1115.org

Freedom and democracy may be on the march, but no one ever said that progress would conform to a timetable. So it comes as little surprise that one of our own recent efforts to improve our electoral systems—the 2002 Help America Vote Act—has fallen behind schedule, to the point where required upgrades in equipment and implementation of new voter identification rules may not be in place by the upcoming 2006 elections.

The report said nearly half of the states missed last month’s federal deadline to implement changes required by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which Congress passed to help restore confidence in the integrity of a process shaken by the drawn-out 2000 recount saga in Florida.

The report, by the non-partisan Electionline.org project, said reforms have stalled across the country for a variety of reasons, including growing concerns about the reliability of electronic voting machines and about the legality of voter ID requirements.

In addition, more than 20 states have failed to create databases of registered voters, another requirement written into the HAVA legislation. Elections are a tricky business, even in countries that have been running them for well over 200 years. While no one is saying that upgrading the systems is easy, to wait more than four years to get everything upgraded is sobering.

Worse, some of the roadblocks in implementing the new election rules seem to be self-imposed. California, for example, acquired warehouses full of electronic voting machines, but were forced to scrap them because they lacked the ability to create a paper trail. Now, concerns about tampering with electronic voting machines is not new; it certainly was there in 2002, but officials went ahead and bought the paperless machines anyway, and now have to start over from scratch. Talk about a lack of foresight—and California is not the only state to be going through similar SNAFUs.

One has to wonder how much easier this would all be if elections conformed to a federal standard, instead of having each state try to muddle up its own rules and regulations. Georgia and Indiana, for example, have passed voter ID laws that are already subject to lawsuits (Georgia’s law was already struck down by a federal judge, though an appeal is pending). Imagine what an election would be like with a standardized set of rules, a standardized ballot, and a standardized voting system (with paper trail, of course).

Not that I have any faith that the federal government could pull off such a task, but at this point it doesn’t seem like the states know what they are doing either. It’s not quite what one would expect from the great American democracy of 2006, but to channel Donald Rumsfeld, we’ll be going in with the democracy we have, not the democracy we want to have.

At least no one has suggested that we stock up on purple fingertip ink.