Who Cares About Reforming U.S. Elections Now?:
Ann Woolner
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) --
Here's a number to ponder. If, say, 68,242 Ohioans had voted for John F. Kerry instead of President George W. Bush, the Democratic senator would be headed for the White House.
With just a tiny shift percentage-wise out of about 115 million votes cast in the U.S., the nation would be getting yet another president who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.
It's easy to lay aside thoughts of reform after this week's election. The popular vote winner also won a majority of electoral votes. No exhaustive recounts or extended court fights were needed to figure out who would be president.
Election machinery mostly ran well, and fears of widespread voter intimidation or voter fraud went largely unrealized.
Bush won a convincing margin of victory, and heavy turnout made it impossible to argue that somehow voters didn't mean what they said. The victor won fair and square.
There is much to celebrate, even for those unhappy with the election's outcome. Before closing the books and resting from a wearying campaign, it's worth deciding whether we are comfortable with certain election realities.
The unofficial vote spread in Ohio gives Bush a victory margin of 136,483 votes. If one more than half switched to Kerry -- 68,242, he would have prevailed in Ohio and, with its 20 electoral votes, captured the White House. That's because of the winner-take-all rule used by 48 states, including Ohio, in allocating Electoral College votes.
A Long Wait
Then there is the fact that millions of Americans waited in line for three, four, even seven hours to cast votes. We can rejoice at such vivid evidence of voter exuberance while regretting that voting required so much of so many.
No one should have to give up a day of work or classes or child-tending to stand, as many did, in soaking rain and parking lot puddles to vote. How many people walked away instead?
And consider this. It took Election Day volunteers, many of them traveling into battleground states from hundreds of miles away, to steer voters to the right polling places, to tell them what to do if they faced problems and, in some cases, to tell poll workers what the rules were.
Provisional Ballots
In a Knights of Columbus hall in a working-class suburb of Youngstown, Ohio, official poll workers were turning people away and erroneously telling them they had no right to provisional ballots, according to Atlanta physician Annette Bernard, who traveled to Youngstown, her hometown, as a Democratic poll watcher on Election Day.
She says she saw that happen to two people whose names had been mistakenly left off the precinct lists. Republican challengers were discouraging poll workers from offering provisional ballots.
``I fault the secretary of state's office for poorly training poll workers,'' says Bernard. ``They were not trained, and they were overwhelmed.''
Lawyer Elizabeth Bernard of Youngstown, Dr. Bernard's sister, figures that, working as a roaming trouble-shooter for Democrats, she helped about a dozen people get provisional ballots.
``I think of all the people who would not have voted if I had not been there,'' says lawyer Bernard.
Diminishing Returns
No election can be flawless, and at some point the energy and money spent tinkering for perfection gives diminishing returns.
Besides, none of this year's difficulties would have changed the outcome, so who cares?
There is a danger in assuming we can drop our guard. What would have happened without the extra scrutiny, much of it non- governmental, and without pre-election lawsuits that put would-be meddlers on notice that they would be watched?
Some problems, like reducing the lines, could be easily solved. In Ohio, reworking deadlines to let local officials consider last-minute registration surges when allocating voting machines would have helped, says Knox County Election Director Pamela Hinkens. Ohio's longest lines occurred in her county, where Kenyon College students waited for up to seven hours.
Expanding mail-in balloting and early voting would ease lines, especially if weekends were included.
``The high turnout did put the system under a bit of a strain,'' says Sean Greene, research director for electionline.org.
More Poll Watchers
More intensive poll worker training on the local level and a boost in the number of U.S. Justice Department poll watchers (a mere 1,000 this year) would ease the need for armies of partisan and nonpartisan volunteers.
Still, having private poll watchers is ``an absolute necessity,'' says lawyer Bernard.
As for the Electoral College, it wouldn't have taken a big shift in Ohio to make it a candidate for extinction. With Kerry in the White House instead of the voters' first choice, you can bet Republicans would have been crying foul as the Democrats did four years ago, even if the U.S. Supreme Court never entered the fight.
It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and create direct presidential elections, and that probably won't happen any time soon. States can change their own winner-take-all rules. But as Colorado voters showed on a ballot question this week, they have no interest in doing so.
The biggest electoral reform issue, dismantling the Electoral College, will have to wait for some other day, when some other candidate loses the popular vote but gains the White House.
In the meantime, the lesson from this year's elections is that the fine-tuning helped, and the scrutiny paid off.
That's a reason to continue them, not to relax.
quote.bloomberg.com |
