The current anti-Bush "pre-election spin" to insure against the possibility of a Bush electoral blowout in 2004 (which, I'm afraid, is looking more and more likely) involves the claim that the Bush "regime" has realized a scheme to establish rigged electronic voting computers in key states across the land. But what they don't seem to get is that rather than insuring against anything, that spin just makes them look excessively juvenile and unfit to wield the levers of power.
Right after the 2000 Florida debacle I was invited to attend a symposium sponsored by the Center for Voting and Democracy. This wasn't because I was some sort of political uberpundit, but because both the director of the organization and myself had written reports on the 1996 Congressional elections, which had been published in 1998. We therefore knew one another. At that time I was more or less incensed at what I saw as the obstructive tactics of Katherine Harris in Florida, and really wanted to do something to ensure that votes were counted fairly and accurately. It seemed imperative to avoid such a bureaucratic train wreck in the future. So I did my best to get the Democratic Party activists who attended this meeting on Capitol Hill (next to the Supreme Court Building) to start discussing legislation about electronic voting and accountability, etc. Well, I just got the "blind stare" from everyone. They weren't even remotely interested. It seemed that once the election had been decided the consensus was to shelve the issue until it could be raised in the next campaign. So, guess who picked up the ball that the Democrats let drop, and used the momentum provided by the 2000 elections to actually do something? Jeb started working to set up electronic voting in Florida almost immediately, and virtually all of the pent up momentum for voting reform was scooped up by Republicans. Boy was that a surprise! The Democrats were sure they owned that issue by some kind of transcendent political right. (Similar to the presumption that they own the issues of descriminatory race, gender, and sexual preference policies and attitudes, and education reform.)
There are currently some guidelines published by NIST for the implementation of electronic voting machines, but they're voluntary for the states, and it's at the state level where decisions are made about implementation. I'm not sure how many states will adopt the NIST guidelines eventually, but those guidelines essentially call for a record of the vote count that can be followed later. Good idea. It ought to eventually be implemented everywhere, but possibly not by 2004 because, well, this stuff costs money, except on Big Rock Candy Mountain (obscure trade union reference).
So the bottom line is that the Democrats sat on their duffs when they could've used the 2000 momentum to do something, and now that there are some issues regarding vote verification they're all over it, not to fix it of course, but to complain and set up spin for post-November. It's almost like they planned it that way, except that's a little like planning to lose your job so you don't have to pay the rent. In this era where national security and the War on Totalitarianism 3.x trumps everything the race just doesn't go to those who complain the loudest. Someone needs to explain that, apparently.
Posted by Demosophist at January 18, 2004 03:43 PM | TrackBack