Wonder why the Obama Campaign and the Democratic Party are urging people to vote early? Because once again we face an election that could hinge on voting rights. By having people vote early on paper ballots, the Obama campaign is wisely ensuring there will be no voting machine problems, no waiting in long lines because election officials did not adequately prepare for a large turnout or because GOP operatives are deliberately slowing things down in an attempt to drive voters away from the polls.

Obama’s Early Vote Push

A week ago in Florida Obama told voters:

Don’t wait until Nov. 4; your car might break down. You might have an emergency . . . the alarm might not go off and you don’t get to work on time.

The he added the real reason for this push:

We’re going to make sure your vote is counted.

Hillary Clinton joined in the early voting campaign:

You don’t have to wait any longer. You can vote today, tomorrow, the next day, and begin our march to take our country back. Now is the time to close the deal for Barack Obama and close the book on eight years of failed Republican leadership.

Joe Biden has also been holding “Early Vote for Change” rallies across the country designed to get people to vote early. In addition the Obama campaign web site has instructions on how you can vote early.

How to Vote Early

Thirty-four states now have some form of early voting. To find out if yours is one of them and if you don’t want to stand in line on election day go to the following URL for instructions. Note: Until I went to do my own early voting, I did not realize the URL I first listed requires you to give an email address to the Obama campaign.

The URL below is nonpartisan and actually walks you through the process of filing an absentee ballot. Because some states have specific requirements about voting early (in my state of Minnesota you must have a reason) this site tells you whether you meet those criteria. I would recommend using it. Second, in my state the request must be mailed, faxed or emailed, so if you in such a state I would recommend you DO IT NOW if you are going to vote early.

http://www.govoteabsentee.org/

Why Vote Early

The Obama Strategy may well hold the key to this election along with suggesting a potentially huge shift in how this country conducts elections. His effort may mean that we will not know the winner of the Presidential race or other significant state races until after election night. Those exit polls and calling state winners may prove irrelevant and impossible since many states do not count absentee or mail-in ballots for as long as several days after the election.

The Boston Globe reports:

With early voting becoming more popular, some analysts believe that as many as one-third of all voters this year could cast their ballots before Nov. 4.

The Christian Science Monitor adds:

In some key states, like Colorado, where many people are casting their votes early by mail as well as in person, over 60 percent of ballots may be in before Election Day.

If Obama’s strategy pays off it could well signal a change in how all of us vote and provide a solution to the voting rights problems that have plagued recent elections. at the root of those problems lie major tensions in our democratic society. The first is between the need to prevent voter fraud and the desire to ensure that everyone can vote. The second–perhaps most contentious–is over the people who are actually allowed to vote.

Voter Fraud and ACORN

The voter fraud issue has become almost gospel to many Republicans who believe the Democrats encourage all kinds of voter chicanery from former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous counting tombstones to Lyndon Johnson’s ballot box 13. Already voter fraud is playing a role in this election with the ACORN controversy.

Unless you have been on a long vacation to some remote area, you have probably heard about the ACORN voter controversy. Last summer canvassers hired by ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, were indicted for filling out false voter registration forms. According to the Seattle Times:

Temporary workers hired by ACORN for a voter registration drive gathered at the downtown Seattle library to fill out bogus registration forms. They copied names from newspaper stories — such as those of actress Katie Holmes, New York Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera and New York Times columnist Frank Rich — pulled them from baby-name books and telephone directories or just made them up.

Similar false registration controversies have occurred in other parts of the country, spawning an FBI investigation of ACORN. John McCain made the ACORN cases a centerpiece of his last debate with Barack Obama charging ACORN:

Is on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history … maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

Along with the Ayers and Reverend Wright controversies, ACORN has been the subject of many of the McCain campaign’s negative ads and robocalls. Yet McCain either does not understand American voting laws or he is deliberately nurturing a false rumor.

As the Times editorialized:

Voter-registration fraud — at least, of the type ACORN workers committed in Seattle last year and allegedly engaged in elsewhere this year — is annoying, potentially costly to taxpayers and certainly illegal, but not, by itself, a serious threat to democratic foundations.

Voter fraud, on the other hand, can change the outcome of elections.

