Thinking Ahead on Electoral Reform

[Wilms]

Thinking Ahead on Electoral Reform

By Jim Gomes

November 24, 2008

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We should not delude ourselves that the post-election warfare of 2000 and the suspicions of 2004 are behind us. This year, pre-election polls consistently showed Obama comfortably ahead in most of the erstwhile battleground states. The lack of voter challenges, lawsuits, and so on was due in large part to both sides expecting that the result wasn't going to be close. If polls had indicated a tighter race, we probably would have witnessed more contention and more problems.

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More serious and troubling are wholesale methods of stealing elections. These include election officials stuffing piles of pre-marked ballots into the boxes, or making ballots from an opponent's geographic base disappear. Or programming election machines to undercount opposing votes or overcount yours. Get convicted of this and you will go to jail too, although the potential competitive benefit is higher than retail vote fraud, and fewer people need to be in on the conspiracy.

Best of all, for those with electoral larceny in their hearts, is voter suppression. Order too few voting machines for polling places in your opponent's strongholds and create long lines that discourage voters. Delete from voter rolls names that resemble those of convicts. Bloodless, bureaucratic, and effective: Thousands of demographically inconvenient voters are disenfranchised. It's also harder to be prosecuted for this.

Criminal activity is not the only cause of electoral mishap and may not be the most significant. Innocent machine malfunctions can also cause votes not to be recorded, or register votes that were never cast.

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We should resist proposals to allow voting over the Internet. While Internet voting could boost turnout, it would also increase the possibility for tampering or malfunction and make sorting out what happened impossible.

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Jim Gomes, a guest columnist, is director of the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark University.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/11/24/thinking_ahead_on_electoral_reform/