Election Reform

The nation's electoral system is broken. There were issues even before the Florida fiasco of the 2000 presidential election, but the reaction to those issues has created a more frightening scenario. At least after the hanging chad issue in Florida, a recount was possible with the confidence of knowing that each ballot had been inspected by a competent representative of the state and/or local election commission.

I fear there will be dozens if not hundreds of major issues in the upcoming mid term election because there will be so many close races nationwide. The new computerized touch screen voting machines will be the cause of delays in results, inability to carry out a recount, lawsuits and general havoc that will reach to the core of our system.

Former President Jimmy Carter has observed hundreds of elections worldwide. In all, if not most of those elections, a simple low tech paper ballot was used. Voting must be 1. easy to understand, 2. require few skills to complete, 3. allow for a recount, 4. have guards against fraud and 5. the registration system must be able to verify that those who vote are legal residents.

The touch screen voting systems fail on four out of five of these requirements. The few screens I have seen are fairly clean with little to confuse a first time user. Most people who have used touch screens in stores or banks will be able to follow the flow. Unfortunately, many voters over 60 years or so do not or have not used these types of screens in other tasks of their lives. These voters still go to the bank teller for withdrawals and do not use the self check out systems in stores. Touch screens will be foreign to this group for the most part. We take for granted that everyone can program a VCR or TIVO and that everyone knows what a back button is. For computer users, and that is most people under 60, answering "Yes" or "OK" to confirm an action on a screen is routine. For my mother , it is not. The lack of these basic computer skills will slow voting to a crawl and stress the undermanned and under trained voting station workers to the breaking point.

Numerous studies have shown that even a moderately skilled computer hacker can break into and either circumvent or manipulate the software in the voting machines. If this were to happen and the extent of it could not be isolated to one machine or polling station it would bring down the system in that district and force a re vote, an unheard of practice in this nation. In addition, with the close races expected next week, the importance of a recount will be greater than ever. There is no sure method of recounting touchscreen voting records. There are no paper ballots. The only prescribed technique is to pull the data again from the machines and compile the total. Unfortunately, the numbers will be identical if all of the data cards matched the original count. As long as the serial number tracked cards are handled properly and accounted for during the counting process, there should be no difference in the vote totals. I can imagine a scenario where some date cards or downloaded information get lost or becomes corrupted, damaged or wiped, but other than that the vote should not change. What happens in a recount situation where data is corrupted? Do those votes come off the totals? Unless paper records are kept at each stage of the original counting, how do we know what the totals from the cards were?

Ballot manipulation is nothing new and no matter what system we use, there will be tampering, but digital data can be manipulated and the tracks can be covered far easier than with paper. Without a recount possibility in a close race, the lawsuits will fly and our judiciary would begin to decide races. I don't think we want that no matter which side of the aisle you reside.

Of course, this is all moot if we can't even discern who can vote, where to vote, how many times and with what type of ballot. Absentee ballots are becoming the preferred method lately. What are the safeguards to keep someone from voting by absentee and on voting day. We have taken away most safeguards. You no longer have to vote in your precinct on national or state elections. Picture IDs are considered intrusions on our privacy and unfair to minorities. Has anyone ever heard of drivers licenses? If we can't control who votes and verify that the vote is legal how can any vote be trusted and what would be the point of a recount?

A Final Note: Why do we vote during the workday? Many millions of people do not vote because they are working. When they get off, the choice is whether to go home or stand in line to vote. Many of these people make the choice to go home instead. The argument is that employers give workers time to vote, but in practice, it doesn't happen that way. Hourly employees rarely leave work to vote.

A large proportion of nations cast their votes on weekends when more people can participate. Why don't we? American participate in voting less than almost any nation on earth. Why is that? Is it because they feel as if their votes do not matter? Is it because they don't feel any passion for the issues or candidates or is it because Americans simply don't care about what is happening beyond the privacy fence of their backyards? I don't know the answer to these questions, but our politicians need to know and need to make changes before only 10 % of those able to vote actually vote. Will that be a representative government?