Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

[Reciprocity]

Well if you think it was a mess last time just wait for Nov 3rd.

Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
By Andrew Gumbel
Oct 25, 2004, 22:08

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Last week saw the start of early voting in Florida and a clutch of other states, and with it came a plethora of problems. In three heavily populated counties - around Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale - the network connection used to verify voter identifications broke down on the first day, creating hours of delay. In Jacksonville, where poor ballot design in 2000 knocked out the votes of 27,000 poor, predominantly black, predominantly Democratic voters, the county elections supervisor chose the first day of polling to resign, citing ill health. He had come under fire for failing to make early voting available in the city's African-American neighborhoods - something his interim successor is now going some way to remedy.
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After the last fiasco everyone from President Bush down vowed to fix the system and ensure another Florida could never happen. But three big things went wrong. First, the new generation of computer touchscreen machines - brought in at dizzying speed and at even more dizzying cost to replace the discredited old punch-cards - turned out to be poorly programmed, unverifiable, prone to all manner of failure and susceptible to undetectable foul play.

Secondly, the Bush administration dragged its feet about enacting funding its own new election laws. As a result, most states won't have their electoral procedures fully updated and coordinated until the next presidential election in 2008. That, in turn, is opening up furious arguments about the ill-defined rules for provisional ballots, absentee ballots, ID card requirements at polling stations and other seemingly esoteric bureaucratic niceties that could have a huge impact on turnout - especially among the poorer, less educated classes who have traditionally been ignored, if not excluded, by the two major parties.

Thirdly, the political leadership allowed itself to be deluded into thinking that the dysfunctions of the US electoral system were purely a matter of technology. Fix the machines, the thinking went, and everything else will be fine. What should have been glaringly obvious in 2000, and is even more glaringly obvious now, is that the failures of the electoral process were a direct result of the ferocity of broader political battles. The blithe incompetence of local election officials and their wonky machinery were side-effects of these battles, not the cause

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http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_12964.shtml