Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
The real problem with the American election system isn't fraud, it's good old-fashioned incompetence. And that's something we can fix -- if we have the will.
Nov 18, 2004 | A few months before the presidential election, Matthew Lockshin, a soft-spoken 23-year-old philosophy student at UC-Berkeley, began to feel adrift in the political culture. He was bothered by a sense of powerlessness over the process: If you're interested in politics and you live in Berkeley, Calif., you quickly realize you can't really do much to sway the mood of the country. You can whine, you can blog, you can Meetup, but in the end where does that get you?
Lockshin felt he needed to do something. So, like hundreds of other Californians, he booked a flight to Florida, and a week before the big day Lockshin found himself in Miami, volunteering with Election Protection, the nonpartisan umbrella group set up to monitor the integrity of this year's vote.
Monitoring the election was an odd experience, Lockshin says; long moments of despair punctuated by spikes of exhilaration. Many Americans, even those disgusted by the chaos of 2000, do not generally appreciate the full measure of their electoral system's disrepair, and Lockshin was astonished by the mess he confronted at the polls. In the days he observed the election (people in Florida could vote early for a couple of weeks before Nov. 2), several voters approached him with extraordinary tales of disenfranchisement, or near disenfranchisement. The dispiriting thing was that many of those people could not be helped. One woman told Lockshin that she'd attempted to vote for John Kerry, but the touch-screen electronic voting machine she was at kept switching her selection to George W. Bush. By the time she'd cast her ballot, it was too late to rescue her vote, Lockshin says.
There were, to be sure, sublime moments as well, times when Lockshin was able to directly help people cast their votes. When voters showed up at the wrong precinct or were turned away from the polls by incompetent poll workers, Lockshin managed to assist them. "On that level I made a difference," he says. "Maybe a small difference."
But after watching what goes on in an election, Lockshin, like many other volunteer poll watchers, finds it difficult to feel fully confident in the final results. It isn't that he believes that Bush stole the election; instead, Lockshin says he just wasn't impressed by what he saw on Election Day, and he isn't inspired to place a great deal of trust in a system that so easily creaked and groaned under the pressure.
In Miami, as in just about every other big city around the nation, some people -- mainly in low-income neighborhoods -- were forced to wait in line for hours to vote to cast a ballot. Across the nation, voters were made to vote on machines that are either demonstrably careless with people's ballots (like punch-card systems) or that don't provide any measure of transparency in the tally (like electronic systems). Still other voters were disenfranchised because they'd been inadvertently struck from the rolls, or because they'd been mistaken for felons, or because their absentee ballots weren't mailed out in time, or their provisional ballots were unfairly tossed out.
Lockshin wonders how you can trust a system that treats some voters so well while treating others so badly. "An election has to be fair, it has to be indisputably fair," he says. "The way that this election was carried out, there's no way to know. There's just no way to test the fairness of it."
Lockshin is not alone in feeling that the election may not have been fair. In the last couple of weeks, many have argued that Kerry won the election and that Bush stole it. On close examination, there is as yet no compelling proof that such is the case. But the suspicions are not without some cause: They reveal a real feeling among many in the electorate that American elections don't work very well anymore, that American democracy is broken. Volunteers and reformers who watched the process on Election Day can testify to this fact. Around the country, in big states and small states, swing states and safe states, in a thousand ways the electoral system failed us on Nov. 2. At best, it barely worked, only just managing to deliver a result. But because it worked so poorly, many people don't find much comfort in the result, and for good reason.
This, clearly, is a problem. And it's one that must be fixed. So what can we do?
At the moment, those who want to improve democracy haven't quite settled on a way to attack the problem. So far there's been a lot of noise, what Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition -- a pioneering, nonpartisan group of reformers in South Florida -- calls the "destructive" way of responding to a broken system. "The destructive method is to run around crying fraud without sufficient evidence, destabilizing the system," she says.
"In my view," she added, "the real question is whether we saw anything on Nov. 2 that gives us pause about the system. The answer to that is a resounding yes ... There is so much that we saw that shows that the system is flawed, unworkable, prohibitively expensive, inaccessible, intended to keep voters away, insecure, lacking in transparency and open to manipulation, that if we don't fix it, we are basically on a collision course with the decay of our democracy."
It's a grim prognosis. But it can be fixed, Rodriguez-Taseff insists, especially if activists take on the challenge. Before the election, many people -- people like Lockshin -- felt irrelevant with respect to politics in America. Now, after the election, many Americans are distressed by the results. Why not channel this despair into something productive for the future? asks Rodriguez-Taseff. Why not work to reform the abysmal American electoral system?
Get Salon in your mailbox!
