Voting machines. The Indianapolis Star has a front page story about voting machines used in Indiana elections, headlined "Voting machines' reliability debated: Questions rage over touch-screen systems." A companion story, titled "State's voting system has its sore spots," points to three other weak points in the Indiana voting system: poll worker issues; inaccurate voting rolls; and absentee voting fraud.
The Indiana Law Blog has had numerous postings about electronic voting and vote fraud; you may use the search box to locate them.
The NYT front page today also featured a story on touch-screen voting, titled "Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National." Related Times stories today, available in the sidebar, are headlined "The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy" and "Missing Voting Machines Snarl Election."
Electoral college. The Colorado electoral college ballot initiative is featured today in the Times, in a story headlined "Coloradans to Consider Splitting Electoral College Votes." Some quotes:
Colorado voters have delivered the state for the Republican presidential candidate in every election in the last half century, except when Bill Clinton won by a whisker in 1992 and Lyndon B. Johnson swamped Barry Goldwater in 1964.Other recent ILB entries on the electoral college may be found here and here.But if a ballot initiative called Amendment 36 is approved by the voters here on Election Day, the facade of unanimity will shatter, and in one stroke a new small state's worth of definitively Democratic Electoral College votes will be created in the heart of what has been the solidly Republican West.
Amendment 36 would make Colorado the first state to distribute its electoral votes on the basis of its popular vote. The change would take effect immediately with this year's election, which means that President Bush and Senator John Kerry would share Colorado's nine electoral votes, but neither would get all. * * *
If Amendment 36 passed it would essentially create a ministate within a state. For example, if a majority of voters go for Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry could still collect four electoral votes. That is the total electoral allotment for New Hampshire.
"It could set a dramatic and amazing precedent," said James G. Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland. "When one state pursues a particular new initiative or new idea, other states tend to take a look." * * *
Supporters landed the measure on the ballot after collecting 134,000 signatures with help from a foundation in Phoenix that wants the Electoral College system scrapped nationwide. The amendment's backers say that voters are ready to try something new and that simply mentioning the 2000 election was enough to induce many people to sign. * * *
Although two states, Nebraska and Maine, allow each Congressional district's voters to determine that district's electoral vote, neither state has ever split its votes as a result. Colorado's system would guarantee a split every time.
Opponents of the measure say that a proportional distribution would make Colorado even less relevant than it is now in presidential elections, since the difference between winning and losing might just be one electoral vote. Supporters say the state would matter as never before.
The backdrop for the issue is the ever-increasing polarization of the nation, a fact that many political experts say is exaggerated by the Electoral College, with its winner-take-all mechanism. The candidates this year are not competing at all in a majority of states - some large, like California; others small, like Idaho - because they think they cannot win there or they cannot lose there.
Redistricting. "Drawing the political lines: How gerrymandering affects election results" is the focus of a dual-author opinion piece today in the Star's opinion section. Too complex to summarize, but certainly worth a read, "Craig Ladwig of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation and Rob Richie and Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy examine this lack of competition [that is the result of gerrymandering] and what can be done about it." The answer appears to be "not much." This has also been the "answer" from earlier ILB entries, including this one from May 23, 2004.
Posted by Marcia Oddi at September 19, 2004 02:03 PM