Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot

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Chance of Chaos Still on the Ballot
By Seth Stern, CQ Staff


CLEVELAND — Five months before Election Day, Jane Platten already has 448 items on her to-do list at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections — and the number is likely to double before November.

There’s been plenty to fix since last summer, when Platten became staff director of what she considered the “broken agency” that conducts the elections in Cleveland and its closest suburbs. Both the 2004 presidential balloting and the 2006 primary were marred by lines of voters four hours long in parts of the city, a rash of technological problems and the indictment of two election workers for allegedly cheating in their post-election audits. That prompted Ohio’s newly elected secretary of State to remove the country’s elections board and name new members, who then hired Platten.


VOTING BAGGAGE: At the Board of Elections warehouse, thousands of cases contain the voting booths that Clevelanders will use to complete their paper ballots Nov. 4. (CQ / SCOTT J. FERRELL)

A year later, she says she’s optimistic her list-making and exacting standards will help ensure an honest and well-run election this fall in the largest county in one of the nation’s largest swing states. But many experts in election procedures say they’re not nearly so confident that either Ohio or the rest of the country will conduct elections that yield accurate and timely results — and thereby boost public confidence in the process.

“If it’s a very close election, we’re in real trouble,” says Peg Rosenfield, who for the past 40 years has watched elections in Ohio for the League of Women Voters, one of the nation’s pre-eminent civic advocacy groups.

And attention to the way the world’s largest democracy conducts its own elections is sure to grow now that the matchup for a historic 2008 presidential contest is set. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois last week secured the Democratic convention delegates necessary to lay claim to becoming the first African-American nominee of a major political party and the general-election opponent of Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

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