Early and often: how to avoid butterfly ballots, long lines, and pregnant chads

Washington Monthly, Oct-Nov, 2005 by Phil Keisling

Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America

By Andrew Gumbel Nation Books: $15.95

Every Election Day brings a few constants: long lines, last-minute campaigning, and complaints by both political parties that the other is trying to steal the race. The nature of these accusations breaks down along party lines. Republicans whisper that Democrats are plotting to manufacture wins through fraud; meanwhile, Democrats warn that Republicans are intimidating voters and using other nefarious means to suppress votes. The charges have only heated up since 2000, when the contested presidential election gave the country an illuminating and disturbing peek behind the curtain of our electoral system.

With the average seventh-grader at least familiar with the term "pregnant chads," election reform is no longer the province of secretaries of state or the occasional academic conference. The issues of how voters are qualified, and how ballots are cast and counted, have received far more public scrutiny in the past half-decade than they did during the previous half-century. And yet the lack of one uniform election system--each state, county, and locality has different rules about how it conducts elections--means that there are literally thousands of voting systems to understand, making it even more difficult to evaluate accusations about failures to protect against voting fraud and suppression.

Into this maze of rules and procedures comes Andrew Gumbel's Steal This Vote, a comprehensive and readable exploration of the American election process. Gumbel, a U.S.-based correspondent for the Independent of London, has taken the time to visit the county courthouses and elections offices where ballots are actually collected and counted, and he supplements his observations with historical tales of electoral scandal. These include Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Senate election, in which the infamous Ballot Box 13 contained the names of 200 voters, all of whom appeared to have voted after the polls closed, in precise alphabetical order. Joining that ignoble page in American history is the Hayes-Tilden presidential election of 1876--Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote but ultimately triumphed over Samuel Tilden in the Electoral College by a margin of 185 to 184. (The late William Rehnquist, whose Supreme Court opinion installed George W. Bush as president, published a book in 2004 that vigorously praised and defended both the process and the outcome of the 1876 election--a decidedly minority view.)

Gumbel is a breezy, confident writer who takes his subject seriously. So it is frustrating to arrive at the end of his book--after he has documented the various flaws in our electoral system and the many possibilities for fraud and vote suppression--only to have him throw up his hands in despair. To hear Gumbel tell it, the United States is doomed to resort to a sort of arms race, a system of mutual deterrence between the two parties, with dueling lawyers and other election observers dispatched to every precinct around the country to prevent wrongdoing. It's a bleak conclusion. Fortunately for the rest of us, it's also an unnecessary one.

When most of us hear the word "steal" in the context of an election, we think of ballot-box-stuffing or the machinations of Tammany Hall figures. In Steal This Vote, Gumbel defines "stealing" as a broad, malleable concept that even extends to strategies aimed at influencing voter beliefs and behavior. There are negative campaign tactics geared toward changing voters' minds about a candidate, underhanded efforts to prevent voting by leafleting poor neighborhoods with "informational fliers" that tell residents where to go to vote ... on Wednesday, and logistical obstacles, such as poorly functioning equipment or under-equipped polling facilities that lead to untenably long lines in some urban locations.

Perhaps the most notorious voter suppression tactic is perfectly legal: Six states, including Florida, bar exfelons who have served their sentences from voting for the rest of their lives. In many cases--including the 2000 election debacle--this injustice is compounded by bureaucratic incompetence; the "can't vote" file for Florida in 2000 contained a staggering number of errors and inaccurately banned names.

In fact, while Gumbel complains equally about voter fraud and suppression, a close inspection of his many anecdotes reveals few consequential and proven examples of fraud since the 1960 presidential election. (Gumbel notes that Nixon was convinced he'd lost Illinois due to Mayor Daley's shenanigans on Kennedy's behalf, but he decided to forego a recount in part because of his own partisans' grubby hands.) After that election, the now-infamous "Votomatic" punch-card system swept the country. Though it will soon be consigned to the scrap heap of electoral history, the Votomatic really was a huge step forward, replacing the far more easily manipulated paper ballots. Gumbel's wistful, even affectionate, portrayal of the Votomatic's rise and demise is one of the book's most interesting chapters.