Election reform? What election reform?

NOTE: This is Andrew Gumbel guest-blogging again.

I thought I’d wait a day or so to see if anyone had much good to say about the major report co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker on the dire state of elections in this country and how to fix them. But it seems the work of their Commission on Federal Election Reform, now concluded, has received a near-universal thumbs-down – most notably from dissenting members of the commission itself.

This, unfortunately, is what you get when you take one prominent Republican and one prominent Democrat and try to pretend that the combination will produce enlightenment and fairness and a just representation of the public interest. It ain’t going to happen, especially if you happen to believe (as I do) that the real problem with American politics lies not with one party or the other but with the two-party system itself. Given the long history of contempt for the electorate and for ballot-box integrity displayed by both Democrats and Republicans, hoping for progressive electoral reform from the two of them conjoined is a bit like inviting rival gangs of thieves to join forces to advise you on how best to secure your worldly goods.

I don’t think everything in the Carter-Baker report is bad – not by a long chalk – and they themselves stress the need for nonpartisanship over bipartisanship. In the end, though, the report reflects just too much of the cross-party haggling that went into its make-up. It argues, valiantly, for fitting the new generation of lousily programmed electronic voting machines with an independently verifiable paper audit trail – no small victory, given the contentiousness of the debate over Diebold and the other touch-screen machine manufacturers – but goes nowhere far enough in calling for thorough public oversight of the questionable software put into the machines in the first place. It calls, rightly, for a clean-up of the country’s notoriously unreliable voter registration rolls, but then plunges deep into voter suppression territory by advocating an absurdly over-restrictive voter ID requirement.

What is saddest is the commissioners’ evident powerlessness to change some of the most fundamental things about the system that need changing. It is utterly anomalous that certain US states -- especially in the South -- continue to disenfranchise ex-felons who have fully paid off their debt to society. But the best report can do is ask, pretty please, if those states would be so kind as to change their minds. Ain’t going to happen, certainly not in Republican-controlled states where most ex-felons are poor and/or black and likely to lean Democrat. Likewise, the United States is virtually alone among established democracies in failing to provide its electoral candidates with equal, unpaid access to the broadcast media. But the report merely “encourages” the networks to provide five minutes of serious coverage of the issues every night in the month running up to any given election. Don’t hold your breath.

That said, there is some good stuff, especially on imposing uniform nationwide standards on registration and provisional ballots. (Inconsistent rules and practices from state to state, and from county to county, are one of the major factors behind the dysfunctions of American elections because of the undue political influence they have historically encouraged.) Some people regard the commission appointment of James Baker, the Bush family consigliere who held up the Republican end of the dogfight over Florida in the wake of the 2000 election, as akin to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. But I prefer to see him in more brutally realistic terms as someone with the White House’s ear who might actually be able to get a few things done.

It’s going to be modest at best, though. For more details, I’d urge you to read the provocative analyses of the ever-excellent Rick Hasen of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Dan Tokaji of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and Tova Wang of The Century Foundation. Wang perhaps puts it best when she says the voter ID question seeks to put blame for fraudulent elections on the individual voter when, far more often, it is the politicians and the administrators who are at fault. She goes on:

As I and others have documented repeatedly (see here, here, and here) voter fraud at the polling place is not our major problem, and identification requirements serve to disenfranchise many groups of voters.

Here's what the problems are in American elections today: too few—not too many—people vote; the voter registration system is not working for voters or elections administrators; voters are still systematically disenfranchised, due to such policies as felon disenfranchisement, flawed felon purges, inaccessible polling sites, misallocation of voting machines, and inappropriate challenges at the polls; voters are individually disenfranchised by continued, often race based, voter intimidation and deceptive practices; and there is a general mistrust of the election system by the American people.

Why don't we start there instead.

Comments

[Marc Davidson]

Thanks for the timely post.
It's difficult to imagine the implementation of an efficient and fair voting system in this country given the control of this process that local jurisdictions have and the corrupting influence of money in the huge contracts given to manufacturers of voting machines.
If we were truly interested as a nation in fixing the problem, we could find a way. One way would be to challenge the constitutionality (on 14th Amendment grounds) of the way fully half of our jurisdictions run elections. This would require, for instance, the implementation of hand-counting or proven automatic systems such as optically scanned ballots. Another way would be to remove any question about the nonpartisanship of our election officials (eg secretaries of state and chairpersons of their state's Bush campaign, Katherine Harris and Steven Blackwell).
You are right to point out that the greater danger is disenfranchisement than ineligible people casting ballots.
With regard to voter ID cards, another layer of computer automation (eg swipe strips) is likely to complicate the system even more causing increased disenfranchisement as well as misuse of the information collected.

[reg]

It is imperative that Mgmax report to this thread with all deliberate speed so that he can use his favorite catch-all term of derision for liberals, "goo goo", in an appropriate context for a change.

[Steve Smith]

"Not by a long chalk?"

[Andrew Gumbel]

Sorry. Britishism. Sorry also for formatting/continuity problems including a few mysteriously skipped words - at one point last night the whole entry looked like it had been blown over by Hurricane Rita.

[Marc Davidson]

Sorry. I'm missing the "goo goo" context.

[Gene Tenace]

Heck, just putting enough machines in neighborhoods that are likely to vote Democrat would make a big enough difference. Making people wait for 4,8, 12 hours to vote is enough right there to hand an election over to the Repubs!

[johnny bench]

Ahem, Joe Rudi can go to hell for that fake 'catch' of my extrabase hit...

[johnny bench]

oops, i had a studs terkel moment there, it was Denis Mencke, not me, who hit that spectacular hit! we wuz robbed!

[reg]

"goo goo" = good government, in the lexicon of cynics (i.e. election reform, Common Cause-type stuff). Mgmax used it rather aggressively in a prior thread under the mistaken assumption that it had something to do with '60s liberals who supported the Black Panthers.

[Nursing apparel]

let's pray for everyone :-) this is the only gift i can actually for a reform.

[Internet Money Making Counselor]

that is very touching to pray for everyone.

[cna certification test]

"goo goo" = good government, in the lexicon of cynics (i.e. election reform, Common Cause-type stuff). Mgmax used it rather aggressively in a prior thread under the mistaken assumption that it had something to do with '60s liberals who supported the Black Panthers.