MID-TERM BLUES

Should the Democrats striking gains silence concerns about U.S. voting practices?

By

Mark Almond


The striking gains made by Democratic Party candidates in the US mid-term elections seem to have silenced the rumbling concerns about the integrity and accuracy of the voting and tallying systems used in the fifty United States. Media references to glitches were sparse during election night as coverage focussed on the shift in power from Republicans to Democrats. In so far as there was any evident concern about legal challenges to outcomes it centred on the two – briefly - unresolved very narrow Senate races in Montana and Virginia upon whose outcome control of the upper chamber rested. However, whether the voting and tallying systems have greatly improved since the Florida fiasco in November, 2000, drew world attention to the issue of the integrity of elections in the world’s most powerful democracy, remains in doubt. To some extent changes since 2000 have replaced old problems with new ones.

In pointing the finger at flaws in US voting systems, I am well aware that some of them are mirrored in Britain’s own increasingly creaky polling system. It should be a common concern of citizens of the two states who see their home countries as the Mothers of Democracy that the will of the people should not only be done but should be seen to be done. Otherwise what kind of example are we really setting to the rest of the world?

Whenever I observe elections in the former Soviet bloc, I admit that Britain’s voting system is flawed and getting worse as efforts to boost turnout and dilute the security and secrecy of the ballot. Outside observers, even when genuinely impartial, do not come from democratic paradises. Nowhere is perfect. It ought to be obvious that all politics is about power, and that even in time-honoured democracies some candidates and their supporters resort to dirty tricks to win power or to keep it. No party is immune to the risk of having cheats in its ranks.

The quality of America’s democracy matters not only to Americans but to everyone in the world given the United States’ unique superpower status and role in events around the globe.

Big Country, Small Observer Mission

If there is one word which international election observers get thrown at them by unhappy natives more often than “fraud”, it is “Florida.” Ever since the hanging chads fiasco in November, 2000, people in so-called “emerging democracies” have been much more inclined to question the bona fides of Western models from which international election observers come. However, the Western media remains hooked on the idea that international election monitors should be the arbiters of a poll’s validity as though they are necessarily objective and omniscient. In fact very often they are biased and ignorant, but also come from the ranks of Western election administrators whose own methods of registering voters, organising polls and tallying votes leave a great deal to be desired.

Is there any international election observer who hasn’t been confronted by the question, “If you can come and look at our polls, why can’t we come and observe your elections?” If the international observer is from Britain or the United States, there is a simple answer to this routine query from voters across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America: “Because in my country we don’t allow independent international election monitors.” To the follow-up question, “Why doesn’t Britain or America do what everywhere else except pretty much North Korea and Cuba, the confident answer used to be: “We’re such old firmly established democracies with a rich civic spirit that no-one would dare to cheat if they could imagine doing such a thing.”

Since Florida in 2000, even the natural good manners of most of the world’s population are stretched by suggestions that jiggery-pokery is unknown in the two mothers of democracy. In Britain, too, the description by one election judge of the shenanigans in Birmingham as worthy of a “banana republic” opened the eyes of an apathetic or complacent public to how far the British voting system had been opened up to potential fraud.

In Britain’s general election in May, 2005, neither the handful of OSCE representatives nor foreign diplomats were permitted to attend the counting of votes – the most vital test of an elections fairness and accuracy. Despite the obligation under both the Moscow and Copenhagen criteria of the OSCE to accept international observers neither Britain nor the United States permit the kind of access to the vote and count which, for instance, Belarus accepts as normal.

In the pre-election period this year fears mounted in anti-Republican circles that some kind of hacking of voting machines or other kind of fraud would permit unscrupulous Republicans to repeat upset victories in 2000 when George W. Bush won the White House despite polling fewer votes than Al Gore or John Kerry lost in Ohio in 2004 despite exit polls pointing to his victory. Some critics of President Bush’s Iraq policy and the escalating death toll among Iraqi civilians there even clutched at the intention of the OSCE to monitor the US midterm elections as a straw of hope for anti-Republican candidates. For instance, Michael Carmichael wrote in Middle East online: “ With Karl Rove’s hand poised over the election-stealing electronic voting machines fabricated by Republican corporations, the Office for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe, now the world’s pre-eminent authority on the fairness of elections, have announced their mission to supervise the American midterm elections. According to reports in Europe, the OSCE is keenly interested in the allegations of e-voting and election fraud in Bush’s America.”

