NYT: Keeping the Voting Clean

[acmavm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/opinion/11hasen.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

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By RICHARD L. HASEN
LOS ANGELES

AS election mishaps hindered voting on Tuesday from Cleveland to Denver, some people were already calling for giving up on the new electronic voting machines, which were themselves put in place to prevent another hanging-chad fiasco like that in Florida in 2000.

The calls will only get louder as the public learns more about Florida’s 13th Congressional District — coincidentally, Katherine Harris’s old district — where voting machines apparently lost or failed to record up to 18,000 votes in a race where the Democratic and Republican candidates are just a few hundred votes apart. If everyone just voted by mail or with pencil and paper, the argument goes, our voting problems would be solved.

But this reaction to the bugs and glitches shows that Americans have not learned the right lesson from 2000: the problem is not with the technology of running our elections but rather with the people running them.

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True, squeaky-clean Oregon has been able to use the vote-by-mail system. But it is not clear that clean elections could be held in places with more rancorous partisan disputes over election rules and vote counting. And mail-in ballots don’t eliminate the problem anyway: losers still have an incentive to claim fraud and try to get a close election result overturned. Public opinion on the integrity of the election process is volatile, and surveys show losers have less confidence in the fairness of the process than winners do.

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To improve the chances that states will choose an independent and competent chief elections officer, states should enact laws making that officer a long-term gubernatorial appointee who takes office only upon confirmation by a 75 percent vote of the legislature — a supermajority requirement that would ensure that a candidate has true bipartisan support. Nonpartisanship in election administration is no dream. It is how Canada and Australia run their national elections.
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[Eric J in MN]

1. Non-partisan Secretaries of State would be fine, but...

...it's the DECISIONS made about elections which are important.

Does the state use paper ballots? Does the state have Election Day Registration?

If a state goes from a partisan to non-partisan Secretary of State, decisions will remain, and may be good or bad.