How to Run a Clean Election

[existentialist]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110008630



IF we can get the rights to support measures (such as paper trails and hand recounts) that address our concerns.]


How to Run a Clean Election
What Mexico can teach the United States.

Monday, July 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Mexico is likely to weather the controversy over its photo-finish election despite the protestors that losing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador brought into the streets on Saturday to claim the election had been stolen. Mexico's nonpartisan National Election Commission has built up a decade of credibility in running clean elections and international observers have certified the count as fair. Indeed, in its successful efforts to overcome its old reputation for corrupt vote-counting Mexico has a lot to teach the United States.

Mexico has developed an elaborate system of safeguards to prevent voter fraud. Absentee ballots, which are cast outside the view of election officials and represent the easiest way to commit fraud, are much harder to apply for than in the U.S. Voters must present a valid voter ID card with a photo and imbedded security codes. After they cast a ballot voters--just like those famously pictured in Iraq last year--also have a finger or thumb dipped in indelible purple ink to prevent them from voting again.

. . .

Americans should be ashamed that in a much richer country that has a much longer democratic tradition, too many states still have slipshod and defective security protections. In the 1960s, Americans fought a civil rights battle to ensure the right of everyone to vote. But every American also has an equal civil right not to have their ballot canceled out by someone who shouldn't be voting, is voting twice or in some case has long since died.

Mexico is ahead of the U.S. in ensuring its elections are both free and accurate. We should ask ourselves if we can afford to let that stunning contrast continue. Our next painfully close presidential election may be only a little over two years away. The time to act is now.

[robinlynne]

1. This is an excerpt from the wall street journal. if you read it, you will s

notice that it identifies the problems as VOTERS. Voters are not the problem. people voting twice is not the problem we are having here. it has what appears to be a good headline, but its content is not. What is better about mexico is that it's opposition leader did NOT concede, and the people went to the streets, neither of which is mentioned by this article. It is basically saying that the Mexican election was not dishonest, because they don't have absentee ballots. The election was, in reality, the same as ours, (dishonest, fraudulent) but the people are standing up to have their votes counted.

[jody]

2. Clean Election? Either draw a SSN from all registered voters in a district

for each political office or limit campaign donations to say $500 from each registered voter in a candidate's district.

[bemildred]

3. This is right wing drivel. nt