GAO report on Election 2004: Huge...yawn
By Smintheus
If you're worried about the fairness of elections in the U.S., and fed up with the national failure to investigate the issue seriously, prepare yourself for another shock. Today the Government Accountability Office finally delivered its assessment of the 2004 election. This involved surveys of local and state election officials, as well as visits to dozens of counties around the country.
Other problems that you might have thought the GAO could usefully take a look at, such as the lack of faith voters have in the integrity of new voting technologies; fraud committed by partisans; the manipulation of election regulations; the withholding of voting machines from minority precincts...these kinds of things appear to be missing from the report. |
Though I haven't read all 519 pages yet, the report appears to be a colossal floperoo. A dud. An opportunity missed. It appears to ignore, circumvent, or tiptoe around all the most awkward issues. Instead of getting to the heart of why so many Americans are deeply troubled about the state of elections, it serves up page after page of pabulum. If you did not already know about these controversies, you would hardly be able to surmise their existence from this muted and elliptical report.
It's almost as if somebody at the GAO decided that it just wouldn't do to ask whether our elections are in crisis. And the GAO's recommendations? It has none. Chiz.
The game is given away by the report's title: Elections: The Nation's Evolving Election System as Reflected in the November 2004 General Election. "Evolving" is a very polite circumlocution for "Going to Hell in a Handbasket".
If you have no stomach for five-hundred-page reports, the Abstract will give you some sense of the fecklessness of the whole project:
"As the elections technology environment evolves, voting system performance management, security, and testing will continue to be important to ensuring the integrity of the overall elections process. GAO found that states made changes — either as a result of HAVA or on their own — to address some of the challenges identified in the November 2000 election. GAO also found that some challenges continued — such as problems receiving voter registration applications from motor vehicle agencies, addressing voter error issues with absentee voting, recruiting and training a sufficient number of poll workers, and continuing to ensure accurate vote counting. At the same time, new challenges arose in the November 2004 election, such as fraudulent, incomplete, or inaccurate applications received through voter registration drives; larger than expected early voter turnout, resulting in long lines; and counting large numbers of absentee ballots and determining the eligibility of provisional voters in time to meet final vote certification deadlines."
[NOTE: commenter Psyche asks a question worth considering . . . what has changed at the GAO since it published the comparatively hard-hitting report in September 2005 entitled "ELECTIONS: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed"?]