Even the Republican who prosecuted the Seattle cases agreed:

The ACORN case in Seattle had nothing to do with manipulating outcomes and everything to do with the workers’ efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs. If anyone was defrauded, it was ACORN, an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Voter Fraud: The Big Picture

The type of voters ACORN solicits have long provoked controversy in America. For a long time, many of them were not allowed to vote. In recent years, the GOP has actively sought to discourage the poor, the elderly, and voters of color from voting because they tend to vote Democratic.

The reverse side of the ACORN story was the investigation of the 2000 Florida election by the Civil Rights Commission, which heard over twenty hours of testimony from more than a hundred witnesses.  It concluded:

Restrictive statutory provisions, wide-ranging errors and inadequate and unequal resources in the election process denied countless Floridians the right to vote. The disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African Americans. Statewide, based upon county-level statistical estimates, African American voters were nearly ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in Florida.

A 2006 draft report for the federal Election that was never issued stated:

Many of those interviewed stated the new identification requirements are the modern version  of voter intimidation  and suppression.

The draft notes that the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of tghe Justice Department was reluctant to provide data for the report. It also notes that under the Bush Administration the Department was bringing fewer cases focusing on intimidation and more on voter fraud.

Meanwhile, Democracy Now reports the intimidation has already begun:

Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility.

The Supreme Court and Voter IDs

As for voter fraud, the tension between how far the government can go to prevent it without turning voting eligibility into the equivalent of filling out a 1040 form figured in one of the past term’s most important Supreme Court cases. The Court ruled in favor of an Indiana voter ID law. The most telling sentence in that opinion reads:

Petitioners ask this Court, in effect, to perform a unique balancing analysis that looks specifically at a small number of voters who may experience a special burden under the statute and weighs their burdens against the State’s broad interests in protecting election integrity. Petitioners urge us to ask whether the State’s interests justify the burden imposed on voters who cannot afford or obtain a birth certificate and who must make a second trip to the circuit court clerk’s office after voting. But on the basis of the evidence in the record it is not possible to quantify either the magnitude of the burden on this narrow class of voters or the portion of the burden imposed on them that is fully justified. [p. 17]

It gets worse:

A voter complaining about such a law’s effect on him has no valid equal-protection claim because, without proof of discriminatory intent, a generally applicable law with disparate impact is not unconstitutional.

If I read this one right it says that the voter must prove “discriminatory intent” in order for there to be any challenge to voting laws. If you remember the history of segregation, the South once applied literacy tests to voters who were given such bizarre tasks as counting jelly beans in a jar to test their “intelligence.”

Voter IDs and Vote Early

The Democrats are anticipating that the voter ID opinion will give the green light for voting officials in states with ID laws–several of which are swing states–to harass voters at the polls or perhaps prevent them from voting altogether. The Obama campaign has entire page devoted to various unfounded rumors being spread about people who will not be allowed to vote.

This anticipated attempt to use voters IDs to both intimidate voters and slow down the process is one of the reasons the Obama campaign is urging people to vote early. Voting early takes care of the ID issue and it hopefully will help shorten lines on election night.

The Voting Gauntlet

These days voting has become a gauntlet that each voter must negotiate in order to be sure their ballot is counted.  It is a national scandal that two elections after the voting problems of 2000, we still do not have a national law that adequately resolves them.

In a summary of various studies of voting technologies and solutions, Rady Ananda points out:

None of these solutions, however, meet the Fair Vote Count standard enumerated by international authority (OSCE) to which the US is a signatory.)

The Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, 2005, Election Observation Manual, list 17 Criteria for a Fair Vote Count:

