The Coming Ballot Meltdown

The Nation: Ohio Election Chaos A Harbinger Of Things To Come

(The Nation) 
The law that finally enshrined the voter-ID requirement, House Bill 3, contained another couple of nasty surprises: a big jump in the cost of petitioning for a manual recount, from $100 per precinct to $500 per precinct, and the lifting of a previous requirement that counties use the independent paper trail to conduct random audits of their touch-screen machinery after every election. In other words, Ohio — like many other states — has now become a recount-hostile environment with greatly diminished accountability all around. Since paperless electronic system votes are almost impossible to verify without recourse to the paper trail, this is a truly chilling development.

What the Republicans have created is, in effect, a system where they have multiple tools to deter their opponents from casting ballots in the first place — through the voter-ID requirement, the strict rules on provisional balloting and so on — and then making the vote count itself so opaque as to be beyond redress. The lack of transparency is a matter of bureaucratic convenience as well as political conniving: County boards of elections are generally delighted to be able to spend state and federal dollars on shiny new computer systems that do all the tricky work of vote tabulation by themselves, that don't entail large paper orders or long-term ballot storage requirements and that obviate the pain, inconvenience and extra cost of conducting recounts. Under the HAVA rules counties have the option of purchasing much cheaper, manually recountable paper-based systems, tabulated by optical scanners. Many Ohio counties have shied away from this alternative, however, because they think it is trickier to operate and requires more intensive poll-worker training. HAVA also requires at least one terminal per precinct for the use of disabled voters, which basically means a touch-screen machine. Rather than buy two separate systems, many counties prefer to go with just one.

If counties think that touch screens are somehow the easier option, though, they're kidding themselves. Poll workers may find it easy to show voters how to use the machines when they're working, but if anything goes wrong workers are likely to be several orders of magnitude more clueless about fixing the problem. Computerized systems also entail huge hidden costs, from maintenance to security (even when the terminals are in storage) to software upgrades. Several Ohio counties have been appalled at the budget overruns they are already facing, and there is a naïveté all around, from Congress on down, about the kind of commitment these machines entail. "If the federal government thinks it can give onetime-only grants, it is wrong," said Dan Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University's Moritz Law School, who is a cautious supporter of electronic systems, at least in principle. "There needs to be ongoing federal attention." Based on the government's behavior so far — its failure to fund HAVA fully or to meet its own deadline, its failure to establish a federal regulatory body with any teeth, its failure to streamline rules on any aspect of conducting elections, leaving everything up to states and counties — nobody should hold their breath.

Another reason to regard Ohio as a bellwether of the nation's electoral health is the fact that its political complexion is changing fast — perhaps faster than any other state's. For twelve years the Republicans have had the run of the place, a length of tenure more or less guaranteed to spawn corruption, regardless of the party in power. The ethical violations, insalubrious associations and compromised integrity of Governor Taft, Representative Bob Ney and others have received widespread attention in the national press. Perhaps less well understood is that, historically speaking, there is no climate more susceptible to electoral malfeasance than one where a single party is in power and in a position to manipulate the rules to its advantage. If a race is also close and the stakes are high, as they were in 2004, then dirty electioneering is more or less a given.

Granted, there are those who have insisted since Election Day that John Kerry was robbed of Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and with them the presidency. That argument, though, is almost certainly a stretch, since Bush's official margin of victory of 120,000-odd votes is just too big to be explained away with any confidence. Certainly, most seasoned election observers in Ohio, as well as veterans of the earnest but disorganized Kerry field campaign, tend to dismiss it. (A 30,000 vote margin, given the multiplicity of the reported problems, might have been a very different story.) The problem, in the end, with many of the stolen-election theories is not that they are wrong to assume that Ohio is corrupt; it is that they have misunderstood the nature of that corruption. Many — including Robert Kennedy Jr. writing in the June 1 Rolling Stone — imagine Ken Blackwell as the mastermind of some coordinated Republican Party conspiracy to re-elect Bush, in which the counties fell magically in line with his or the party's directives. The reality, though, is that Blackwell's influence only went so far, and the counties — partly because of the lack of support from the secretary of state's office — acted largely on their own. The county boards of elections were, in turn, stuffed with political appointees from both parties who engaged in struggles of varying degrees of intensity. (The stereotypical image of boards of elections, which may not be that far from the truth, is one where the Democrats are sweet, well-meaning old ladies, and the Republicans are razor-sharp lawyers.) The autonomy and complexity of the counties cannot be overstressed. As Catherine Turcer, legislative director of the anticorruption group Ohio Citizen Action, put it sardonically: "Every county has its own party structure, so you can launder money eighty-eight ways."