Marie Cocco: High Time for Voting Reform

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



High Time for Voting Reform

Posted on Feb 12, 2007
By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—For those who despair that it’s way too early to start thinking about the 2008 presidential election—and who doesn’t?—there is a more productive way to spend political effort: Start working to ensure that the vote goes better in 2008 than it has in any election since the catastrophe of 2000.

Save for a single Florida congressional district—the one previously held, fittingly enough, by Katherine Harris—the 2006 congressional elections produced clear winners and losers, with relatively few allegations that machine malfunctions or partisan malfeasance changed the outcome. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t machine malfunctions, partisan malfeasance—and a certain chaotic quality to whole affair.

Touch-screen machines mysterious flipped voters’ choices or failed to record them at all, cards to activate the computers went missing, poll workers sometimes didn’t even know how to turn machines on. New identification requirements, and poll workers’ confused interpretations of them, vexed hundreds of would-be voters—including Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, who was turned away from the polls until he returned with identification bearing his home address.

“Around the country, the individual voting experience didn’t go well,’’ says Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the performance of the voting system.

Help is on the way—from Florida, of all places. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070212_high_time_for_voting_reform/