Honest Voting

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger says that on Friday Republicans in the Democratic-controlled Mississippi House lost their bid to introduce a bill that would require voters to show identification at the polls .

The measure failed by 54 to 61. Voter ID legislation has repeatedly passed the Senate and died in the House.

Governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, chose voter ID as one of 11 items on his agenda for a special session of the Mississippi legislature. Supporters of voter ID say it helps prevent fraud. Opponents say there’s little proof of voter fraud, and they worry the requirement would intimidate older African Americans once threatened for trying to vote.

House Republicans tried last week to hold lawmakers’ salaries hostage in an attempt to pass voter ID. That attempt also failed…this time. Republicans are expected to try again later in the special legislative session.

The need for voter ID continues to be a major Republican talking point. I was entertained by Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann’s assertion that the state’s racial problems are a thing of the past — glad to know that somewhere on this planet has been cleansed of race and class prejudice!

If you take a close look at the Constitution, you may be shocked to discover that there’s no constitutionally protected right to vote. Surprised me too! But it does explain the hot mess that we’re left with every couple of years.

A group called FairVote.org has devoted itself to analyzing American and international elections and election practices, and studying the effects on voter participation, fairness in representation and competitive choice.  So they keep pretty busy.  They’ve decided that American elections are such a hodgepodge that we need to get some form of uniform election standards.

Parenthetically, their board officers are an entertaining mixture: “chair emeritus John B. Anderson, today a law professor and formerly a Member of Congress (IL) and 1980 presidential candidate; chair Krist Novoselic, musician and author (I’m highlighting that for myself, but maybe you wondered what happened to the third member of Nirvana too); vice-chair Eddie Hailes, senior attorney with the Advancement Project; secretary Cynthia Terrell, a board member of the American Friends Service Committee; and treasurer William Redpath, a licensed CPA.”

You can get a PDF of FairVote’s report on the Municipal Right to Vote Initiative from the link at the top, or directly here.  I’ll be writing about this group again.

http://www.votefraud.org/ puzzles me. What disturbs me about the site is its design, which challenges my heart-felt belief that ideas aren’t responsible for their owners. This *looks* like a nutball site, with its massive underlines and haphazard tables. (How did I turn into such a web snob? It’s not as though I’m a master of CSS either.) When I scroll down the page I fully expect to see instructions on folding a tinfoil hat.

Nevertheless this site demonstrates that voting integrity isn’t a liberals-only issue. The man behind this site, Jim Condit, Jr., got interested in the issue of election fraud because he was concerned that Pat Buchanan had been electorally shafted. He encouraged his readers to watch the vote count for Ron Paul. And he’s right to do so. Preserving…maintaining…okay, creating secure elections is something that should concern everyone from every party.

This post on the ACM Risks Digest shows how shallow the awareness of basic electronic voting security can run.

Democrats Abroad is the organization the Democratic Party set up to keep in touch with the six-million Democrats who are temporarily or permanently living abroad. Just because you’re out of the country doesn’t mean you should be prevented from voting, said the party, and so they set up what they called a “Global Primary.” In some places you could vote in person, but the goal was to hold the primary over the Internet. A noble enterprise.

Unfortunately, as Peter Kaiser reported in the February 25, 2008 Risks Digest, the party mismanaged the electronic security of the “Global Primary” from start to finish. Here are the errors he noted:

• Registration was handled on unsecured web pages.
• Voters’ ballot numbers and PINs were distributed via email.
• The (secured) voting pages required Java but didn’t let a Java-less user know that until he or she had already entered the ballot number and PIN, leaving that user’s vote in limbo. What happens to a vote cut off in midstream? No way to tell.
• The ballot included candidates who had already withdrawn their candidacy. What happened to a vote from someone who didn’t know that and happily voted for their no-longer-a-candidate? No way to tell.
• At the end, voters were encouraged to print out the record of their votes. However, the website reportedly said that those printouts were non-binding, so really, why bother?

And these are people who want to lead the United States into a safer electronic age? Crack a book, why don’t you?

Today Digby wrote with the usual incisive grace about the HBO movie Recount. It gave her nightmares, she said, nightmares about the month she spent screaming at the television about the Republican spin.

My distaste for that month of spin remains so virulent that I can’t bring myself to watch the movie. Probably not ever. Do I want to watch some of my favorite actors inhabit the characters of political operatives and drive home yet again how passionately those operatives felt their cause was just, to the point that collusion and fraud seemed like natural acts? Probably not ever.

We need to watch the electoral process especially carefully this year. As Digby points out, Tim Griffin, handpicked by Rove to replace the fired US attorney in Arkansas, was just hired to run the RNC’s Obama opposition research team. “..The voter fraud apparatus that Rove and others before him have built, which includes Republican lawyers like Carvin and Griffin, is still up and running.”

More later, while I do a quick brain scrub at the new Indiana Jones movie.

Championing free, honest, and accurate elections is like taking a principled stand in favor of Mom and apple pie.  Who would want to come out against fair elections?  You might as well declare yourself a fancier of child pornography.

As I type this I’m watching Start the Revolution Without Me, that classic costume farce with Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder playing French aristocrat and peasant twins mixed and switched at birth.  The scene that just finished was the elegant Dance of Note-Passing, where the nobility at the ball gradually abandon the pretence of dancing as they exchange scrawled requests for sex and assassination.  Eventually the floor is littered with historical Post-Its.  There’s so much evidence of intrigue that the dancers ignore everything that doesn’t affect them directly until someone forgets himelf and openly shouts his death threat. Even then the crowd politely ignores his outburst until the offender quietly leaves the room.

This is far closer a metaphor for the current state of elections than I expected when I casually turned on the television.

People around the world have put a lot of thought into making elections speedy, well-publicized…and favorable for their party.   What you’ll read about here is ways that concerned citizens attempt to keep election results aboveboard, alternating with tales of citizens with other concerns who attempt to torque those results in their direction.