Six years ago we welcomed in the Help America Vote Act which was supposed to address the ills of the system exposed in 2000. While it took time to get some “solutions” in place and begin rolling them out, we were told that 2006 was going to be a “transitional year” as many new systems and policies were put in place. So this year we should be good to go, right? This report from the Washington Post indicates that there may still be another cycle of a hard rain falling in our future.
Faced with a surge in voter registrations leading up to Nov. 4, election officials across the country are bracing for long lines, equipment failures and confusion over polling procedures that could cost thousands the chance to cast a ballot.
“You change systems and throw in lots of new voters, and you can plan to be up the proverbial creek,” said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a consulting firm that has tracked the voting changes.
The article points out that voter registration is surging across the nation at a rate much higher than the average population growth. The close race in Nevada will take place with roughly 400,000 more voters than in the 2004 cycle. This patter is being repeated in many of the battleground states. How much of this growth came from the widely discussed “advanced ground game” of the Obama campaign will remain to be seen until the shouting is over.
But no matter who they support, this swelling number of citizens may run into problems when they show up to cast their votes. New types of voting machines will doubtless cause issues for volunteers on site who may not be familiar with them. Paper ballots showing up in places not used to them can lead to issues as well. (The article points out that Palm Beach, Florida lost more than 3,500 votes in this year’s primary which still has one judicial election hanging up in the air.) And then there’s our old friends at Diebold, though they now operate under a new name.
Premier Election Solutions, the company that makes many of the nation’s voting machines, last month acknowledged that software used in 34 states, including Virginia and Maryland, could cause votes to be dropped. The company, formerly called Diebold, said it has no fix for the problem now, but election officials can catch the errors and recover the votes through a routine process of double-checking electronic memory cards.
Feeling better yet? If we see yet another shift in the polls, Virginia may still be one of the deciding factors in the presidential election. What’ a few thousand dropped votes?
Some states have added many more machines (a 50% increase in some Ohio districts) to handle the expanded crowds, but long lines are still expected in many urban areas. How long will some of these new voters be willing to wait to cast their ballot? You might spend twenty hours on line for the new Jesus Phone (i-Phone) but will you hang out in the rain for three or four hours to help determine the nation’s next leader? The longer the lines, the more the weather may affect the outcome. And that, my friends, may be the best metaphor for American elections of all.