The Machinery of Democracy

The great machinery of American democracy whirred into action this morning, only to seize up and shut right down again--in precinct after precinct, county after county, and state after state. Some of the chaos was widely forecast in an election in which one-third of the nation's precincts were deploying brand-new, technically suspect machinery for the first time and pollworker training was spotty at best. Some of it was simply a continuation of the inglorious American tradition of dirty electioneering.

More than forty precincts in Cleveland, Ohio--a city under the microscope after the controversies of the 2004 presidential race--couldn't get their electronic touch screen-terminals fired up on time. In Indianapolis, officials facing the same problem in more than 100 precincts resorted to handing out paper ballots. In Delaware County, Indiana, northeast of the state capital, a programming error meant the voter smart cards would not work, prompting hours of delay and a court petition to keep the polls open an extra couple of hours. And that was just the situation before breakfast.

By mid-afternoon, the city of Denver was on the verge of the electoral breakdown, as the computer terminals either seized up or broke down and the paper ballots offered as a substitute started to run out. It took Bill Ritter, the Democratic candidate for governor, almost two hours to cast his vote. In New Jersey, Republicans complained that the machines were rigged in favor of incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Menendez; in Virginia, where Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb's name was truncated on the interface of voting machines in several counties, Democrats complained that the machines were rigged in favor of the Republicans.

The list of problem states encompassed almost the entire country: Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Maryland, Utah...Even where the machines started up correctly, there were complaints of screen freezes, votes for one candidate apparently being marked for another, optical scan readers that wouldn't read ballots, and more.

And those were just the technical problems. In several heavily African American districts around the country, Republican operatives took a page right out of the Jim Crow-Jesse Helms playbook, calling voters to tell them their precinct location had changed when it hadn't, or warning them they risked arrest if they showed up to vote, or trying to talk them into believing the election was on Wednesday, not Tuesday. In heavily African-American Buckingham County, Virginia, a widely circulated flyer announced in bold letters: "SKIP THIS ELECTION".

Virginia, with its pivotal Allen-Webb Senate race, appeared to suffer the worst of these problems, but it was far from the only affected state. The Republican Party's "robo-call" campaign--repeat phone calls, many of them late at night, appearing to endorse Democratic candidates but really designed to dump dirt on them and deter voters from showing up at all--took place in twenty closely fought House districts across the country. The radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham, meanwhile, fouled up the Democratic Party's voter complaint hotline by openly mocking it on air and reading out the freefone number several times. The hotline reported a spike in crank calls, slowing down voters with bona fide complaints to lodge.

Will any of this affect the outcome of the election? In close races, absolutely it might. Several states have already either restricted or eliminated recount procedures--their idea of avoiding another meltdown like Florida in 2000 – so transparency and accountability are already shaky notions at best. If Allen and Webb, or any other two candidates, are just a few hundred or a few thousand votes apart by tomorrow morning, there may be literally no way of knowing which is the deserving winner. The attorneys, out in unprecedented force, will have their say, of course. But they are likely only to obscure things further. Elections, after all, are for the people to speak out, not the lawyers.

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