America’s Third World Voting Systems A Disgrace
Voting across the country is in chaos. Our state by state patchwork of voting rules, laws, ID’s, machines, processes, poll worker training and counting can only be described as third world. I believe these systemic flaws contribute to the national malaise about voting participation. For many it is a pain in the butt. Others, a huge inconvenience. For many a discouraging experience.
What are the flaws? Inconsistency on voting rules, laws and rights from state to state. Poor quality training of poll workers. Proprietary machines owned and operated by private corporations, some of whom do not hide their partisanship. Nor do they particularly hide the inferiority of their technology. We make registration as difficult as possible for many. Especially minority and young voters whose votes are deliberately suppressed by policy from the Republican party.
Voting rights and election protection advocates have pointed out this absurdity from what is often promoted as the world’s greatest democracy. But nothing happens to rectify the innumerable defects in the system and process. It is time to give all Americans, regardless of their state of residence, equal and reliable access to their participation in the electoral system. It should become a national priority. This is a national embarrassment.
The 2014 mid-terms once again painfully illuminated the problem. The reports are still flowing in from election protection groups. One source on which I rely for reporting on voting problems is Brads Blog. Brad Freeman has passed along many examples, close to twenty states, where irregularities have been reported. Verification is still underway but here are some examples.
Chicago- 2,000 election judges were notified just before election day that their training was not complete and therefore they should not report for duty November 4. It caused unopened polls, delays and frustrated voters across the city.
Virginia-Machine vote flipping.
North Carolina-Wrong data was sent to polling sites, including wrong information on voter polling locations.
Michigan-Software failure.
Indiana-Machines would not boot properly in some counties.
Connecticut-Computer glitches caused a court to order some polls to stay open later to rectify.
Georgia-At least 40,000 registrations were not processed.
Missouri-Ferguson ran out of ballots.
Florida-The infamous Broward County compute voter ID system failed.
Arkansas-Poll workers asking from wrong ID’s, machine vote flipping.
Alabama-ID requirement inconsistencies across the State.
Texas-Statewide registration database transmission failed; machine failures in largest County, No provisional ballots ordered, total confusion on ID requirements due to Federal Court last minute intervention.
Maryland-Touch screen vote flipping.
New Mexico-major drop in motor voter registration.
California-L.A. county double voter registrations.
Colorado-Duplicate and incorrectly printed ballots.
Tennessee-Machine vote flipping. Incorrectly printed ballots.
We really don’t know how this might have impacted individual contests. Under this chaotic system, we mostly cannot ever know. America, can’t we do better, or do we not care?
Tags: Featured
I agree, it’s pathetic and uniform national standards are needed. But don’t hold your breath, it would take a constitutional amendment.
It is pathetic. But I do think that voting has to be made a right of citizens before anyone takes it more seriously.
There’s an interesting article from TechCrunch about using technology to disrupt the current state of voting.
We have a system at odds with itself, because we are so damned determined to know who won what as quickly as possible.
However, the statement, “We make registration as difficult as possible for many. Especially minority and young voters whose votes are deliberately suppressed by policy from the Republican party,” is silly. With Motor Voter, we have the ability for people to register to vote at any DMV, and there is a DMV office in every county in the country. More, they all have photo identification machines to produce drivers licenses, which would enable anyone registering to vote to get a photo ID for voting purposes, if they didn’t already have one. Many states allow party canvassers to register people on the spot, in shopping malls or wherever, though those don’t produce photo IDs.
How much easier do you want registering to vote to be?
