Election Reform: Is there a great divide?

[Bill Bored]

It occurs to me that there are those of us who, because of rampant disenfranchisement, dirty tricks and disabilities, believe that their access to the polls is the most important election reform issue. They say things like, "What difference does it make how accurate the count is if we can't get to the polls in the first place?"

With all due respect, my answer to this question is that the integrity of the count still makes a HUGE difference -- whether we can all get to the polls or not!

Others argue that it makes no difference if everyone gets to the polls unless all our votes are counted as cast.

Of course, those like myself, who are preoccupied with getting the count right, must also acknowledge the necessity to protect the franchise by guaranteeing voting rights and facilitating the exercise thereof by every eligible American.

But just as we must all fight for vote-casting rights, we must all fight for vote-counting rights too.

Ideally, we should not even find ourselves debating whether to support this bill or that, based on which of these rights any particular bill happens to protect or violate. Of course, a comprehensive approach is best, but the issues are so complicated and require so much legal and technical expertise to resolve, that IMHO, the ideal mix is unlikely to be present in any one particular bill. At least not yet.

At the heart of the problem is the disconnect between lawyers and technologists. Maybe a good patent lawyer could help! Computer security professionals definitely would. Minority and disabled computer security professionals and patent lawyers would probably be ideal, as they would have equal concerns for both ballot access AND counting integrity. Not just concerns, but actual knowledge of how to protect both of these crucial rights.

This is what appears to be missing from all the bills currently on the table, although I haven't been able to read Boxer and Clinton's bill yet.

Add to this the subtleties of language. The use of the term "record" as opposed to "ballot" or "verifiable" as opposed to "verified." It's enough to drive some of us to advocate all paper ballots, all the time!

Then we have the constitutional amenders. At least at this point, these bills are separate from the others. But I suspect this is only because they go through a different legislative process than regular federal law, rather than any attempt to actually clarify any of the issues at hand.

This is kind of a rant I'm on, but I really think to get this right, we do have to acknowledge the multidisciplinary nature of the problem and the solutions. I'm not sure this is happening in any of the legislation proposed thus far, and my gut feeling is that to gain full support, bills addressing voting rights may ultimately have to be separate from those addressing counting rights. Unfortunately, it's just a right-brain/left-brain sort of thing.

I hope I will be proven wrong at some point in the process where it will still be possible to have grassroots participation.

[anaxarchos]

1. Your perception of a divide is accurate.

It is also deeper than a tactical divide over which bill to support. It is one of strategic objectives. In the immortal words of Country Joe McDonald, "it's 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for?"...