New York Times Editorial - Counting the vote, badly

New York Times Editorial - Counting the vote, badly
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 16, 2006


The U.S. midterm elections last week provided a lot of disturbing news about the reliability of electronic voting - starting, naturally, with Florida. In a Congressional race there between Vern Buchanan, a Republican, and Christine Jennings, a Democrat, the machines in Sarasota County reported that more than 18,000 people, or one in eight, did not choose either candidate. That "undervote" of nearly 13 percent is hard to believe, given that only about 2.5 percent of absentee voters did not vote in that race. If there was a glitch, it may have made all the difference. Jennings trails Buchanan by about 400 votes.

The serious questions about the Buchanan-Jennings race only add to the high level of mistrust that many people already feel about electronic voting. More than half of the states, including California, New York, Ohio and Illinois, require that electronic voting machines produce voter-verified paper records, which help ensure that votes are properly recorded. But Congress has resisted all appeals to pass a law that would ensure that electronic voting is honest and accurate across the United States.

Fortunately, that may be about to change. With the Democrats now in control of both houses, there is an excellent chance of passing tough electronic voting legislation. Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, had more than 200 co-sponsors for a strong bill before the midterm elections, and support is likely to grow in the new Congress. In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will be chairwoman of the Rules and Administration Committee, which oversees elections, plans to develop a similar bill.

The problems with elections go well beyond electronic voting. Partisan secretaries of state continue to skew the rules to favor their parties and political allies. States are adopting harsh standards for voter registration drives to make it harder for people to register, as well as draconian voter identification laws to make casting a ballot harder for poor people, racial minorities, the elderly and students. Some states have adopted an indefensible rule that provisional ballots cast at the wrong table of the correct polling place must be thrown out.

Congress has failed to address these and other important flaws with the mechanics of the election system. But this, too, may be about to change. Feinstein is saying that providing fair access to the ballot will be among her committee's top priorities in the coming year. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, plans to revise and reintroduce her "Count Every Vote Act," which takes an admirably broad approach to overhauling the voting system.

Election reform has tended to be a partisan issue, with Democrats arguing for reform and Republicans resisting it. It shouldn't be. Congressional Democrats should make fixing America's broken system of elections a top priority, and Republicans should join them.