One has to look at the overall results.. We still have Obama as president, and we have only one third of America that just voted more for Republicans, unless pot was on the ballot. Then, dude, Democrats rocked…with 65% turnout…
After 4 years from now we should still be standing, and it is for the best; that is what the founding fathers hoped for…
Dana, Delaware’s registration system is a breeze; fast, one stop shopping. But it states like Texas you’ve got about 600,000 people with various barriers such as a 100 mile drive in many rural areas without a DPS office nearby as they have in urban Texas. If you don’t have a car or drivers license, you’re screwed at getting an ID with any kind of convenience; DPS offices there and other southern states are nightmares; open bankers hours, not so good for hourly wage people lucky enough to have a job. No time off from employers to get one. In urban areas, long lines and when you get to the service window finally (Yes, I’ve been there, done that) you do not have the 2 or3 verifying docs they want to prove your birth. If you’re unlucky enough to have not been born in a hospital as many rural poor are, no birth certificate for you. You’re really screwed. Then things like marriage, divorce, moving as 20% of us do every year, you’ve got a name change to rectify or new address. If you’re not so smart, mentally healthy or very persistent, you give up and you’re part of the great body of American “unwashed” who just don’t vote.
Should be much easier for all; issue automatically once you turn 18; algorithms can figure that out, and once registered, always registered. And why be required to vote at a particular poll; you should be able to walk in and vote at any poll if you can prove you’re a resident of that state with a simple receipt of some kind like rent or utility bill. That takes care of the most of the moving issues. You can now do that where they have early voting where you vote where you want in the state because they’re verifying with one digital database.
Mr Merriman, you’ve said that a person ought o be able to vote anywhere in the state, but computer glitches have already been mentioned, and unless you are voting at your own precinct, your ballot may well be wrong, due to different local offices and various constituency boundaries.
I’ve been registered to vote in Kentucky, Virginia, Delaware and now Pennsylvania, in large cities (Lexington, KY, Hampton, VA and New Castle County) and in small towns, and I’ve never seen any significant problem. Yeah, it might require some effort if you live in the backwoods somewhere, but we’ll never have a system which requires no effort.
As for people who choose not to vote, for whatever reasons they have, as far as I am concerned they have “voted” for the winners, because that is the practical effect of their decisions. When I hear complaints like, “Well, 64% of registered voters didn’t vote,” my reaction is, “So what? That’s on them, and they have chosen not to count.”
Dana, I didn’t say state…..but happily the digital age has enabled counties to run countywide early voting sites for voters from anywhere in the county. My old county was massive and we could early vote at a couple dozen locations. Last cycle we had 254 different ballots. Shouldn’t be hard for small states if its done in a county four times the size as delaware.
An alternative to first past the post voting could be a huge step in the right direction. http://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
A point of clarification to ProPop’s post: The Brad Blog site.
The author is Brad Friedman, a Californian.
His site is The Brad Blog.
The link is http://bradblog.com/
Brad and lawyer Ernest Canning have some 10 to 12 years worth of comment on the failures of touch screen voting machines, vote blocking and voter disenfranchisement. He does not print rumor and fact checks quite extensively. He is second on my list of sites I check daily and support with a monthly site support donation. Please go to the site. You will find it well worth your time.
Tom, thanks for posting the detail on BradsBlog which I cited. Brad indeed does his homework and has a very strong network of voting system activists around the country. He also has a show on KPFK radio (Pacifica Network) in LA and I became acquainted with him when we collaborated on some voting machine fiasco reporting years ago when I was a volunteer producer at KPFT, a Pacifica network station in Houston.
Dana –
“you’ve said that a person ought o be able to vote anywhere in the state, but computer glitches have already been mentioned, and unless you are voting at your own precinct, your ballot may well be wrong, due to different local offices and various constituency boundaries.”
This is unbelievable. It’s 2014. I can google “Where’s my polling place”, and it will reference the address that I’ve saved in google maps against shapefiles for different electoral districts and return not just the address of where I vote (and hours and directions), but also a list of all offices I can vote on and the candidates. There is no technological excuse for not having online voting, aside from the shitty government procurement process that keeps the bureaucracy a decade behind the rest of us.
On a different note – why is it so hard to vote in deep blue states? You had 45 days to vote in Nebraska. At any point in time between mid-September and November 4th, voters could go cast their ballot. In Massachusetts, you had the 13 hours between 7 AM and 8 PM on a single Tuesday in November. Why is it that when Democrats take large majorities in a state, they never address access to the polls?
