Voting-Watch Groups Call for Election Reform
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4—Although legal battles reminiscent of the 2000 election debacle did not surface in the aftermath of the recent presidential election, a handful of voting-watch groups warn that the country should not rest easy.
After the dust cleared on Wednesday, George W. Bush’s wide margin of victory in the popular vote only masked the many voting problems that were scattered throughout the country, these groups say.
“There’s a variety of problems, many of them are systemic problems, showing that we just can’t handle this level of voting,” Chellie Pingree, president of liberal-leaning Common Cause and a former international election monitor, said. “We haven’t solved many of the problems in this country.”
Pingree’s group logged more than 175,000 calls on the toll-free hotline it had set up to walk voters through any problems they encountered on Election Day.
According to Pingree, voters reported problems with long lines due to insufficient poll staffing and electronic voting machine breakdowns, as well as voter intimidation and restrictions including polling booth time limits.
Others reported registration problems including instances in which they never received a requested absentee ballot and then arrived at the polling station to find that their vote had somehow already been recorded, and instances in which they arrived at the precinct to which they thought they were registered, only to find that their name was not on the roll.
The Election Protection Coalition, a progressive umbrella group of civic and civil rights groups that set up its own hotline to deal with Election Day problems, received more than 4,500 complaints of ballot problems, nearly 3,000 of polling place and location problems, more than 7,000 of registration difficulties and over 1,000 of voter intimidation.
And in the battleground state of Iowa, the secretary of state’s office reported that four counties were still tabulating votes as late as Wednesday morning. In one county, an electronic voting machine that shut down forced poll workers to feed approximately 23,000 ballots through manually.
“We were clearly not prepared in this country, to handle so many voters, in spite of the fact that Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to attempt to cure some of the problems of the 2000 election,” Pingree said.
That law was implemented by Congress to clarify voting procedures after the close race between Bush and Al Gore in 2000, when disputes over punch-card ballots in Florida led to a 38-day delay in the determining the election winner.
The act required the use of provisional ballots—given to voters to cast if their names do not appear on the precinct rolls —and also required first-timevoters to show identification when entering the polling booths to cast their ballots.
But the act does not provide a uniform standard to tell states how and when provisional ballots should be counted or what should be recognized as valid identification.
Robert A. Pastor, director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, said this has led to problems.
“Both [practices] are not working very well, because everybody has implemented them differently, and it is not clear what a uniform protection is like at this point.”
Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University, said too much discretion is given to poll workers in each state, and thus, provisional ballots are treated as “second-class votes.”
“We’ve got problems of uniformity and consistency in counting, some of the same problems that were identified in Bush v. Gore,” he said. “The provisional ballots are second class votes…in part, because we don’t know whether they’ll be counted.”
Both Pastor and Overton also noted that the law had been under-funded by Congress.
The provisional ballot received public attention Tuesday evening, when Ohio became the linchpin to election success for President Bush. As votes were tallied late into the night and the state appeared to be settling in Bush’s favor, some 100,000 to 200,000 provisional ballots that remained to be counted led many of the media networks to refrain from calling the state’s projected vote.
It was not until John Kerry conceded the election to Bush on Wednesday, admitting that it was not possible provisional votes could help him overtake Bush in Ohio, that the issue was resolved.
But Miles Rapoport, president of the non-partisan public policy organization Demos and former Connecticut secretary of state, said all votes should always be counted, regardless of the margin of victory.
“Failure to count every ballot will lead the millions of Americans who voted for the first time yesterday to question whether casting a ballot actually makes a difference,” he said.
He urged federal and state governments to dedicate necessary funds for fully staffed polling places and trained poll workers, set national standards for voting practices beyond what is set out in the election law, and increase the ease and transparency of registration and voting systems.
“If the right to cast a ballot and have that vote be counted is to mean anything, then the major reforms that have been promised since the last presidential must be realized,” he said. “It’s too late for excuses.”
The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which is part of the Election Protection Coalition, held a forum on Thursday in which the Rev. Jesse Jackson of Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also called for the next Congress to take further steps in reforming the election system.
And Overton, of George Washington, said the message should also go out to the American public.
“A lot of the problems that had been alluded to can be resolved when the American people wake up and realize that their votes count, but that they only count if the system is responsive and more effective than it has been up until now,” he said.
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