NYT OpEd: When the Umpires Take Sides

[dw]

Editorial published March 29, 2004 in The New York Times

When Katherine Harris had to decide which candidate won Florida in 2000, many people were disturbed to learn she was both the state's top elections official and co-chairwoman of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign. This year, that kind of unhealthy injection of partisanship into the administration of a presidential election could happen again.

Ms. Harris's successor is staying out of partisan politics this year, but other secretaries of state are diving right in. In Missouri, as important a swing state as Florida, the secretary of state has a top position in the Missouri Bush-Cheney campaign. In Michigan, another battleground state, the secretary of state has signed on as co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney campaign, and has been supporting an openly Republican voter registration drive.

When international observers monitor voting in new democracies, a key factor they look for is nonpartisan election administration. (A guidebook monitors use instructs that this can be done by the use of either "mainly professional" or "politically balanced" administrators.) This advice is rarely followed here at home. Decisions about voting machines and voter eligibility, and about who has won a close election, are often in the hands of partisan officials. The private companies that are rapidly moving into the elections field have political ties as well. To remove the appearance, and perhaps the reality, of bias, this culture of partisanship in election operations should be dismantled.

...snip

Private companies are playing a large, and growing, role in election administration. This trend has the potential to "professionalize" the system, but unfortunately, most of these companies have hurt their own credibility by getting involved in partisan politics. The chief executive of Diebold, one of the leading electronic voting-machine manufacturers, made headlines when he wrote a fund-raising letter saying he was committed to seeing President Bush re-elected. Other leading companies have, more quietly, abandoned their own neutrality. Accenture, which put together a voter database for Florida and is preparing one for Pennsylvania, is a generous donor to both parties, although it gives about twice as much money to Republicans as Democrats.

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[Manix]

1. ..this situation needs to be cleaned up.

[tom_paine]

2. There is only one way to clean up this kind of pervasive corruption

And it wouldn't make things any better, trust me.

It will be a long, slow, painful, cruel ride down to Hell for Imperial Amerika.

[cybildisobedience]

3. why is the NYT still tiptoeing around these issues?

Granted, at least they're writing about it now, and a few months ago, they were completely ignoring it or dismissing legitimate concerns as wild-eyed conspiracy theories.
But why are they gently suggesting things are quite kosher? Why can't they say that this stinks to high heavens, and these "officials" are nothing more than well-placed crooks who are lying in wait for their opportunity to pull off another heist?
What exactly, are they waiting for? When do the gloves come off?

[Name removed]

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