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Magazine| Nov 03, 2008
US: elections
Can America Count?
There's a serious fear that vote 'purges' could mar the US elections
ASHISH KUMAR SEN
Is the US president elected directly?
In a sense, no. He's elected by a group of electors who constitute the electoral college. On Election Day, voters in each state, by casting votes for a president, actually choose the quota of electors who will vote for the voters' preferred candidate. The electors cast their votes on Dec 15, a mere formality. Usually, electors are nominated by their parties.
How many electors does a state elect?
The number of electors each of the 50 states chooses equals its strength in the House of Representatives plus its number of senators (each state has two senators). Though the District of Columbia doesn't have representation in Congress, it has three electors. With the electoral college having 538 members, a candidate needs 270 votes to become prez.
Can a candidate poll more votes and yet lose?
This has happened thrice, most recently in 2000. The reason is that except Nebraska and Maine, the other states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the state's popular vote. In 2000, George W. Bush won some states with slender margins and lost a few heavily. Thus, he had more electors but lagged behind in the national popular vote.
What's a swing state? And why are they so important?
It's a state which switches its allegiance from one party to another, like Florida and New Mexico. Most other states have a history of consistently supporting one party. A new swing state can emerge when, in contrast to its history of supporting, say, Republicans, they back Democrats. Example: Virginia. Candidates concentrate most on these battleground states.
***
Election surveys often prove as fickle as the weather, stoking hopes and dashing these in rapid succession. One day a candidate trails his opponent, the next he’s surging past, riding unforeseen developments. The American presidential elections of 2008, running up to its November 4 climax, was billed as a neck-and-neck race between Democrat candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain till early September. Not any longer. The irony is that it’s meltdown which has finally helped Obama surpass McCain in all opinion polls, with leads ranging from a mere one per cent (AP/GFK) to an unassailable 11 per cent (ABC News/Washington Post). The national average puts Obama ahead of his rival by 5.7 per cent. A gap wide enough to convince many in the United States that their country is on the verge of choosing its first black president. The hope among the liberals, at least, is that he’ll lead them from the darkness of the Bush administration to a new Democratic dawn.
Obama and team are still cautious though, aware that opinion polls have gone awry in the past. For one, there’s the ‘Bradley effect’, an eponymous term coined to explain the inability of election surveys to capture the often decisive role of ethnicity in elections. In ’82, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American Democrat, lost the election for governor of California even though a string of opinion polls had shown him comfortably ahead. The obvious conclusion: a large number of people, contrary to what they had told pollsters, couldn’t overcome their prejudice to vote for a black man.
Now, should Obama overcome the Bradley effect, he faces the daunting task of neutralising election rigging. In the 2004 presidential election, three million votes cast were never counted. Tens of thousands found their names had been deliberately scrubbed out from the voter list.Voting machines malfunctioned, at times ‘deliberately’, to eat up votes, and thousands of contest ballots were tossed in the bin. New Age America has devised ingenious methods of rigging that people in India may still be innocent of.
Rigging, in many ways, has been an inextricable part of America’s polling history—founding father George Washington spent 40 pounds on booze for his neighbours to win an election in 1785. Ballot stuffing, purchase of votes, intimidation etc were the favoured tactics earlier. In the cyber age, rigging has become more sophisticated, hi-tech and difficult to track.
It took the infamous battle for Florida between George W. Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election to turn the spotlight on rigging. In that election, Florida used the punch card ballot, in which a stylus is used to punch holes indicating the voter’s choice, leading to protracted arguments over the now infamous "hanging chads"—the piece of paper left attached due to an incomplete punch-through. The Florida administration, then under Governor Jeb Bush, brother of George, refused to count these votes. Bush won the state—and its 27 electors—by just 537 votes.
Even more startling were the findings of journalist Greg Palast, whose breathtaking investigations showed that some 90,000 names had been purged from Florida’s voter list. Under Florida laws, felons (those convicted of violent crimes) are barred from voting for life. But officials scrubbed out even those convicted of felony in other states but had their voting rights instituted after serving their sentence—and subsequently shifted to Florida. Not only this, even those accused of misdemeanours (like drunken driving) were added to the "delete list", as were many innocents whose names were similar to the felons. Palast found the voter list showed felons with conviction dates of 2007!
