About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

94 Nat'l Civic Rev. 2 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/natmnr94 and id is 1 raw text is: Otto von Bismarck once compared the legislative process to sausage making two things, he suggested, you don't want to see being made. The same might be said of America's patchwork voting system, which was on display again during the 2004 presidential election. Although the more comfortable margin of victory in the presi- dential election this time around meant less media attention than in 2000, there was still plenty of sausage making on view for those who cared to take a peek: interminable lines at polling places, too few poll workers and machines, absentee ballots gone missing, glitches in untested electronic voting systems, and discrepant treatment of everything from regis- tration forms to provisional ballots. These recurring failures in election administration pose a challenge and an opportunity for champions of political reform. Not since the days of the power political machine, when dead people voted in alphabetical order, have a significant number of Americans had such doubt about the integrity not just of individual elected officials but of the voting system itself. Doubt extends beyond traditional questions of fairness or accessibility to whether the system is rendering a reliable vote count. After the 2000 election, political reform groups argued that the Florida recount debacle was a wake-up call for reform advocates. The broad public dialogue on systems change that many reformers hoped to see never transpired, though there were attempts to deal with some of the more obvious problems. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to deal with some of the problems raised in 2000. The law allocated $3.9 million to states to be disbursed over a three-year peri- od, paying for improvements in voting equipment and election administration. But as Sarah Tobias, a senior policy analyst at Demos, writes in this issue of the National Civic Review, HAVA implementation was thwarted from its inception. Although Congress passed HAVA with strong, bipartisan support it nev- ertheless consistently underfunded the new law, she observes. The Election Assistance Commission -a body intended to disburse HAVA funds to the states and to give guidance on complex implementation challenges was sup- posed to be up and running within 120 days of HAVA's pas- sage, but it wasn't established until the end of 2003. Meanwhile, most states proceeded with election reform at a glacial pace, with many waiting until 2006 to carry out HAVA's new requirements. Demos President and NCR departments editor Miles Rapoport advocates a strong national election commission to ensure progress on basic questions of access and fairness. We have the potential mechanism for it in the Election Assistance Commission that was set up under HAVA, he said in an inter- view this past December, but it was set up to be weak, to have no teeth, and it wasn't funded or even appointed. Though strong national standards go against the grain of the traditional emphasis on local and state control of election pro- cedures, recent problems with voting equipment, ballot design, unequal resources for polling places, and arbitrary enforcement of state and local rules argue for a set of nation- al standards to guarantee the contemporary democratic prin- ciple of one person, one vote. Another critical issue of concern is partisanship of the election administration process. Even if the decisions of state and coun- ty election officials are beyond reproach, the appearance of a conflict of interest on the part of individuals with strong party loyalty or political ambition raises questions about fairness and equity. Party-affiliated election officers are a vestige of the nine- teenth century, when every position from dogcatcher to police commissioner was held by an elected party loyalist. Election administration should be a task for which expertise and impar- tiality, not partisanship, are part of the job description. American political reformers have their work set out for them, but anyone who seeks an inspiring example of nonpartisan reform should look north to the Canadian province of British Columbia. There the provincial legislature appointed a citi- zens assembly to consider whether to keep the current first- past-the-post voting system for electing members of the leg- islature or adopt a form of proportional representation. As Henry Milner describes in this issue, the effort was so nonpar- tisan that elected officials weren't even allowed to participate. The assembly's recommendations for a voting system will be placed on the ballot for a public referendum in May 2005. Such an ambitious effort to combine deliberative democracy with political reform would be hard to imagine in an American state, but the last two presidential elections have at least raised the question in the minds of many voters. One thing you can say is that reform itself has come back as an issue, notes Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause, also in an interview at the end of 2004. People see the danger of hav- ing a broken system. Honestly, we can't answer all the ques- tions we get about electoral reform. Do the machines work? Do their votes count? It is a huge topic of conversation among activists and citizens. Michael McGrath Editor 2 1 National Civic Review

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most