Thursday, January 06, 2005
The Ohio voting kerfuffle and the importance of parties
The allegations are many and arcane, but if you're even slightly interested you can go read this summarizing post at the Scrutiny Hooligans. I have no intention of sorting through them, and not because I got what I want out of Ohio. It is because it is not very interesting to me, and wouldn't be if I were a Democrat.
It is, however, an extremely interesting topic to a great many Democrats. So interesting, in fact, that John Kerry is raising money on the controversy. Yesterday he sent a fundraising email to 3,000,000 people on his list, calling for federalizing election management:
Tomorrow, members of Congress will meet to certify the results of the 2004 presidential election. I will not be taking part in a formal protest of the Ohio Electors.
Despite widespread reports of irregularities, questionable practices by some election officials and instances of lawful voters being denied the right to vote, our legal teams on the ground have found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.
But, that does not mean we should abandon our commitment to addressing those problems that happened in Ohio. We must act today to make sure they never happen again.
Kerry, per usual, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, he is unwilling to put his money where his mouth is and fight the election result in any serious way, worried that it will hurt his image in 2008 (which it would). On the other hand, he wants to stoke the flames of anger on the left so that he can raise money from it. So he's taking the position that the voting errors were immaterial in the sense that they were inconsequential, but that there is a principle to be upheld here. That he's not willing to uphold. Except to abstain from a vote in the Senate, which is nothing new for him.
Enough about Kerry. I have no doubt that a detailed inspection of every statewide election that has ever happened in any American state would reveal "irregularities." If each cast vote has embedded within it several transactions (registering to vote, recording the registration, showing up at the polls, the presentation of proof that the voter is who is he is, the actual balloting, the counting of the ballots, the reporting of the results, and so forth), even the smallest state election involves millions of transactions. As any company that has had to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 knows, it takes staggering sums and a tremendous amount of work to develop systems that control millions of transactions adequately, and systems that are adequately in control still make a lot of mistakes.
So there are going to be a lot of mistakes embedded in our state elections, unless we are willing to spend billions on building better systems and billions more in maintenance, the training of skilled staff, and so forth. I don't know of anybody except frustrated politicians who think that is a good use of either money or smart people, both of which are not exactly in excess supply.
When these problems come up, what happens? Well, the officials and bureaucrats charged with resolving them go about their business. Not surprisingly, they tend to resolve matters of judgment and interpretation of law in favor of their own party. This is reasonable -- somebody has to decide these things, and to argue that state courts are better at it than elected state officials is extremely dubious. State judges are often no less partisan than the local secretary of state. If you doubt this, see the behavior of state judges in Florida during the 2000 election (and if you are a Democrat, spare me the "judges good, Harris bad" rant -- there was no difference in their partisanship that could be detected by any fair observer). Perhaps the Washington gubernatorial election this year is a similar case running in favor of the Democrats.
In these controversies, we can detect the continuing relevance of political parties. To win a national campaign for president, you need to control levers of local power, which means working to win local and state elections. For most of the last65 years or so it was the Democrats who understood this. Democratic mayors and governors and other officials had a huge impact on presidential elections, which impact would have been much more widely documented if we applied today's standards of electoral "proofreading" to elections in the Sixties and Seventies. Since the GOP nadir of the mid-Seventies, however, it has been the Republicans who have worked to build national power within state and local government. As a result, the Republicans have a much smoother road to the White House than they did thirty years ago.
The Democrats will not enjoy sustained success in "national" elections until they start winning state elections. The sooner they abandon their legalistic and frankly naive idea that elections must be federalized and flawless, the sooner they will pave their very rocky road to the White House.
5 Comments:
By 
Gordon Smith, at
Thu Jan 06, 08:20:00 AM:
Jack,
Thanks for the shoutout.
I don't believe in flawless elections, but the proliferation of voting machines without paper trails ought to be disturbing to all. Diebold, a company that manufactures many of the voting machines, also manufactures ATMs that have no problem spitting out receipts. It's an easy fix and one that will provide added voter confidence in the legitimacy of our elections.
I've got lots more to say, but, as you note, I've already said a good bit of it at ScruHoo.
By 
, at
Thu Jan 06, 10:13:00 AM:
Just spend the damn money to prove the election was fair and move on.
Peace.
By Sluggo, at
Thu Jan 06, 10:28:00 AM:
Good post.
Even after his head exploded Gore finally put the 2000 election to bed (for a few months, anyway). Kerry's game is something you'd expect from a local councilman. Sleezy, transparent and ultimately self-defeating.
If anyone thinks there was anything hinkier about Ohio or Washington or Florida in 2000 than in New Jersey or Arkansas they're crazy. The closeness brings the scrutiny which reveals the bugs on the windshields. You take as close a look at the vote anywhere last year you'll see the same thing.
I agree with Screwy. Fixing this shouldn't be as hard as it seems to be. But the constitution places control of elections locally for good reasons. That some of the locals are morons is inevitable, but we should be very careful about centralizing any aspect of them.
By Gordon Smith, at
Thu Jan 06, 09:45:00 PM:
Jack,
Anything to add after seeing/hearing about/reading about the debate over the Ohio irregularities and the need for voting reform measures?
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Jan 06, 10:53:00 PM:
I certainly agree with Screwy's point that electronic voting systems could and probably should be made to generate paper records. In any case, there are well-accepted techniques to validate the security of software. These techniques are used to validate software in medical diagnostic systems, for example.
As for the broader question, I do not see how in our system the management of elections -- even presidential elections -- is a federal question. There will be some states with pretty clean systems (Iowa comes to mind, with its bipartisan commission for redistricting, for example), and some states with relatively partisan systems. So what? It's a state question.
Admittedly, it is stressful for the rest of the country when a state with issues turns out to be the swing state in a presidential election, but dems da breaks (no pun intended, Screwy!). I persist in my belief that Democrats would be better off winning some statehouses and other local offices than fighting this particular battle.
Finally, because of computer-driven gerry-mandering, the United States House of Representatives is less subject to voter scrutiny than any other level of American government. Once elected, you have to get caught sleeping with your sister to get kicked out of the House by the voters, and this is because 49 states have rigged their system to guarantee incumbancy.
If the Democrats actually cared about making "every vote count," they would start by reforming the process by which Congressional districts are drawn in the states that they control. Of course, such a reform effort cannot begin in the House of Representatives, and it is the very least likely to begin in the Congressional Black Caucus, which led today's protest.