This overlooked the reality that it has been the OSCE’s invariable agreement with the US foreign policy line which has given its election reports the status of gospel truth for naïve followers of the authorised version of politics in Eurasia.

The pathetically small contingent of observers sent to the United States by the OSCE despite all the media controversies about possible snarl ups and frauds indicated the lack of consistency in that organisation’s approach to its task of monitoring democracy in the member states of the OSE. The OSCE proudly boasted that sixteen observers would monitor the mid-term elections in a country of 300 million people. In 2001, for instance, the OSCE claimed to have deployed 250 observers in Albania a country with 1 per cent of the population of the United States. In Montenegro in May, 2006, the OSCE claimed to field more than 600 observers in a country of only 600,000 people.

The quality of the OSCE observer mission’s findings can be judged by its boast that “Although the mission may visit some polling stations on election day, no systematic observation of polling station procedures will take place”! Despite not planning the kind of large-scale observation of polling stations which it boasts of elsewhere, nonetheless the OSCE promises, “A final report with findings and recommendations will be issued.” As in Britain in 2005, the OSCE monitors will not be able to observe the crucial count. In other words their mission is a fig-leaf or a sop to all those lesser breeds around the world in much smaller countries who have to host observer missions up to 100 times bigger than the one deployed to the USA.

Understandably Americans do not take the OSCE seriously, at least not when it pokes its nose into their own affairs. Already in 2004, the apparatchiks of the OSCE could not help giving vent to the damage to their self-esteem done by the lack of respect for them shown by Americans, voters and officials alike. A British veteran of highly critical recent OSCE missions to ex-Communist countries who were to be whipped into line, Andrew Bruce told the Los Angeles Times in 2004: “’There is so little awareness of the OSCE here… People in the Balkans know a lot more about us.’ In former Soviet republics where the organization has sent election observers - such as Armenia and Azerbaijan - they've been received by the prime minister”!

Foreigners are allowed to “learn from” British or American elections and in that sense can observe them but they are not invited to write reports about our conduct. That would be too much like pupils expressing an opinion on teacher’s performance. After the 2004 elections, one US OSCE official, Nat Parry, wrote an account of how distressing one Albanian observer found the ways in which Republican activists tried to discourage ethnic minority voters from casting ballots: “Her voice shook as she recounted reports of black voters being challenged by Republican lawyers at polling places, of minorities asked for two forms of identification when only one was needed, of polling places in precincts with large minority populations being moved to police stations, of hundreds of electronic voting malfunctions, and of polling stations lacking enough provisional ballots.

The Albanian lawmaker, flipping through page after page of her notes, was stunned by the disenfranchisement of minority voters. ‘How could this happen here?’ she asked me. ‘How could this happen in America?’…”

In other places, election workers refused entry to the OSCE observers or even called out the police to deal with the unwelcome foreigners poking their nose in other people’s affairs.

The situation was little different on 7th November, 2006 from 2004 when according to the International Herald Tribune’s Thomas Crampton, “Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such laws mean that no election observers from the OSCE are in Ohio, a swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling issues.” Ohio was the state which swung it but the OSCE’s observers saw nothing there.

Official America was not much more interested in the conduct of its own elections than the OSCE. Although the US Justice Department boosted its own observation of the mid-term elections, its sample remained pretty paltry. It sent out more than “850 people to watch the polls in 69 jurisdictions across the country today, focusing primarily on areas with closely contested races or a high number of minority voters.” This was “more than twice the number sent during the 2002 midterm elections.” However, even though an unprecedented number of potentially controversial districts were covered, “no observers are being sent to Missouri, Tennessee or Virginia, where three of the most hotly contested U.S. Senate races will play out.”

