Those Damned Machines
Election 2006 is technically not over. While the overall results are not in question, there are still some House seats in question because of the closeness of the votes. Overall, though, the election appears to have gone more smoothly than the last couple of elections. There certainly are fewer claims of fraud and election mismanagement in the process itself. At the same time, however, there were plenty of glitches on November 7: inadequate numbers of paper ballots at several polling stations; problems with voter lists; and, of course, malfunctioning electronic voting machines.
Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and an elections expert, has an interesting op-ed piece in today's NY Times in which he makes the case for shifting the emphasis on election analysis away from the machines (or methods used to cast votes)to the people responsible for running the elections.
But this reaction to the bugs and glitches shows that Americans have not learned the right lesson from 2000: the problem is not with the technology of running our elections but rather with the people running them.
The United States should join the rest of the world’s advanced democracies and put nonpartisan professionals in charge. We need officials whose ultimate allegiance is to the fairness, integrity and professionalism of the election process, not to helping one party or the other gain political advantage. We don’t need disputes like the current one in Florida being resolved by party hacks.
Critics of electronic voting raise two main issues: machines are susceptible to fraud (or hacking) and they are difficult to use.
Fraud problems would not go away if we switched to vote by mail, as Oregon has. Such voting — let’s call it mandatory absentee balloting — takes the voter out of the polling booth and puts him at home or elsewhere, someplace where votes could be sold to the highest bidder. Most of the documented cases of voting fraud in the United States in recent years involve absentee ballots. At the beginning of the last century, voter turnout declined as states adopted secret, in-person balloting, most likely because corrupt politicians stopped buying votes since they couldn’t verify that people were really voting for their candidate.
The point is not that electronic voting is the best system; maybe it should be scrapped. The real solution is to create a cadre of dedicated, professional nonpartisan administrators with enough money to run a scrupulously fair and voter-friendly system of election administration to resolve such questions.
To improve the chances that states will choose an independent and competent chief elections officer, states should enact laws making that officer a long-term gubernatorial appointee who takes office only upon confirmation by a 75 percent vote of the legislature — a supermajority requirement that would ensure that a candidate has true bipartisan support. Nonpartisanship in election administration is no dream. It is how Canada and Australia run their national elections.
The strawman in election reform has always been the machine, just as it is in this analysis. The complaints are not about the machines, but rather the reliability and security of the machines. People want to know that their votes count and will be counted. Too many independent studies have shown that the current election machines are insecure, easily hacked, and prone to rather suspicious breakdowns. These problems could, however, be fixed if there were a will to do so. It is no accident that a Senate bill which proposed such fixes never made it to the floor in the current Congress.
That criticism of Mr. Hasen's argument aside, however, the man makes a good point: the people in charge of elections are the critical factor. In California, the Secretary of State is charged with that responsibility, and that post is an elected position, which means that the office holder is to some greater or lesser extent a partisan. At the local level, the County Registrar of Voters is charged with the nuts and bolts of the election (overseeing voter registration, providing ballots, machines, poll locations, poll workers, tabulation workers, etc.). In most municipalities, this also is an elected position.
Could the current Secretary of State order a questionable voter list purge as was done in Ohio? Probably. Would such a purge happen under an independent commission? Probably not, although there certainly is no absolute guarantee of that. The benefit of an elected Secretary of State, however, is that the individual holding the position can be ousted, either by recall or by voting him or her out at the next election. The independent commissioner proposed by Mr. Hasen does not have that direct accountability.
Perhaps a national, independent commission running all elections should be explored, but until it can be demonstrated that there will be a direct accountability to voters, the idea will be a hard sell.
Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and an elections expert, has an interesting op-ed piece in today's NY Times in which he makes the case for shifting the emphasis on election analysis away from the machines (or methods used to cast votes)to the people responsible for running the elections.
But this reaction to the bugs and glitches shows that Americans have not learned the right lesson from 2000: the problem is not with the technology of running our elections but rather with the people running them.
The United States should join the rest of the world’s advanced democracies and put nonpartisan professionals in charge. We need officials whose ultimate allegiance is to the fairness, integrity and professionalism of the election process, not to helping one party or the other gain political advantage. We don’t need disputes like the current one in Florida being resolved by party hacks.
Critics of electronic voting raise two main issues: machines are susceptible to fraud (or hacking) and they are difficult to use.
Fraud problems would not go away if we switched to vote by mail, as Oregon has. Such voting — let’s call it mandatory absentee balloting — takes the voter out of the polling booth and puts him at home or elsewhere, someplace where votes could be sold to the highest bidder. Most of the documented cases of voting fraud in the United States in recent years involve absentee ballots. At the beginning of the last century, voter turnout declined as states adopted secret, in-person balloting, most likely because corrupt politicians stopped buying votes since they couldn’t verify that people were really voting for their candidate.
The point is not that electronic voting is the best system; maybe it should be scrapped. The real solution is to create a cadre of dedicated, professional nonpartisan administrators with enough money to run a scrupulously fair and voter-friendly system of election administration to resolve such questions.
To improve the chances that states will choose an independent and competent chief elections officer, states should enact laws making that officer a long-term gubernatorial appointee who takes office only upon confirmation by a 75 percent vote of the legislature — a supermajority requirement that would ensure that a candidate has true bipartisan support. Nonpartisanship in election administration is no dream. It is how Canada and Australia run their national elections.
The strawman in election reform has always been the machine, just as it is in this analysis. The complaints are not about the machines, but rather the reliability and security of the machines. People want to know that their votes count and will be counted. Too many independent studies have shown that the current election machines are insecure, easily hacked, and prone to rather suspicious breakdowns. These problems could, however, be fixed if there were a will to do so. It is no accident that a Senate bill which proposed such fixes never made it to the floor in the current Congress.
That criticism of Mr. Hasen's argument aside, however, the man makes a good point: the people in charge of elections are the critical factor. In California, the Secretary of State is charged with that responsibility, and that post is an elected position, which means that the office holder is to some greater or lesser extent a partisan. At the local level, the County Registrar of Voters is charged with the nuts and bolts of the election (overseeing voter registration, providing ballots, machines, poll locations, poll workers, tabulation workers, etc.). In most municipalities, this also is an elected position.
Could the current Secretary of State order a questionable voter list purge as was done in Ohio? Probably. Would such a purge happen under an independent commission? Probably not, although there certainly is no absolute guarantee of that. The benefit of an elected Secretary of State, however, is that the individual holding the position can be ousted, either by recall or by voting him or her out at the next election. The independent commissioner proposed by Mr. Hasen does not have that direct accountability.
Perhaps a national, independent commission running all elections should be explored, but until it can be demonstrated that there will be a direct accountability to voters, the idea will be a hard sell.
Labels: Election 2006, Voter Fraud
posted by Diane at 3:05 AM
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