Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are slowing their drive to revamp the nation's voting systems, aides said yesterday. Under pressure from state and local officials, as well as from lobbyists for the disabled, House leaders now advocate putting off the most sweeping changes until 2012, four years later than planned.Actually, this development is not surprising, since the framework for overhauling the election process hasn't even been agreed to yet. It's another example of Democrats promising the electorate something that they knew they couldn't accomplish. The NYT tries to spin this as Democrats being compassionate to the local governments and the disabled (huh?), but the Dems were never willing to deal with the real issues underlying election reform. If they had lost in 2006 they would be screaming about this now, but they won so they feel they can wait.
It's a question of the federal government vs. the local governments, really. Ostensibly, Congress should only be looking at reforming federal elections -- elections for president and members of the Senate and House.
But it doesn't make any sense to stop there -- as local elections accompany federal elections, you really can't have separate rules. The common sense approach to all of this, and ironically also the biggest hurdle, is creating a photo ID for eligible voters tied into the local voter roll database, then tying that into some sort of a national database. The same with the election machines. For some unknown reason the Left and privacy absolutists are overwhelmingly opposed to this admittedly difficult job, which always made any effective reform under a Democrat Congress doubtful.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 1)
1. After all they are DEMOCRATS... liars , cheats and tyrants...wait more of the same to follow....won't be long before they shut down all free speech...they already went after the watchdog group keeping an eye on the Unions....we told you so....
joem at 11:55PM on Jul 20th 2007
2. Actually, Election Reform for 2008 was opposed by three groups: 1. election officials who do not want their work subjected to independent scrutiny and do not want to have to replace inauditable voting equipment without paper ballot records with cheaper, more reliable optical scan paper ballots; and 2. a group of election "integrity" activists who put out a plethora of disinformation about the House bill HR811, including Brad Friedman, Rob Kall, Nancy Tobi, Rebecca Mercuri, and Mark Crispin Miller; and 3. opposed by two powerful disability rights lobbyists who don't seem to understand that independent audits of vote count accuracy cannot be conducted without voter verified paper ballots - and who seem to want to keep the expensive, inaccurate DREs rather than use ballot printers that are actually more friendly for the disabled.
You bring up a good point about the Republicans being more likely to vote for a bill that includes a voter ID card requirement, even though the academic research shows that voter fraud is not a problem except in a small area around Washington DC, whose citizens are disenfranchised in not being allowed to vote legally in federal elections.
Kathy Dopp at 3:32AM on Jul 21st 2007
3.
The Dems should push ahead and get this voting issue reformed and done with. Stop caving into special interest groups.
And the Repubs should stop whining about a voter ID. They participated in the bipartisan study that found that having ID basically made no difference in voter fraud. All it did was supress the vote of poor Americans who could not afford the ID, you know those people who usually vote Dem.
The House, the Senate and the Executive Branch, and Cheney's branch of government are all peopled by self serving, out of touch, elitists who have not a clue.
cdnbirch at 11:28PM on Jul 21st 2007