The Political Voices of Women

My thanks to (our first) guest blogger Faye Anderson, from Anderson@Large, for contributing this post. Thank you Faye.

A year from now, Americans will go to the polls to elect the next president of the United States. While Democrats hope to ride a wave of voter discontent to hegemonic control of the White House and Congress for the first time since 1994, the Democratic presidential nominee should hold off measuring the drapes in the Oval Office.

The 2008 election outcome will turn on voter turnout. With an evenly divided electorate, every vote will count. And therein lies the rub.

The specter of the 2000 election debacle, and John Kerry and John Edwards’ broken promise “that in this election, every vote would count and every vote would be counted” will undermine voter mobilization efforts in 2008. African American voters will be particularly disillusioned given Kerry conceded before all the ballots were counted in Ohio. And without a high black voter turnout in Ohio, Florida and other battleground states, Democrats don’t stand a snowball’s chance of winning.

Republican operatives will make political hay out of the stories of black voters who waited in lines up to five hours long for a presidential candidate who conceded before their votes were counted. Kerry’s flip-flop on the importance of counting every vote gives Republicans an effective message to demobilize Democratic base voters: Remember Ohio.

At the same time, voters remember “Florida,” which has become a metaphor for voter disenfranchisement, voting irregularities and unreliable voting machines.

In 2000, the American public met Chad. In 2006, Chip took center stage in Sarasota County, where paperless voting machines lost more than 18,000 votes in the election to fill the congressional seat vacated by former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The election was decided by 386 votes.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has since tossed out the state’s electronic voting machines. Last month, the General Accountability Office released a preliminary report of what happened in Sarasota County. The GAO reported it could not conclusively eliminate the paperless voting machines as the cause of the 18,000 undervotes.

While the GAO gave DREs a little more time, the American people lack confidence e-voting will ever be ready for prime time. As Time magazine reports:

After the initial excitement, it didn’t take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all.

The high black voter turnout in the 2000 election exposed the underbelly of Florida’s electoral infrastructure. Seven years later, “Florida” still matters. Indeed, the Pew Research Center found there is a partisan and racial gap in voters’ confidence their vote will be accurately counted.

While 79 percent of Republicans have confidence their vote will be counted, only 45 percent of Democrats are sure. The percentage of black voters who express little or no confidence their vote will be counted has doubled since 2004, from 15 percent to 29 percent.

It doesn’t take a computer scientist to know there is a correlation between voters’ confidence in the integrity of the electoral process and voter turnout. If Democrats fail to address voters’ distrust in the machinery of our democracy, they will do so at their own peril.

Faye M. Anderson wrote and produced “Counting on Democracy,” a documentary about the 2000 election debacle that aired on PBS. Faye is a member of the Election Verification Network, a coalition of computer scientists, voting rights experts and activists committed to ensuring that every vote is recorded and counted accurately. She can be reached at andersonatlarge@gmail.com.