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Bo Lipari notes that New York's new voting machines keep failing during certification testing, and that this is a good thing. Here's why he thinks so. We agree that rigorous testing is a good thing—and that it's better to find out about problems now then on Election Day.
Let's just hope the vendors get their acts together in time for New York to use its new voting machines by 2009, as it is required to do by law.
I just sat through a nail-biting, emotionally exhausting two hour TV movie. The opening ten minutes were especially nerve-wracking. The film begins with elderly Floridians squinting at their butterfly ballots, then stabbing at the ballots, scary music playing, over and over, voting by accident for Pat Buchanan. Think of the shower scene in "Psycho" with your grandmother instead of Janet Leigh. Even more exciting: would the panting, lurching advance man catch up with Al Gore before he walked onstage to concede?
Maybe not everybody would find this as thrilling. But
Recount,which airs on HBO this Sunday, is one of the
better political movies I've ever seen. It "gets" the motives and methods
of political players better than anything in years. More relevant to the
work of the Brennan
Center, it brings to life
the ways our elections can go wrong, and the rickety and often corrupt
machinery by which we still cast and count votes.
(Full disclosure: I am an old colleague and friend of Ron Klain, the protagonist; I see GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg at the beach many summers; and I go duck hunting with James Baker every year. Well, that part isn't true. But like anyone involved in politics, back then I had a rooting interest in the outcome of the recount.)
The narrative crackles and does a good job portraying the legal machinations that led to the Supreme Court's 5–4 intervention to stop the counting, thus making George W. Bush President. It's all here, from the "Brooks Brothers riot" in which Republican congressional staffers shut down the counting in Miami, to the frenzied efforts to read and understand the Supreme Court opinion that announced its reasoning only applied to this case. The acting is terrific, and the dialogue is sharp and as profane as real life politics (and HBO).
*Cross-posted from ReformNY
There's an old saying in Alabama and a few other neighboring states—"thank God for Mississippi"—that serves to remind people that as bad as things might be in their own state, they're worse somewhere else.
It might be hard to believe that when it comes to voting machines, any state could look more dysfunctional than New York. But New Jersey is giving New York some pretty darn good competition: it's starting to look as though, for yet another general election, voters in New Jersey will be using one of the worst voting systems in the country, without any paper trail to independently verify their votes.
New Jersey passed a law requiring voter verified paper records in 2005. We learn today that after failing to meet previous deadlines, the Attorney General is now asking for another extension, meaning voters in New Jersey will continue to vote on unverifiable electronic machines in November 2008.
We're all for rigorous testing of voting machines and printers. It would be foolish to buy printers that are likely to fail. But it's hard not to ask, what are they thinking in New Jersey? Why would they even contemplate buying printers that have failed testing before (see list of failures here), for a voting system that is so lousy to begin with?
With a looming budget crisis, New Jersey is looking to spend $20 million dollars on printers that have never been used anywhere else, for full-face DREs, which are the worst type of voting system in the country. Professor Kimball of the University of Missouri has shown that the layout of the full-face DREs they use in New Jersey is so confusing that it may result in as many as 20-25% of voters accidentally missing state ballot initiatives. There are also troubling news reports from the February 5 primary that indicate these same machines were providing inaccurate voter totals.
In the end, almost all New York counties rejected confusing, error-prone full-face DREs and instead purchased optical scan machines. It is hard not to ask, what is wrong with New Jersey that it would insist on investing $20 million on questionable printers for questionable machines that virtually every county in New York, and every state in the nation, has rejected?
Three weeks after Super Tuesday, thousands of Los Angeles votes may finally be counted.
On February 5, I was in Los Angeles, helping with a nonpartisan election protection effort. We received calls reporting plenty of problems, some familiar, some new. But early in the day, it was clear that there was a serious issue confronting independent voters.
In California, voters unaffiliated with any party could vote in the primary for the Democratic party or the American Independent party (the Republican primary was open to registered Republicans only). Theoretically.
Problem one: bad information. Some pollworkers didn't offer the choice of a partisan primary ballot. Worse, others did affirmative harm, incorrectly telling unaffiliated voters that they couldn't vote in a partisan primary.
Problem two: bad ballots.
In Los Angeles county, the unaffiliated ballots baffled thousands of
voters. The ballots themselves were just
numbers and bubbles, like the answer sheet for a standardized test. The candidates were listed in a separate
booklet, like the test's exam questions.
Democratic candidates, rotating in position from voter to voter, were
assigned to bubbles #8-15; American Independent candidates, also rotating, were
assigned bubbles #8-10. So bubbles #8-10
could have been votes for either party. To
tell one from the other, voters were supposed to fill in a different bubble—bubble # 5 or 6—with their party choice.
The "double
bubble" system was sufficiently confusing that about 49,500
voters got it wrong. Officials are
now trying to determine whether they can reliably count some of the ballots:
for example, voters who filled in bubbles #11-15
(which should be unambiguous Democratic votes), or voters in precincts where
all of the unaffiliated voters who wanted partisan ballots checked
in for the same party's primary. It
looks like the Los Angeles county clerk may now try
to count both categories. But that
will still leave the many ambiguous ballots uncounted, and can't possibly help
the people who were turned away without casting a ballot at all.
