Five ways to safeguard voting rights and how non-controversy could save the election reform movement
From Miller-McCune.com
BY DAVID ROSENFELD
Two weeks before Election Day, county clerk Ruth Johnson — who administers elections in Oakland County, Mich. — reported a problem with the optical scanners used to read the county’s more than 600,000 paper ballots. Johnson was familiar with performance issues in the Model 100 scanners made by Election Systems and Software. But this was different.
After the fact, such concerns might seem unwarranted. There were no major disruptions on Election Day involving magnifying glasses or a constitutional crisis. That’s partly because so many races were decided by large enough margins for problems not to take on national import and because concerns were identified and challenged in court by an army of election defense attorneys ahead of time.
Despite the ease with which the presidential election was decided, there is still much to be desired about the U.S. election system. Not to be forgotten were the deluge of court cases in which Republican-affiliated attorneys lost in their arguments to remove voters from the rolls or shut down early voting sites.
There were fights in states to restore voters already removed, several of which were successful; a Republican-led campaign of confusing mailers; attacks against groups that register voters; and misinformation to college students. Election Day also saw unacceptably long lines and thousands of cases of people finding they were not registered to vote.
“I would dispute that things ran smoothly on Election Day,” said Elizabeth Westfall, an attorney with the civil rights-oriented Advancement Project. “My blood went up when I saw the potential for challenges under the HAVA (Help America Vote Act), if that had not been undone in Ohio,” said Westfall, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision shortly before Election Day that threw out a Republican-led challenge of 200,000 voters based on mismatched Social Security records. “Had they been successful, it would have been an absolute disaster.”
