Ezra Klein: More Machines

June 27, 2005

More Machines

Tova Wang's got an interesting piece on voter suppression in The Century Foundation's Taking Note. According to her, it wasn't high tech hackers doing the work, but old school class discrimination:

Elections officials, whether through incompetence or intentional efforts to suppress the vote, did more damage than any particular technology might have done by failing to supply sufficient numbers of voting machines. And as the House Judiciary Democratic Committee investigation found in Ohio, "There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas." Right after the election the Washington Post reported that, "local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry."

All over the country, voters had to wait in line for up to nine hours. Interestingly, however, some of the worst of it was in key battleground states. Observing early voting in a Broward County, Florida shopping mall, I myself encountered numerous voters, some of them elderly, who had waited five to six hours to vote. The worst of it evidently was on the campus of Kenyon College in Ohio where there were only two voting machines. According to the Beacon Journal, one student waited ten hours—until 2 a.m.—to vote.

Such waiting times are tantamount to disenfranchisement for many average working Americans, possibly in violation of federal voting laws and constitutional guarantees. How many people can stay away from their jobs for hours on end to vote? What about the single working mother who has to deal with her job and her kids? What about the man who is working two or three jobs to make ends meet?

Something we should fix before the midterms roll around. Paging Dr. Dean?

June 27, 2005 in Elections | Permalink

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Comments

I am in complete agreement.

The one thing that I haven't heard is a balance of this right with the equally important issue of insuring against vote fraud. Too many people voting early and often.

Posted by: Robert Zimmerman | Jun 27, 2005 12:58:54 PM

If I remember correctly, this is the exact tactic that College Republicans learn at their seminars. Make voting as inconvenient as possible, like cramming voting in a small space, and you can discourage many voters. Times sure have changed. Remember when lawmakers were doing everything possible to increase voter turnout, i.e. motor voter drives. For people who love democracy so much, these republicans sure are trying to make it as difficult as possible.

Posted by: sgiff | Jun 27, 2005 1:13:23 PM

"Such waiting times are tantamount to disenfranchisement for many average working Americans"

They are disenfranchisement, for anyone. Election officials, who permit this kind of nonsense should be prosecuted.

The whole idea of touch-screen, computer voting creating an opportunity for high-tech ballot-stuffing by hacking, may be just a magician's trick to distract people from the consequences of replacing voting "machines" that cost less than $20 apiece (as some punchcard and fill-in-the-dot thingees do) with machines that cost $3000 apiece. In other words, if voting machines become a scarce commodity, voting discrimination by queue will become the norm.

For Democrats, the obvious thing is to promote strictly paper voting -- no machines and easy absentee voting.

Posted by: Bruce Wilder | Jun 27, 2005 1:34:19 PM

Democracy sounds so easy..... One person, one vote.

The integrity of the voting system has been questioned almost from the beginning. People are inventive, and if the object is increase votes for one party and decrease votes for another, corrupt officials will find a way to do that.

One way to discourage voting is to base the number of machines in a precinct or ward on the number of people who have voted in previous recent elections. Republicans are most consistent voters (although increasingly through absentee ballots), so Democratic precincts - where often the voters don't vote in primaries, etc - get fewer machines or ballot boxes or whatever. It would be hard to make a legal case against these corrupters who would take refuge in statistics from earlier elections.

In my mind, having elections under the control of partisan elected officials is asking for trouble. I don't have a better solution however than Oregon's system which relies solely on mail-in ballots which are optically scanned paper (and can be recounted). No precincts and no machines.

Any system that trusts a programmed computer that hasn't been independently audited and controlled is an invitation to fraud. This can also apply to the tabulating computers in an optically scanned environment unless recounts are done by hand.

People DO quite often believe that the ends justify the means, so we should take that into our plans and make sure that the means are fully auditable (and fairly distributed - in the case of voting machines).

One possible solution to shortages of machines is some sort of 'flying squad' of vehicles with machines aboard to respond to long lines where they exist.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Jun 27, 2005 2:30:48 PM

I agree that this is a problem. I think that you can find bi-partisan agreement on this issue, and I also think that in the majority of cases you will find that this is a result of incompetance or honest mistakes rather than malice.

I also think that attributing it to malice is likely to do more harm to the cause of fixing this problem. This is not to say that I don't think there are corrupt people who would engage in the tactics you describe, but I think they are the minority and certainly not representative of either parties views.

The last election has quite impressive turnout, especially in battleground states. This sort of problem is understandable under that situation.

Jim: You 'flying squad' idea is creative, but I think unworkable and an invitation to fraud in the other direction.

Posted by: Dave Justus | Jun 27, 2005 2:52:10 PM

Here is the easy solution.

1)Insist upon paper trails for audit purposes.

2)Require maximum wait times and tie it to federal funds.

3)Require picture identification as you would any other important transaction.

Problem solved

Posted by: Robert Zimmerman | Jun 27, 2005 3:13:28 PM

Bingo.

With all due respect to the elected officials of Ohio (or any state), if you can't figure out how to make the voting process nearly 100% effective, you are quite frankly morons. I can't believe we can send someone to the moon or cure cancer, but we can't figure out how to making voting easy and effective. I agree with Jim, this is gross negligence.

Posted by: Adrock | Jun 27, 2005 3:31:10 PM

It is gross negligence, but since it directly benefits one political party, and that party has the majority, nothing will be done about it. I'd think the Congressional Democrats would start to be a bit more vocal about making election day a holiday, minimum number of voting machines, access to polls. I think it's far enough now from the election that "Bush stole the vote" rhetoric isn't automatically encoded in a neutral discussion about election reform.

Posted by: Horatio | Jun 27, 2005 3:54:34 PM

Robert,

Sounds good to me if you add a requirement that prevents conflict of interest by election officials.

Posted by: William Bollinger | Jun 27, 2005 4:25:17 PM

Ezra, is there a set standard for how many voting machines are available for each voter in a district?

Does anyone know of a set ratio that civil libertarians like?

It would be good to have codification, like teachers have with no more than 20 students per class for effective learning. The simple numbers help humans--surely there must a be a number we can broadcast everywhere, beat them over the heads with it.

Posted by: paradox | Jun 27, 2005 4:56:44 PM

1)Insist upon paper trails for audit purposes.

2)Require maximum wait times and tie it to federal funds.

3)Require picture identification as you would any other important transaction.

These are good ideas.

Posted by: TJ | Jun 27, 2005 5:19:01 PM

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