Voter Disenfranchisement: The Sequel

From the St Petersburg Times in Florida (22 Oct 2004):

Election chief warns of absentee scam
People posing as election officials are visiting residents of several counties and offering to take absentee ballots.
By Stephen Hegarty

Pasco elections officials have a warning for the county's absentee voters: Don't give your ballot to a stranger claiming to be from the elections office.

They're not who they say they are.

"The people who are soliciting your ballots in this manner are not elections officials," Pasco Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning warned Thursday. The warning came after a phone call from a west Pasco woman. Other Florida counties have gotten similar complaints.

"We've had a bunch of them - 100 at least," said Bob Sweat, elections supervisor for Manatee County. "It's probably going on all over the state of Florida."

From Democracy Now!'s segment "Suppression, Fraud and Breakdown: Voting Problems Emerge in States Across the Country" (25 Oct 2004):

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Jon Greenbaum [director of Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law], about Broward County in Florida and what you have found there?

JON GREENBAUM: Well as I mentioned before, we have already found some problems. We have a hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. And people are calling in to the hotline and telling us about problems that they're having when they're trying to vote in Broward County, including waiting in long lines because machines are down, including machines that don't appear to have been properly set up in advance, including machines that weren't tested prior to being put out in the field. It's very troubling. Because once again, we have a situation where it's hard to have full confidence that people are going to be able to participate in the way they should be able to participate in the system.

From "Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," by Andrew Gumbel of The lndependent (24 Oct 2004):

After the last fiasco everyone from President Bush down vowed to fix the system and ensure another Florida could never happen. But three big things went wrong. First, the new generation of computer touchscreen machines - brought in at dizzying speed and at even more dizzying cost to replace the discredited old punch-cards - turned out to be poorly programmed, unverifiable, prone to all manner of failure and susceptible to undetectable foul play.

Secondly, the Bush administration dragged its feet about enacting funding its own new election laws. As a result, most states won't have their electoral procedures fully updated and coordinated until the next presidential election in 2008. That, in turn, is opening up furious arguments about the ill-defined rules for provisional ballots, absentee ballots, ID card requirements at polling stations and other seemingly esoteric bureaucratic niceties that could have a huge impact on turnout - especially among the poorer, less educated classes who have traditionally been ignored, if not excluded, by the two major parties.

Thirdly, the political leadership allowed itself to be deluded into thinking that the dysfunctions of the US electoral system were purely a matter of technology. Fix the machines, the thinking went, and everything else will be fine. What should have been glaringly obvious in 2000, and is even more glaringly obvious now, is that the failures of the electoral process were a direct result of the ferocity of broader political battles. The blithe incompetence of local election officials and their wonky machinery were side-effects of these battles, not the cause.

For background on the 2000 election failure, see Robert Greenwald's film, Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, and Greg Palast's reporting of voter disenfranchisement.