, an election law professor at Ohio State University. “If you go back in our history, you can find voter registration rules used to exclude blacks or immigrants from voting. But since 2000 it seems to have gotten worse. Both parties have realized that election administration rules can make the difference between victory and defeat in a close election. And unlike virtually every other country in the world, our systems are administered by partisan officials elected as candidates of their parties.”
Robert A. Pastor, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, who was executive director of the Carter-Baker commission, said the voter identification fights of recent months pale when compared with some of these other issues, especially voter registration. Only half of eligible voters in the country are registered and few of them lack photo IDs, he said. “The proponents of voter ID are adamant that it is essential to stop electoral fraud even though there is hardly any evidence of voter impersonation, and the opponents are sure that it will lead to voter suppression even though they haven’t been able — until Pennsylvania — to point to a single instance where a voter could not vote because of a lack of ID,” he said. “I did a survey of Indiana, Maryland, and Mississippi and found only about 1.2 percent of registered voters did not have photo IDs. The problem remains registration — not IDs — in reducing voting participation. To quote Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands war, ‘It’s a fight between two bald men over a comb.’ ”
Full Article: Voter ID Issue Is One of Many for U.S. Voting Systems – NYTimes.com.
The Voting News
A News Service of the Verified Voting Foundation
