Beyond Voting Machines: HAVA and Real Election Reform

By Miles Rapoport, AlterNet. Posted July 30, 2003.

Butterfly ballots. Hanging chads. Thousands of African Americans turned away from the polls. Hundreds of elderly Jews voting for Pat Buchanan.

The details of the Florida 2000 election debacle are seared into our collective memory, and rightly so. They proved to Americans of all political persuasions that our election laws are broken. In so doing, the debacle created an opening for voting reform that we have not seen for decades. Citizens of all stripes have started to question the sanctity of our election laws. Why do we vote the way we do? Should partisan operatives administer elections? Who should count our votes? And who should be allowed to vote in the first place?

This opening for reform is a chance to help more people vote, to bring more people into our democracy. Specifically, it is an opportunity to knock down some of the structural barriers that keep millions of Americans from voting. Many of our past barriers to voting -- like colonial laws that enfranchised only white, male landowners, or Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests -- have been culled out as un-American and abolished. But numerous barriers still exist today. The 2000 election has given us the chance to attack them with renewed vigor.

Progressives need to seize this moment, for reasons both moral and practical. Morally, the progressive ideals of equality and justice can never be attained if vulnerable segments of the population -- young people, low income communities, people of color -- continue to be pushed out of the political process. Practically, those marginalized communities are more likely to vote against the candidates of America's conservative minority. That means more victories for progressive causes.

The Help America Vote Act

In the wake of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) last October. HAVA mandates that all 50 states upgrade many aspects of their election procedures, including their voting machines, registration processes and poll worker training. The specifics of implementation have been left up to each state, which allows for widely varying interpretations of the Federal law -- and thus leaves open the possibility of either progressive reforms or regressive erosions of voting rights. The dangers and opportunities presented by HAVA make it a topic that progressives ignore at their peril.

The most widely publicized criticism of HAVA revolves around "paperless ballots." A group of respected journalists and computer scientists (many writing in this MoveOn bulletin) have raised an important red flag about electronic voting machines being vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. We should heed this warning, but we should not lose the opportunity to engage other critical reforms. If we focus only on the risks of computer voting, we reinforce the misunderstanding that HAVA is no more than "machinery chicanery." If that happens, we will have squandered the unique opportunity to influence all the other election reforms that are being written, right now, under our very noses.

For example, we should pay close attention to HAVA's voter identification requirements, which Republicans insisted upon as the price of a bipartisan bill. HAVA requires that first-time voters who registered by mail show identification -- such as a driver's license, government ID card or other specified documentation -- in order to vote. In addition, when they register, voters must give their driver's license number or, if they do not have a driver's license, the last four digits of their Social Security number (if they have one). In cases where the state can verify these numbers, new voters who registered by mail and provided one of these numbers would not have to show identification at the polls.

These provisions may heighten the opportunities for confusion and voter intimidation. Some critics envision partisan operatives fighting for victories with "Ballot Security Squads;" others worry about the role of some election officials, who have been known to display suspicion or outright hostility toward new voters, particularly voters of color and newly naturalized citizens. Lawmakers in some states, like Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, California and Massachusetts, have introduced legislation to enact even more rigid ID requirements in the guise of complying with HAVA. On the other hand, election officials in some states are interpreting the law in ways that will not dampen voting. Ohio, for example, plans to accept many different kinds of IDs at the ballot box, so that no voters are needlessly turned away from the polls. Those who care about increasing participation will have to fight hard -- probably in court, ultimately -- against ID provisions that would discriminate against poor voters, voters of color, young people or new citizens.

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