Stung, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) set up a Voting Rights Institute in 2001 to spread voter rights awareness, and advocacy groups launched vigorous campaigns to register voters. But they have often found their zeal thwarted. For instance, the League of Women Voters abandoned a voter registration drive in Florida after hefty fines ($5,000 per violation, later reduced to $1,000 by a court order) were imposed for minor errors in voter forms and for failing to meet deadlines to turn these in. Its president, Mary G. Wilson, says, "Intimidation tactics such as those used recently in an effort to discredit the third party voter registration efforts of ACORN have no place in the American political process."
McCain and the Republicans have accused ACORN of submitting fraudulent voter forms, some of which were signed by Mickey Mouse and such like. Strange, since US laws require voter registration groups to submit all duly filled up forms to the authorities. ACORN, in fact, flagged questionable forms for official scrutiny to ensure that these names didn’t enter the voter list. It was these that the Republicans seized to raise an outcry on fraud, hoping to discourage new voter registrations.
Nevertheless, an estimated 9 million new voters have registered for the November 4 election. The Obama campaign says Democratic registrations have outpaced Republican ones 4-to-1. But the voter list purges have even affected this. Facilitating the purges is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, which allows rejection of first-time registrants if their personal information does not correspond to details in government databases.Four states, including the swing states of Iowa and Florida, require a perfect match. Even a spelling error by a clerk could spell doom. Thus, even "Joe the Plumber", whom McCain referred to repeatedly in his last debate with Obama, risks disenfranchisement. Joe’s name, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, has been misspelt in the voter list as Worzelbacher.
Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice says HAVA could lead to widespread "disenfranchisement-by-typo". She cites the example of Ohio, currently battling over 2,00,000 new voters whose registration information did not perfectly match with state databases. Colorado recently scrubbed out one in five people from its voter database. Virginia has been scaring away students seeking voter registration locally saying it could lose them scholarships from their home states. And Florida, says Weiser, has an "obstacle course" of barriers to voter registration and even voting.
Weiser’s colleague at the Brennan Centre, Myrna Perez, is the author of Voter Purges, a report on the scrubbing out of genuine voters from the rolls. In Mississippi earlier this year, she found a local election official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer a week before the presidential primary. (The deadline for purges is 90 days before any election, so last-minute changes mean it’s irreversible.) "Purges can happen anywhere at any time," Perez told Outlook, adding, "Voters in all the states could be victims". Perez further says 39 states and Washington DC reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls between 2004-06. Incidentally, periodic purges are necessary to strike out those who have died, shifted residence, or those who have recently had their voting rights denied.
Perez, however, says emphatically, "Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation." For instance, a Brennan Center report found that in 2004, Florida planned to remove 48,000 "suspected felons" from its voter rolls. Many of those identified were in fact eligible to vote. A majority of them were black, though many think it is problematic to correlate race and purges because of the secrecy involved. Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Greg Palast recently wrote in Rolling Stone, "In state after state, Republican operatives—the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics—are wielding new federal legislations to systematically disenfranchise Democrats."
Should a person escape the purge, he may still be unable to vote. Under US laws, a person has to produce his ID card for registration. Once registered, he’s given a voter card which he’s to bring to the polling booth. But some states demand that the voter bring his driving licence as well on polling day. This goes against those who don’t own cars and the elderly. A voter is also often challenged through the system of "caging"—political parties post registered letters to the voter, and if returned, his credentials are deemed suspect—and challenged.
Voters can of course file "provisional ballots" if their registration is disputed, and HAVA allows elections officials to later review these. Palast and Kennedy, however, claim "in 2004, a third of all provisional ballots—as many as 1 million votes—were simply thrown away at the discretion of officials". Weiser believes provisional ballots are an "effective failsafe" for a minority of voters who would otherwise be turned away, but accepts a significant number never get counted.
In some areas, minority communities have had to contend with voter intimidation too.Deepa Iyer, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), told Outlook that South Asian voters have been illegally asked to show ID at polling places. In Hamtramck, Michigan, where there is a large Bangladeshi population, voters were asked to take an oath that they were legal citizens. "People with a name like yours or mine have to overcome the assumption that we are not really citizens," Iyer says.
In sum, the voter registration systems in the US are indeed fraught with error and vulnerable to manipulation. Weiser admits this: "Few states have procedures in place to ensure that voters who were wrongfully purged, challenged, kept off the voter rolls, or otherwise deterred can remedy the problem and cast a ballot that will count on Election Day." Is it then unreasonable for the Obama team to sound a note of caution about the results of November 4?
