Reply #8: Recipe for a Fair Election. Steve Hill (CivilRights.Org & TomPaine.Com)

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TomPaine.Com is doing penance for the lousy investigative reporting of Russ Baker – Mr. Gumshoe who couldn’t find the truth and said it didn’t exist if he counldn’t find it. Nice essay by Steve Hill…more of that and less of weak investigators.

Op-Ed Recipe for a Fair Election

http://www.civilrights.org/issues/voting/details.cfm?id...
By Steven Hill
TomPaine.com
June 12, 2006
Steven Hill is author of the recently published 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy and director of the Political Reform Program of the New America Foundation.

Part II of a two-part series, Part I appeared on June 5, 2006.

Heading into the 2006 congressional and state elections, fair election advocates need to remain vigilant, particularly in the handful of close races where a swing of a small number of votes could change an election outcome. Longer term, activists must turn their efforts to a more visionary agenda that will ensure fair and secure elections in the 21st century. Here are the reforms necessary for modernizing our elections and making sure that every vote is counted.

1. Nonpartisan election officials. At the top of the list must be creating a bureaucracy of impartial, nonpartisan election officials. We should have learned this lesson in the 2000 presidential election when Katherine Harris oversaw the Florida election as both secretary of state and co-chair of George Bush's election committee. If it can't be guaranteed that the partisan loyalties of election managers will play no role in deciding outcomes, then elections become a charade. Election protection advocates fearful of voting technology forget that fraud has occurred throughout American history with paper ballots, whether through ballot box stuffing or entire ballot boxes disappearing. It hardly matters if the voting technology is computerized voting or paper ballots if the election administrators themselves are partisan-motivated or crooked.

Yet for the 2004 election, it was as though Katherine Harris had cloned herself. The secretaries of state overseeing elections in the battleground states of Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan were all co-chairs of their states' Bush reelection campaigns; in West Virginia, the Democratic Secretary of State oversaw the election for his own governor's race. In Florida, a highly partisan Republican secretary of state once again ran the election, as did a partisan Democrat in New Mexico. A political scientist from Mexico City monitoring the 2004 U.S. presidential election told Business Week that election administration in the United States "looks an awful lot like the old Mexican PRI to me," referring to the notorious party that dominated Mexican politics for seven decades by rigging elections.

Did we learn this lesson in 2004? Not in Ohio, apparently. This year, notorious Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell is overseeing the election in which he is running as the GOP candidate for governor. The New York Times reports that already Blackwell is trying to rig voter registration laws to increase his chances by issuing rulings that all but squash get-out-the-vote drives that will register more poor and minority voters