|
CommonDreams.org
Versions of this commentary appeared in several
publications, including the Anniston Star (AL), Atlanta
Journal-Constitution (GA) and Baltimore
Sun (MD).
Democracy on the Cheap
By Steven
Hill and Rob Richie
December 12, 2003
After the 2000 presidential race, many Americans saw new voting
technology as the obvious means to avoid the millions of votes lost
due to voter error around the nation. Following that botched
election, Florida spent millions of dollars for new touchscreen
voting equipment.
Yet this equipment had major problems in its debut in the 2002 gubernatorial elections.
In the hotly contested Democratic primary, the touchscreen
equipment used in Dade County produced a higher rate of non-votes
that disproportionately hurt minority voters than the old punchcard
equipment, according to the ACLU of Florida. It was deja vu all
over again. Now a burgeoning national movement questions the
security of such equipment and calls for paper trails that will
provide a voter-verifiable audit trail.
When made fully secure and publicly accountable, touchscreen
voting offers important advantages. Take Brazil's experience. A
country of 180 million people, with great diversity and vast
stretches of rural territory, much like the United States, Brazil
has a national touchscreen system. When voters select a candidate,
they see the name, party and photo of the candidate in order to
verify their vote. No overvotes, no undervotes, no confusing
butterfly ballots. No disfranchisement of language minorities and
voters with disabilities or low rates of literacy.
There's a simple reason the United States is playing catch up to
Brazil -- and most other nations -- when it comes to modernizing
election administration. Under our decentralized election
administration regime, we have a shockingly weak national commitment
to fair and secure elections. In fact the main players in running
elections are the more than 3,000 county election administrators
scattered across the country.
With the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the federal government for
the first time established a few national election standards and
provided some funds to states. But those standards are weak, and
funds available for only three years. There's little training for
election administrators, and too often county election chiefs are
selected based more on whom they know than training and experience.
And there's limited guidance to assist counties when they bargain
with the equipment vendors.
The vendors themselves spark questions. Three companies dominate the
field: Elections Systems and Software, Sequoia Voting Systems, and
Diebold. They are relatively small profit-making corporations, often
cutting corners to make a buck, stretched beyond their capacities,
strained by the myriad of state bodies certifying equipment, and all
to quick to put aside public interest concerns if not spelled out in
contracts. Their equipment isn't nearly as good as it could or
should be.
Vendors make up for these deficits through political connections.
They typically hire former election regulators like former
California Secretary of State Bill Jones as their sales
representatives. Besides the government-to-industry revolving door,
they have been known to give big campaign contributions. In fact
there is no firewall between the corporations who run elections and
partisan politics. The CEO of Diebold, for example, attended
strategy pow-wows with wealthy benefactors of George Bush and wrote
in a fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio
deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" -- even as
his company seeks to win Ohio's multimillion dollar contract for new
equipment from the Republican-run state government.
The manufacture and selling of voting equipment shouldn't be just
another business. There indeed is something special about our
electoral infrastructure and administration that cries out for a
federal system with national standards and regulations. After
September 11 we moved to have federal workers monitoring airport
security. But after election 2000, we did nothing comparable for our
elections.
Imagine an alternative reality, in which the federal government
used its immense resources to invest in developing voting
technologies that were truly cutting edge and secure, with open
source software, voter-verified paper trails, national standards and
the public interest incorporated without resistance. Imagine
election administration led by qualified and properly trained
administrators and poll workers. Imagine national voter registration
lists that better assured clean lists as well as "universal voter
registration," resulting in automatic registration of 50 million new
voters, many of them young, poor and minority. All counties and
states would be held to a high standard, with the federal government
partnering with them to meet those standards.
But no, instead we are stuck with the current shadowy vendors and
decentralized hodge-podge that lately have made U.S. democracy a
laughingstock around the world. Call it democracy on the cheap. The
debate over voter-verified paper trails is a window into a far
bigger problem of decentralized elections that inevitably will lead
to future debacles until corrected. We can no longer passively
accept an election administration regime gone deeply awry.
Steven Hill is senior analyst for the Center
for Voting and Democracy (www.fairvote.org) and author of
"Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All
Politics" (www.FixingElections.com ),
which is now available in paperback. Rob Richie is executive
director of the Center. |