If fraud or error was to mar the midterm elections it would be up to citizens’ groups or even ordinary citizens to catch the problems themselves. Only Americans can ensure the probity of their own elections, but then we are all the only true guarantors of our own freedoms wherever we live. Complacency and national pride are the two greatest threats to democracy in established democracies because they blind citizens to the cynicism of ambitious politicians – something to which America’s Founding Fathers were ever alert.

Dirty Tricks backfire – Better to miscount the votes

Although media and critics of the American way of voting and counting the votes laid great emphasise on an allegedly highly partisan atmosphere combined with all manner of attempts to deceive or bully vulnerable voters into choosing someone other than their preferred candidate or not voting at all, it is to be doubted if the old-style voter suppression or confusion is the main threat to the integrity of the polls nowadays.

Mud-slinging is as old as contested elections and certainly older than democracy. Often dirty tricks backfire because they need to become public knowledge if they are to work at all. Automated phone threats might sound a cool way to influence opponents’ supporters into not voting as they would prefer but only to a political cretin who cannot see that someone will record them and tell the press. Similarly, distributing misleading leaflets has to put the black propaganda into the open to reach its targets and someone cries foul.

Even armed intimidation on polling day itself is of limited effect. The New York Times reported that “In Arizona, Roy Warden -- an anti-immigration activist with the Minutemen -- and a handful of supporters staked out a precinct in the city of South Tucson and questioned Latino voters as they entered the polls to determine if they spoke English. Armed with a 9mm Glock automatic strapped to his side, Warden said he planned to photograph as many Latino voters entering polls at as many as 20 precincts in an effort to identify illegal immigrants and felons.” Mr Warden also “heckled Democratic congressman Raul Grijalva as he walked into the precinct to cast his ballot” but dismissed the Minuteman saying even someone packing a Glock "hasn't been a deterrence to voters -- it's just been a nuisance."
Exotic and high profile forms of intimidating behaviour like these pose much less of a threat to the integrity of elections in the United States than basic features of how voting and counting are administered in the fifty different jurisdictions.

Vote Early, Vote Publicly

Far more problematic than gross efforts at intimidation is the spread of voting methods which are inherently unreliable in terms of guaranteeing secrecy and accuracy of the ballot, or simply unproven and unprovable in their reliability. The epidemic of early voting across America in recent decades is a much greater threat to the secrecy and honesty of the polls across America than militia men or klansmen could ever be.

In 2001, John Mark Hansen, the director of research for National Commission on Federal Election Reform, a bipartisan group co-chaired by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, said, "Most states do not routinely check signatures either on applications or on returned ballots, just as most states do not verify signatures or require proof of identity at the polls"

The trend away from a single election day and to postal ballots alarms election observers on both Left and Right. John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute has drawn attention to the potential threats to the integrity of secrecy of the ballot and to civic values of early voting and postal ballots in his book, Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils showing how in the quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan was first elected the proportion of Americans using early voting procedures has shot up from 1:20 to more than a quarter of all participants in national elections. Oregon is an entirely postal ballot state.

With 30 US states allowing postal ballots on demand, on 30th October, Mr Fortier listed a wide range of problems caused by early voting in the Wall Street Journal: “This year more voters than ever will cast ballots early. The result may be that we get the final election results late. It's possible we won't know which party controls either house of Congress for days or even weeks because of all the disputes and delays caused by absentee ballots.”