Magazine| Nov 03, 2008
US: elections
Can America Count?
There's a serious fear that vote 'purges' could mar the US elections
ASHISH KUMAR SEN
Is the US president elected directly?
In a sense, no. He's elected by a group of electors who constitute the electoral college. On Election Day, voters in each state, by casting votes for a president, actually choose the quota of electors who will vote for the voters' preferred candidate. The electors cast their votes on Dec 15, a mere formality. Usually, electors are nominated by their parties.
How many electors does a state elect?
The number of electors each of the 50 states chooses equals its strength in the House of Representatives plus its number of senators (each state has two senators). Though the District of Columbia doesn't have representation in Congress, it has three electors. With the electoral college having 538 members, a candidate needs 270 votes to become prez.
Can a candidate poll more votes and yet lose?
This has happened thrice, most recently in 2000. The reason is that except Nebraska and Maine, the other states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the state's popular vote. In 2000, George W. Bush won some states with slender margins and lost a few heavily. Thus, he had more electors but lagged behind in the national popular vote.
What's a swing state? And why are they so important?
It's a state which switches its allegiance from one party to another, like Florida and New Mexico. Most other states have a history of consistently supporting one party. A new swing state can emerge when, in contrast to its history of supporting, say, Republicans, they back Democrats. Example: Virginia. Candidates concentrate most on these battleground states.
***
Election surveys often prove as fickle as the weather, stoking hopes and dashing these in rapid succession. One day a candidate trails his opponent, the next he’s surging past, riding unforeseen developments. The American presidential elections of 2008, running up to its November 4 climax, was billed as a neck-and-neck race between Democrat candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain till early September. Not any longer. The irony is that it’s meltdown which has finally helped Obama surpass McCain in all opinion polls, with leads ranging from a mere one per cent (AP/GFK) to an unassailable 11 per cent (ABC News/Washington Post). The national average puts Obama ahead of his rival by 5.7 per cent. A gap wide enough to convince many in the United States that their country is on the verge of choosing its first black president. The hope among the liberals, at least, is that he’ll lead them from the darkness of the Bush administration to a new Democratic dawn.
Obama and team are still cautious though, aware that opinion polls have gone awry in the past. For one, there’s the ‘Bradley effect’, an eponymous term coined to explain the inability of election surveys to capture the often decisive role of ethnicity in elections. In ’82, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American Democrat, lost the election for governor of California even though a string of opinion polls had shown him comfortably ahead. The obvious conclusion: a large number of people, contrary to what they had told pollsters, couldn’t overcome their prejudice to vote for a black man.
Now, should Obama overcome the Bradley effect, he faces the daunting task of neutralising election rigging. In the 2004 presidential election, three million votes cast were never counted. Tens of thousands found their names had been deliberately scrubbed out from the voter list.Voting machines malfunctioned, at times ‘deliberately’, to eat up votes, and thousands of contest ballots were tossed in the bin. New Age America has devised ingenious methods of rigging that people in India may still be innocent of.
Rigging, in many ways, has been an inextricable part of America’s polling history—founding father George Washington spent 40 pounds on booze for his neighbours to win an election in 1785. Ballot stuffing, purchase of votes, intimidation etc were the favoured tactics earlier. In the cyber age, rigging has become more sophisticated, hi-tech and difficult to track.
It took the infamous battle for Florida between George W. Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election to turn the spotlight on rigging. In that election, Florida used the punch card ballot, in which a stylus is used to punch holes indicating the voter’s choice, leading to protracted arguments over the now infamous "hanging chads"—the piece of paper left attached due to an incomplete punch-through. The Florida administration, then under Governor Jeb Bush, brother of George, refused to count these votes. Bush won the state—and its 27 electors—by just 537 votes.
Even more startling were the findings of journalist Greg Palast, whose breathtaking investigations showed that some 90,000 names had been purged from Florida’s voter list. Under Florida laws, felons (those convicted of violent crimes) are barred from voting for life. But officials scrubbed out even those convicted of felony in other states but had their voting rights instituted after serving their sentence—and subsequently shifted to Florida. Not only this, even those accused of misdemeanours (like drunken driving) were added to the "delete list", as were many innocents whose names were similar to the felons. Palast found the voter list showed felons with conviction dates of 2007!
