Fortunately, a District judge made the right decision, protecting voters and rejecting a transparent effort to suppress turnout for Barack Obama.
Shouldn't Democrats be on the side of getting more voters to the polls, not turning them away? Leave that to the Republicans.
As Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. has written in
the pages of The Nation: "Our voting system's foundation is built on
the sand of states' rights and local control. We have fifty states,
3,141 counties and 7,800 different local election jurisdictions. All
separate and unequal." While many of the needed reforms are resolutely
unsexy, they are also vital if we are to overcome our current crisis --
a downsized politics of excluded alternatives and a growing mistrust of
the way we vote and our election results.
The 2000
presidential debacle focused public attention on our increasingly
dysfunctional electoral system. In its wake a pro-democracy movement
has emerged, and efforts to bring democracy home are making headway on
some important fronts. Many advocates have demonstrated the
unreliability of so-called black box or touch-screen voting machines
which can be hacked, breakdown, and don't always leave a paper trail to
resolve tabulation disputes. California's Secretary of State Debra
Bowen recently decertified Diebold voting machines.
Bowen,
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Bruner, and Minnesota Secretary of
State Mark Ritchie all support switching from touch-screen to optical
scan machines, which read ballots that voters mark by hand, like a
standardized test. They are more trustworthy and cost-effective, and
they provide a record of each vote. Representative Rush Holt also
recently introduced the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act
of 2008. Currently, 20 states are scheduled to conduct completely
unauditable elections in 2008. This bill would reimburse jurisdictions
that choose to implement voter-verified paper trails; provide funding
for audits of voting; and help states move to an entirely paper-based
system. It's a good effort at a quick-fix -- but it still makes the fix
optional.
- "We're going to try to persuade as many counties
as possible to do the right thing before November," Holt told me.
"There is still time for them to do it, and I think the incentive in
this bill, combined with public activism, will persuade some to put in
a paper-based system and an audit."
What's truly needed is
passage of Holt's HR 811 which would establish a voter-verified paper
trail and audit of every federal election as the national standard. It
currently has 216 bipartisan cosponsors and House leadership needs to
be pressed to take action on it.
While we are seeing a real
uptick in registration during the Democratic presidential primaries,
much more could be accomplished if people had better access to the
polls. Examples include: making Election Day a national holiday so that
working people can more easily participate; allowing Election Day
Registration (six states currently use it and voter turnout is 8 to 15
percentage points higher than the national average); and making
registration at DMVs an opt-out process rather than opt-in. All of
these measures would serve to boost registration and turnout.
Senator
Hillary Clinton and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones' Count Every
Vote Act supports these needed reforms, and it also establishes minimum
standards for the allocation of voting machines and poll workers to cut
down on lines, re-enfranchises millions of Americans who have committed
a felony but have completed their sentences, and allows for
non-partisan election observers.
We also need to do a better
job protecting voters. For all of the hype about voter fraud, it occurs
"statistically… about as often as death by lightning strike," according
to Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt of the non-partisan Brennan Center
for Justice. In contrast, we know that efforts to keep people away from
the polls are rampant in every election. We need to put an end to new
exclusionary ID tactics, 21st century poll taxes, and unjust scrubbing
of voter files. Also, Senator Barack Obama's Deceptive Practices and
Voter Intimidation Prevention Act would make voter intimidation and
election misinformation -- like letters telling Latino voters that if
they are immigrants and vote they will be arrested -- punishable by
more than just a slap on the wrist. It also establishes a process for
reaching out to misinformed voters with accurate information before the
polls close.
Vital reforms are also needed to ensure that
elected representative's are more responsive and accountable to the
people. First and foremost, we need to get Big Money out of our
campaigns. Only "clean money" legislation will allow ordinary people to
run for office and have their voices heard. Studies by the Campaign
Finance Institute placed the cost of winning a House election in 2006
at nearly $1.26 million -- and over $8.8 million for a Senate seat. In
November, one analyst projected that the 2008 campaign would burn
through 5 billion dollars. Public financing of campaigns would free
elected officials from the influence of big money, and also increase
the power of the public over their representatives.
In the
Senate, Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter's Fair Elections Now Act has
garnered 9 cosponsors, and in the House, the Clean Money, Clean
Elections Act has 52 cosponsors behind it. Under both bills, candidates
who show a qualifying level of support and opt-out of further private
contributions would be supported by public funding. The legislation was
modeled on successful public financing systems in Maine, Arizona and
North Carolina. Short of a system of full public financing, one modest
proposal to reduce the influence of big money is to dramatically
increase the amount of federal matching funds received for donations of
$100 or less -- matching them on a 1:4 basis. The effect could be
further reinforced by eliminating matching funds for donations over
$100.
The power of incumbency also drastically restricts the
choices available to the American people, exacerbating our downsized
politics of excluded alternatives. Incumbents derive much of their
power from the redistricting process -- increasingly a bipartisan farce
in which the parties collaborate to draw district lines that will
preserve their power. As reformers often remark: "Instead of
constituents choosing their legislators, legislators choose their
constituents." Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, and
Washington all have at least nominally independent commissions which
have full authority over the process of drawing up Congressional
districts -- taking the process of drawing up districts out of the
hands of the two major political parties.
Finally, if
majority rule is to be more than a hollow slogan, and third parties
more than "spoilers," we need to experiment with ways to more
accurately represent the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and
opinions of the American people. Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) -- in
which low scoring candidates are eliminated after the first round of
tabulations, and their supporters second-choice votes are added to
those who remain, until one candidate gets the majority -- offers
another way to challenge the duopoly and also ensure that the winning
candidate has the support of a majority.
We also need to do
away with the Electoral College so that the president is elected
directly by the people. The National Popular Vote Compact -- in which
states pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national
popular vote instead of the winner of their own state -- is one way
people are working to achieve that. It would take effect when states
representing a majority of votes in the Electoral College agree to join
the compact. It would therefore ensure that the candidate with the most
votes for president would be the winner, and every citizen's vote would
count equally regardless of geography.
While there is reason
to hope that this election will bring increased or even record-breaking
participation at the polls, there's clearly work to be done so that we
have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Let's demand a democracy promotion program at home to ensure that every
voter can vote, every vote gets counted, money doesn't talk louder than
the will of the people, and every challenger gets to make his or her
case.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
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Released: 24 Janaury 2008
Word count: 1,436
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Released: 24 January 2008
Word Count: 1,436
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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