How the World's Greatest Democracy Sucks at Elections

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/north-dakota-senate-race-results-14328460

How the World's Greatest Democracy Sucks at Elections
By Charles P. Pierce
at 1:29PM


Jupiter Images

Come Tuesday, we undoubtedly are going to turn into The Land of a Thousand Finagles, so we should thank the folks at Technology Review for publishing what amounts to a Daily Racing Form to inform us as to which states are most vulnerable to technical glitches, both unplanned and, ahem, planned. We also have the undeniable fact that the country's major population centers are likely still to be a mess, Hurricane Sandy being the best argument in years for good old paper ballots. And, of course, there are other clusters of fk with which to be dealt.

Sasha Issenberg, famous hounder of frauds, has a piece today in which he explains, in great detail, why we might not know who won the Senate race in North Dakota until the Fourth of July. Gere would seem to be the basic problem:

North Dakota has the prospect of being a much more open-ended mess if lawyers for candidates Rick Berg and Heidi Heitkamp start challenging the eligibility of those who cast ballots: The state is the only one with no voter registration. Any North Dakotan who arrives at a polling place (or early-vote location) with an ID card showing him or her to be over 18 years old and a resident of the local precinct is handed a ballot approved by a judge of elections. Anyone who does not have ID, or one with a local address on it-or is challenged by an election monitor-can complete an affidavit ballot attesting to his or her eligibility. While the state retains a central file of who has participated in past elections, voters' IDs are not checked against it or any other external data source.

Excuse me, what?

It gets better.

Imagine Heitkamp v. Berg having all of the legal machinations of the epic eight-month Minnesota recount that eventually sent Al Franken to the Senate, laced with the partisan vote-fraud paranoias that have hovered over this election cycle. This time, however, it is Democrats who are imagining buses of ineligible voters streaming to polling places, particularly arriviste oil-field workers in the booming northwest corner of the state who could cast affidavit ballots even if they're not permanent North Dakota residents. "If you are challenged at the time, all you need to do is sign something saying you are a qualified elector," says one Democratic operative familiar with the party's plans in case of a post-election legal battle. "If we can prove that an affidavit ballot was inappropriately cast we have no recourse."

I'd quibble with the "partisan vote-fraud paranoias" bit, since only one party has proven itself paranoid about vote-fraud that demonstrably does not exist, and has framed partisan legislation in response, but it does seem that North Dakota has set itself up for the legal hooley of all time. And speaking of partisan vote-fraud paranoia, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted got himself a win in court yesterday. A three-judge federal appeals court panel made up entirely of people appointed by one President Bush or another issued a stay of a previous court order that had ordered Husted and Ohio to stop disenfranchising voters who voted in the wrong precinct because they were directed to the wrong precinct by polling workers. (Apparently, it is common in Ohio, particularly in "certain" neighborhoods, to use one polling place to service voters from several precincts. Wonderful.) Now, the three judges have ruled, if a poll worker directs you to the wrong precinct, and you vote, you are SOL, as Edmund Burke used to put it, and what could possibly go wrong with that system?

This conclusion absolves voters of all responsibility for voting in the correct precinct or correct polling place by assessing voter burden solely on the basis of the outcome-i.e., the state's ballot validity determination. While poll-worker error may contribute to the occurrence of wrong-place/wrong-precinct ballots, the burden on these voters certainly differs from the burden on right-place/wrong-precinct voters-and likely decreases-because the wrong-place/wrong-precinct voter took affirmative steps to arrive at the wrong polling location.

And thus are voters encouraged not to trust even the nice ladies who work the polling places. Not that Ohio is going to be crucial or controversial all on its own or anything. Our system doesn't need U.N. observers. It needs a damn exorcist.

[RevStPatrick]

1. We are not a Democracy. We are a Republic.

And that's part of the problem.
Each state gets to make up its own rules.
If the rules were uniform from state to state, we might not suck so bad.

[harrose]

2. #1 way we suck...

... we allow conservatives to vote.