Two Years Out: Fix Our Voting Problems!

In 2000 it was evident that this nation had serious ballot casting and counting problems. So, it is now 2006 and what have we done about it?

Well, we passed the Help America Vote Act and we are nationally just as f**ked as up as ever.

Here is a piece from the NYT from around the country:

Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube

By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Correction Appended

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.

And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube.

RedState.com, the conservative journal, heralded a “massive meltdown in Pennsylvania” early in the day, citing “widespread reports of an electoral nightmare shaping up in Pennsylvania with certain types of electronic voting machines.”

Erick Erickson, RedState’s chief blogger, also included a report of poll watcher intimidation in Philadelphia, along with a link to a video on YouTube that appeared to show a certified poll observer (armed with a video camera) being blocked from a polling station.www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-HK_VT81Pk&e

Brad Friedman, perhaps the most dogged critic of electronic voting machine technology in the blogosphere, said he saw his site traffic spike at left-leaning Bradblog.com, as reports of machine malfunctions began pouring in from around the country.

“Folks understand by now that I’ll get these stories out so that they’ll get confirmed,” Mr. Friedman said.

That the blog now has a firm place in the choreography of national events — and in elections perhaps more so than in any other cultural exercise — is a boon to the democratic process, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

“In a lot of ways they’re helping to set the agenda for the mainstream media in fast-moving events like this,” Mr. Zittrain said. “They just need to be able to produce enough that’s credible quickly to give a lead.”

Alluding to some of the voter intimidation reports that unfolded on Election Day, he added, “There’s also a real difference between hearing about a call that tells someone they’re not allowed to vote and actually hearing the call as if you are receiving it.”

Some bloggers placed what were said to be digital recordings of such calls online for the world to hear.

Elsewhere online, voting machine problems also filled many posts on Talking Points Memo, a liberal site that seemed to take the initiative in tracking complaints, malfunctions and alleged malfeasance by Republicans.

Among the litany of issues cited at Talking Points: computer problems that caused long lines in Denver; polling stations that stayed open later in Indiana after voting problems and delays; votes for Claire C. McCaskill in the Missouri Senate race that somehow registered for her opponent, Jim Talent; complaints that crashed an Ohio county phone system.

It was impossible to gauge the veracity of every report cited. Some blogs linked to reports in local or national news media. Others copied e-mail messages or cited phone calls with local polling officials, while still others merely created open threads for readers to contribute their personal accounts of voting problems.

Not every site thought chaos was at hand, however. Ed Morrissey of the conservative Captain’s Quarters blog said traffic to his site yesterday was about two or three times normal. But Mr. Morrissey added that though he had heard some talk of voting woes, he thought on the whole they were “pretty minor” and would not have any effect on the overall outcome.

One of the biggest controversies of the last national election cycle — the discrepancy between the exit polls that showed John Kerry with a lead and the final results — continued to animate discussions on many liberal blogs. With the 2004 discrepancy in mind, major news organizations were embargoed yesterday from releasing poll data for most of the day, and had generally agreed to refrain from releasing detailed numbers until most polls had closed.

The big question mark, however, was whether the numbers would leak in the blogs, and by 6 p.m. that had already begun to happen. Chris Bowers of MyDD.com, a liberal blog, posted “unconfirmed Senate numbers” at 5:47 p.m. — though he added a caveat.

“Double super caution: these numbers are both unconfirmed, and they are exit polls,” Mr. Bowers wrote. “I am going to keep looking into this.”

Even so, many of the biggest names in political blogging — including John Aravosis of Americablog, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Mr. Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters — had been corralled by a member of the mainstream news media, CNN, at Tryst, a trendy Washington coffeehouse, last night.

Constantine Stavropoulos, the owner of the cafe, said he had closed its doors for the “blog party,” which the network periodically broadcast and streamed online. He said he expected the bloggers — an attractive bunch, he said — to linger long after the votes were in.

“Bloggers look a lot better than I thought they would,” Mr. Stavropoulos said.

Michael McElroy contributed reporting.

Correction: Nov. 10, 2006

An article on Wednesday about accounts on blogs of voting machine malfunctions and other polling problems misspelled the name of the political blog of John Aravosis. It is Americablog, not Americblog.

Damn those bloggers and netroots!

That being the obligatory comment, it seems to me that we have two years before the election in 2008 to get our national voting system together.

The question is: do we have the political will?