Tuesday, October 28, 2008

ADDENDUM TO YESTERDAY'S POST

Here's another story on GOP voter suppression and purges.
Posted by at

2 comments:

JIm said...

INTELLIGENT THOUGHTS ON ELECTION FRAUD FROM AN UNLIKELY SOURCE, THE LA TIMES. EXCERPTS ARE SHOWN BELOW. HTTP://WWW.LATIMES.COM/NEWS/OPINION/COMMENTARY/LA-OE-STEWART27-2008OCT27,0,4960239.STORY

OPINION
Election fraud fears: the cure
States need better machinery and better registration procedures.
By Charles Stewart III
October 27, 2008

Escalating rage over the role of ACORN in registering presumably Democratic voters threatens to undermine the political legitimacy of a Barack Obama victory Nov. 4. And perhaps that's the point. But if John McCain were well ahead in the polls, the left would undoubtedly be shouting about electoral-system failures to de-legitimize a GOP win. It is too late to tone down the rhetoric for 2008, but if we want to end these sorts of attacks, there's only one solution: States must become more serious about how they administer elections.

The ACORN controversy -- in which hundreds of thousands of registration cards gathered by the Assn. of Community Organizers for Reform Now, including some that were fraudulent, were rejected by election officials -- represents nothing new. Republicans have been charging that Democrats inflate voter rolls for decades; likewise, Democrats accuse Republicans of suppressing legitimate votes.

Of course, the left has its own favorite election-horror narrative: the failure of electronic voting machines. The most extreme tales have the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 as literally hardwired by the voting equipment in Ohio. These suspicions too are a product of election reform legislation gone awry.

What to do? To stop attacks on voting machines (and thus remove any taint from Republican victories), states need laws that ensure a clear chain of custody for all machines and ballots before an election, require thorough audits of the machines after an election and make all software open to public scrutiny. Some states, including California, have made progress in this area, but most have not.

To stop attacks on groups like ACORN (and thus remove any taint from the victories of Democrats), states must do a much better job of registering new voters.
Democracies can work only when the losers accept the result. In recent years, only the most extreme voices have truly doubted Bush's claim to the Oval Office, and we can only hope that if Obama wins, only the most extreme voices on the right will truly doubt his election.

But our democracy needs more than hope. Well-meaning reforms have caused much of this mudslinging, and only sober, bipartisan efforts to change those laws will relegate charges of election fraud to the back pages of the newspapers.

Charles Stewart III is a professor of political science at MIT and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

October 28, 2008 at 2:32:00 PM EDT
Harryn Studios said...

very goebbel-esque jim ...

October 29, 2008 at 9:29:00 AM EDT

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