In case you missed it, tremendous news for democracy lovers everywhere late yesterday, as the week ended up being a very good one for the voters, for a change…
- In Missouri, GOP vote-suppressor Thor Hearne lost one, and the voters won one for a change, as the attempt by Republican legislators in the state house to pass a Constitutional amendment requiring Photo ID restrictions and proof of citizenship sure to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legal, registered voters went down in flames on the last day of the legislative session.
On the federal level, GOP voter-fraud zealot Hans von Spakovsky (cue evil music), finally withdrew his nomination to the FEC, which had been blocked by Sens. Obama and Feingold. The standoff had kept the FEC from have the required quorum of commissioners needed to do business in a crucial election year. With vS out of the way, perhaps a responsible, pro-voter set of commissioners can now take their place. But we’ll see. Rick Hasen has the outlook. Either way, it’s another very big victory.
In Tennessee, both houses have approved a bill to require a paper ballot for every vote cast! The bill has to go back to conference to work out one last point, but given its extraordinary success in both houses (it passed unanimously this week in the state Senate!) it’s likely to be enacted quickly. This is a huge win for the tireless Election Integrity citizen heroes on the ground in TN, and a loss for the pro-machine, pro-invisible/unverifiable ballot crowd there, including Davidson County’s Republican Election Commissioner Lynn Greer, who once told me, after I attended a meeting there, that “paper is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on this country.” Apparently he was serious. The good news: the responsible folks in the state disagree with him. The bad news: the requirement for paper ballots won’t take effect until 2010. But we’ll take what we can get!
Finally, in Arizona, as Steve Rosenfeld, as one of my guests yesterday while I was guest hosting The Peter B. Collins Show told us, the DoJ has finally settled a lawsuit against the state where Sec. of State Jan Brewer, who once called Election Integrity advocates “anarchists” and “conspiracy theorists” has been doing everything she could, for years, to keep legitimate voters from being able to properly cast their ballots and have them counted accurately. The state has now finally agreed to follow the law (National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the NVRA or the “Motor Voter Bill”) by performing voter registration services at public assistance facilities such as welfare clinics.
We spoke about most of the breaking good news above last night on the PBC Show (audio archive here), and will try, for the next few hours at least, to enjoy some of the great news, for a change, on several fronts in the continuing Republican War on Voting.
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Thanks for the great summary! Hopefully this is a sign of voting reform’s momentum nation-wide. Here in Missouri, Instant Runoff Voting bills were introduced in both the House and the Senate in the last few months. And we’re working on it at the city level in Kansas City. Hopefully we’ll be in the news too in a year or so!
Unfortunately, I’m no fan of IRV for a number of reasons (among them, we currently have enough trouble adding 1 + 1 + 1, much less the more complicated IRV scheme, which almost guarantees we need to use less-than-transparent, error-prone, voting machines, plus, IRV can be used to game elections.)
On the other hand, if you’re looking for an alternative to plurality voting (and the two-party duopoly that seems to come with it), but a scheme that won’t cause the problems mentioned above, and can be handled by either our current, bad, op-scan paper-ballot systems, or hand-counting, you may wish to take a look at Approval Voting.
I’m not endorsing Approval Voting, because I’d still like to learn more about it. But it seems a much better alternative, rather than IRV.
The lonesome-est losers.
How are the disabled voting in Tennessee? How did TN get out of the touchscreens for disabled voting? Not that I agree that it really works for disabled voting – but just wondering what they are doing.
To respond to Michelle G., the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act requires that voters use paper ballots that they complete themselves (with a pencil or a ballot-marking device.)Our disabled voters have reviewed several ballot-marking options and many seem to prefer the Auto-Mark.
We are very pleased to have our disabled voters aligned with us. As several told our legislature, “we want our votes to count, and to be capable of being re-counted, just like every other voter. That is why we want the DREs scrapped as much as anyone.”
Regarding TN’s new paper ballot law, what has Tennessee provided in the legislation for meaningful recounts and audits? What body is responsible for election law enforcement in TN? Or is this just a law that will benefit one of a small handful of vendors? Might the vendors have lobbied hard for this law?
Paper ballots have potential, but so far, many states have the machines and are not doing meaningful audits or recounts. Take a look – is the legislature serioius or are paper ballots being treated as a voter confidence builder? All I do is look at the increasingly small pool of vendors who will control programming elections nationally as everyone clamors for paper ballots but the well designed actual counting of them is just a bothersome detail that… never gets addressed in a way that would satisfy a professional auditor (just the general public).
If “paper ballot” is not followed by meaningful laws and counts/audits, you have voters less anxious and happier, but not a better system — only the POTENTIAL for one. Good luck getting legislation through under those conditions.
Kind of like many buying a hybrid car and leaving it in the garage while they keep driving the SUV. Somebody will cheer because sales of hybrids are up, and the potential for using fuel responsibly exists, but until those hybrids are used, only the voting company — er, hybrid seller — is the beneficiary.
This is a big challenge of having high tech systems’ operation determined by legislation. It must be codified to be enforceable, but legislatures often don’t deal with detail well and horse trade provisions in bills to get some of what they want. Citizens en masse don’t/can’t deal with the details, and aren’t focused on election law.
Let’s count how many states have not merely paper ballots with potential, but also meaningful security for ballots/machines/memory cards, chain of custody provisions with tough penalties, provisions for counting, and ballot reconciliation and blank ballot management provisions. Because paper ballots are introduced into sets of state election laws many of which have political machine origins, the task should not be underestimated in changing them.
Good point Brad.
And three of the traditional far right congressional districts last week rejected the far right … in three different southern states.
Those are the places that call the MSM “liberal”, which we know is patently false. If you consider context, the MSM is no where near ‘liberal’.
The past decade has probably been the most far right and fascist in our recent history, so for Obama to be called a “liberal” in a fascist era only means he is not a fascist.
He is closer to the people who don’t support fascism and who are doing “liberal” voting.
Yep, a middle of the road voter of 12 years ago (or even the ’06 election perhaps) would be called a ‘liberal’ by the fascist arm of the republican party this year.
Also remember what NH showed us:
Thanks for the good-news summary, Brad.