Anderson@Large

Ballot Box Blues

As I was checking out of the hotel on Friday, a USA Today headline caught my attention. Eight years after the Florida election debacle, election officials are still singing the blues:

Since 2000, states and localities have replaced punch-card ballots in fits and starts, in some cases reversing initial decisions to go to entirely paperless systems. As a result, a number of key areas — among them Cuyahoga County, Ohio — will be trying out new systems. In Colorado, a number of new voting machines failed a test run in December.

In addition to huge lines and new equipment, problems could arise with registration rolls. State officials are already struggling with a huge increase in forms to process. Come Election Day, many voters are likely to show up thinking that they are registered, only to find that they are not.

To minimize the number of voters who will be crying the blues on Election Day, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation Voices of the Electorate Democracy Reform Project will convene a symposium, “Election ’08: Still Not Ready,” on Tuesday, Sept. 23, from 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Voting rights experts, voter empowerment groups and community-based activists will identify steps that election officials and voters must take to remove barriers to the ballot and ensure that every vote is counted as intended (disclosure: I am the project coordinator).

In 50 days, voters will go to the polls and make history. Either an African American will be the next occupant of the Oval Office or a woman will be elected vice president of the United States. But for some voters, history will repeat itself.

During the primary season, voters encountered malfunctioning voting machines, inaccurate voter databases, confusing ballot designs and instructions, untrained poll workers, burdensome voter ID requirements, uncounted ballots and ballot shortages from Palm Beach County to Los Angeles County.

In the Sept. 9, primary in the nation’s capitol, electronic voting machines counted thousands of write-in votes cast by phantom voters. While election officials said it was due to a “computer glitch,” the e-voting machines’ manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, says they're not to blame.

In Florida’s Aug. 26, primary, more than 3,500 ballots were lost in Palm Beach County. The missing ballots have since been found. But get this: there now are 139 more ballots than were originally counted.

Voters must not wait until Election Day to protect their right to vote. This point was underscored by the Rev. Al Sharpton during the National Action Network’s weekly rally:

Waiting until something happens does not lead to progress…Otherwise you wait on Election Day for the same trick. You don’t sit up and wait for an accident to happen. You avoid it. Sitting around waiting for accidents that are avoidable is unconscionable.

The Voices of the Electorate symposium is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. Please RSVP by Friday, Sept. 20 to [email protected].

For free voter information, including registering to vote, verifying registration status, early voting or polling place location, call the national voter assistance hotline, 1-866-MYVOTE1.

Election '08: A Cautionary Tale

It's April Fool's Day but Florida voters were fooled back in 2007 when Gov. Charlie Crist signed into law legislation banning electronic voting machines. The bill passed unanimously in the House and drew just two nay votes in the Senate.

Voting rights advocates (including the writer) cheered that Florida was ending its experiment with unreliable paperless voting machines. But we did not know that buried in the legislative boilerplate was a provision that would disenfranchise millions of voters:

Each political party other than a minor political party shall, on the last second Tuesday in January March in each year the number of which is a multiple of 4, elect one person to be the candidate for nomination of such party for President of the United States or select delegates to the national nominating convention, as provided by party rule.

In plain English, the presidential primary was moved from March 11 to Jan. 29. And the rest is history.

Investigator reporter Wayne Barrett writes:

The Republicans don't just control both houses of the Florida legislature. Their combined 103-to-57 majority allowed them to dictate the terms of the bill that moved the primary to January 29. It is true that all but one of the state's Democratic legislators supported the bill. But a closer look reveals that vote to be more an indication of a realistic and productive compromise with the ruling Republicans than any intent to breach Democratic rules.

Florida's leading news outlets, just like Michigan's, converted an early primary into a matter of state patriotism, and that point of view, coupled with the mathematical inability to even slow the Republican push, forced Democrats to roll over.

