By Christopher Swope

As I waited my turn to enter a rickety New York City voting machine Tuesday, my mind drifted away from the tight mayoral race between Michael Bloomberg and Mark Green and flashed with thoughts of butterfly ballots, bleary-eyed vote-counters and hanging chads. With all the recent events, I thought, it’s hard to believe it was only a year ago that the nation was briefly obsessed with how elections are conducted and scored.

My daydream quickly turned more real than I could have expected. I was second-in-line when a pair of NYPD cops marched into the lobby of Norman Thomas High School on 33rd Street. They headed straight to the voting machine in front of me, had a word with an election monitor and then slipped under the curtain to investigate something. A minute later, one emerged with some bad news for the monitor. “It’s all wrong,” the cop said. “You’ve got to switch to paper ballots immediately.”

The problem, I later found out, was with the layout of the ballot. The section with the mayoral candidates was fine, but below that, some names of candidates on the ballot didn’t line up with the offices they were running for. Another voting machine at the same high school apparently had the same problem. Sound familiar? This was midtown Manhattan, but suddenly it felt like West Palm Beach, circa November 2000.

The election monitor seemed reluctant to go to paper ballots and talked the cop into an alternative solution. The monitor would explain the discrepancy to each voter, starting with me and the man in front of me. He waved us both toward him and before I had a chance to absorb what was going on, I was crammed into a tiny voting booth with two strangers and a cop looking over my shoulder. “See, you mark these names on the ballot here,” the monitor said. “But the machine behind, it’s registering something different.”

I understood what the monitor was saying, but the ballot was so wrecked that his directions made no sense to me. Thankfully, I had come to the polls with the intention of voting only for mayor, so this mess meant little to me. But others, I’m sure, were equally confused, to say nothing of the countless people who had already cast unintended votes for candidates in the same way that thousands of Palm Beach County Democrats last year voted for arch-conservative Pat Buchanan.

I’m not sure if what I witnessed was fraud or mere sloppiness, but either way it was a symbol of how little progress we’ve made on election reform in the past year. Congress, which should be setting minimum standards for voting equipment and offering to pick up much of the tab, couldn’t get an election bill out of committee. State legislatures introduced nearly 1,800 reform bills, but according to the Constitution Project at Georgetown University, only three states — Florida, Georgia and Maryland — passed significant legislation aimed at preventing the sort of electoral quagmire that made our democracy the butt of jokes around the world.

The problems with elections wouldn’t be so maddening if they weren’t so easy to solve. Inaccurate, out-of-date voting equipment such as punch cards and lever-style voting machines should be replaced by computerized systems that are easier to use and force voters to confirm their choices. In an age of technology, there are no excuses for the Florida fiasco last year, or the apparent problems Tuesday in New York City’s 36th election district.

It’s an unfortunate truism of American government that politicians react to, rather than prevent, catastrophe. This is why it took the terrible events of September 11 to inspire our leaders to fight terrorism and defend our security at home. November 7, 2000, was the September 11 of American elections. If election reform doesn’t happen now, it won’t ever — and the lawmakers who miss this chance can live with their shame.

Christopher Swope is a Governing staff writer.

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Complete index of previous columns

 
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