America has had seven years, 11 months and two weeks since the disputed 2000 presidential election to get its act together and ensure that citizens can trust the integrity, validity and accuracy of the electoral process.
Yet here we are, two weeks before the 2008 presidential election, and the integrity, validity and accuracy of the Nov. 4 balloting are very much in question.
In a number of battleground states, disputes over voter registration and eligibility have already led to legal challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court had to step in to allow early voting by mail in Ohio after a lawsuit charged that some of the state’s 200,000 newly registered voters hadn’t been properly verified. In Michigan, lawyers are battling to ensure that qualified voters who lost their homes to foreclosure are still able to cast ballots. In Colorado, tens of thousands of people reportedly have been purged from the voter rolls by officials who, in trying to verify eligibility, relied heavily on a federal database with known problems.
Republicans are decrying efforts by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to sign up new voters who are likely to favor Democrats. Since the third and final debate, when Sen. John McCain voiced concern that ACORN is “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy,” his supporters have turned this concern into an obsession. In the past week, the Republican National Committee has relentlessly accused the group of trying to undermine the election, while Fox News has become the all-ACORN-all-the-time network.
Meanwhile, Democrats accuse Republicans of employing dirty tricks to suppress the vote in areas where Sen. Barack Obama is likely to be favored. A standard GOP intimidation technique, the Democrats charge, is to spread the word in neighborhoods with large minority populations that authorities will be waiting at polling places to arrest anyone who has so much as an unpaid parking ticket. In recent elections in New Mexico and Virginia, GOP operatives have been accused of calling registered Democrats on Election Day and telling them, incorrectly, that their voting precincts have changed.
If all this weren’t discouraging enough, the vote count on Nov. 4 is almost certain to be disputed. In many states, including New Jersey, voters will be casting their ballots on electronic machines that are not backed up by a paper record. If anything goes wrong with any of the 11,000 machines used in New Jersey on Election Day, there will be no way to validate or recheck the vote totals.
Worse, the electronic machines, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, may not be as tamper-proof as the clunky old mechanical machines they replaced. As part of a longstanding lawsuit brought by the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action, Princeton University computer expert Anthony Appel reported that it took him about seven minutes, “using simple tools,” to hack into a Sequoia machine and install software that could steal votes and change the outcome of an election. While another expert, Carnegie Mellon University professor Michael Shamos, scoffed at the notion that hacking into an electronic machine under “laboratory conditions” in any way discredits the security and safety of the Sequoia system, most of us would probably feel a whole lot better if our electronic votes were backed up by a paper record.
Unfortunately, the trial in this case won’t begin until January — in time, perhaps, to safeguard the counting of the votes in next year’s gubernatorial race, but not in this year’s presidential contest.
When Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, its members may have thought they resolved the crisis in voter confidence brought on by the 2000 election. But as the events leading up to the 2008 election have already made abundantly clear, the electoral process they attempted to fix is still badly broken.

