Honest Voting

Sorry for the gap — health concerns kept me away from the keyboard. Once more unto the breach, dear friends!

The New York Times alerts us that several states will be using new technology for the November ‘08 elections. A few of those states already know they’ll be short on poll workers — of any kind, not just workers with training. In other words, it’s a potential recipe for chaos.

The United States Election Assistance Commission estimates that for the November election, which will bring out a wave of new voters, at least two million poll workers should be ready at the tables.

Several states have started using high-school students — this isn’t a bad thing, mind you. I signed up as a poll worker for the February primaries, and my fellow poll peon was a calm, self-possessed high-school student who appeared to be in her early 20s. She said she got extra credit for staffing the poll table, and why shouldn’t she. She did a great job.

The good side of all this is that many states have also shifted to paper ballots, which helps to preserve the paper trail in case of a dispute. Whether the states will print enough ballots is another story.

But my own concern is with the voter rolls. Larger numbers of voters, coupled with new voter registration databases, mean larger numbers of people who won’t remember to check their registrations before heading over to their community center to vote. Jonah H. Goldman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law told the Times that when states purge voter lists for duplicates, frauds, and felons, oversight isn’t as close as one might wish. Twelve states are about to find out whether they’ll experience a re-enactment of their 2004 problems, including Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, which have purged hundreds of thousands of voters since 2006.

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