Vote your Heart Out
By Laura PaskusExcitement over the election has ebbed and flowed throughout the course of this extraordinarily long election season. But you can sure bet on some sparks flying at the Democratic Party convention in Denver in August—if not on the convention stages, than at least on the streets (Check out Recreate68.org).
And while I don’t want to be a buzz kill, it wouldn’t hurt to remember presidential elections past. The phrase “hanging chads” ring a bell? Who still remembers that Al Gore actually won the popular vote in 2000? And how about those 350,000 voters purged from voter registration lists in Ohio in 2004?
So forget for a minute about Super Delegates, lofty speeches and even the record amounts of cash candidates are raising — and instead check in with the election system in your own mountain state.
1. Fuhgettaboutit!
New Mexico’s voter-registration database, voting machines and campaign finance reporting databases have all been outsourced to a private company, ES&S, currently being sued by California and the city of San Francisco for fraud.
County clerks also say they don’t have the cash to maintain the new electronic voting machines — and the company won’t train public employees to fix broken machines.
Things also went awry at the Feb. 5 Democratic Party caucus, with many registered voters being told they weren’t on the rolls — including a former judge and a county clerk.
Gov. Bill Richardson and party leadership promised an investigation and a summit to figure out what went wrong. There’s been no word yet on the results of that investigation — and the summit has been canceled.
2. Damn civic involvement
Arizona’s Feb. 5 caucus didn’t run too smoothly either. In the Arizona Daily Star, Daniel Scarpinato and Josh Brodesky reported: “Record turnout, voter confusion and short-staffed polling places on Tuesday produced an election as notable for long lines and names missing from the voter rolls as for the results.
“With presidential primary votes still being counted Wednesday afternoon, election officials were trying to figure out how they were caught off-guard by a tsunami of civic involvement.”
3. You’ll tell me if you’re wrong, right?
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Testing Board, auditors and the state’s office of Cyber Security tested the state’s voting systems after activists sued over the use of electronic voting machines.
In December, after finding that ES&S machines sold to Colorado — and used in the 2004 and 2006 elections — failed tests, Colorado’s Secretary of State Mark Coffman, decertified all of those systems, as well as the Hart InterCivic ballot scanners used in 47 counties.
In March, Coffman recertified the state’s voting systems, but according to a story in the Rocky Mountain News — “Electronic voting machines get ok for this year, but future’s iffy” — Denver officials are purging their machines and switching to paper ballots.
4. Miami and Bics
Here’s an excerpt from a Casper Star-Tribune story by Rebecca Boone that ran after Election Day 2006:
“Problem pens, broken scanners, low supplies and long lines plagued some of Idaho’s polling stations on Election Day, prompting some political candidates to compare the state’s woes to a more infamous election in the south. “This is like a Third World country. This is like Miami in 2000,” said Democrat Jerry Brady, who lost the governor’s seat to Republican C.L. “Butch” Otter.
And here’s more:
“The slowest vote counts came from eastern Idaho’s Bannock County, where optical scan readers failed to recognize the ink used to mark ballots. The county was using the Bic pens recommended by the company that makes the scanner, Idaho Secretary of State Chief Deputy Tim Hurst said, but the machines still didn’t work.”
5. One man + two votes = prison time?
Utah is one of the few states without a lengthy list of problems on the votersunite.org website, which tracks voting errors and discrepancies.
But check out this November 2006 story from KCPW:
“After seeing Stealing America Vote by Vote — a documentary film about election fraud in the 2004 presidential election — a Salt Lake County man says he wondered whether the new electronic voting machines being used today would allow him to vote twice. He voted early on Friday, then says he went to his precinct today to test his theory: “I expected it to, you know, maybe a screen to come up and say, ‘you voted twice,’ that’s what I expected. But there was nothing that happened.””
KCPW has agreed to keep the man’s name confidential because voting twice is a felony. While he views his act as a test of the new system, if not one of civil disobedience, Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen is not impressed: “The bottom line is we go back and do a history report, and, if he did this intentionally, it’s prosecutable.”
6. Women call for accuracy
In January — soon after the Ohio Secretary of State’s office released a $1.9 million report detailing ES&S voting machine errors — the Montana League of Women Voters released an op-ed, titled, “Ohio has just done Montana voters a huge favor.”
Organizers point out that 44 of Montana’s 56 counties use one or more ES&S machines and ask Montana Secretary of State Brad Johnson to “assure voters that their votes are secure and accurately counted by decertifying ES&S machines,” then recertifying them if they meet the recommendations of the Ohio report.
“Montana voters,” they write, “deserve to know that the machines that count their votes have, at the least, met industry standards for accuracy and security.”
7. And, the how to vote slideshow
Wyoming, too, will be using ES&S voting machines in November, in all but three of its counties. To help voters avoid making improper marks that ballot scanners might record incorrectly, the Wyoming Secretary of State offers an on-line slideshow, “Marking Your Optical Scan Ballot.” Just visit vote.wyoming.gov MG
