Block the vote

Politics | Partisan politics and faulty technology thwart election reform | Mark Bergin

Whatever happened to slips of paper and a top hat?

From hanging chads to long lines to malfunctioning electronic machines, the nightmare of federal, state, and local elections grows increasingly complex. Accounts of problems in this past November's election seemed endless—thousands of uncounted votes in Wisconsin, a computer glitch leading to millions of negative votes in Ohio, hundreds of felons voting in Nevada, dead people voting in Washington state, and a host of significant other problems in 39 of 50 states.

Nine months later, are such hitches fixed?

Yes and no, according to Caltech political science professor Michael Alvarez, co-director of the Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology Project. "States in certain areas are being required to make changes," he told WORLD. "But a lot of it is a process problem and a people problem, so a lot of these issues are always going to be with us." Federal requirements for computerized statewide voter files aim to solve Election-Day confusion by placing laptops at every polling location. And a new federal law requiring electronic machines to produce paper trails is expected to pass. But whether thousands of districts across the nation can successfully implement such changes remains in question. "If not solvable, a lot of the problems can at least be mitigated," Mr. Alvarez said.