Short-Circuiting the Vote

The upshot of this multi-year experiment has been an increasingly broad consensus that paper ballots (read by optical scan machines) constitute the best available technology for voting. Several states that had purchased DRE machines, including Florida and New Mexico, have junked the modern technology in favor of paper ballots, and many others are in the process of doing so (leaving them in a state of improvisational technological limbo for this election). Happy are the secretaries of state in places like Minnesota that stuck with optical scan systems and never chased the electronic grail in the first place.

What this means for Tuesday is that votes will again be cast and counted, as they were in 2000, on a wide array of technologies, varying not only by state but often by county. Voters in some locales, moreover, will be given the option of utilizing old-fashioned paper ballots if they distrust whatever new technology is in place. We have a national voting system that is very much in transition—not only forward from the clearly flawed punch card and lever machines but also backwards from touch screens to paper and optical scans. In transition too is the effort (mandated by HAVA) to develop comprehensive statewide databases of registered voters; the shortcomings of these databases may prompt significant challenges to individual voters and to the tallies.

On balance, we have probably made progress in the last eight years: our voting systems are likely more reliable, and certainly better scrutinized, than they were in 2000. But we are not close to a worry-free election, a day when all citizens (and even voting experts) can calmly go to the polls with confidence that the will of the people will be smoothly and accurately translated into the vote tallies. The response of our political parties to the threat of election-day problems has been as quintessentially American as the rush to buy new technology: they are sending in the lawyers. A report last week indicated that 5,000 lawyers were being dispatched to Florida, and something similar seems to be unfolding in Virginia. Throughout the nation, many thousands of lawyers will be stationed at polling places or manning hotlines, ready to go to court at the first sign of trouble. Thousands of lawyers, flawed voter lists, and machines we don't trust: is this any way to run a democracy?

Alexander Keyssar is Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is the author of The Right to Vote: the Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

© 2008