Saving the Vote
The New York Times
August 17, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream
journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded:
there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004
presidential election will be suspect.
When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean
that the election will, in fact, have been stolen.
(We may never know.) I mean that
there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty
of the vote count that much of the world and many
Americans will have serious doubts.
How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only
one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where
recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings
the election to George Bush.
Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting
machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have
examined some of these machines' programming code are
appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether
Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount.
The public will have to take the result on faith.
Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard
to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was
the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons.
But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black,
couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list
of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's
brother in the White House.
This year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret.
When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once again
wrongly disenfranchised many people - again, largely
African-American - while including almost no Hispanics.
Yesterday, my colleague Bob Herbert reported on another highly
suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers have gone into the homes
of elderly African-American voters - including participants in
get-out-the-vote operations - and interrogated them as part of what the state
says is a fraud investigation. But the state has provided little
information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks
remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters.
Given this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless
voting machines give President Bush an upset, uncheckable victory.
Congress should have acted long ago to place the coming election
above suspicion by requiring a paper trail for votes. But legislation was
bottled up in committee, and it may be too late to change the hardware.
Yet it is crucial that this election be credible. What can be done?
There is still time for officials to provide enhanced security,
assuring the public that nobody can tamper with voting machines before or
during the election; to hire independent security consultants to perform
random tests before and during Election Day; and to provide paper
ballots to every voter who requests one.
Voters, too, can do their bit. Recently the Florida Republican Party
sent out a brochure urging supporters to use absentee ballots to make
sure their votes are counted. The party claims that was a
mistake - but it was, in fact, good advice. Voters should use paper ballots where
they are available, and if this means voting absentee, so be it.
(Election officials will be furious about the increased workload, but they have
brought this on themselves.)
Finally, some voting activists have urged a last-minute push
for independent exit polling, parallel to but independent of polling by media
groups (whose combined operation suffered a meltdown during
the upset Republican electoral triumph in 2002). This sounds like a very
good idea.
Intensive exit polling would do triple duty. It would serve as
a deterrent to anyone contemplating election fraud. If all went well, it would help
validate the results and silence skeptics. And it would give an early
warning if there was election tampering - perhaps early enough to seek
redress.
It's horrifying to think that the credibility of our democracy - a democracy
bought through the courage and sacrifice of many brave men and
women - is now in danger. It's so horrifying that many prefer not to
think about it. But closing our eyes won't make the threat go away. On
the contrary, denial will only increase the chances of a disastrously suspect election.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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