Picture you and me …

September 25th, 2006

Besides Diebold, we have serious problems with voter’s having to jump through hoops to get a photo ID … and I seriously question such a need. This is personal with me as I’ve been battling the system to get a copy of my birth certificate for months in order to renew my [now expired] driver’s license; here in Roy Blunt’s home state, we took up the new “proof of citizenship” requirements last year. I was born a few months after the end of the war in what served as a temporary wartime hospital; I’m still being “looked for” — now they’re hunting through the microfiche. Meanwhile, I’m out scout, and I can’t tell you how aggravated I am with this whole process.

Such is our infamous Homeland Security, where Who Knows What can come in via container through any port … Who Knows What will be lifted out of your personal luggage before getting on a plane … and Who Knows How thousands of old, poor or disadvantaged folks will be “guaranteed” their vote under a system that is paranoid by intent and designed to keep them away from the polls by making the hurdles too difficult to leap.

A local radio talk show recently featured a caller who had these same questions — the DJ said that if people couldn’t get a photo ID, then they were too stupid to vote.

Oh REALLY! I would say that the stupid ALREADY voted — and look at the fine mess we’re in today. Perhaps when I’ve finally proved that I am who I’ve always been, I’ll drive down and tell him so to his face.

Miffed, dearhearts … I’m very, very miffed. And fretful about our voting situation in the Land of the Free [?!] and Home of the Brave.

Diebold update, last.

Jude

Photo IDs are solution to problem that doesn’t exist
GOP attempts to scare nation with nonexistent hordes of illegal voters
Cynthia Tucker, Universal Press Syndicate
09.25.06
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21408

Republican leaders have discovered a grave threat to American democracy that most of us apparently had not noticed: Everywhere, in big states and small, red enclaves and blue, bustling metropolises and rural hamlets, impostors are flocking to the polls to vote under false pretenses. Apparently, the nation has been overrun by fake voters.

What else would explain the GOP’s insistence on using its power to ram through requirements that voters show government-issued photo IDs at the ballot box? Last week the GOP-dominated House passed a measure requiring voters to show government-issued photo IDs to vote in federal elections by 2008.

“Americans should have their votes counted, and not negated by an illegal alien,” said U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.

Similarly, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue and his state Republican colleagues have backed a stringent state requirement for government-issued photo IDs. (Last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford struck down Georgia’s voter ID law, ruling it violates the state’s constitution. The state is expected to appeal.)

Announcing a plan earlier this month to crack down on fraudulent documents, Perdue said, “It’s simply unacceptable for people to sneak into the country illegally on Thursday, obtain a government-issued ID on Friday, head for the welfare office on Friday and go to vote on Tuesday.”

Now, you can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of a single case in which an illegal immigrant successfully used a fake ID to vote. Neither Burton nor Perdue presented evidence of any such cases.

“People who look carefully at this thing, there’s very little ‘there’ there — very little fraud,” said Thomas Patterson, an expert on elections at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “If you are an illegal immigrant, the last thing you want to do is show up at a polling place. … We have enough trouble getting people to vote when they’re eligible. The idea that people are going to stick their necks out and get (a) penalty stretches the imagination.”

Patterson notes that the voting and registration rules that apply in much of this country are already more stringent than those in most Western European democracies. In much of Western Europe, for example, the postal service simply notifies voter registration officials when a citizen moves, and his voting precinct is automatically changed. “Here, the onus is on the citizen. You kind of sense that the ballot box belongs to registration officials instead of the citizens,” he said.

The 2004 presidential election followed a campaign that centered on the threat of terrorism, following the worst attack on American territory since Pearl Harbor. Even with those high stakes, only 60 percent of eligible voters bothered to cast ballots.

In the presidential election of 2000, 51 percent of eligible citizens voted. In 1996, about 49 percent cast ballots; in 1992, about 55 percent. In Georgia’s last gubernatorial election, about half the eligible citizens cast a ballot. In Arizona, an enterprising political activist has proposed placing each voter’s name in a draw for a million-dollar lottery, in an effort to boost participation.

Yet, the lack of a problem has made Republicans no less insistent on a solution. It makes you wonder whether they are up to something other than ferreting out voter fraud. Even if there is a legitimate need for a single, government-sponsored identification card in an age of terrorism, it would take years — and a well-organized, government-funded effort — to place those IDs in the hands of every elderly and rural American in out-of-the-way hamlets and every American of color in down-at-the-heels urban neighborhoods.

Of course, Republicans know that. They also know that most minority voters tend to cast their ballots for Democrats; so do many low-income elderly voters. Since those voters are less likely to have driver’s licenses, it’s a safe bet that requiring a photo ID at the polls will shave off a few Democratic voters — enough to make a difference in close races.

