Just two weeks have passed since Election Day, and many states haven't even yet finalized their election results, so it's still too early for voting experts to describe precisely what went wrong, and how, on Nov. 2. But there are some general points that experts agree on, the most important one of which is that "the system was overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to use it," according to Doug Chapin, director of the election-reform Web site Electionline.org. "We saw this in the long lines, the broken machines, the shortages of printed materials," he says. In very significant ways, the system just fell short.
This wasn't a localized thing. It didn't happen only in swing states like Florida and Ohio. It occurred everywhere across the country. Voters in New York and California reported long lines at the polls. Chapin, who lives in northern Virginia, a state not highly contested in the presidential race, says that he got to his precinct at 5:30 a.m. on Election Day, and he was already the 15th person in line. By the time he'd finished voting, there were 200 people waiting. He'd never seen such a turnout before, he says.
Why did this happen? Why weren't elections officials better prepared to handle the number of voters, especially since pollsters had been reporting intense enthusiasm and excitement over this race and were forecasting a record turnout? Because officials don't have many good guidelines for what to expect and how to plan for what will happen on Election Day, Chapin says. Even worse, some officials don't even care about turnout; many jurisdictions have no laws calling on officials to draw up plans to accommodate higher numbers of voters, and in the jurisdictions that do have rules, the rules are often meaningless. "Some places might have laws that say that you need to have one machine for every 250 voters you expect at the polls," Chapin explains. "But we often don't know if that is based on an actual number -- we don't know if that one machine can actually handle 250 voters."
Indeed, for all the high-minded rhetoric you often hear from politicians regarding the importance of your vote, the American election system is essentially designed "to function well only with low turnout," Rodriguez-Taseff says. In the elections business, a low turnout is not a bad thing -- it's part of the plan. American elections work well only when some of us vote. "The system is intended to be limited," Rodriguez-Taseff says. "If you're an elections official you actually want fewer voters, because if you have fewer voters you need fewer resources. We created a system that has so many barriers to voting that the system functions best when few people vote. And when few people vote, the system functions beautifully."
The problem is more pronounced, Rodriguez-Taseff says, in jurisdictions that use electronic voting machines. "You have incredibly expensive technology, so you cannot possibly buy enough machines for everyone," she notes. This was exactly the problem Miami faced this year. Rodriguez-Taseff points out that her coalition knew at least a month before the election that there could be a shortage of machines at the polls this year. Registration in the county was up, and the local ballot was especially long, causing each machine to be tied up for a longer stretch by each voter. On Oct. 24, the Miami Herald reported these concerns. After monitoring voters at early voting locations, reporters at the paper saw that each machine could handle only about six voters per hour -- only 71 voters per machine on Election Day -- a rate that spelled extremely long wait times. But nothing could be done about the problem, Constance Kaplan, the county's election supervisor, told the paper. "I'm wracking my brain," she said. "I wish I could go out and buy more equipment to make it a better ratio." But of course, Kaplan lacked the time and the money to order more machines by Election Day.
Not all voters are affected equally by the system's flaws. When the American electoral system is overloaded, it's most often the people in low-income and minority neighborhoods who bear the greatest burden. You see this in the way counties allocate voting systems to different precincts. In many voting jurisdictions across the country, the number of machines passed out to each precinct is based on how that precinct voted in the past. This would seem to be a commonsense approach -- neighborhoods with historically high turnout should get more machines, you might think -- but Rodriguez-Taseff explains that the methods used to measure historical turnout are often biased. In Miami, for instance, the county doesn't differentiate between the different ways voters in certain precincts may have cast ballots. If a neighborhood has had a high rate of absentee votes, which is true of wealthier areas, the number of machines given to that neighborhood is not discounted to reflect the fact that many voters there won't be coming to the polls.
"How dumb can they be to allocate the machines without taking into account absentee and early voting?" Rodriguez-Taseff asks. She's right; it does seem pretty dumb. But it's also easy to see how such a thing can happen. People who've never run elections, or haven't done the hard work of reforming elections, often don't realize how daunting these once-every-two-year events are. As a matter of logistics, voting is enormously complex, and sometimes -- indeed, frequently -- stupid decisions slip into the system, and correcting these mistakes is the daily bane of the election reformists like Rodriguez-Taseff.
"I know there are places where such decisions are based on malice," she says -- where few voting machines are given to minority neighborhoods specifically to disenfranchise people in those areas. But in Miami, "this is, frankly, incompetence." The problem slipped into the system because people weren't thinking. Now it's up to reformers like those in Rodriguez-Taseff's group to persuade the county to fix it. The group is up to the task. Every Wednesday for two years, the Miami coalition has been meeting to work on ways to fix problems just like this one, Rodriguez-Taseff notes, adding, "We'll be here two years from now, even when the TV cameras have stopped coming to our meetings," doing the same work. And because fixing these problems is hard work, and because it needs to happen all over the country and not just in Miami, she says that it'd be great if folks elsewhere also directed their energies into reform efforts.
Unfortunately, in the past couple of weeks, while the Internet has been consumed by theories of a stolen election, the efforts of activists like Rodriguez-Taseff and of all the volunteers who manned the polls on Election Day have largely been overlooked. Focusing on the long-term reform of the system is not sexy, Rodriguez-Taseff concedes; it doesn't promise the kind of excitement you get from looking into ways that might overturn Nov. 2's results.
Next page: It could have been a lot worse