How to protect your right to vote when they try to stop you

Protecting the Right to Vote (NY Times editorial)

No one expects Florida elections to go smoothly, but this year the state got off to an alarming start. Voters reported that after selecting Democratic candidates on electronic voting machines, the review screens registered that they had chosen Republicans. A spokeswoman for the Broward County supervisor of elections told The Miami Herald that the machines often fall out of sync under heavy use, but that they can be fixed when voters complain.

That snapshot of Florida’s early voting is confirmation — as if any were needed — that a great deal can go wrong tomorrow, much of it eminently preventable. Six years after the 2000 election meltdown, voting machines are still unreliable, and there are an array of other obstacles to voters who want their votes to count.

Voting is a right and a responsibility, but it is also, unfortunately, a challenge. As people go to the polls tomorrow, they should be on the lookout for:

ELECTRONIC VOTING GLITCHES In addition to misrecording votes, A.T.M.-style voting machines can provide misleading or incomplete information. (On some Virginia machines, the last name of the Democratic Senate candidate, Jim Webb, will not appear on the summary page.) Voters should check and double-check their votes, and the voter-verified paper trail if one is available, and report anything that does not look right. If the machines do not work, they should insist on casting a paper ballot.

VOTE SUPPRESSION In California, 14,000 Hispanic voters received letters last month falsely informing them that immigrants could be sent to jail for voting. Every election there are attempts to trick voters, especially members of minorities and the poor. Voters should insist on their right to cast a ballot.

VOTER ID CONFUSION Election officials often demand identification even when it is not legally required, or misstate the requirements. Georgia this year sent out letters saying that a photo ID is required even though the courts ruled otherwise. Voters can check the law on their local Board of Elections Web site. If there is a dispute, they should insist at the very least on casting a provisional ballot.

VOTING ROLL PURGES Election officials sometimes wrongly remove voters’ names from the rolls. That happened, notoriously, in Florida in 2000, and this year Kentucky lost a lawsuit over a faulty purge. Even people whose names are missing from the rolls may be eligible voters. Voters who have trouble casting a ballot should appeal to the person running the polling place. If that fails, they should call a voters’ hot line — like 1-866-OUR-VOTE, run by the National Campaign for Fair Elections — or a political party or campaign. Federal law says a voter whose eligibility is in doubt has the right to cast a provisional ballot, whose validity will be decided later. But regular ballots are more likely to be counted.

Unfortunately, many of the things that go wrong tomorrow may be invisible to the average voter. Machines that appear to work properly may be throwing out or altering votes. Without a voter-verified paper trail and an effective vote audit, this can go undetected. Provisional ballots may be wrongly rejected after the polls close. Some states, shamefully, have laws saying that if a provisional ballot is cast in the correct polling place but at the wrong table, it will not count.

These flaws point to the need to continue to push a reluctant Congress, as well as state legislatures, for meaningful election reform. Tomorrow, though, voters should just focus on getting their votes counted within our current, deeply flawed system.