"WASHINGTON --- New electronic voting machines have arrived in Yolo County, Calif., but there is one hitch: the audio program for the visually impaired in some of them works only in Vietnamese."
To Whom It May Concern:
HELP !!!
Sincerely Yours,
Democracy
New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Woes
| by Ian Urbina |
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Summary: Summarized by Copernic Summarizer
"Talk about panic," said Freddy Oakley, the county's top election official. "I've got gray-haired ladies as poll workers standing around looking stunned."
As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results.
In Maryland, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, a shortage of technicians has vendors for new machines soliciting applications for technical support workers on job Web sites like Monster.com. Oakley, who is also facing a shortage, raided the computer science department at the University of California, Davis, hiring 60 graduate students as troubleshooters.
Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states considered most likely to experience difficulties, according to voting experts who have been tracking the technology and other election changes.
"We've got new laws, new technology, heightened partisanship and a growing involvement of lawyers in the voting process," said Tova Wang, who studies elections for the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. "We also have the greatest potential for problems in more places next month than in any voting season before."
Election officials in many of the states are struggling with delays in the delivery of machines before the election as old-fashioned lever and punch-card machines are phased out.
A chronic shortage of poll workers, many of them retirees uncomfortable with new technology, has worsened matters.
Wendy S. Noren, the top election official for Boone County, Mo., which includes Columbia, said delays in the delivery of new machines had left her county several weeks behind schedule and with 600 poll workers yet to be trained. Noren said she also had not yet been provided with the software coding she needed to print the training manuals. "I think we will make it," she said, "but my staff is already at the point of passing out, and the sprint is just starting."
New computerized registration rolls and litigation over new voter identification laws in states like Arizona, Georgia, Indiana and Missouri have left many poll workers and voters unclear about the rules, including whether they are in effect, as the courts have blocked many of the new laws.
"We're expecting arguments at the polls in these states that will slow everything down and probably cause large numbers of legitimate voters to be turned away or to be forced to vote on provisional ballots," said Barbara Burt, an elections reform director for Common Cause.
Meanwhile, votes in about half of the 45 most competitive Congressional races, including contests in Florida, Georgia and Indiana, will be cast on electronic machines that provide no independent means of verification.
"In a close race, a machine error in one precinct could leave the results in doubt and the losing candidates won't be able to get a recount," said Warren Stewart, policy director for VoteTrustUSA, an advocacy group that has criticized electronic voting.
Deborah L. Markowitz, president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, was less inclined to sound the alarm. She said that since it was not a presidential election year and many states had encouraged voting by mail, fewer people would turn up at the polls than in 2004.
Markowitz said, there will be far fewer people incorrectly excluded from the new databases compared with when registration rolls were on paper. "There will be isolated incidents, there is no doubt about that," she said. "But over all the system will move faster and with fewer problems."
Charles Stewart, head of the political science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a study this year indicating that from 2000 to 2004, new technology helped reduce the number of improperly marked ballots by about one million votes. "If you think things are bad and worrisome now, they were much worse before 2000," Mr. Stewart said, adding that breakdowns in the mechanics of voting are simply more highlighted, not more prevalent.
Still, this is a year of firsts for some local election officials.
Cherie Poucher, elections director for Wake County, N.C., which includes Raleigh, said she expected 350,000 voters on Election Day, up from the 30,000 in the May primary. She worries that the county's 218 optical scan machines may be unable to handle the increased load.
The machines were replaced within hours, she said, and since her county uses optical scan machines rather than paperless machines, voters were able to deposit paper ballots into a ballot box until replacements arrived.
Justin Levitt, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that on election night his organization will be keeping particularly close watch on North Carolina, Florida and South Dakota, because of new voter registration databases there. These databases were intended to help streamline registration and decrease fraud, and they help political parties track potentially supportive voters.
In some states, however, the databases have blocked large numbers of eligible voters from joining registration lists. North Carolina, for example, requires that information provided by voters for registration forms match information in the motor vehicle or Social Security databases.
A report released last Thursday by the Century Foundation, Common Cause and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights cited concerns that most states have only vague, if any, standards for voting machine distribution. There is no federal minimum for the ratio of voters to machines and there is wide variation in state standards.
Election officials in Ohio, which had some of the longest lines in 2004, passed a law this year setting the ratio at 1:175, the report said.
Keith A. Cunningham, director of the Allen County board of elections in Ohio and former president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, said most counties were close to the ratio required by the law.
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