Primary Season: Off, Running and Often Paperless
By far the most-watched of the three is Ohio, where allegations of voting irregularity surfaced in 2004. The most infamous quote from that election cycle goes to Canton, Ohio's Diebold CEO, who was a muckety-muck in Ohio Republican politics: "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
The (Ohio) Beacon Journal reports:
Forty-four of Ohio's 88 counties tried out their new voting equipment in the fall. Problems reported ranged from voters' privacy being jeopardized by the machines' design, to vote counting being clumsier, to memory cards holding votes going missing...
A separate state law is allowing Ohio voters beginning in this election to use absentee ballots without a reason, which could add a new dimension to Election Day processing. Simultaneously, the first step in a new voter-ID mandate will be in effect May 2, when first-time voters who didn't show identification when they registered will have to produce it at the polls. All Ohio voters will have to show ID beginning in November.
HAVA
The Help America Vote Act has kicked in with full force, hence the IDs and electronic voting. However, there is no federal mandate for a paper back-up to electrons, so some voters may be casting their ballots on faith. In fact, almost one-third of Americans cast a ballot in the 2004 election with little, if any, way to determine if the vote recorded (or counted) was the one cast.
We are the only major democracy to allows private corporations to secretly count and tabulate votes with proprietary non-transparent software. In October, the GAO issued a report detailing specific instances of e-voting problems in the 2004 election.
The Financial Times notes that "8,000 separate election authorities [are] managing approximately 175,000 polling places and perhaps as many as 150,000 different ballot forms." It's an astoundingly compex system.
Every two years, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are contested. One-third of the 100 Senate seats are up for election every two years; this year, voters will select 33 Senators (currently held by 18 Democrats and 15 Republicans). And voters will select new governors in 36 states.
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