Election Corrections
America's voting machinery was supposed to be fixed, but the road to reform has been slow going
Voting machine concerns have dominated the debate so far, but statewide voter registration databases required by the Help America Vote Act have also proved costly and time-consuming for states. The databases are intended to prevent voters from being inadvertently left off registration lists if they move from one jurisdiction to another within a state. But 13 states missed the law's January deadline, according to electionline.org. The Justice Department has sued Alabama and New York for failing to comply and is reviewing the actions of other states for potential lawsuits, says Eric Holland, a Justice Department spokesman. "The big issues to watch in the coming election," says Daniel Tokaji, an elections-law professor at Ohio State University, "mostly have to do with registration."
Overriding all the technology concerns are worries that there is no national oversight of elections. "There is no enforcement mechanism to really fix the problems we are seeing," says Heather Gerken, a professor at Yale Law School. Congress set up the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to advise states as part of the Help America Vote Act, but it took nine months to even get its members confirmed. The Rev. DeForest "Buster" Soaries, a Republican and the first head of the EAC, arrived in Washington in late 2003 and found a commission lacking real power. "Instead of hitting the ground running," says Soaries, who resigned in 2005, "we hit the ground looking for office space to borrow." Congress has since allocated more money to the commission, but critics carp that EAC still lacks regulatory power. The result: a patchwork quilt of problem-plagued state and county regulations. "You can go to 12 precincts in one county on Election Day and see 12 different procedures," says Mike Alvarez, codirector of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. "I think that will bedevil elections."
Wherever the elections are close this fall, they'll most likely be scrutinized by armies of lawyers. By setting those January 2006 deadlines for various reforms, "Congress designed it this way so we would have 2006 be our 'get experience' year," says Doug Lewis, head of the nonprofit Election Center, which trains election officials. Then everything will be smoothed out in time for the 2008 presidential election. Or that's the idea, anyway.
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