In the continuing brouhaha, one element has been left out of
the conversation: properly programmed touchscreen systems might have avoided the
toil and trouble of both problems.
To be crystal clear: this is not an endorsement of touchscreens over optical scans, or punchcards, or rock-paper-scissors. There are plenty of concerns with most, if not all, of the existing touchscreen systems. This is also not a declaration that all paper ballots are flawed: the design that confused thousands of Angelenos could have, and should have, been avoided.
Still, both the pollworker problem and the ballot problem were big issues caused by small lapses in a series of rules. We've seen both types before, and we'll see them again, and it's useful to keep our own limitations in mind. Most election procedures are sets of "if, then" instructions: if unaffiliated, then ask about a partisan ballot . . . if partisan ballot, then ask which party. There are an awful lot of "if, then" rules for people to keep track of on election day. And one thing computers can be good at is walking people through those rules, step by step.
*Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
As progressives prepare for the political season, we might rue the "one that got away." There's a rare chance to reform voting laws to expand the electorate and strengthen democracy, not just next year but for the next decade. But election reform in 2008 must start in 2007 -- and time is slipping by.
Voting is the heart of democracy. Yet millions of Americans face huge obstacles when they try to register, cast their ballot, or have it counted. We now know that last year partisans waged a frenetic effort to disenfranchise voters -- orchestrated, remarkably, by the Justice Department itself. Happily, a growing grassroots voter protection movement pushed back. (The Brennan Center for Justice, to cite just one example, stopped the disenfranchisement of some 300-700,000 voters, with lawsuits and advocacy.) That was needed, and right, but ultimately defensive.
Now we can go on the offense: to change voting laws and reform election administration, in states across the country. Why the opportunity? The new Congress, of course, but even more, twelve new secretaries of state elected on voter protection platforms; sixteen states with potentially sympathetic Democratic governors and legislatures (up from eight); in some places, competition among both parties to be "pro reform." Rarely do the stars align as now. Key goals:
* Keeping eligible citizens on the voter list. State officials routinely purge voters from the rolls -- a secret process prone to partisan manipulation. A purge list of "potential felons" in Florida in 2004 included 22,000 African-Americans and only 63 Hispanics, in the one state where those blocs vote for different parties. (What a coincidence!) Now we can end the system of secret and partisan purges of the voter rolls. Several Secretaries of State are preparing to reform their own systems. And the Brennan Center plans lawsuits in other states to force standards and accountability.
* Ending felony disenfranchisement, an ugly relic of Jim Crow. Florida's new Republican governor, Charlie Crist, with a stroke of a pen created the chance to restore the vote for about 500,000. Virginia's laws disenfranchise for life one out of three black men. The Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, could -- and should -- do what Florida's conservative Republican governor did, and change the state forever.
* Allowing Election Day Registration. States with EDR have 5-7% higher voter turnout. That's an astounding jump, far higher than even the best voter registration or GOTV drive could muster. Recently Iowa and Montana joined six other states with EDR, and North Carolina is poised to be the ninth. Drives are underway in a half dozen other states.
* Fixing electronic voting. A Brennan Center task force of the nation's top computer scientists concluded emphatically that every one of the nation's electronic voting systems is insecure. Next week, the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the bill introduced by Reps. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA), a strong measure that would ban touchscreen machines that lack an audit record, require random auditing, and prohibit wireless components in voting machines. Numerous states can be pushed to require paper trails and audits.
* Stopping onerous ID requirements. An individual is more likely to be killed by lightening than to commit voter fraud. The U.S. Attorney scandal has revealed the "voter fraud" scare for the political witch hunt that it is. But it has proven a highly convenient way for partisans to push for proof of citizenship and other ID requirements that are end up preventing voting, not fraud. (The necessary paperwork can cost up to $200. By contrast, the notorious poll tax was $8.97 in current dollars when it was declared unconstitutional in 1966.) For the first time in years, civil rights proponents are able to push back -- which helps clear the field for pro-enfranchisement reform.
It all adds up to a rare opportunity for lasting change. But progressives must be truly strategic. In 2004 they spent hundreds of millions of dollars to register and mobilize voters. Activists plan similar, even larger efforts next year. Voter mobilization is vital. But this time there's a difference: a fraction of that significant investment, sharply targeted, can help sweep away barriers to civic participation. Soon it will be too late. Most state legislatures will finish their work just a few months into next year, and the polarized political season looms. For needed changes to have a chance to empower voters in November 2008, the activism must start now.
Stakes are achingly high. Voting rights should be a nonpartisan issue, but not everyone got the memo. In a moment of candor about just one obstacle to voting, the former Political Director of the Texas Republican Party told the Houston Chronicle "that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote." That's an affront not to a party, but to democracy.
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