Ballot Battle Obscures Real Crisis
National Review: Disputed Race In Florida Shows Voting Systems Still Flawedhttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/05/opinion/main2333639.shtmlDo you remember the Election Crisis of 2006? In the weeks before November 7, Democrats laid the groundwork for widespread legal challenges to voting results, readying themselves to find irregularities, voter suppression, and outright fraud in precincts across America. Activists on the left established hotlines — call 866-OUR-VOTE! — and assembled platoons of volunteer lawyers. This time, they vowed, Republicans would not get away with stealing an election.
And then Democrats won. The hotlines went quiet. The lawyers went back to work. The crisis went away.
Which left some Capitol Hill Republicans who have worked with Democrats on so-called “election reform” issues feeling a little, well, cynical. “If they lose, they assume something is wrong with the system,” says one top Senate aide. “We lose, we say we lost. We’re not going to court. Had the shoe been on the other foot, they would have been suing until the end of time.”
As it turns out, however, there is one case in which Democrats are suing, at least for now. And even though it appears they are flat wrong about the facts of the case, their objections raise serious questions that need to be resolved before 2008.
That conclusion is gaining increasing support among nearly all experts outside the Democratic party. But there is still no proof of the results that you can hold in your hands. And because of that, the controversy has put candidates, activists, election officials, and lawmakers nationwide into a quandary: After the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the government spent millions of dollars to help states install new, paperless, electronic voting machines, and those new systems have earned perhaps even less public confidence than the old paper-ballot systems. Even though Jennings’s claims were unfounded (and they were positively scientific compared with the paranoid ravings in some quarters of the Left about Diebold machines), :nopity: people in both parties are still uncomfortable about votes cast with no paper record.
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Increasingly, it appears, the lawmakers are moving toward paper ballots. In 2007, the House will take up a bill by Democratic representative Rush Holt that would require voting machines to make a paper record. That could mean attaching a receipt printer to electronic machines, or it could mean a switch back to optical-scan paper ballots. Observers in both parties believe the Holt bill will likely pass the Democrat-controlled House, and probably emerge successfully in some form from the Democrat-controlled Senate. The question then will be whether Congress will give states money to replace the still-new electronic machines, just six years after handing out cash to buy them.
Whatever Congress decides, local election officials are already moving on their own to get rid of the electronic machines. Maryland, New Mexico, New Jersey, Connecticut, and several other states are in the process of changing their systems. Florida is looking at changes, too — and Sarasota County has already announced that it is switching to optical-scan/paper ballots for 2008. “What happened there will probably have an impact in legislatures far beyond Florida,” says Seligson. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/05/opinion/main2333639.shtml
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