In the News

Texans could face major disruptions at polling places on Election Day because of voting machine breakdowns or massive turnouts that overwhelm local authorities.

So says a report by three nonpartisan voter advocacy groups that cited Texas and nine other states as having inadequate contingency plans for using emergency paper ballots.

Since the "hanging chad" debacle of 2000, states have worked hard to restore trust in Election Day by updating voting machines. Slowly, but surely, they're making progress. But now, charges of "fraud" and "suppression" in voter registration are kicking up a cloud of controversy — and again endangering voter confidence.

Last month I published a story about new statewide voter registration databases and how federal rules governing how states must use the databases could disenfranchise thousands of new voters who have registered to vote for the first time since the law went into effect in 2004.

The story got a bit lost in all of the hoopla over the Sarah Palin e-mail hacker so I wanted to draw your attention to the piece again and add information about how the new federal rules are making it easy for political parties in some states to challenge the eligibility of voters to cast a ballot, seemingly in an effort to suppress their votes.

I also wanted to discuss a separate issue involving purges of existing voters from registration lists, which is affecting thousands of long-time voters in states across the country who may be surprised when they arrive at polls in November to find that their name has been inexplicably stricken from their state's voter roll. I'll discuss the issue of challenging eligibility in a post labeled Part II and will address the purges in Part III.

In a lively, sometimes contentious, conference at MIT on the problems and merits of the Electoral College, a group of scholars looked into what one called the "fun house mirror of electoral politics" and debated its reflections of federalism, states' rights and equality.