1. Is the count performed by polling-station officials, or are other persons involved?
2.  Do election officials appear to understand and adhere to the required procedures?
3.  Are ballots counted in an orderly and secure manner?
4. Is the count conducted in a transparent environment, with adequate arrangements for
domestic observers?
5. Does the number of registered voters recorded as having voted correspond with the
number of ballots cast?
6. Are unused ballots secured, cancelled, or destroyed after being counted?
7. Are invalid ballots properly identified in a uniform manner? Are invalid ballots appropriately segregated and preserved for review?
8. Do the ballots contain any unusual markings intended to violate the secrecy of the vote?
9. Does the number of invalid ballots seem inordinately high?
10. Does the counting adhere to the principle that the ballot is deemed valid if the will of the voter is clear?
11. Are ballots for each party or candidate separated correctly and counted individually?
12. Are any disputes or complaints resolved in a satisfactory manner?
13.l Are official counting records correctly completed at the end of the count and signed by all authorized persons?
14. Are domestic observers and poll watchers from political parties able to obtain official copies of the protocol for the polling station?
15. Are the results publicly posted at the polling station?
16. Are there inappropriate activities by police and/or security forces, such as taking notes and reporting figures or results by telephone?
17. Did polling-station officials agree on the vote-count procedures and results, and, if not, what action was taken in case of disagreement?

It is ironic that while we insist on these criteria for elections in  places such as Iraq or the former Soviet Union, they still are not in place in America.

Upcoming Problems

Today FairVote issued a report on election administration based on a survey of county clerks in swing states. FairVote staff and interns surveyed nearly every county clerk in Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia, as well as election officials in counties with at least 500,000 residents in Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The press release issued today stated:

Voters in the largest counties in 10 key swing states may experience problems on Election Day because of insufficient preparation and inadequate poll booth and machine allocation plans, according to a report released today by FairVote, a nonpartisan advocacy
group.

FairVote’s Adam Fogel, co-author of the report warned:

Many of the largest counties in key states are not prepared for Election Day. The across the board lack of uniformity we see in this report speaks to the patchwork election system we have in this country. Most local officials do the best they can with the limited resources they have available, but state and federal officials must do more to ensure transparent election administration and increased accountability after Election Day.

The nine page full report spells out some of the grim details. It is especially critical of inaction by the federal government to correct problems in America’s voting system:

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 does not specify what kind of voting equipment states must use. Furthermore, there are no requirements for the number of voting machines they have to put in each precinct.

In short, insufficient federal guidelines address the issue of voting system uniformity and their allocation.

On the issue of how officials estimated how many voting booths they need:

Not a single election official surveyed could refer to a specific scientific formula that they use for calculating the number of booths needed.

The report made four recommendations for future elections:

First, voting machines specifications, at least in terms of the way votes are counted, should be standardized across the country.

Second, a standard formula for the allocation of voting machines and poll booths should be implemented.

Third, all election officials should receive a draft of their ballot before printing a final version.

Fourth, post-secondary institutions should have polling locations on campus and students should not be subjected to allocation decisions that discriminate against them.

Trouble Ahead?

In my home state of Minnesota I still remember caucus night when the school parking lot where the caucus was held overflowed so badly many people were unable to attend on what was a cold winter night with six inches of snow on the ground. While the weather will be better (we hope), that same school will be serving as a polling place on election day. Will we witness a recurrence of what happened this past winter? Fairvote suggests that may well be the case.

Could we be facing a Presidential election in which officials have to hold the polls open past the designated time in order to allow everyone to vote? Could we facing the massive traffic tie-ups that caused people in my state to give up even  trying to get to last winter’s caucuses? Could we be facing an election in which people who want to vote are unable to do so because of lack or voting machines or inadequate voting machines?

We should not be asking these questions a week before Election Day in the year 2008 in the United States of America.  The fact that we are leads to a bigger question, “Why?” Why have both Congress and the White House dragged their feet on election reform?

Where Do The Candidates Stand

John McCain says nothing on his web site about voting rights. on the other hand Barack Obama states:

There is no more fundamental American right than the right to vote. Before the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, barriers such as literacy tests, poll taxes and property requirements disenfranchised many Americans, especially minorities. More than 40 years later, there are still numerous obstacles to ensuring that every citizen has the ability to vote.

Next week if you are stuck in line waiting to vote, or get harassed for an ID, or worry that the voting machine you are using will not properly count your vote, you might think about those two positions.

Next Week

The still unfinished agenda that began with Bush v. Gore asks will the country still firmly support the long-standing principle that free elections shall not be compromised by intimidation and manipulation? At the same time, will the independent, contrary spirit of the place the marble came from allow us to adequately meet the challenges of electronic voting and the still-unfulfilled promise made to those who are still systematically disenfranchised?