Voting system flirts with disaster
By Don Campbell   USA Today   07 November 2004
The nation dodged a bullet last week, when Democrat John Kerry decided to concede to President Bush without waiting for a final vote count in Ohio. His decision also effectively ended a lot of other legal skirmishes at polling places across the country.

But just because Bush's margin of victory was large enough to withstand challenge is no reason to forget that we still need to get serious about reforming the nation's election machinery. Put bluntly, we need to take the politicians out of the process.

One reason that "early voters" stood in line for up to six hours in Georgia and other states during the past few weeks was because they were concerned that some snafu would jeopardize their votes on Election Day. Exit polling nationally showed that 1 in 10 voters (nearly 12 million people) feared that their vote wouldn't be counted accurately.

The sight of hordes of partisan lawyers descending on polling places throughout the nation last Tuesday was not reassuring. Even the good news of an unprecedented turnout demonstrated that the system wasn't prepared to handle the volume.

As the 2000 election debacle in Florida showed, and the confusion and allegations of fraud this year underscored, we can no longer afford to let state and local politicians administer what has become a nightmarish patchwork of election regulations. Indeed, the world was watching as its greatest democracy floundered Election Day. An editorial in Le Monde may well have been written in Cleveland: "What an example for a democracy to give the world, electors voting late into the night in Ohio, waiting for votes, faulty voting machines, these unending recounts!"

A federal solution

Though I detest government bureaucracy and the Big Brotherism inherent in its use of technology, it's time to federalize presidential elections and use simple computer technology to sharply reduce, if not eliminate, efforts by partisans to rig the system. We need:

? A non-partisan ? not bipartisan ? federal board or agency with the power to set and enforce standards on registration, absentee ballots, voting machines, provisional voting, military voting and ID requirements for prospective voters. This should replace the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which has been ineffective. Whatever solution it crafts should treat voting as a law-enforcement function.

? A national voter database or a network of state voter databases that can communicate with each other to automatically bar a prospective voter from being registered in more than one place. The EAC has directed states to create statewide databases, but few have complied.

In Cleveland, for example, a newspaper investigation found that 27,000 voters were registered in both Ohio and Florida.

So why are we still flailing after Florida 2000? The "fix" that was supposed to cure the ills wasn't a fix at all. In 2002, Congress created the EAC and gave it $4 billion to streamline voting. But the commission's most noteworthy act has also been its most controversial: requiring each state to allow provisional voting, in which prospective voters whose names aren't on registration rolls can cast ballots to be examined after Election Day. If election laws were national and uniform, there would be scant need for provisional voting.

Keep it simple

The objective is simple and not remotely partisan: Every citizen who is qualified to vote should be able to vote ? and have that vote counted ? once. Registration and voting should be made as easy as possible, but the integrity of the system has to be restored. Voter fraud should be vigorously prosecuted. It's a felony; let's treat it as one.

This need for a voting-system fix is often obfuscated by cries of disenfranchisement. Yet the notion that large numbers of Americans are being disenfranchised strikes me as absurd. In most states, you have to go out of your way not to be registered, and citizens are deluged with reminders of where and when to register and to vote. By fixing the system, we could quiet spurious cries of disenfranchisement.

This new agency also should mandate and finance electronic voting, with touch-screen machines that produce a "paper trail." Georgia just had its second election, with few glitches, using all-electronic voting.

I've always had a high regard for election officials I've met at the state and local levels over the years, but things are different now. Highly partisan ideological groups with bottomless bank accounts and no qualms about gaming the system are trying to hijack the process.

We must send them packing. If Americans can't have confidence that the system is honest, democracy can't survive.