Man of the Year

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The weekend’s hot movie, “Man of the Year,” stars Robin Williams as a comedian who declares for the presidency as a joke, only to get elected because of a fault in the computer program used in the voting booths by a company that doesn’t want to admit its error lest its stock collapse. In the real world, the news is that one of the principal suppliers of the newfangled electronic voting devices actually in use in precincts in 17 states and around America, Sequoia Voting Systems, has been purchased by a company called Smartmatic, which may or may not have ties to the government of Venezuela’s Marxist strongman, Hugo Chavez. Smartmatic claims that its ties to the Venezuelan regime have been overstated and that it would be impossible for Mr. Chavez to try to manipulate American election returns.

The deal, which is currently being vetted by our government in Washington, has made many Americans jittery. But it’s not the biggest scandal in the six years since the 2000 election triggered calls for reform. The real scandal is that all the reformist zeal following the Broward County recount in 2000 has only made the problem worse. In the 2002 Help America Vote Act, Congress approved $3.9 billion in grants to the states to upgrade voting technology. The result, as is often the case when Congress spends money, has been anything but pretty, ranging from charges of technological failure to dark hints of foreign tampering.

No one argues such antiquated technologies as Florida’s punch cards are perfect. But the latest generation of so-called direct-recording electronic voting machines, which will be used by 39% of all American voters in 37 states come Tuesday, don’t exactly inspire confidence either. One need only read a recent report from a Washington-based advocacy group, Common Cause, to understand why. The report, “Election Reform: Malfunction and Malfeasance,” is a catalogue of electoral horrors.

In March, officials in Tarrant County, Texas, discovered that electronic machines had recorded 100,000 primary votes that were never cast — according to the machine tallies, 158,000 people had voted when only 58,000 had turned up at the polls. In November, voting machines in a county in North Carolina “lost” 4,438 votes, casting into disarray a statewide election for agricultural commissioner that stood at a 2,287-vote margin. In Berks County, Pa., electronic machines lost 111 votes in a 2005 primary in which three races were decided by fewer than 111 votes. In a local election in Fairfax County, Va., in 2003, voting machines seemed to subtract a vote for a school board candidate for every 100th attempt to cast a ballot in her favor.

Those are but some of the irregularities documented by Common Cause. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia, James Webb, has discovered that a software fluke in some voting machines in Alexandria, Fairfax County, and Charlottesville will truncate his name because it’s too long. After foul-ups with electronic machines in the September primary, politicians in Maryland are urging voters in some counties to vote absentee because that will ensure them access to paper ballots. So a growing number of jurisdictions are turning to that centuries-old technology for making fairly lasting memorials of important undertakings — paper. In New York, state law requires new machines to leave a paper record. The machines are supposed to be rolled out in 2007, although it’s unclear yet what form they will take. As of this fall’s primary, disabled voters in the city are able to use new devices to mark paper ballots.

Optical scanning devices that use computers to tally votes marked on paper ballots are making a comeback. More election boards are opting for direct-recording electronic devices that also generate a paper record that can be verified by the voter and used in case of a recount. But that early splurge after 2002 is making it harder for some jurisdictions to abandon faulty technologies, precisely because they have already spent so much money. Maryland has used $106 million, much of it in federal HAVA aid, on the machines the state’s governor is now proposing to ditch in favor of paper ballots, according to a report on CNet News.

What this shows, as much as anything, is the danger inherent in the federal government throwing billions of dollars at a problem. Ostensibly, Congress attempted to allow the laboratory of the states to function by giving local officials a choice of which machines to buy, but short-circuited that effort with a flood of cash. In fact, the sudden influx of federal money left local officials without much time to figure out what worked and what didn’t before they committed themselves — and their voters — to methods that turn out to be full of glitches. Now those officials are stuck. It’s a problem that goes deeper than any stir about a Venezuelan company or any localized voting problems. Let’s hope Congress doesn’t try to cover up its mistakes in the hope that its stock won’t go down.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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