The North Coast times-eagle., October 01, 2006, Page 2, Image 2

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10 STEPS TO BETTER ELECTIONS
BY STEVEN HILL
The U.S. electoral system is our nation’s crazy aunt in
the attic. Every few years she pops out and creates a scene, and
everyone swears that something must be done. But as soon as
election day passes, we re happy to ignore her again — at least
until the next time she frustrates the will of the people.
Under a fair, equitable, and democratic system of voting,
Al Gore would have been elected President in 2000, and George
W. Bush would still be whacking weeds in Crawford. In 2004,
even though Bush won the popular vote by some three million
ballots, the election was still tarnished. Florida replayed its 2000
debacle with attempts to purge African-American voters from the
rolls, and voters who requested absentee ballots but never
received them were barred from voting in person. There were
hundreds of complaints of voting irregularities in Ohio, with
voters in some black precincts waiting in lines at polling places
for seven hours because of voting-machine shortages. Some
voters were required to show identification even though the
demand was illegal. Approximately 92,000 ballots failed to
record a vote for President, most of them on the same type of
discredited punch-card systems that malfunctioned in Florida
in 2000. Ohio election officials may have improperly disqualified
thousands of the 155,000 provisional ballots cast. Bush won the
state — and thus the Presidency — by 118,000 votes.
Although the United States prides itself as a beacon of
democracy to the rest of the world, for the second time in a row
our Presidential election appeared bumbling, if not downright
fraudulent. Sergio Aguayo, an election observer in Mexico City,
told Business-Week that the partisan way the 2004 election was
run was “looks an awful lot like the old Mexican PRI," referring
to the notoriously corrupt ruling party that dominated Mexican
politics for decades. President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter
Center monitors elections around the world, said that in Florida,
“some basic international requirements for a fair election are
missing.”
When elections are unfair, the environment loses.
While polls show that large majorities of Americans favor
strong environmental protections, those aspirations are routinely
frustrated by a flawed voting system. In November 2004 in San
Diego, environmental write-in candidate Donna Frye won the
most votes for Mayor, but lost on a technicality when the clear
intent of some 5,000 write-in voters was ignored. In Washington
State, after Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi
declared victory, it took a hand recount to find that more than
700 absentee votes had been ignored When all the votes were
counted, Democrat Christine Gregoire was declared the winner
by 129 votes. And as long as the winner-take-all system remains
intact, the Green Party is doomed to retain the role of spoiler
instead of electoral leader for environmental issues.
We don’t have to quietly accept the status quo. Here are
ten ways we could dramatically improve our electoral system...
all are worthy of bipartisan consideration. Some could be imple­
mented at county or state levels, and some are more readily
achievable than others. All have the same end: to expand the
franchise, and make sure that every vote is counted.
1. H ave n o n p a rtis a n o ffic ia ls a d m in is te r e le c tio n s
\Ne should have learned this lesson in the 2000 Presi­
dential election, when the co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign,
Katherine Harris, also ran the election as Florida’s secretary of
state. For the 2004 election, it was as though Harris had cloned
herself: the secretaries of state overseeing the elections in the
battleground states of Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan were all
co-chairs of their states' Bush reelection campaigns. In Missouri,
Secretary of State Matt Blunt was also running for governor, and
so oversaw his own race. In the days leading up to the election
in Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell sought to rule out
(largely Democrats) voter registrations submitted on paper of
the wrong weight, and to strictly limit the counting of provisional
ballots. During the election, African-American precincts and other
strongholds of support for John Kerry were allocated far fewer
voting machines than the Republican suburbs. In the subsequent
recount, Blackwell allowed different counties to handle the
process according to the whim of local officials. In Florida, a
highly partisan Republican secretary of state once again ran
the election, as did a partisan Democrat in New Mexico.
Without nonpartisan election managers, the outcomes
of elections will always be open to conflict-of-interest questions.
In addition, many current election officials are ignorant of the
technology of voting equipment, or even how to run elections.
Election administrators should be well-trained professional civil
servants who know how to make electoral processes transparent
and secure.
MORIN
2. E s ta b lis h n a tio n a l s ta n d a rd s fo r fa ir e le c tio n s
The United States leaves the administration of elections
to local officials in more than 3000 counties.This creates different
standards and practices for recounts and use of absentee and
provisional ballots, as well as wide discrepancies in the quality
of voting equipment. Most established democracies use national
election commissions to set uniform standards, to develop
secure and reliable voting equipment, and to work with state and
local election officials to ensure pre- and post-election account­
ability. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, established
by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, is a pale version of such
an entity, and needs to be strengthened. A robust elections
commission, for example, would crack down on the revolving
door between state election regulators and officials and the
voting equipment industry (see below).
