Fixing Elections

Now that the Democrats have actually won a national election, it's time we stopped all the talk about Diebold and Karl Rove conspiring to steal elections and started focusing on the real problem, which is the woeful lack of reliability, accountability and transparency in this country's electoral system.

It's actually a golden opportunity. Democrats who have been educating themselves on the shortcomings of electronic voting and the importance of recounts should still feel motivated to reform a system that so many felt was rigged against them in previous electoral cycles. Republicans, meanwhile, might finally want to initiate a grown-up conversation on the subject before they get tagged with the "sore loser" label they thrust so willingly on their opponents in 2000, 2002 and 2004.

From a procedural point of view, the 2006 midterms were a disaster that could still--depending on how things pan out in Virginia--turn into a catastrophe. One-third of the country was asked to vote on new machines whose technical integrity was questioned by computer scientists at a dozen top-flight universities and research institutes. Machines either failed to fire up, hit software obstacles or registered screen freezes, misalignments or votes cast for one candidate that appeared to be recorded for another. In Denver the new e-voting systems came close to collapsing altogether. In eight states voting hours had to be extended because the machines, operated by inexperienced and undertrained poll workers, didn't do what the manual said they would do.

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