The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. -Thomas Paine
Tom Paine's words ring just as true today as they did over 200 years ago. And yet, despite the fiascoes in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere in the last few elections, voting rights have not been brought up at all in the presidential debates.
So I figured I'd better write a diary on where the presidential candidates stand on voting rights. Here it is.
Summary table:
| Chris Dodd | Bill Richardson | Joe Biden | John Edwards | Hillary Clinton | Barack Obama | Dennis Kucinich |
Full D.C. Representation | FOR | FOR | ??? | FOR | FOR | FOR | FOR |
Restore Voting Rights to Ex-Felons | AGAINST | FOR | AGAINST | FOR | FOR | FOR | FOR |
Require a paper trail | AGAINST | FOR | FOR | FOR | FOR | FOR | FOR |
D.C. Representation
The United States is the only country in the world to deny citizens of the federal district representation.
Every candidate has supported D.C.'s right to representation in some way.
Clinton, Dodd and Obama co-sponsored full D.C. voting rights legislation in the 109th Congress (none has been introduced this session as the goal was to try the compromise Utah-DC seat thing, which failed, although all the Dems in Congress running now voted for it).
Clinton, Dodd and Edwards co-sponsored the same legislation in the 108th Congress
Kucinich has also co-sponsored such legislation
Richardson voted to admit D.C. as a state (the Senate never brought it to the floor for a vote)
So I suppose Biden's been a little weaker on DC voting rights.
Restoring Voting Rights to Ex-Felons
MissLaura wrote about this issue last Sunday.
13 US states impose a lifetime ban on voting except for those felons who successfully petition to have their rights restored (which can be a difficult and time-consuming process, and one many may not know is available).
In 2002, Harry Reid introduced an amendment to the Help America Vote Act to restore voting rights in federal elections to ex-felons.
Senator Clinton voted for it, while Biden, Dodd and Edwards voted against it.
Senator Edwards has since come out in favor of restoring voting rights to ex-felons. Biden and Dodd, as far as I can tell, have not.
Dennis Kucinich has co-sponsored legislation to restore voting rights upon release from incarceration (which would include those on probation and on parole).
Bill Richardson signed legislation requiring the Department of Corrections to notify the Secretary of State's office when to notify the Secretary of State's office when felons complete their sentences.
Barack Obama opposed the nomination of Hans van Spakovsky partly for these reasons
In 2000, while sitting on the Fulton County Registration Board in Georgia, von Spakovsky endorsed the idea of "purging" election rolls of felons and joined a Republican group called the "Voting Integrity Project." This group helped remove voters from election rolls in Florida – denying countless legitimate Democratic voters in Florida their right to vote.
Ensure Every Vote Counts-Paper Trails etc.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Many states are hastily implementing flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures. EFF is protecting your right to vote in the courts while working with legislators and election officials across the country to ensure fair, transparent elections.
Twenty-three states still do not require a paper record of all votes, despite the demonstrated technical failures of e-voting machines in the 2004 presidential election -- including the complete loss of thousands of votes. In turn, voters cannot verify that the e-voting machines are recording their votes as intended, and election officials cannot conduct recounts. Most of these machines use "black box" software that hasn't been publicly reviewed for security. Indeed, when security researchers have inspected the devices, they've found serious vulnerabilities all too often.
But poorly-designed machines are not the only problem. Most election workers remain woefully under-trained regarding potential e-voting problems. Vendor technicians frequently have unsupervised access to voting equipment. Local election officials routinely deny attempts to examine e-voting audit data.
Chris Dodd's Help America Vote Act was the major factor in the massive increase in the use of electronic voting machines
We all know the problems with these machines now (OH-Pres 2004 and FL-13 2006 being two big examples of where these machines may have [2004] or definitely [2006] screwed us over).
Of course, at the time, most did not. Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer were the only Senators to vote against the Help America Vote Act, with similarly low numbers of NAY votes in the House of Representatives.
However, today, one would expect our presidential candidates to be committed to requiring a paper trail. And most have made that commitment on their website:
John Edwards: who, although it's not on his site, supports a total ban on DRE voting machines
Joe Biden:
Hillary Clinton:
Bill Richardson:
Barack Obama: Although it's not on his voting rights page, he said he supports it in his DC for Democracy response
Dennis Kucinich: He links to his congressional candidacy page, but it's pretty clear
The one candidate with nothing on his site is Christopher Dodd.
No mention of voting rights on his site at all.
However, he has introduced a bill to "fix" this problem of a lack of a paper trail, S. 730
I put fix in quotation marks because saying this bill fixes the problems with voting rights is like saying Bush's Healthy Forests plan actually creates healthy forest, or that his Clear Skies plan actually reduced air pollution.
I refer you to Section 4 of this bill:
SEC. 4. VOTER VERIFIED BALLOTS.
(a) Verification-
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 301(a) of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (42 U.S.C. 15481(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraph:
`(7) VOTER VERIFIED BALLOTS- In order to meet the requirements of paragraph (1)(A)(i), on and after January 1, 2009:
`(A) The voting system shall provide an independent means of voter verification which meets the requirements of subparagraph (B) and which allows each voter to verify the ballot before it is cast and counted.
`(B) A means of voter verification meets the requirements of this subparagraph if the voting system allows the voter to choose from one of the following options to verify the voter's vote selection:
`(i) A paper record.
`(ii) An audio record.
`(iii) A pictorial record.