3. D e ve lo p “p u b lic in te r e s t" v o tin g e q u ip m e n t
The voting-equipment industry is dominated by three
companies: Sequoia Voting Systems, Election Systems and
Software (ES&S), and Diebold Election Systems. These com­
panies develop their own private software and hardware that
is then certified by state authorities, although the rigor of the
certification procedures varies widely from state to state.
Laxness is encouraged by the revolving door between state
officials and the industry. New Hampshire senator John Sununu
(R) and former California secretary of state Bill Jones (R) have
acted as private consultants on behalf of Diebold and Sequoia,
respectively. Chuck Hagel resigned as chair of Election Systems
and Software’s parent company, and eight months later was
elected Republican senator from Nebraska, with his own former
company's machines counting the votes. And Katherine Harris’s
predecessor as secretary of state in Florida, Sandra Mortham
(R), was hired by ES&S to peddle its voting machines in the
state. In Ohio, according to the Los Angeles Times, one vendor
competing for $100 million in contracts treated election officials
to free meals, limousine rides, and concert tickets. Other vendors
have spent thousands of dollars on conferences for election
officials, footing the bill for hospitality suites, banquets, lobster
bakes, and pool parties.
Even more unsettling, the voting-machine companies
openly favor the Republican Party. The executives and founders
of the big three vendors have poured hundreds of thousands of
dollars into party coffers in the past few years. Ciber Labs, one
of the federal testing laboratories, has donated tens of thousands
TIMES EAGLE WORD SEARCH
of dollars to the Republican National Committee and to GOP
candidates. Walden O’Dell, Diebold’s CEO, is a big Bush fund­
raiser who attended strategy powwows at the President’s
Crawford, Texas ranch; he famously told Republicans in a
fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver
its electoral votes to the President,” even as his company was
seeking multimillion-dollar contracts to provide computerized
voting equipment in that state.
In Hocking County, Ohio, three days before the state­
wide recount for the 2004 Presidential election was to begin in
mid-December, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton went
public with a troubling incident: An employee of Triad Systems,
the company that owns and runs the voting equipment in 41
Ohio counties (and is another Republican donor), came into
the office, modified the computer tabulator, and advised voting
officials how to manipulate the machinery so that “the count
would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand
recount of the county.” This prompted Representative John
Conyers (D-Mich.) to request an FBI investigation into illegal
election tampering.
At the very least, advocates of fair elections should
demand a voter-verified paper trail so that any recounts would
have a chance of uncovering errors or fraud. We have such
an audit trail for ATM transactions; are our votes less important?
Better still would be to develop ‘public interest' voting equipment.
Instead of the nuts and bolts of our democracy being in the
hands of private companies, the software code would be subject
to the rules and disclosures of open government. And that voting
equipment then would be deployed to rich and poor neighbor­
hoods alike to ensure that every voter is using the same, best
equipment. Publicly developed voting systems are already in
place in Belgium, Brazil, and Argentina. Last year India, which
is the world’s largest democracy and has twice as many voters
as the United States, held nationwide elections, with voters
from New Delhi to the Himalayas, illiterate voters and polyglot
communities alike, all voting on the same computerized equip­
ment.
4. R e g is te r e v e ry c itiz e n
The United States has some 60 million potential voters
who are disenfranchised because they are not registered. In
most of the world’s established democracies, every citizen who
turns 18 is automatically registered to vote. This is known as
universal voter registration. Were it implemented in the United
States, it would prevent shameful shenanigans such as the
Republican-paid registrars in Nevada who simply threw away
the cards of those registering Democratic, and the Republican
challenges to minority voters at the polls in Ohio.
Under the Help America Vote Act, all states need to
establish statewide voter databases. Additional state or federal
regulations could require these databases to be melded with
U.S. Census Bureau databases so that anyone turning 18 is
automatically registered to vote.
5. M a k in g v o tin g e a s ie r
Voting on the first Tuesday in November in the middle
of a busy workweek is not a requirement of the U.S. Constitution.
It’s just a tradition dating from the 1840s, when President James
Polk changed the date to make it easier for farmers to vote. Most
other democracies vote on the weekend or make election day
a holiday. Puerto Rico typically does so, and has a higher voter
turnout than all 50 states. The commission established in the
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