I was unsatisfied with how the
original poll in this diary went, so I set up a new ranked-choice poll at
www.demochoice.org.
Please take the poll: click here to vote for your favorite Democratic National Committee Voting Rights Institute recommendations. I think you will find that this is a much better way to select than the "pick just one" style available here.
The recommendations are repeated for your reference below the fold.
I picked my 12 favorite (below, with
boldface) because I don't have all day to type every single one in. I tried to eliminate redundancies and the less important.
The Democratic Party will continue to work
with Members of Congress, state lawmakers, local election officials,
and community leaders to make sure that all voters maintain confidence
in our system of elections.
[This 204-page PDF] Democracy at Risk: The Ohio Election report will be broadly distributed
to members of Congress and other elected leaders, Democratic National
Committee (DNC) officials, state party leaders and activists. We will
also post our results on the official Voting Rights Institute (VRI)
website to help educate citizens about what is at stake in the next
election.
In addition, the Party will work with the appropriate officials and the
grassroots community to update and reform our election laws. Some of
the recommendations are as follows:
- The Democratic Party must continue its efforts to monitor
election law reform in all fifty states, the District of Columbia and
territories.
- States should be encouraged to codify into
law all required election practices, including requirements for the
adequate training of official poll workers.
- States should adopt uniform and clear
published standards for the distribution of voting equipment and the
assignment of official pollworkers among precincts, to ensure adequate
and nondiscriminatory access. These standards should be based on set
ratios of numbers of machines and pollworkers per number of voters
expected to turn out, and should be made available for public comment
before being adopting.
- States should adopt legislation to make clear and uniform the rules on voter registration.
- The Democratic Party should monitor the
processing of voter registrations by local election authorities on an
ongoing basis to ensure the timely processing of registrations and
changes, including both newly registered voters and voters who move
within a jurisdiction or the state, and the Party should ask state
Attorneys General to take action where necessary to force the timely
updating of voter lists.
- States should be urged to implement statewide
voter lists in accordance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the
election reform law enacted by Congress in 2002 following the Florida
debacle.
- State and local jurisdictions should adopt clear
and uniform rules on the use of, and the counting of, provisional
ballots, and distribute them for public comment well in advance of each
election day.
- The Democratic Party should monitor the purging
and updating of registered voter lists by local officials, and the
Party should challenge, and ask state Attorneys General to challenge,
unlawful purges and other improper list maintenance practices.
- States should not adopt requirements that voters
show identification at the polls, beyond those already required by
federal law (requiring that identification be shown only by first time
voters who did not show identification when registering.)
- State Attorneys General and local authorities
should vigorously enforce, to the full extent permitted by state law, a
voters right to vote without showing identification.
- Jurisdictions should be encouraged to use
precinct-tabulated optical scan systems with a computer assisted device
at each precinct, in preference to touchscreen (direct recording
equipment or DRE) machines.
- Touchscreen (DRE) machines should not be
used until a reliable voter verifiable audit feature can be uniformly
incorporated into these systems. In the event of a recount, the paper
or other auditable record should be considered the official record.
- Remaining punchcard systems should be discontinued.
- States should ask state Attorneys General to
challenge unfair or discriminatory distribution of equipment and
resources where necessary, and the Democratic Party should bring
litigation as necessary.
- Voting equipment vendors should be required
to disclose their source code so that it can be examined by third
parties. No voting machine should have wireless connections or be able
to connect to the Internet.
- Any equipment used by voters to vote or by
officials to tabulate the votes should be used exclusively for that
purpose. That is particularly important for tabulating/aggregating
computers.
- States should adopt no excuse required standards for absentee voting.
- States should make it easier for college students to vote in the jurisdiction in which their school is located.
- States should develop procedures to ensure that
voting is facilitated, without compromising security or privacy, for
all eligible voters living overseas.
- States should make voter suppression a criminal offense at the state level, in all states.
- States should improve the training of pollworkers.
- States should expend significantly more resources in educating voters on where, when and how to vote.
- Partisan officials who volunteer to work for a candidate should not oversee or administer any elections.