The GOP has given up making its policies broadly appealing. Instead, it works hard at keeping a certain slice of voters from the polls. Their focus on blocking the ballot box seems especially harsh — and hypocritical — at the very time that President Bush has claimed that spreading democratic ideals is the centerpiece of American foreign policy. How can we export democracy to Iraq if we are so uncomfortable with it here at home?

The ‘Harder To Vote’ Act
Wade Henderson
September 21, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/21/the_harder_to_vote_act.php

Wade Henderson is the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Just two months ago, the nation watched Congress, both House and Senate, overwhelmingly reaffirm a commitment to voting rights when it reauthorized the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law guarantees access to the voting booth for all Americans for the next 25 years.

So it boggles the mind why we are having yet another national discussion about who can and cannot vote in this country.

Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the “Federal Election Integrity Act of 2006″ (HR 4844), sponsored by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., which would require all voters to obtain and show government-issued photo IDs proving their citizenship before they could vote.

Proponents of this ill-advised legislation say it is necessary to prevent voter misrepresentation—people showing up at the polls pretending to be someone they’re not.

While our electoral system isn’t perfect, the supporters of this bill are inflating voter fraud into a problem that just doesn’t exist. Congress and the states have proven extremely successful at preventing non-citizens from voting and ensuring that voters are who they claim to be.

Far greater problems loom over the electoral system than voter misrepresentation—scarcity of polling places, ill-prepared poll workers, faulty voting machines and lack of language-appropriate voting materials, to name just a few.

Just one week ago, on September 12, for example, countless voters in Montgomery County, Maryland, went to vote in the primary and found their regular polling places shuttered. In other cases, they were confronted with broken voting machines and a lack of paper ballots, with the result that they were turned away, disenfranchised, unable to cast their votes

Far from addressing such structural problems, the House-passed legislation creates another one—one that would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of registered voters.

On the surface, the bill seems reasonable. Many citizens might wonder what’s wrong with showing their government-issued driver’s license when they go to vote. But most states don’t require proof of citizenship to issue a person a driver’s license.

The only document that meets the bill’s requirement for proof of citizenship is a passport. According to the State Department, only 25 percent of Americans over age 18 have a passport. Passports can cost as much as $100.

In order to get a passport, you need your birth certificate. Do you know where your birth certificate is?

Many would probably have to pay for a replacement copy of their birth certificate so they could get a passport. At least another $20.

Let’s face it: HR 4844 is the equivalent of a poll tax since voters would have to pay for a passport to prove their citizenship in order to vote.

So we are left then to wonder why the need for this reckless law that will actually discourage, confuse and discriminate against voters. If passed, this onerous bill would prevent many eligible voters from exercising their right to vote, disproportionately affecting people of color, the elderly, individuals with disabilities, rural and Native American voters, the homeless, low-income people and married women, who studies show to be less likely to carry a photo ID.

Election reform in this country is necessary and a very serious matter, but HR 4844 is simply not the vehicle to address it.

The Senate is due to take up the bill shortly. We expect that, like its 98-0 vote to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, the Senate will give measured consideration of this bill and put an end to attempts to disenfranchise American voters.

Officials Wary of Electronic Voting Machines
IAN URBINA
September 24, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/us/politics/24voting.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A growing number of state and local officials are getting cold feet about electronic voting technology, and many are making last-minute efforts to limit or reverse the rollout of new machines in the November elections.

Less than two months before voters head to the polls, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland this week became the most recent official to raise concerns publicly. Mr. Ehrlich, a Republican, said he lacked confidence in the state’s new $106 million electronic voting system and suggested a return to paper ballots.

Dozens of states have adopted electronic voting technology to comply with federal legislation in 2002 intended to phase out old-fashioned lever and punch-card machines after the “hanging chads” confusion of the 2000 presidential election.

But some election officials and voting experts say they fear that the new technology may have only swapped old problems for newer, more complicated ones. Their concerns became more urgent after widespread problems with the new technology were reported this year in primaries in Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland and elsewhere.

This year, about one-third of all precincts nationwide are using the electronic voting technology for the first time, raising the chance of problems at the polls as workers struggle to adjust to the new system.

“I think there is good reason for concern headed into the midterm elections,” said Richard F. Celeste, a Democrat and former Ohio governor who was co-chairman of a study of new machines for the National Research Council with Richard L. Thornburgh, a Republican and former governor of Pennsylvania.

“You have to train the poll workers,” Mr. Celeste said, “especially since many of them are of a generation for whom this technology is a particular challenge. You need to have plans in place to relocate voters to another precinct if machines don’t work, and I just don’t know whether these steps have been taken.”

Paperless touch-screen machines have been the biggest source of consternation, and with about 40 percent of registered voters nationally expected to cast their ballots on these machines in the midterm elections, many local officials fear that the lack of a paper trail will leave no way to verify votes in case of fraud or computer failure.

