Dems' challenge for good reasons

By The Sentinel, January 8, 2005

A fair amount of grumbling accompanied Congress' counting of the electoral vote on Thursday, once the Democrats chose to challenge the vote by the Ohio delegation.

But the handful of Democrats who delayed the proceedings by a few hours had a point they wished to press. They wanted America, if for only the short amount of time it took to bring up their challenge and have it voted down, to think about the need for reform of the way elections are conducted in this country.

Elections typically are governed by the individual states as a matter of law. Nearly all elected officials fall under the jurisdiction of their states except for members of Congress, the president and vice president. Since congressmen and senators are elected within the boundaries of states, it is convenient for states to administer those elections as well.

That leaves the president and vice president, who are the only officials elected by all the voters in America. But under the law, voters are choosing their individual state's electors, not the actual candidates, which makes even the presidential election a state election.

As it happens, the mechanics of putting on an election are seldom questioned when the margin of victory is wide. There were no grassroots voter fraud campaigns made on behalf of Walter Mondale or Robert Dole, for example.

But the last two presidential elections were determined by the narrowest of margins, which caused the spotlight to fall on those places where the race was tightest. In 2000, it was Florida; in 2004, it was Ohio.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has led an investigation of electoral wrongdoing in Ohio and issued a 102-page report alleging numerous incidents of attempted disenfranchisement of voters, the vast majority of which took place in majority-Democratic precincts and against newly registered voters.

Poll workers reported that representatives of the private corporations that sold Ohio its voting machinery turned up unannounced in a number of places and made uninspected software changes to voting machines while recounts were going on.

And Ohio's Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell resisted all calls to investigate these incidents as they were uncovered, which you would not find surprising once you discover he was also chairman of Ohio's committee to re-elect Bush and Cheney. This marks the second election in a row in which a contested state's chief election officer doubled as chairman of that state's Republican presidential campaign committee.

None of this changes the result of the 2004 election, of course, but all of it undermines confidence in the electoral process. In a time when we are committing troops to establish democracy in Iraq, is it really acceptable for Americans to assume that their own close elections are being determined by whoever is the party in power in a particular jurisdiction rather than the will of the people?

Keep in mind that much of the contention over the 2004 election can be traced directly to the electoral college. Without it, Bush's popular margin of more than 3 million votes could never have been called into question.

By contrast, a switch of fewer than 60,000 votes in Ohio would have made John Kerry president against the wishes of more than 3 million Americans. The Democrats who challenged the electoral vote count on Thursday didn't call attention to that aspect of our electoral problems ? but it's one more reason to take them seriously.