It's about time:
DENVER (AP) — With the presidential race in full swing, Colorado and other states have found critical flaws in the accuracy and security of their electronic voting machines, forcing officials to scramble to return to the paper ballots they abandoned after the Florida debacle of 2000.
In December alone, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that widely used voting equipment is unfit for elections.
"Every system that is out there, one state or another has found that they are no good," said John Gideon of the advocacy group Voters Unite. "Everybody is starting to look at this now and starting to realize that there is something wrong."
Acknowledging the problem of vulnerable and/or malfunctioning voting machines is the first step. Dealing with the aftermath of that acknowledgment is another issue entirely:
Now some states are turning back to paper — in some cases, just weeks before primary elections.
California, Ohio and Florida have chosen to use scanning machines that count paper ballots electronically.
In Colorado, which has spent $41 million in federal grants on electronic systems, many of the state's nearly 3 million registered voters — and the county officials who conduct the voting — don't know what their elections will look like in 2008.
Coffman and Colorado's clerks and recorders are in a dispute over whether to use mail-in ballots or cast paper ballots at polling places.
All fear time is running out.
"We look at each other and go, 'We have used this equipment in three elections. Why did it get taken to a test board and get decertified?'" said Debbie Green, who heads the Colorado County Clerks Association and is the clerk and recorder of rural Park County. "There are some counties having elections in January and February and they don't have any election equipment."
It's been seven long years since the infamous "hanging chads" of the 2000 Florida debacle, and the greatest democracy on earth still hasn't gotten that "democracy" part quite right.
It hasn't been, of course, from a lack of effort. Members of Congress (most notably Representative Rush Holt and Senator Barbara Boxer, among a handful of dedicated others) have led the charge for voter-verified paper trails and the implementation of a ballot system that American voters can rely upon. But election reform, as the Help America Vote Act of 2002 proved, can be a complicated issue, made more so by the fact that it gets little attention during the year. After all, the integrity of the ballot isn't as sexy as some other items on the legislative agenda, and the media's eyes only seem to drift to the issue right around election day.
And so we continue to play this game. During the year, individual states endeavor to fix this vulnerable and broken system. Molasses-like progress is made on a national level as various election reform bills slink through committees. And as primaries and general elections roll around, Americans shuffle to the polls, touching screens that should never have been certified and trusting their votes to systems that have less verification than ATMs. The press, in turn, does it part, with video clips of long lines and blurbs about sporadic machine malfunctions. And as long as the margin of victory is large enough to make people nod their heads and move along, we engage in a national shrug and move along ourselves, deceiving ourselves that this fragile system based entirely on trust is worthy of repetition again.
Great progress has been made at the state level, but Congress needs to act with urgency to enact meaningful, comprehensive legislation that will restore confidence in our voting system. Most critically, there must be an acknowledgment that a patchwork system of voting methods--some of which are more secure and verifiable than others--is simply unacceptable. It is not enough to call for reform. It's not even enough to pass bill requiring reform. What is needed is an aggressive, sustained cooperation between state and federal governments to fully fund a renovation of America's voting procedures.
It's taken our nation seven years to accept that the process by which we exercise our right to vote is deeply and disturbingly flawed. Let it not be another seven years before we fix it.