Thinking ahead on electoral reform
WHATEVER side you were on in the presidential election, there is one thing everyone can agree on.
Barack Obama won.
This time no one is talking about butterfly ballots in Florida or skullduggery in Ohio. We chose a president without the intervention of the courts. The system worked.
But what about next time?
We should not delude ourselves that the post-election warfare of 2000 and the suspicions of 2004 are behind us. This year, pre-election polls consistently showed Obama comfortably ahead in most of the erstwhile battleground states. The lack of voter challenges, lawsuits, and so on was due in large part to both sides expecting that the result wasn't going to be close. If polls had indicated a tighter race, we probably would have witnessed more contention and more problems.
There are competing "red" and "blue" diagnoses and prescriptions for our elections. Republicans tend to focus on people voting who are not properly registered or qualified. Democrats are more concerned about impediments to legally qualified people casting their votes and having them counted.
While both concerns are legitimate, they are not equally threatening to the integrity of American democracy.
When it comes to trying to steal an election, only chumps pay retail. Yes, there are many ways to get individuals to cast fraudulent votes. Bribe a derelict to claim he is a recently deceased registered voter. Have a campaign worker impersonate a shut-in who is unlikely to venture out to vote. This kind of activity is, of course, illegal. Get convicted and you wind up in prison. However, little evidence exists that much of this takes place, and no wonder: The risks of retail vote fraud simply aren't worth it. In big races - president, governor - the likelihood that it will affect the outcome is infinitesimal.
More serious and troubling are wholesale methods of stealing elections. These include election officials stuffing piles of pre-marked ballots into the boxes, or making ballots from an opponent's geographic base disappear. Or programming election machines to undercount opposing votes or overcount yours. Get convicted of this and you will go to jail too, although the potential competitive benefit is higher than retail vote fraud, and fewer people need to be in on the conspiracy.
Best of all, for those with electoral larceny in their hearts, is voter suppression. Order too few voting machines for polling places in your opponent's strongholds and create long lines that discourage voters. Delete from voter rolls names that resemble those of convicts. Bloodless, bureaucratic, and effective: Thousands of demographically inconvenient voters are disenfranchised. It's also harder to be prosecuted for this.
Criminal activity is not the only cause of electoral mishap and may not be the most significant. Innocent machine malfunctions can also cause votes not to be recorded, or register votes that were never cast.
Now is the time to improve voting procedures, before the next close election happens. We should continue the trend toward voting over several weeks rather than on one day. It is harder to cause lines at the polls when votes are cast over a longer period, and people whose right to vote is challenged have more time to prove their qualifications. The federal government should also increase its funding for states to buy more voting machines.
Congress should amend federal law to prohibit the use of any voting machine that does not produce a paper trail. In case of machine failure, suspicious results, or just a very close race, it is imperative to have a backup system available for recounts.
We should resist proposals to allow voting over the Internet. While Internet voting could boost turnout, it would also increase the possibility for tampering or malfunction and make sorting out what happened impossible.
America will face enough challenges in the years ahead without new, avoidable electoral controversies. It is time to move beyond the partisan "is this good for our side?" approach to elections and reform them in ways that will strengthen government's legitimacy regardless of who wins.
Jim Gomes, a guest columnist, is director of the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark University. 