Time to Get the Voting Train on the Right Track

Are we headed for another train wreck election with new disputes over every vote being counted? If what happened last week in Maryland is any indication then that is just what the future holds us.

If the recent primary elections in Baltimore and Montgomery County, Maryland are a preview of what will happen in a few weeks then a train wreck of enormous consequence is exactly where we are headed.

My partner, Greg and I went to our polling place early. There was no line. In fact other than the elections officials we were the only ones in our polling place. Imagine our surprise to find the poll workers fumbling with equipment and grumbling that they needed more training in order to properly operate our touch screen voting equipment and the accompanying electronic voter check-in system.

Once our poll workers located the voter key cards and found our names on the list we were able to vote with few problems. However, as several poll workers fiddled with strips of papers seemingly trying to determine which strip belonged to which machine, I left feeling less than confident that in fact the vote that I cast was indeed counted.

We were the fortunate ones.

Reports from other polling places in the city and surrounding counties told of long lines, systems crashes, late opening polls all of which resulted in an untold number of voters being unable to cast their vote.  The state election administrator is demanding to know what went wrong after learning that election workers did not receive access cards to operate the Diebold voting machines for the county's 238 precincts on time, forcing as many as 12,000 voters to use provisional paper ballots that quickly ran out. Some were simply told to come back later and vote.

Ohio-based Diebold was responsible for training poll workers to use the touch-screen voting machines. Both city election workers and Diebold representatives ran the training sessions, which covered election law, the voting machines and the new electronic voter check-in system. While there's a great deal of finger pointing going on, or not; the way forward is not clear. Of course partisan bickering makes the process of putting the election train back on the right track more challenging than it needs to be.

With the fallout from the 2000 elections and all manner of state and federal election reform you would think we would have our act together by now, but no such luck.

It would be bad enough if this was a problem only in Maryland. However, problems with electronic voting have cropped up in other places and concerns over the security of electronic voting systems have been posed by many who understand the vulnerabilities of the systems currently in use. There are four main manufacturers of electronic voting systems, none of which have demonstrated to be more secure than the others. Diebold is the most well-known.

In my predominantly African American inner city working class neighborhood getting people tuned in so that they can turn out to vote has always been challenging. Like many other black and low-income voters too many of my neighbors don't believe that their vote really counts or will be counted at all. This latest debacle does nothing to add confidence in our voting systems.

To make matters worse on Wednesday the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve the "Federal Election Integrity Act." The bill imposes new, substantial, and unnecessary barriers to vote in federal elections by establishing a single form of identification-- one that proves citizenship -- as an ironclad requirement to vote. According to Theodore M. Shaw, Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP LDF "the bill effectively transforms the vote from a right to a privilege by elevating the privileged over those citizens who will disproportionately become ensnared in this voting trap including: African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, the elderly, disabled, and poor.

So why should lesbian and gay Americans care?

Well first and foremost because we are Americans and the right to vote is precious and shouldn't be undermined by politics, profit motives and incompetence. As black LGBT Americans we are likely to live in the cities, counties, neighborhoods and precincts that receive the least attention though we may need the most.

Moreover I would add to our transgender brothers and sisters to Mr. Shaw's list of who would be harmed if the deceptively named "Federal Election Integrity Act" became law.  My colleague Mara Keisling, the Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality has cited any number of instances where new identification requirements, adopted in the name of national security, have served to undermine the rights, dignity and privacy of transgender men and women. This latest move would undoubtedly disenfranchise a number of fellow Americans.

The stakes are high. Both this election and the 2008 Presidential elections are likely to determine the political landscape for decades to come. From marriage equality to immigration, from access to health care for people living with AIDS to safe schools for young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth the quality of life for our constituents is on the line.

Now is not the time to allow partisan forces to install additional barriers to the polls. This will not put the train back on track. We must insist that prudence and reason prevail in the Senate.

I don't believe it is  too late to fix what's broken. But it won't get fixed unless we the people demand that we bring some of the current national zeal for spreading democracy around the world home to Maryland, Ohio, Florida and all the other states in this grand union.

H. Alexander Robinson is the executive director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition. Robinson has done extensive research on elections systems and voting rights and was the lead author of Defending the Vote the NAACP Voter Empowerment 2001-2002 Election Reform Report