corrente

Hey, who knew the "Help America Vote" act would be just as Orwellian as the "Healthy Forests" initiative? Well, it has been:

[A new election rule, the "provisional ballot"] is intended to prevent one of the major problems experienced in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, when scores of voters, especially minority voters, were turned away at the polls over registration questions that could not be resolved quickly.

Provisional voting, the centerpiece of the Help America Vote Act that Congress passed in 2002, will be put into effect across the nation in the coming presidential election in an effort to ensure that more votes are counted.

But election officials say the experience of hundreds across the country during primary season show how failures in carrying out the measure could end up disenfranchising voters instead.

All but a handful of states have passed legislation creating some form of provisional balloting. Most states adopted the new rules to make a deadline to get federal election money this year.

An examination of those rules, however, shows there is no uniformity in how they are applied. Some states, for example, allow provisional ballots to be counted even if they are filed in the wrong precinct, but at least 16 states, including Illinois, throw them out.

And few states have worked out the details of how to train workers to carry out provisional balloting and other voting changes, setting up the potential for a protracted ballot-by-ballot fight in any election that is close.

In the primary in Chicago, one in 90 ballots was provisionally cast. The majority of the 93 percent that were thrown out were disqualified because of technical errors caused by election workers; these included more than 1,200 ballots filed in the wrong precinct. Some 2,400 were discounted because affidavits were incompletely or incorrectly filled out. Only 416 provisional votes were ultimately counted.

In the primary, provisional ballot problems were more likely to disenfranchise minority voters in Chicago than white voters, exactly the problem in Florida four years ago that provisional voting was intended to address. In wards that are 80 percent or more minority members, the rate of disqualified ballots was double that of wards that are 80 percent white.
(via NY Times)

Well. Boiling it down: The Help America Vote act threw billions of dollars to Republican-donating companies whose electronic voting machines leave no audit trail and whose software is at best, buggy, and at worse enables elections to be stolen. Meanwhile, Democratic voters are no better off than before.

Of course, you can't blame the Republicans. Florida 2000 worked just fine for them. So why shouldn't they seek to replicate that success, nationwide, in 2004? One, two, many Floridas!

Um, can anyone think of a reason why we should regard another Republican administration as legitimate, if the popular vote in election 2004 is as close as election 2000 was?