Word: voter
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Every day, it seems, there are more lawsuits presenting intriguing new facts. In Seminole County, Democrats have filed a lawsuit claiming that Republicans illegally completed portions of some voters' absentee-ballot applications; some 4,700 votes are at stake. And the N.A.A.C.P. held hearings in Miami Nov. 11 in which black voters gave disturbing testimony about being intimidated from voting in a variety of ways--from being required to provide IDs that were not required of white voters to being denied legally required translators. The Justice Department is investigating the claims. Republicans, meanwhile, are charging Democrats with targeting more than...
Depending on who was speaking last week, Florida's secretary of state is either a hero or a villain of the Sunshine State's postelection madness--ready to bring an end to our long national nightmare or to abrogate the God-given rights of the American voter. Florida's senate minority leader, Buddy Dyer, a Democrat, says she "had an extraordinary chance to go down in history in a more honorable way and didn't take it." Not surprisingly, the other side disagrees. "She has had no choice but to follow the law," says former state Republican Party chairman...
Both G.O.P. and Democratic state legislators say that Harris, as secretary of state, has shown little interest in electoral-reform bills--despite taking office after one of the state's worst cases of voter fraud, one that saw a Miami mayoral race overturned in court. Her post requires especially detailed contact with local apparatchiks. But county election supervisors, the people who could have saved Florida from a week of embarrassment, grouse that she rarely attends their state meetings...
...this for the ongoing struggle over Florida--it has forced people to notice that U.S. voting methods are not exactly state of the art. About 2% of all ballots in presidential elections, for example, are marked for more than one candidate or for none, mostly as a consequence of voter confusion. This year that would have been more than 2 million votes. The chaos, as we've learned in the past two weeks, extends to the counting process as well. In New Mexico, a 500-vote discrepancy was traced to a vote counter's sloppy handwriting: the number...
...punch cards introduce their own problems. Holes that are incompletely punctured by the voter can baffle the counting machines. Those problems led Wisconsin to ban the cards in the 1990s, just as New Hampshire had done in 1986. In 1988, a report by the National Bureau of Standards, a federal agency, recommended that punch cards be abandoned everywhere. William Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, recalls a test run in which just five cards were put through a counting machine three times--and produced three different counts. "It was not the most comforting feeling when...