`(iv) An electronic record or other means that provides for voter verification that is accessible for individuals with disabilities, including nonvisual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides privacy and independence equal to that provided for other voters.
`(C) Any means of verification described in clause (ii), (iii), or (iv) of subparagraph (B) must provide verification which is equal or superior to verification through the use of a paper record.
`(D) The requirements of this paragraph shall not apply to any voting system purchased before January 1, 2009, in order to meet the requirements of paragraph (3)(B).'.
Section (C) is meaningless since there's no way to quantify quality of verification and thus no way to enforce the law
It's a poison-pill bill to provide a loophole to prevent a paper trail.
Miscellaneous
Kucinich opposed Henry Hyde's bill last fall to require a Photo ID to vote in federal elections (it passed the House but was not brought up in the Senate)
Kucinich is co-sponsoring two bills introduced by Keith Ellison to protect voting rights: To require states to let people register to vote for elections on election day and his bill to prohibit requiring a Photo ID as a condition of letting people vote (he just introduced it yesterday so I can't link to it yet)
Obama's bill to prohibit deceptive practices (co-sponsored by Clinton but not Dodd or Biden) has been approved by the Judiciary Committee and is on the Senate legislative calendar.
Why this act is necessary (what it would prohibit):
Calculated efforts to disenfranchise voters persist each election year. During the 2006 election, thousands of Latino voters in Orange County, California received letters telling them that immigrants who voted would be jailed - implying that this even applied to naturalized citizens. In Maryland, voters received fabricated sample Democratic ballots that featured Republican candidates for governor and senator. And in Virginia, voters were phoned by a fraudulent "Virginia Elections Commission" claiming they were ineligible to vote. These tactics most often target vulnerable communities, such as minorities, the elderly, and the disabled.
Senator Clinton offered an amendment to the Help America Vote Act to require a benchmark on ballot performance (how many votes were discarded as ineligible).
Mr. President, the amendment I offer today is very similar to the amendment I offered a number of weeks ago at the beginning of this important debate. I appreciate the great support and good suggestions my colleagues have provided. And I particularly thank a colleague who suggested that this amendment should be entitled--rather than the ``Residual Vote Error Rates'' amendment, which is a mouthful--the ``Leave No Vote Behind'' amendment.
So that is how I shall refer to it. Why? Because this amendment is about ensuring that we do just that: Leave no vote behind, that we do everything we reasonably can to ensure that everyone's vote is counted.
This amendment is neither liberal nor conservative. It is neither Democrat nor Republican. But it goes to the very heart of the reliability and accountability of our electoral system.
Every voter who goes to the polls or votes by absentee or votes in any other manner that is appropriate under our laws should know that that effort was not in vain. It is truly American to ensure that we give every one of our citizens the confidence to believe our Federal election system is the best it can be. Therefore, this amendment is critical to our deliberations because year after year--not just in 2000 but in every year--in every State, ballots were not counted because of so-called residual votes. There are overvotes. There are undervotes. There are spoiled votes. According to the Caltech/MIT Report:
Over the past four presidential elections [going back, therefore, 16 years] the rate of residual votes in presidential elections was slightly over two percent. This means that in a typical presidential election over 2 million voters did not have a presidential vote recorded for their ballots.
The percentage of discarded ballots is even higher in a Senate election, which, I suppose, should get us all thinking.
But it is imperative we recognize that some of these are legitimate errors. Some of these are the problems that elderly people have in punching the little chad through the hole. Some of it is confusion with respect to the appropriate place to make the mark which is made.
For all the reasons that lie behind these uncounted votes, the Commission, headed by former Presidents Ford and Carter, recommended, unanimously, that Congress needs to focus not just on the machine or mechanical errors in improving our election system, but on the unintentional human errors as well.
The Commission did so because only by measuring the rate of these residual vote errors will we be able to assess effectively whether the voting process as a whole is giving all of our citizens the equal opportunity to have their votes counted.
That is why I have offered this amendment, which would require the newly established Office of Election Administration to establish a residual vote error rate, a standard or benchmark with which voting systems will have to comply. It is a transfer of authority and expertise to the body that we are setting up to make determinations about our mechanical and machine errors.
Since I offered this amendment back in February, it has been improved, thanks to the suggestions made by Senator Bingaman, who asked to be shown as an original cosponsor. He proposed and now included in the leave no vote behind amendment language that would give the Office of Election Administration even greater flexibility in setting the residual error rate standard.
Senator Bingaman pointed out there are certain distinct communities in some parts of our country that have a historically high rate of intentional undervoting in elections for Federal office compared to the rest of the country. Therefore, the language added by Senator Bingaman requires the Office of Election Administration to report to Congress on the extent to which this is happening and permits the office either to set a separate benchmark or exclude whole areas. This gives us the requisite flexibility that the office requires, and I certainly hope our colleagues will support this amendment because, in the absence of taking some action on this issue, we are not going to be responding to what were the most serious questions raised in the past election.
This is also in keeping with the other voting system standards in the bill. The mechanical rate standard, as important as that is, does not address this human error rate.
Before I lose my voice and leave it behind, I would certainly urge my colleagues' support of this important amendment that would leave no vote behind and give greater assurance to voters no matter where they live that their votes truly will be counted.
On adoption of this amendment, 47 Democrats and Jim Jeffords (including Clinton, Biden and Edwards) voted YEA.
Max Baucus, Jean Carnahan, and Christopher Dodd voted NAY.
Had the three of them voted YEA, it would have been adopted.