Stung, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) set up a Voting Rights Institute in 2001 to spread voter rights awareness, and advocacy groups launched vigorous campaigns to register voters. But they have often found their zeal thwarted. For instance, the League of Women Voters abandoned a voter registration drive in Florida after hefty fines ($5,000 per violation, later reduced to $1,000 by a court order) were imposed for minor errors in voter forms and for failing to meet deadlines to turn these in. Its president, Mary G. Wilson, says, "Intimidation tactics such as those used recently in an effort to discredit the third party voter registration efforts of ACORN have no place in the American political process."
McCain and the Republicans have accused ACORN of submitting fraudulent voter forms, some of which were signed by Mickey Mouse and such like. Strange, since US laws require voter registration groups to submit all duly filled up forms to the authorities. ACORN, in fact, flagged questionable forms for official scrutiny to ensure that these names didn’t enter the voter list. It was these that the Republicans seized to raise an outcry on fraud, hoping to discourage new voter registrations.
Nevertheless, an estimated 9 million new voters have registered for the November 4 election. The Obama campaign says Democratic registrations have outpaced Republican ones 4-to-1. But the voter list purges have even affected this. Facilitating the purges is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, which allows rejection of first-time registrants if their personal information does not correspond to details in government databases.Four states, including the swing states of Iowa and Florida, require a perfect match. Even a spelling error by a clerk could spell doom. Thus, even "Joe the Plumber", whom McCain referred to repeatedly in his last debate with Obama, risks disenfranchisement. Joe’s name, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, has been misspelt in the voter list as Worzelbacher.
Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice says HAVA could lead to widespread "disenfranchisement-by-typo". She cites the example of Ohio, currently battling over 2,00,000 new voters whose registration information did not perfectly match with state databases. Colorado recently scrubbed out one in five people from its voter database. Virginia has been scaring away students seeking voter registration locally saying it could lose them scholarships from their home states. And Florida, says Weiser, has an "obstacle course" of barriers to voter registration and even voting.
Weiser’s colleague at the Brennan Centre, Myrna Perez, is the author of Voter Purges, a report on the scrubbing out of genuine voters from the rolls. In Mississippi earlier this year, she found a local election official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer a week before the presidential primary. (The deadline for purges is 90 days before any election, so last-minute changes mean it’s irreversible.) "Purges can happen anywhere at any time," Perez told Outlook, adding, "Voters in all the states could be victims". Perez further says 39 states and Washington DC reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls between 2004-06. Incidentally, periodic purges are necessary to strike out those who have died, shifted residence, or those who have recently had their voting rights denied.
Perez, however, says emphatically, "Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation." For instance, a Brennan Center report found that in 2004, Florida planned to remove 48,000 "suspected felons" from its voter rolls. Many of those identified were in fact eligible to vote. A majority of them were black, though many think it is problematic to correlate race and purges because of the secrecy involved. Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Greg Palast recently wrote in Rolling Stone, "In state after state, Republican operatives—the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics—are wielding new federal legislations to systematically disenfranchise Democrats."
Should a person escape the purge, he may still be unable to vote. Under US laws, a person has to produce his ID card for registration. Once registered, he’s given a voter card which he’s to bring to the polling booth. But some states demand that the voter bring his driving licence as well on polling day. This goes against those who don’t own cars and the elderly. A voter is also often challenged through the system of "caging"—political parties post registered letters to the voter, and if returned, his credentials are deemed suspect—and challenged.
Voters can of course file "provisional ballots" if their registration is disputed, and HAVA allows elections officials to later review these. Palast and Kennedy, however, claim "in 2004, a third of all provisional ballots—as many as 1 million votes—were simply thrown away at the discretion of officials". Weiser believes provisional ballots are an "effective failsafe" for a minority of voters who would otherwise be turned away, but accepts a significant number never get counted.
In some areas, minority communities have had to contend with voter intimidation too.Deepa Iyer, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), told Outlook that South Asian voters have been illegally asked to show ID at polling places. In Hamtramck, Michigan, where there is a large Bangladeshi population, voters were asked to take an oath that they were legal citizens. "People with a name like yours or mine have to overcome the assumption that we are not really citizens," Iyer says.
In sum, the voter registration systems in the US are indeed fraught with error and vulnerable to manipulation. Weiser admits this: "Few states have procedures in place to ensure that voters who were wrongfully purged, challenged, kept off the voter rolls, or otherwise deterred can remedy the problem and cast a ballot that will count on Election Day." Is it then unreasonable for the Obama team to sound a note of caution about the results of November 4?
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