The sloppy way in which absentee ballots are handled is an insult to democracy. Routinely in the past when exit polls and counting trends suggest the result won’t be altered by counting the packs of absentee ballots, they have not been counted. The concession speech of the defeated candidate apparently obviating the need for a full published result. At the local level the failure to count absentee ballots fully and quickly has led to local candidates losing who in reality won. For instance, according to Fortier, “In 2004, a worker at a Toledo, Ohio, election office found 300 completed absentee ballots in a storage room more than a month after the vote. At least half hadn't been counted, and they affected the result of at least one local contest.”
Fortier’s research produces a basic conclusion evident also from Britain’s flirtation with postal voting under Tony Blair: “Simply put, absentee voting makes it easier to commit election fraud, because the ballots are cast outside the supervision of election officials.” Of course the advocates of postal voting like Sam Younger, the chairman of Britain’s so-called Independent Election Commission, take a little fraud into account as the price to pay for a boost in turnout as far back as 2001 when he told the BBC: “I think there is a greater possibility of postal vote fraud this time because it is simply easier to get postal votes and there are more and more postal forms floating about” but he wanted to have a "balance between the encouragement to participation... and the dangers of any increase in fraud." Mr Younger’s commission was explicitly urged by Parliament to promote “'greater participation” in a law passed according to one experienced observer of Britain’s docile House of Commons: “The Electoral Commission was created in November 2000 by a Bill which was not so much rushed through Parliament as boot-heeled down its gullet. The Government made extensive late amendments to the legislation and then guillotined the Bill in the Commons after an hour or so of debate. It is remembered as one of the worst examples of sloppy law-making in recent history but no one felt it would matter much. Electoral commissions? Hardly sexy, after all. Oh yes they are.”

American proponents of dropping “antiquated” procedures like “going to vote” on polling day see any boost in turnout above the traditionally modest levels in recent decades as a benefit – as though reaching North Korean levels of “voter participation” would be ideal.. But anyone who reads the sort of abuses listed by Fortier will doubt that any civic or democratic value is promoted by the kind of “granny farming” (to use the English term) which he reports. For instance, there are examples of the kind of abuses of the sick and Alzheimerly which naïve observers might think only occur in places like Romania. Voting in intensive care might share a Stakhanovite-like devotion to democracy on the part the citizen-patient but it is hardly plausible – yet across America as in so many of the New European states where I have observed elections it is apparently “normal.” In the mayoral race in Chicago in 2003, they initially enabled the candidate who actually polled fewer votes to win before the courts ordered “Abuses such as those in East Chicago can occur because many states allow political parties to collect absentee-ballot applications, and several even let them collect the completed ballots. Most states even let campaign workers assist voters in filling out the ballots if they ask for help.”

Ease of access to absentee ballots encourages inflating the size of the electorate with phantom or out-of-state voters. Low turnout – on 7th November it was 40.4 percent nationwide, compared with 39.7 percent in 2002 – encourages politicians to develop expedients to boost participation. Not only do these make fraud or pressure easier, they risk overloading the system if they succeed in boosting voter numbers.


Electronic Voting: Diebold provides a paper trail in Belarus but not Back-home

Ever since Walden O’Dell, the chief executive of the Diebold Corporation, wrote his infamous letter of 14th August, 2003, telling fellow Ohio Republicans that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year” controversy has raged not only about the reliability but also the impartiality of electronic voting machines.

After the ructions in 2000 with allegations that old-fashioned mechanical voting machines were the cause of the Florida hanging chads, the push for touchscreen technology in polling booths really took off. Its adoption was routinely welcomed as a step forward. For instance, the OSCE reported on “the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which amongst other things introduced reform of voting technologies.”

But even if fraudulent hacking could be ruled out – which sadly numerous enthusiastic computer nerds showed it could not – malfunctioning computer terminals offered at least many chances for mistakes and mis-recorded votes as hand-operated pull-voting machines. Part of the problem is the multiplicity of candidates on American ballots with both federal, state and local offices to be filled. Voters cannot spare the time to tick off dozens of choices and so some way of indicating support across the board for a party ticket was found long ago.

But even if the hanging chads episode illustrated how weak arms or poorly maintained machines could mean that votes were not fully registered on the old equipment at least such errors were visible to the naked eye. With computers American voters lack access to a hard copy record of how they voted. Worse still adjudicating authorities too cannot test the electronic result against a paper record.

In Venezuela voters receive a paper print out of how they have voted. This confirmation slip is deposited in a ballot box as a reserve against challenges to the outcome. When they duly followed in Venezuela two years ago the discrepancy between the electronic result and the paper result was found to be minutely small. In Belarus – an outlaw state to Bushies – Diebold machines are commonplace and I have used several to withdraw cash. Oddly enough in Belarus Diebold machines provide a paper receipt and count out the cash accurately, but back home in America at election time what is good enough for Belarusians is too good for Americans. “Paper print out!” – “Next, they’ll be asking for $100 out of the wall every time they tap in $100”!