Barrett reports that Democrats did try to adhere to national party rules:

Martin Kiar and Mary Brandenburg, House Democrats who were cosponsors of the bill, tried to amend it. "We offered an amendment on the floor shifting the date to one within the Democratic Party rules," said Brandenburg. "The Democrats all voted for it, and Republicans all voted against it." Actually, the Kiar/Brandenburg proposal did not completely comply with DNC directives, but it was a signal of the concerns Florida Dems had about the move-up legislation. Said Kiar: "No matter what, whether we supported it or cosponsored it, the Republican majority was going to push it through."

Barrett’s piece is headlined “Could the Republicans pick the Democratic nominee?” Yes, they could. The question is: Should Democrats let them?

South Carolina Paper Chase

Folks, forget about a paper trail. In South Carolina, some Republican primary voters cast their ballot on paper towels.

Unreliable electronic voting machines proved to be, well, unreliable. In Horry County, e-voting machines in 80 percent of the precincts malfunctioned. Predictably, election officials tried to hide behind the hoary catchall “human error” to dodge responsibility for disenfranchising voters.

Since the machines were not programmed properly, the problem should be characterized as a programming error so that those responsible are held accountable.

Unlike Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised black Americans, the shift from the ballot box to the black box has put all Americans at risk. Jim_Crow.com is an equal opportunity threat to democracy. E-voting is wreaking havoc at the polls and eroding confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.

The voting irregularities occurred in a John McCain stronghold. Thousands of voters reportedly were turned away from the polls. Before being declared the winner, the McCain camp was "still weighing our options.”

Does anyone doubt that McCain would have challenged the results if, say, Mike Huckabee had been declared the winner?

Voices of the Electorate

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Our vote is our voice. Seven years after the Florida election debacle and more than five years since President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, Electionline.org reports:

But the public's lingering concerns over electronic voting, partisan disputes over voter ID and other issues continue to plague America's election system.

For more than 30 years, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation has fought to ensure our voices are heard in the democratic process. On Wednesday, it will hold its 6th annual Voices of the Electorate Democracy Symposium, "Engaging Minorities and New Americans in the Democracy Reform Movement and the 2008 Election Cycle."

The symposium will feature opening remarks by Melanie Campbell, the National Coalition's CEO and Executive Director. Rep. Artur Davis will update election reform and voting rights legislation in the 110th Congress.

I will moderate a roundtable discussion on the changing face of American democracy and strategies for increasing minorities' and new American citizens' civic engagement.

The symposium will be held tomorrow from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm at the U.S. Capitol in Room HC-7. The event is free and open to the public but reservations are required.

To reserve a seat, send an email to Kevin Parker or call 202/659-4929.

A live webcast of the symposium will be available here, starting at 10:00 am ET.

Election '08: Why 'Florida' Still Matters

The 2008 election is now less than a year away. Democrats hope to ride a wave of voter discontent to hegemonic control of the White House and Congress for the first time since 1994.

But Democratic presidential candidates should hold off measuring the drapes in the Oval Office. The election outcome will turn on voter turnout. With an evenly divided electorate, every vote will count. And therein lies the rub.

The 2000 election debacle, and John Kerry and John Edwards' broken promise "that in this election, every vote would count and every vote would be counted" undermine voter mobilization efforts. African American voters will be particularly disillusioned given that Kerry conceded before all the votes were counted in Ohio. And without a high black voter turnout in Ohio, Florida and other battleground states, Democrats don't stand a snowball's chance of winning.

Republican operatives will make political hay out of the stories of black voters who waited in lines up to five hours for a presidential candidate who conceded before their votes were counted. Kerry's flip-flop on the importance of counting every vote gives Republicans an effective message to demobilize Democratic base voters: Remember Ohio.

At the same time, voters remember "Florida," which has become a metaphor for voter disenfranchisement, voting irregularities and unreliable voting machines.

