Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
Is this any way to choose the leader of the world's greatest country?
Election day was barely an hour long before reports started tripping across the wires about long lines, voting mistakes, missing ballots, faulty machinery, allegations of vote fraud, unlawful electioneering at polling places and even violence in some precincts.
Barack Obama's victory margin was large enough to reduce the news significance of these stories, but had the election been close, they would have been highly significant. Much of the nation hasn't learned anything since the hanging chads of 2000, despite legislation passed by Congress and a number of states that were supposed to end, or at least reduce, such problems. But it hasn't happened.
Tuesday may have seen the largest turnout in the nation's history, but it also saw record foul-ups.
The problem is twofold:
- First, voter registration programs in many states that simply invite fraud and corruption.
- Second, totally overwhelmed voting systems that become virtually unmanageable and rife with errors.
It's ironic that in simplifying registration, many states have put a heavier burden on their voting systems. If they simply tightened up their registration rules, as Georgia and Indiana have done with photo IDs, they'd find the going a lot easier at the polling places.
Wisconsin, for instance, is a key swing state whose presidential races in 2000 and 2004 were decided by less than 12,000 votes. Yet anyone who shows up at the polls on Election Day may register and vote.
If you don't think that invites fraud, then consider that in 2004 up to 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than there were voters on record as having cast ballots.
Then there are mail-in registrations, sign-ups at motor vehicle departments and absentee ballot abuses. ACORN-type registration drives -- in which workers with quotas are tempted to forge registrations -- also contribute to vote fraud. If you can get their names on the rolls, an ACORN whistleblower told John Fund of The Wall Street Journal , "I assure you, you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots."
There's a serious danger that if states with lax registration laws don't tighten them up, the loss of confidence in our voting system could destroy the democratic process.
Sadly, we are already going down that road, yet it's so easy to fix. Simply require voters to show the same kind of identification to election officials that they show to loan officials when they buy a car or to supermarket clerks when they cash a check. Not to do this is to invite vote fraud and corruption.
It's a mystery to us why there are so many security gaps and performance defects in the various voting systems across the country. Banks can make ATM machines work flawlessly, but government can't produce a safe voting machine?
A few weeks ago several states were notified that two of the supposedly safest vote counting systems -- touchscreen and optical scanners -- had developed serious software problems. If they can't be trusted, what can?
There's really no excuse for this. If we can send men to the moon, we ought to be able to develop a system that can accurately count votes. Heading toward Election Day 2012, a top priority for Congress and the states must be to restore integrity to the voter registration process and efficiency in the voting system.
Photo ID, adding more voting precincts to reduce long lines and developing vote-counting measures that can be trusted is still the best way to go -- just as it has been since 2000.