Why Diebold cannot offer to American voters the paper trail it offers as standard to Belarusian bank customers remains a mystery. Perhaps if US voters paid a fee for the privilege like bank customers then Diebold would offer them a printed record of how they voted and even a 99.999% certainty that their transaction at the electronic ballot box would be accurate.

On polling day, MSNBC reported among other problems, “programming errors and inexperience with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and leaving some in Florida with little choice but use paper ballots instead.” While in Cleveland, “voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touch screen machines that they couldn’t get to start properly. “In Indiana’s Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers didn’t know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. She said it could take most of the day to fix all of the machine-related issues.”

Readers of the truthout website can find hundreds of similar examples. A Google search would turn up many more.

Even if hacking by people of ill-intent or just the kind of malevolent nerds who send out computer viruses could be ruled out, as American elections go electronic the risk of the real intentions of voters being lost in cyberspace grow apace. However galling the Florida count in 2000 was at least the hanging chads left a concrete body of evidence for lawyers and activists to scrutinize. An electronic re-run of the Florida crisis would be much more controversial. Partisan positions would be even less likely to be shaken by evidence. America could find itself in 2008 simultaneously involved in its continuing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorists plus crises with Iran or North Korea and facing a domestic constitutional imbroglio if electronic voting goes haywire.

Faith-based acceptance of the efficacy of the new technology runs in the face of evidence of widespread glitches in the machinery and equally widespread failure to run or maintain the machines properly by polling day staff. In a close race, errors more than fraud could throw the system into crisis.

Register Now, Vote Now

American history is littered with even more examples than British history of ways in which politicians have devised ways of deliberately complicating the rules about how to exercise one’s theoretical democratic right after coming of age, sometimes to exclude people of a specific race, always of the “wrong” political affiliation. However, in recent years great efforts have been made both by legislation, court decisions and civic initiatives to enable any adult US citizen who wants to vote to do so. Nowadays from the perspective of the security and integrity of the ballot, efforts to enfranchise spur-of-the-moment, would be voters even on election day itself risk reducing the honesty of the ballot. In Montana, for instance, “For the first time, Montanans may register to vote on Election Day, thanks to a 2005 law change. The previous law required voters to be registered by 30 days before the election…. To do so… citizens should go to their county election offices, which are usually in the county courthouses. They simply tell the election official that they want to register to vote, he said, and they will be given a registration card to complete.
The new voter will be given a ballot on the spot… The voter can either fill out the ballot in a voting booth or take it home and return it later with sufficient time before the polls close at 8 p.m.”! Maybe no-one in Montana has ever intimidated anyone, let alone a voter, but leaving ballots to wander around on election day is an invitation to attempts to influence or intimidate voters with them in their possession outside the polling precinct. Anywhere else in the world, wandering ballot papers would be regarded as prima facie evidence of poor conduct of the poll, or even fraud.

As this Group’s observers have witnessed in Kosovo, for instance, the US system of permitting unregistered voters to use so-called “provisional ballots” which may or may not be counted, not only according to whether the would-be voter has the right to vote but also whether election workers decide it is worth their while to count them, means in effect introducing an unnecessary complicating factor into the poll under the guise of ensuring votes for all. Sadly, some notion of civic commitment should be expected from would-be voters. Annual registration with a closure date or at least regular registration cut-off points with publication of electoral registers should replace on-the-day registration and provisional ballots. The web lends itself admirably to free and universal access to voters’ registers so anyone can check well in advance if they have been left off despite filling in the necessary forms.

