August 19, 2004
Never again....
One of the ugliest, nastiest bits of our recent political history was the attacks on the ballots of our overseas military personnel during the 2000 election.
By the time the Herron memo made headlines, the Dems were challenging more than 1,500 absentee ballots (which grew to more than 2,400) mostly from soldiers overseas. This was almost three times the number of votes — 537 — that proved to be Bush's margin of victory. Had the Herron scam succeeded, and protests against those votes been sustained, Al Gore would be in the White House today.This is from a fine piece by Jeff Babbin... and a very pleasing one, because we learn that our Secretary of Defense is not going to let it happen again.This problem is not unique to Florida, and it didn't just happen in 2000. According to the results of a survey by the Reserve Officers' Association, ROA estimates that the disenfranchisement rate among military personnel who try to vote in Florida, Missouri, and South Carolina is 40-45 percent.
...For once, at the insistence of Don Rumsfeld, the folks in Fort Fumble are acting, not reacting, to solve this problem before it repeats itself.How I admire that guy. Posted by John Weidner at August 19, 2004 05:50 PM | TrackBackOn March 17, Rumsfeld sent a memo to the Joint Chiefs and Combatant Commanders telling them how the services will make sure all military members — and their family members — who are overseas, or stationed here but are away from home, get the chance to vote, and vote so that no Mark Herrons can disenfranchise them.
At the heart of Rumsfeld's plan is putting some teeth into the old Voting Assistance Officer idea. On top of it is a strategy — now underway — to use both the internet and the Postal Service effectively to help servicemen and their families request absentee ballots and get them returned in time to be counted...
The voting trouble is not that votes don't get counted, but that there's no decision from the election. If the election is close, it doesn't matter which way it goes because about half the population wants each way; what matters is that a decision is quick and definite and final.
Even deliberate noncounting, so long as it doesn't represent a significant fraction of the votes cast, doesn't affect things much, just moving the decision point from say 50% to 49.9%. Who cares.
In a huge election, you will never get the miscount rate down to anywhere near the margin of victory, so the problem is eternal, unless the focus goes off of every-vote-counts and towards a fair and fast decision, recognizing that the actual percentage when it's close simply doesn't actually matter, so long as it's a definite decision.
Punch cards have an error rate of something like 5%, and we've lived with it for years. What hasn't happened before is that somebody decided to reverse a decision by pretending that every-vote-must-be-counted instead, when the decision didn't go his way. That gives him two chances at a decision, where he only is entitled to one. And once challenges are allowed by custom (cf. Nixon vs JKF), there's no end to it, and no decision ever is forthcoming, and the electoral system collapses entirely.
