Make Every Vote Count

A recent report from the advocacy group America’s Voice highlighted the growing power of Latino voters in the upcoming 2010 elections.  Latino voters played a critical role in 2008 to propel President Obama to victory in several key swing states that previously trended Republican, including Virginia.  Latino voter registration and turnout rates have exploded over the past few years: roughly 10 million voted in the 2008 Presidential election alone, a 2.5 million increase from 2004 and 4 million person increase since 2000.  Latino voter registration grew by over 54% between 2000 and 2008, and turnout grew 64% over the same time period.  

Last month, leading voting machine manufacturer Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) purchased Premier Election Solutions from its parent company, Diebold Inc. ES&S currently controls 50% of the voting machine market in the US and the acquisition of Premier will add another 33%, giving the company control of over 80% of the market.  The sale was not announced prior to completion and has raised serious concerns among voting integrity advocates and lawmakers.

This Dispatch will outline the serious problems that counting prisoners where they are incarcerated, instead of where they lived before their conviction, has caused for governance at the state and local level.  States around the country have introduced legislation to determine redistricting for elections based on the home community of the incarcerated, a key reform to achieve both democratic results and economic justice within our states.

Whether out of circumstance or an emerging trend, where state authority was at issue, this term the U.S. Supreme Court overwhelmingly deferred to state decision makers-- a significant reveral from last year. 

The District of Columbia has obtained an agreement from Sequoia Voting Systems to review a vast amount of information about one of their voting machines, which somehow recorded thousands of extra ballots during the September primaries. Investigators assembled by the council will have access to the source code and documents related to its creation, as well as blueprints for the machine hardware.  

Three recent revelations about electronic voting machines highlight the maddening lack of security in paperless elections, and emphasize why paper ballot voting with robust post-election audits are a basic requirement for secure elections.

This week the US Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the minority vote dilution component (section 2) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In doing so the court interpreted the VRA to only protect the voting power of minority groups when they constitute a majority of the electorate in a legislative district. This ruling makes the requirements of section 2 significantly narrower then the defendant in the case, the chief elections official for the state of North Carolina, had believed it to be.

This year election administrators, many of whom were fielding new voting equipment for the first time, faced record turnout.  After the pervasive problems with the previous two presidential elections and the fears of more election problems, both real and imagined, voters across the political spectrum faced the election with deep skepticism about its fairness and integrity.  Today we give a brief overview of whether the expectations for the election were born out, and what election day tells us about where to focus reforms.

Common Cause and The Century Foundation have released the new version of their joint biennial report on election administration in 10 swing states and the findings are not very encouraging: while voters' desire to participate is growing, states have only made fitful progress improving the voting process, and in many instances things have moved backward since the last federal election in 2006.  Examining the most recent election experiences of Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia the report details serious problems in every major aspect of the voting process, along with a handful of bright spots where individual states are moving important reforms.

The 2000 presidential election propelled America's problems with our elections into the national spotlight in an unprecedented way.  Americans, night after night, watched news stories exposing the many problems that are routine in elections but that receive little attention: confusing ballots that lead people to mark their vote for the wrong candidate, voter suppression aimed at minorities through voter registration purges, and weary election officials trying to discern voters’ intent on ambiguously marked punch card ballots.