Looming Risks in '08 Elections
A front-page story in today's New York Times underscores why the Secretary of State Project exists.
"With millions of new voters heading to the polls this November," the article starts, "election officials and voting monitors [fear] long lines, stressed-out poll workers and late tallies on Election Day." Among the potential problems: New voting technologies, changing election rules, and, sadly, not enough ballots.
The truth is, most voting problems can be solved by good Secretaries of State. Printing enough ballots, training enough poll workers and ordering reliable, hacker-proof elections machines isn't rocket science. Unfortunately, if a Secretary of State wants to suppress the votes of young people, African Americans, or low income folks -- like Ohio's Ken Blackwell did in 2004 -- he or she can simply not try very hard to fix those voting problems. Or, even worse, fix them in selective polling places (read: affluent suburbs).
Here at the SoS Project, we're proud to see one of our star 2006 candidates, Jennifer Brunner, taking a strong stand against these kinds of problems. Another passage from the Times article:
Although most of the 30 states with touch-screen machines still do not plan to provide backup paper ballots, others, including Ohio, will do so for the first time in a presidential election. In 2004, hundreds of voters in Knox County, Ohio, many of them Kenyon College students, had to wait more than nine hours after one of the two voting machines at their polling place just off campus broke down. There were reports of lines where the wait was several hours long in at least three other counties.
"We refuse to let that happen," said Jennifer L. Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, who plans to instruct all counties that use touch-screen machines to order backup paper ballots equal to at least a quarter of the votes cast there in the last presidential election.
That's the kind of problem-solving attitude we need from more Secretaries of State. We think our slate of candidates this year all fall squarely into that category.
If you have a minute, leave a comment on the New York Times site to thank reporter Ian Urbina for shining the spotlight on this pressing issue.
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