We're about to finish the 2008 election cycle with the conclusion of two elections for the United States Senate, a recount in Minnesota and a runoff in Georgia. It's hard to imagine a better illustration of America's oddball and potentially disastrous election process.
The Senate election in Minnesota is being recounted in what most consider, ballot challenges aside, an admirably scrupulous process. In Minnesota, every voter votes on a paper ballot read by optical scanners, and ballot-marking devices are available in every polling place to serve voters who cannot use a pen to mark a ballot due to vision, dexterity or other disabilities. Recounts are done by hand. If there is doubt about the intent of the voter, the ballots can be examined, and standards for evaluating intent applied. Part of the reason there are so many unresolved ballot challenges in Minnesota is simply because there is independent evidence of voter intent to evaluate.
Dianne Feinstein has, with Republican Robert Bennett, introduced perhaps the worst bill yet drafted on the issue of electronic voting. Meet S.3212, the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform Act.
S.3212 does not require a voter-verified paper record, paper ballot, or paper anything. The bill allows "independent records" of ballots which could be electronic, audio, video, pictorial, or "other independently produced record." The bill is so crappily written that it seems these independent records don't necessarily have to be seen by the voter before she casts her ballot. The bill places a representative of the voting system industry on the federal committee that drafts voting system guidelines (not an unheard of practice in the federal government, but the voting system industry just ain't ready for this kind of role, to put it kindly).
So it's hard to see how the Pennsylvania primary could be more important. Even the difference of a few points in the margin of victory could prove crucial in determining the course of the Democratic primary campaign.
We've heard this before in the 2008 primary season: a key state in the Presidential nominating process will conduct a primary election in which most votes are recorded and counted by paperless electronic voting machines.
What's wrong with New Jersey? The state passed a law requiring voter-verifiable paper records in July of 2005. Now, unless Governor Corzine vetoes legislation passed last week, the Garden State will have an unverifiable Presidential election, cast on insecure, unreliable electronic voting machines. And the nation will have 15 more electoral votes dependent entirely on ones and zeroes.
Pamela Smith of the Verified Voting Foundation gives background in an OpEd piece in today's Times of Trenton. The gist: instead of choosing a system of voter-marked paper ballots read by optical scanners, New Jersey's Division of Elections decided to recommend adding $2,000 printers to aging electronic machines that were never designed with paper records in mind.
There is something you can do: whether or not you live in New Jersey, urge Governor Corzine to veto the legislation extending the deadline for voter-verifiable paper records, and propose instead a system of paper ballots, optical scanners, and accessible ballot-marking devices. Action links after the flip.
As we count down to the new year - a time when the Supreme Court will weigh-in on the voter ID debate and we will cast ballots for the next president of the United States - Texas lawmakers continue to aggressively present the alleged issue of non-citizens voting. This week, voter ID was added to the list of topics to be studied by the House State Affairs Committee for the 2009 legislative session, an action deemed a partisan ploy to reintroduce the "discriminatory and divisive" legislation of 2007. Stirring the so-called voter fraud plot in Texas to greater heights, a coalition of legislators requested Secretary of State Phil Wilson "implement more stringent proof of citizenship requirements before casting a ballot in Texas" in November 2008.
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