In 2000, the American public met Chad. In 2006, Chip took center stage in Sarasota County, where paperless voting machines lost more than 18,000 votes in the election to fill the Congressional seat vacated by former Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The election was decided by 386 votes.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has since tossed out the state's electronic voting machines. Last month, the General Accountability Office released a preliminary report on what happened. The GAO said it could not conclusively eliminate the paperless voting machines as the cause of the 18,000 undervotes.

While the GAO gave DREs a little more time, the American people don't think e-voting will ever be ready for prime time. As Time magazine reports:

After the initial excitement, it didn't take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all.

The high black voter turnout in 2000 exposed the underbelly of Florida's electoral infrastructure. Seven years later, Florida still matters. And because it does, Sen. Bill Nelson recently introduced the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007," which would ban e-voting machines in federal elections by 2012. Sen. Nelson said:

The bottom line is we have to ensure every vote is counted – and, counted properly. Citizens must have confidence in the integrity of their elections.

The Pew Research Center found there is a partisan and racial gap in voters' confidence their vote will be accurately counted. While 79 percent of Republicans have confidence their vote will be counted, only 45 percent of Democrats are sure. The percentage of black voters who express little or no confidence their vote will be counted has doubled since 2004, from 15 percent to 29 percent.

It doesn't take a computer scientist to know there is a correlation between voters' confidence in the integrity of the electoral process and voter turnout. The bottom line: If Democrats fail to address voters' distrust in the machinery of our democracy, they do so at their own peril.

E-Voting Still Not Ready for Prime Time

A while back the Miami Herald published my op-ed piece on the perils of electronic voting machines in which I wrote:

The machinery of our democracy must not be entrusted to a handful of unaccountable vendors and a revolving door of election officials-cum-lobbyists peddling unproven and untested “solutions.”

Fast forward four years and the General Accountability Office is investigating the 18,000 undervotes in Florida’s 13th Congressional District. And while he’s past his prime, Dan Rather’s report shows e-voting still is not ready for prime time.

Meanwhile, the folks at Voter Action are taking action. They have issued a public call for a congressional investigation of voting machine companies:

Last night’s broadcast by Dan Rather Reports of “The Trouble with Touch Screens” raises serious questions as to whether US voting systems companies have engaged in commercial fraud by knowingly marketing defective products to jurisdictions throughout the country. It also serves as a wake-up call to the nation of the dangers associated with the outsourcing of key election functions to private vendors. Voter Action today calls on the United States Congress to launch a full investigation into the increasing influence and control that private companies wage in the way we conduct our elections and to determine whether certain US voting systems companies have committed crimes under federal and state anti-fraud statutes which should be referred to the appropriate authorities for prosecution.

For more info, click here.

To sign a petition in support of a congressional investigation, click here.

Counting on Democracy – The Movie

The battle in Florida’s 13th congressional district rages on.  Meanwhile, the 2008 presidential election is underway.

BTW, I agree with Karl Rove that the presidential wannabes may “develop a persona earlier and wear out their welcome earlier.”

In any case, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s decision to toss out the state’s paperless voting machines (and here) shows there’s some unfinished business from the 2000 presidential election, which exposed the underbelly of the nation’s electoral infrastructure.
          

George Santayana told us “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  The mainstream media's under-reporting of Florida’s past voting rights violations doomed us to the worst president in U.S. history.

I was determined to tell the story behind the story of the 2000 election debacle.  So, I wrote and produced “Counting on Democracy.”  The film, narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, was aired on PBS stations nationwide.

Sadly, history is repeating itself.  It’s clear from the 18,000 lost votes in Sarasota County that Florida election officials “learn nothing from history.”

Earlier this week, Sen. Bill Nelson, who brought an end to the political career of former Secretary of State Katherine Harris, introduced legislation that would make paperless voting history:

If Congress doesn’t get this done, I’m afraid our democracy could die from lack of legitimacy.

To sign a petition urging Congress to ban paperless voting, click here.
            
To view a clip from “Counting on Democracy,” click here.
        
To schedule a screening and talk with the filmmaker, please click here.