As a result, states are scrambling to make last-minute fixes before the technology has its biggest test in November, when voter turnout will be higher than in the primaries, many races will be close and the threat of litigation will be ever-present.

“We have the real chance of recounts in the coming elections, and if you have differences between the paper trail and the electronic record, which number prevails?” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the author of the Election Law blog, www.electionlawblog.org.

Professor Hasen found that election challenges filed in court grew to 361 in 2004, up from 197 in 2000. “What you have coming up is the intersection of new technology and an unclear legal regime,” he said.

Like Mr. Ehrlich, other state officials have decided on a late-hour change of course. In January, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico decided to reverse plans to use the touch-screen machines, opting instead to return to paper ballots with optical scanners. Last month, the Connecticut secretary of state, Susan Bysiewicz, decided to do the same.

“I didn’t want my state to continue being an embarrassment like Ohio and Florida every four years,” said Mr. Richardson, a Democrat, adding, “I also thought we needed to restore voter confidence, and that wasn’t going to happen with the touch-screen machines.”

In Pennsylvania, a state senator introduced a bill last week that would require every precinct to provide voters with the option to use paper ballots, which would involve printing extra absentee ballots and having them on site. A similar measure is being considered on the federal level.

In the last year or so, at least 27 states have adopted measures requiring a paper trail, which has often involved replacing paperless touch-screen machines with ones that have a printer attached.

But even the systems backed up by paper have problems. In a study released this month, the nonpartisan Election Science Institute found that about 10 percent of the paper ballots sampled from the May primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, were uncountable because printers had jammed and poll workers had loaded the paper in backward.

Lawsuits have been filed in Colorado, Arizona, California, Pennsylvania and Georgia seeking to prohibit the use of touch-screen machines.

Deborah L. Markowitz, the Vermont secretary of state and the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said that while there might be some problems in November, she expected them to be limited and isolated.

“The real story of the recent primary races was how few problems there were, considering how new this technology is,” said Ms. Markowitz, a Democrat. “The failures we did see, like in Maryland, Ohio and Missouri, were small and most often from poll workers not being prepared.”

Many states have installed the machines in the past year because of a federal deadline. If states wanted to take advantage of federal incentives offered by the Help America Vote Act, they had to upgrade their voting machines by 2006.

In the primary last week in Maryland, several counties reported machine-related problems, including computers that misidentified the party affiliations of voters, electronic voter registration lists that froze and voting-machine memory cards whose contents could not be electronically transmitted. In Montgomery County, election workers did not receive access cards to voting machines for the county’s 238 precincts on time, forcing as many as 12,000 voters to use provisional paper ballots until they ran out.

“We had a bad experience in the primary that led to very long lines, which means people get discouraged and leave the polls without voting,” said Governor Ehrlich, who is in a tight re-election race and has been accused by his critics of trying to use the voting issue to motivate his base. “We have hot races coming up in November and turnout will be high, so we can expect lines to be two or three times longer. If even a couple of these machines break down, we could be in serious trouble.”

Problems during primaries elsewhere have been equally severe.

In the Illinois primary in March, Cook County officials delayed the results of the county board elections for a week because of human and mechanical problems at hundreds of sites with new voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems.

In the April primary in Tarrant County, Tex., machines made by Hart InterCivic counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were cast. The problem was attributed to programming errors, not hacking.

In the past year, the Government Accountability Office, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and the Congressional Research Service have released reports raising concerns about the security of electronic machines.

Advocates of the new technology dispute the conclusions.

“Many of these are exaggerated accusations by a handful of vocal activists,” said Mark Radke, director of marketing for Diebold Election Systems, one of the largest sellers of touch-screen machines. “But if you want to talk about fraud and tabulation error, the newer technology is far more accurate.”

Mr. Radke cited a study from the California Institute of Technology that found that between the 2000 election, when touch-screen machines were not used, and the 2004 election, when they were, there was a 40 percent reduction in voter error in Maryland, making the vote there the most accurate in the country.

“There is always the potential for human error,” Mr. Radke said, “but that is easily correctible.”

But critics say bugs and hackers could corrupt the machines.

A Princeton University study released this month on one of Diebold’s machines — a model that Diebold says it no longer uses — found that hackers could easily tamper with electronic voting machines by installing a virus to disable the machines and change the vote totals.

Mr. Radke dismissed the concerns about hackers and bugs as most often based on unrealistic scenarios.

“We don’t leave these machines sitting on a street corner,” he said. “But in one of these cases, they gave the hackers complete and unfettered access to the machines.”

Warren Stewart, legislative director for VoteTrustUSA, an advocacy group that has criticized electronic voting, said that after poll workers are trained to use the machines in the days before an election, many counties send the machines home with the workers. “That seems like pretty unfettered access to me,” Mr. Stewart said.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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