Honest Voting

It’s not only voting activists who’ve noticed the potential bottleneck at the polls this year.  The New York Times‘ editorial board writer Adam Cohen wrote today that in Ohio “tens of thousands of votes were suppressed by something so mundane that no one thought to focus on it: long lines.”

Cohen points out that most of the decisions about polling stations and voting equipment are made by local officials, not state or national leaders. The result is that efforts to coordinate numbers of machines and ballots may sometimes be hamstrung by disjointed planning or even various kinds of bias.  (College towns may do their best to minimize votes from the college population, for example.)

Cohen, who was in Ohio for the 2004 election, says he watched tens of thousands of people give up on voting when faced with hours-long lines to reach the voting booth.  Therefore he’s cheered to learn that Ohio’s secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner (mentioned previously on this blog) — is “hyperfocused on long lines” for the coming election.  He reports that she has been pushing reluctant local election officials to have at least one voting machine for every 175 voters, and she is also directing counties that use electronic voting machines to have backup paper ballots on hand equal to 25 percent of the 2004 turnout — ballots that can also be used if lines get out of control.  Missouri’s secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, has been doing much the same; in addition she is providing funds for the hiring and training of poll workers, which will be needed in November in record numbers.

But most other states aren’t considering these issues. Let me second Cohen here: “An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world’s leading democracy.”

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