Despite the Media Hype, Thousands WERE Disenfranchised Nov. 7

by James Parks, Nov 17, 2006

Despite media reports that everything went well on Election Day, the reality on the ground was that thousands of people were disenfranchised because electronic voting machines failed or poll workers weren’t trained well enough. As a result, voters stood for hours in long lines, and in some cases, votes were not recorded at all.

Eight states extended balloting hours to make sure everyone could vote. The web site votersunited.org logged hundreds of individual complaints about malfunctioning voting machines, ballots not being recorded and votes being counted for the wrong candidate.

Just ask Randy Wooten about the voting machines. He was surprised when he didn’t receive a single vote for mayor of Waldenburg, Ark., on Election Day. He knows he voted for himself, as did his wife, Roxanne, in an election where only 36 votes were cast. (Waldenberg’s population is 80). According to Computerworld, the touch-screen voting machines in Waldenburg did not record the Wootens’ votes.

The worst situation of machine malfunction had to be in Sarasota County, Fla., where some 18,000 voters were not recorded as casting ballots in the congressional race. The state began a recount this week, but the recount only involves the votes that were recorded, not those 18,000 that were not. The activist groups People for the American Way (PFAW) and Common Cause scheduled a public hearing for Nov. 16 to hear from people who were disenfranchised by faulty machines.

In response to the problems in Florida and around the country, Common Cause has launched www.GetItStraightBy2008.org to demand a voter-verified paper trail for all electronic ballots.

In a statement announcing the hearing, Reggie Mitchell, legal counsel for PFAW in Florida, said:

Dozens upon dozens of voters have reported just to our organization alone problems trying to vote in the congressional race. Many of our colleagues and coalition allies have received similar reports. Something clearly went very wrong in Sarasota County.

Neither the machine recount nor the manual recount will address this problem. You can’t recount votes that were never cast due to a faulty ballot design, or that somehow “disappeared” between the screen the voter touched and the summary screen at the end of voting. A recount does not address the fact that some 18,000 people apparently were denied their right to vote in this race.

All across the country, voters encountered problems casting votes. Here are a few other examples:

• In Denver, voters stood in lines for hours after officials replaced 400 neighborhood precincts with 55 centralized voting centers, causing traffic jams, made worse by the slow operation of the county’s digital database. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter waited nearly two hours to vote. Mayor John Hickenlooper (D) has called for an investigation. Despite the problems, a judge denied a motion by the Democratic Party to extend voting by two hours.
• In Maryland, some voters in Prince George’s Country said that when they cast ballots for Ben Cardin, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, the machine recorded the vote for his Republican opponent, Michael Steele.
• In Delaware and Marion counties in Indiana, computer errors caused problems in nearly 200 precincts. A court order extended voting for nearly three hours in Delaware County to make up for late starts.
• In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, a federal judge ordered polls kept open an extra 90 minutes because of long lines and late openings caused by machine problems.

After the debacle in Florida in the 2000 elections, the federal government poured billions of dollars into states to help them replace outdated voting machines with optical-scan ballots and touch-screen machines. Many activists have said these machines are not  tamper-proof and in fact would disenfranchise more voters while leaving the door open for the same kinds of problems as occurred in 2000.

Last year, the AFL-CIO Executive Council called for increased efforts to make sure voting systems were safe:

The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call for many Americans who believed that disenfranchisement was a thing of the past. Countless citizens were denied their constitutional right to vote as a result of failed voting systems, flawed processes, and—by some accounts—deliberate intimidation and chicanery. The failure of voting systems around the country disproportionately disenfranchised people of color, people with disabilities, the poor, and older Americans. Ultimately, these failures cheated us all.

In June, we noted a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, which concluded the three major electronic voting systems used in the United States—optical scanners, touch screen with paper trails and those without paper trails—have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities.

The report, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, also offered hope, saying most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. So far, only 26 states require paper records of votes, and fewer than half of those require regular audits.

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