By Staff
A main question to be answered Nov. 4 is how much of a factor our election system itself will be.
We landed a man on the moon, so why does the most successful democracy in human history struggle so with conducting a reliable election – especially if 130 million Americans, including millions of new voters, present themselves at the polls?
After committing almost $3 billion to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) over the past six years, it ought to be smooth sailing, but potential problems don't provide much reassurance that we're going to reap improvement from our investment.
In New Mexico on Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots found their names missing from registration lists, forcing them to cast "provisional" ballots which can be reviewed and discarded at the discretion of election officials. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots – perhaps a million votes – got tossed in the trash.
Suppressing the vote is fundamental to GOP electoral strategy.
Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich once said, "I don't want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
HAVA, passed in 2002, was intended as reform to avoid repeating the Florida debacle of 2000 which left the Supreme Court to decide the White House.
Florida's GOP-dominated Legislature created fines up to $5,000 per violation for groups failing to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms.
Faced with potentially huge penalties for clerical errors, even the League of Women Voters abandoned its voter-registration drive. A court order eventually reduced the maximum penalty to $1,000, but critics still regard it as a "democracy tax."
Florida GOP officials rejected 15,000 new registrants in 2006-2007 – 75 percent happened to be Hispanic and black voters.
HAVA helps some states reject first-time registrants whose data does not correspond precisely to other government databases, such as driver's licenses.
With information such as Social Security numbers, street addresses and names required to be spelled exactly, a typing mistake can cost a veteran voter the right to vote.
Disenfranchisement by typo sounded like a good idea at the time – solving old problems with new technology – but Wisconsin suspended database purges after an August check turned up a 22-percent match failure rate.
In fact, four of six former judges who oversee its state elections couldn't be matched with state driver's license data.
In California, the Republican Secretary of State reportedly blocked 43 percent of all new voters from registering in 2006.
HAVA centralizes and computerizes records that are maintained by the Secretary of State.
In some ways this is a major improvement over little handwritten file cards, but those records were overseen by bipartisan county election boards.
Partisan state officials are empowered to purge rolls of voters they deem ineligible.
At the other end of the technology spectrum, 11 million people live in counties that will still vote with lever machines or punch-card ballots – even though the congressional deadline to replace that equipment expired in 2006.
Now that purges are nationalized, state officials reportedly scrubbed almost 10 million voters in 2004-2006 – led by Colorado at almost one of every six.
President Bush appointed Colorado's Republican Secretary of State to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency HAVA created to guide states in "list maintenance."
According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, investigating 2000 Florida returns, African-Americans were almost 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected. In 2004, New Mexico's 19,000 spoiled ballots was three times George Bush's victory margin.
This must be monitored carefully because taken together, we're talking about enough votes to swing a presidential election as tight as 2000 or 2004.