One-Party Statelets

If the mid-term elections promised an unusually high level of turnover in the membership of the House of Representatives and even the Senate at federal level, in many of the individual states uncontested elections remained commonplace. For instance, in Arkansas 70% seats in the local legislature were filled without opposition. Georgia had 68% of incumbents unopposed. Elsewhere in the Old South, things looked up a little for multi-party democracy. In South Carolina as many as 34 out of the 124 House seats were contested even so ensuring a Republican hold on power since the GOP held 74 seats already. North Carolina seemed in the grip of an almost frenzied level of partisan competition with as many as half sitting candidates having to sweat out the long-drawn out counting process because someone eccentric or optimistic enough could be found to stand against them. Overall, 30% of the 6,100 seats in states legislatures would go by default because no opposition candidate was put up. Apparently even the Great American optimist cannot be found to take a chance in 2000 seats up for grabs without takers.

Only three states – Hawaii, Nebraska and Louisiana – had at least two candidates for every seat up for grabs – but then Louisiana only had two seats up for grabs in 2006!

Maybe low salaries for elected state representatives and the burden of travelling to the state capitol discourage some would-be candidates but the basic problem is gerry-mandering. Both at state and federal level, district boundaries for seats in the House are drawn up by the sitting members. This is a bi-partisan practice but ironically it ends with a carve-up to suit incumbents of both parties rather than any kind of fair distribution according to colour-blind or non-partisan criteria. Districts are often geographically contorted but psephologically shrewd. Without a rational re-districting one party-statelets within Americas fifty states will remain the norm.

Because so many House races were decided by wide margins, it is easy to conclude that no significant problems remain with US voting systems, but the very narrowness of key Senatorial contests shows how significant small outages in electronic voting tallies or other problems, not necessarily fraudulent, with voting and counting procedures could still be in 2008.




Cure worse than the disease

Seeking technical solutions to civic problems is modern politics’ most insidious disease pretending to be a cure. Making voting easier, more comfortable and convenient is the cure for everything from voter apathy to electoral fraud. In fact it is neither.

The Federalism of the United States has many virtues but not every aspect is positive. Fifty different voting systems, each with its own anomalies, may have the kind of quaint charm that attracts people to Old Europe but the multiplicity of vagaries and inconsistencies hardly makes for reassurance that the voters are getting either an honest or even a reliable result.

Sadly through laziness or lack of understanding, citizens in democracies like America and Britain have surrendered control and oversight of the electoral system to officials and electoral workers who out of their own laziness and lack of attention to detail or out of partisan zeal may cheat. Any experienced election observer cannot avoid noting that a lack of secrecy of the ballot, a slow count and a failure to control the identity of voters are a recipe for electoral fraud. Electronic voting has its dangers, too, but the focus on the recurrent flaws in the electronic voting machines used across the United States should not distract from the wider problem posed by absentee ballots to the secrecy and honesty of the ballot and of the counting of votes.


Help America Count the Vote

After the Florida imbroglio in 2000 drew global attention to the vagaries of US electoral systems, the Congress passed the “Help America Vote Act”. No doubt many reforms were necessary to ensure that all entitled people had access to the polls and that mechanical malfunctions did not distort the process. Nevertheless, the reliability of the new machinery, especially electronic voting machines remains in serious doubt. Enough glitches, to speak of nothing worse, happened on 7th November to suggest that a serious re-think of technological dependence at election time is called for.

The widespread use of early voting also raises unresolved doubts about the security and integrity of the ballot and indicates that Congressmen were more concerned about boosting turnout than any potential for fraud which such procedures facilitate. The proliferation of early voting should be restricted as a pestilential threat to both honest elections and genuine civic participation.

At least as much as helping Americans to vote, the new Congress and/or state legislatures need to think of ways to help America count votes accurately and quickly.
That costs money or manpower. Instead of relying on flawed possibly hacked machines, good old-fashioned bank tellers should be hired to do the job if civic spirit doesn’t inspire volunteers.

As Britain ought to know, a landslide can mask a thousand flaws in the electoral machinery. Americans of either party or neither would be wise to fix the problems with the voting systems before another Florida-style fiasco puts the whole electoral system in question. The irony of the uncontroversial polls in November, 2006, is that their hidden flaws could yet rear their heads with a vengeance in a closely contested presidential election in 2008.