I came from a state that has close to two weeks of “early voting” prior to Nov. 4 election day. I was a strong advocate for early voting to expand and increase voter participation. Still am really.
But when I tried to do the homework on whether early voting around the U.S. expanded the participation levels recently, I found scant evidence that this is the case. I really don’t get it, in seems so rational that giving people more dates will expand the electorate.
Participation in early voting has steadily increased, but not in the overall voting rate that I can find.
Anyone have a clue on hard research on this?
To follow up to another point by Dana:
“Well, 64% of registered voters didn’t vote,” my reaction is, “So what? That’s on them, and they have chosen not to count.”
Let’s say I’m a single mother that has to work three jobs to make ends meet. I don’t have time to make it to the polls on election day… because I’m working. I don’t have time to swing by the Dept. of Elections because during the hours that they’re open… I’m working. Really, the only thing I can do is request that an absentee ballot be mailed to me, so that’s another form that I have to fill out, send in, wait for the ballot to be mailed to me, fill that out, and mail that in.
So yes, voting is available, but it’s sure as hell not convenient. No, it will never require no effort, but there’s a good bit of room for this bar to come down. It’s downright offensive to say that “it’s on them”, because people like Maria Fernandes (http://goo.gl/DLqQqy) are a bit too busy to jump through several hoops over the course of a few weeks to cast a ballot.
If we want to make our democracy more representative of the 99%, the progressive line can’t be “it’s on them”.
PP –
It’s really tempting to look at turnout as a measure of access to the polls, but in the end this whole line of questioning is immaterial.
It’s about making sure that everyone has the opportunity to vote, not making sure that everyone actually does.
I hear this so much, we are far behind our brother/sister democratic States and behind even not republic/democracies. However, this really doesn’t affect our terrible views toward voting and candidates/campaigns.
The percentage of people who are turned away due to archaic laws is grotesque, even more so the non-laws and systematic oppression that plagues immigrants, the poor, and the elderly outside of voting itself. When the Government is slapping you in the face everyday, the last thing on your agenda is squeezing voting into your already overworked, underpaid, better off dead lifestyle. Then there are the actual laws that hurt these same groups around IDs, voting hours etc.
I fully support national early vote, funded/subsidized by the federal government and government oversight committees that actually investigate and hold back money from states that do not have fair elections. In an ideal world if you did not comply with the federal regulations, could not implement early voting, can not implement electronic voting, still have archaic laws on the books etc, the federal agency would take over the elections. I would also like to see incentives. States get more money when they turn out more voters and if two cycles pass below a certain threshold of turnout you lose, federal takes over.
So that is my position, and while I know it wont happen, lets just say it did and we had a magical world where anyone who wanted to could vote. Still wouldn’t change a damn thing. Most americans know that voting is a joke…only in some rare instance in the smallest number of states does your vote matter, especially the larger the scale. Obviously one vote can still change low level races, but in the national and statewide scheme, it doesn’t matter. Each side spends a billion bucks for each cycle now. The majority of election districts in this country aren’t functionally competive and even in “wave” elections like 2014 (or 2010..0r 2006) there are only short term swings before it settles. 2016 is a great year for democrats (mathematically). We defend few seats and where the GOP defends, many of these “swing” States were won by Obama or even Gore and Kerry before him.
Candidates, Commitees and Campaigns continue to preach to the lowest common denominator, they fully play politics and very little substance is discussed. There is little confidence in government and few outside of the percentage that is “fully in” such as those taking their time to follow politicians and post on a message board even care, and half of them are constantly disappointed, only to show up at the polls and vote for the same old people/parties.
Fairer elections, actual restrictions and regulations, more honest voices/third parties will help but unless our government goes through a renaissance and actually beings to change we wont see turnout increase.
Delaware’s registration system is a breeze, but the elections commission and polling places are operated with the same level of integrity as Nicaragua or any other 3rd world country.
You don’t need ID or anything to vote if someone “vouches” for you, so basically we have subjective laws and everything is in the hands of the poll workers..