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NYT |
Little Change Forecast For Election Process
- Despite the outcry over last year's
presidential election, the next national election will probably occur under
virtually the same circumstances as the last, with the same unreliable voting
systems and under the same dizzying hodgepodge of rules that vary from county
to county across the nation. [registrars, states rights,]
- "There is no technical fix to the problem," said Thomas Mann, a scholar
at the Brookings Institution. "There's no possibility of a uniform national
ballot. There are contradictory findings on the accuracy of different voting
equipment." [table, states rights]
- Elections officials are reluctant to formalize
means to call voters' errors to their attention at the polling place, for
fear of violating the privacy of the ballot.
- Setting national or state standards for ballots and recounts might
have seemed a logical response to the mess in Florida. But it is becoming
increasingly clear that elections officials are resistant to giving up turf.
And untangling the roles of federal, state and local officials is emerging
as a central obstacle.
- Sharon Priest, secretary of state in Arkansas and president of the
National Association of Secretaries of State, said she could accept statewide
standards but she rejected national standards.
- "Frankly," Ms. Priest said, "we don't have to have the feds tell
us everything that we have to do."
- She gave perhaps the gloomiest assessment on the future of election
reform: "Unless there's a real uprising on the part of people in this country
who will call their congressmen and senators and say, `Elections are important
to us and democracy comes at a price, and we're willing to pay that price
— do something!' then I'm not sure, running into budgets now, that
anything's going to get done."
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