David Sarasohn: 'In a country where your vote is supposed to count, you
should be worried about someone stealing your vote'

As the U.S. marks its 230th birthday, the "consent of the governed" is
threatened by lax enforcement, irregularities and outright fraud

David Sarasohn, The Oregonian

Early on in Tuesday's readings of the Declaration of Independence -- a
little bit after "When in the course of human events," and just before the
grill is ready for the hot dogs -- comes what Thomas Jefferson might have
called the punch line:

Governments, he explained, "derive their just power from the consent of the
governed."

Two hundred thirty years later, everything government does -- from fighting
wars, to protecting mollusks, to delivering mail -- is based on that
consent.

But in the last two presidential elections, we're not sure the governed
actually consented.

The voice of the people was distorted by a blast of static.

Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University issued a
report after 18 months concluding that one person, with knowledge and access
to voting machine software, could change the result of an election. "It's
not a question of 'if,' " said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, R-Va., "it's a
question of 'when.' "

If it hasn't already happened.

Last month in Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., charged at considerable
length that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, where
a John Kerry victory would have produced a much taller Inauguration Day.

Kennedy's conclusion is at least debatable. But his evidence argues that if
the world's most powerful government is based on the consent of the
governed, it would be worth some more effort to make sure they're
consenting.

Gathering material largely already published, the article reported that Ohio
election officials obstructed registration efforts; failed to process
registration forms; improperly purged voters from the registration roll;
distributed voting machines in ways that produced hours-long waits in
inner-city precincts; changed the precinct boundaries and then rejected
voters appearing at the wrong precincts; failed to follow federal law
concerning provisional ballots; and allowed intimidation of ex-convicts
whose right to vote had been restored.

Aside from that, the 2004 election in Ohio was a model expression of the
public will.

Professor Spencer Overton of George Washington University law school, whose
book "Stealing Democracy" was published this summer, says Kennedy points out
major problems with the ways we elect people.

Still, cautions Overton, the size of Kerry's defeat -- 118,000 votes --
makes it hard to know whether the impact of all these abuses changed the
outcome. Now, Florida in 2000 -- which Bush won by 537 votes after the state
improperly purged thousands of African American voters -- is another issue,
and a more painful one. 120 recommendations

But stealing an election might not take all that trouble.

The Brennan Center found that the three most widely used new electronic
voting systems have major problems with security and reliability, and
they're not being checked closely enough. "With electronic voting systems,"
warned Lawrence D. Norden, the center's associate counsel, "there are
certain attacks that can reach enough voting machines . . . that you could
affect the outcome of a statewide election."

Aside from the companies -- who argue it hasn't happened yet -- few seem to
deny the possibility. Even Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who originally thought
Democrats just wanted to "re-fight the 2000 election," concluded that the
security problems were "inexcusable." A bill from Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., to
enact many of the report's 120 recommendations -- largely closer auditing
and comparing the outcomes with mandatory paper trails -- now has 192
co-sponsors.

Still, problems persist. Idea of picture IDs crops up

Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas redistricting plan -- unnervingly
authorizing any level of political gerrymandering, as incumbent re-election
rates hover, like a D.C. July day, in the high 90s -- while finding a Voting
Rights Act violation in part of the map. But the entire Voting Rights Act,
passed 40 years ago to protect access to the polls, now teeters in Congress,
where a group of Southern Republicans are blocking what had been a
bipartisan agreement.

Besides cutting way back on federal oversight, the objectors' goal is to end
bilingual voting materials -- although, Overton notes, 70 percent of voters
who use them were born in the United States. They also would require picture
IDs for voting, and Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., introduced
a bill in May to do just that.

Georgia passed such a bill last year, including a state photo ID for voters
without driver's licenses -- at a cost of $20. A federal court threw it out
as violating the constitutional amendment banning a poll tax.

Still, a federal photo ID voting requirement would not only limit voting by
minorities and other Americans less likely to have a driver's license, it
might endanger Oregon's own solution to many voting problems -- the mail
ballot.

"If I was in Oregon," says Overton, "I would be really nervous about this
photo ID idea."

There are things we need to do now, before the voice of the people turns
into just another unreliable exit poll.

As both Overton and the experts from the Brennan Center stress, we need to
keep a much closer oversight on the system, with frequent surprise audits of
both the private companies who manufacture voting machines and the
politicians who run the voting systems. We need to closely monitor local
governments to follow federal law -- with a renewed Voting Rights Act and a
reinvigorated Justice Department. We need to make sure local voting systems
have enough resources and machines to avoid a four-hour-wait test for
voting -- even if it costs some more money.

Currently -- even after Florida and Ohio -- the United States does not
invest heavily in its election system, and spending varies considerably. In
2004, Wyoming spent $2.15 per voter, while California spent $3.99 -- and
Canada laid out $9.51.

That bought more than just more ballots in French. From a popular voice

Freedom, politicians intone solemnly, trying to look as if they'd just
thought of it, isn't free. Neither is democracy, although there are
questions about just how much of it our current leaders want to buy.

Kennedy quotes Tom Paine, the pamphleteer of the Revolution, declaring that
voting "is the right upon which all other rights depend." Currently, it's a
right threatened by manipulation, technology, eroding legal protections and
a penny-pinching attitude toward the elections that decide the spending of
trillions.

At the core of the Fourth of July -- from Jefferson roughing out a few notes
for an intercolonial memo to the politician-packed parades of this
Tuesday -- is the idea that all of government comes out of a popular voice,
that life and death decisions can be legitimate only after counting noses as
precisely as possible.

At this point in American history, on this July Fourth, people who believe
that need to be setting off their own fireworks.

David Sarasohn, The Oregonian's associate editor, can be reached at
davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com.