Make Every Vote Count

The District of Columbia has obtained an agreement from Sequoia Voting Systems to review a vast amount of information about one of their voting machines, which somehow recorded thousands of extra ballots during the September primaries. Investigators assembled by the council will have access to the source code and documents related to its creation, as well as blueprints for the machine hardware.  

Three recent revelations about electronic voting machines highlight the maddening lack of security in paperless elections, and emphasize why paper ballot voting with robust post-election audits are a basic requirement for secure elections.

This week the US Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the minority vote dilution component (section 2) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In doing so the court interpreted the VRA to only protect the voting power of minority groups when they constitute a majority of the electorate in a legislative district. This ruling makes the requirements of section 2 significantly narrower then the defendant in the case, the chief elections official for the state of North Carolina, had believed it to be.

This year election administrators, many of whom were fielding new voting equipment for the first time, faced record turnout.  After the pervasive problems with the previous two presidential elections and the fears of more election problems, both real and imagined, voters across the political spectrum faced the election with deep skepticism about its fairness and integrity.  Today we give a brief overview of whether the expectations for the election were born out, and what election day tells us about where to focus reforms.

Common Cause and The Century Foundation have released the new version of their joint biennial report on election administration in 10 swing states and the findings are not very encouraging: while voters' desire to participate is growing, states have only made fitful progress improving the voting process, and in many instances things have moved backward since the last federal election in 2006.  Examining the most recent election experiences of Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia the report details serious problems in every major aspect of the voting process, along with a handful of bright spots where individual states are moving important reforms.

The 2000 presidential election propelled America's problems with our elections into the national spotlight in an unprecedented way.  Americans, night after night, watched news stories exposing the many problems that are routine in elections but that receive little attention: confusing ballots that lead people to mark their vote for the wrong candidate, voter suppression aimed at minorities through voter registration purges, and weary election officials trying to discern voters’ intent on ambiguously marked punch card ballots.

We've seen in recent weeks the quadrennial year complaints about the disproportionate effects that a handful of states like Iowa and New Hampshire have on the nominating process, but that is just a shadow of the far larger distortion of our democracy due to the Electoral College.