Congress Won't Prevent Election Disasters This Year

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/congress-wont-prevent-ele_b_100295.html

Art Levine
Congress Won't Prevent Election Disasters This Year


As voters go to the polls today to choose between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, there's an overlooked peril facing all voters this year: a failing election system and GOP-led vote suppression. All these obstacles undermine fair and accurate voting, leading to potential meltdowns and the disenfranchisement of voters, especially African-Americans.

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How do we prevent these screw-ups from denying progressives ( and of course those Republicans who may care about honest elections) the right to a fair election this November? How, in short, do we avoid a repeat of Ohio in 2004 in key battleground states?

The Election Protection coalition has some short-term reform suggestions, but they're just not likely to happen unless the rest of the progressive community organizes to make these issues a priority before November's vote:

Over the coming months, election officials across the country have the authority to prevent many of these problems from happening. Election Protection looks forward to working together with those responsible for administering elections to:


*Improve poll worker training;

*Ensure proper protocols for dealing with election machinery breakdowns;

*Implement procedures to guarantee that all eligible registrants make it on the registra-
tion rolls; and

*Widely publicize correct requirements and restrictions about voter identification and
other procedures.

Will any of this happen in such a large-scale way to prevent election disasters and the quiet disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters come November?

Don't count on it -- unless far more concerned citizens get involved in the often arcane issues of election reform.

As Robert Fitrakis, an Ohio voting rights attorney and editor of the Free Press alternative paper, told me for the Altnernet article, "The system is still broken and instead of voting being a universally guaranteed federal right, it lingers under the shadow of Jim Crow and states' rights."

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