Vote early, vote often

Friday, Jan. 20, 2006

As long as there have been elections there have been people trying to ‘‘fix” them.

In old-time Baltimore, partisan gangs beat-up or kidnapped rival voters to keep them from the polls. Ballot boxes were both stuffed and stolen; and the political bosses openly purchased votes for cash or whiskey.

Common ‘‘voting irregularities” included ‘‘walking around” money freely dispensed to ‘‘runners” who could turn out family and friends with the machine’s ballot in hand, ‘‘late boxes,” stuffed ballot boxes held until all the other votes were counted and the needed victory margin was known; and the amazing ability of deceased persons to vote from the grave.

Today, politicians are still tampering with elections by changing state election laws to favor one party over another. This category includes the Democrats’ recent attempt to move the 2006 primary election from September to June with the sole given reason that a longer general election campaign increases Democrats’ chances of winning in November. This hijacking failed not because of idealism but because too many statehouse incumbents thought the new date threatened their own re-elections.

But election tampering never rests. Lost in the recent furor over the Wal-Mart bill were three elections bills that the legislature passed last year and the governor vetoed. As with the Wal-Mart bill, Democratic super-majorities overrode the vetoes last week. Too bad, because if lawmakers read the report of the Governor’s Commission on the Administration of Elections, headed by former U.S. prosecutor George Beall, they might understand the chaos these bills unleash.

Early voting

Let’s open the polls several days early as a convenience to voters. Looks good on paper; 14 other states do it and it’s sure to boost voter participation, right?

Think again. Like most ‘‘feel good” bills, Maryland’s new ‘‘early voting” law creates more problems than it addresses. For this year’s elections, each local board will pick three early voting sites per county, open eight hours a day for the five days before Election Day.

Sounds easy until you consider the logistics of assembling 2 million people to elect their government at borrowed places during a 12-hour period in a fair, trustworthy method conducted by volunteers and part-timers.

Fine, where are the extra election judges, poll watchers and challengers going to come from? And at what sites? (forget borrowing schools and churches for five days). Also, get ready for the lawsuits over which three sites are picked in each county (inaccessible to blacks, poor people, etc.). And who’s going to pay for all this mess? Most counties didn’t budget for it.

Even worse, during early voting each day’s ballots don’t get counted, they get stored until Election Day. Do you think this opens the door to voting fraud just a little? Who’s going to guard the early votes for five days, local politicians?

Although Democrats believe early voting will generate greater Democratic turnouts, every study shows turnouts remain constant.

Meanwhile, local elections officials are supposed to administer this nightmare. The pros, the Maryland State Board of Elections Officials and the Maryland Association of Elections Officials, approve early voting but oppose the bill because they can’t implement for 2006. Even Common Cause shares this view, which the Democratic lawmakers ignored.

Absentee voting

Until this week, you couldn’t get a Maryland absentee ballot unless you had an excuse (out of town, illness, death in family) AND unless you signed a written request.

Under our new ‘‘no excuse, no request” law these meager safeguards disappear. Maryland’s voter identification requirement is already lax (you can vote at the polls without any ID) so just imagine the mischief when political ‘‘agents” show up at nursing homes and homeless centers with bulk absentee ballots.

Once again, local elections officials opposed the bill and went ignored, as did the Maryland League of Women Voters who testified, ‘‘The dangers inherent in absentee voting are privacy, accuracy, security, intimidation ... and fraud.”

Provisional ballots

Wait, it gets worse. Until this week you could only vote at your neighborhood polling place. Now, thanks to the Democratic majority, you can vote anywhere in Maryland using your new provisional ballot. And, because of the state’s limited elections technology, ‘‘a provisional ballot could be cast successfully in multiple counties and not detected until long after the votes were counted and the election certified,” the Beall Commission found.

Someday, Maryland will have real time electronic polling books permitting officials at any polling place to instantly track who’s registered and who’s already voted in the current election. But until then, Maryland’s new provisional ballot law recklessly opens the door to fraud.

Why? Why have the statehouse Democrats pushed through such dangerous elections laws opposed by non-partisan elections officials, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters?

The act of voting is how ‘‘we the people” grant government its authority to govern. When elections lose their legitimacy, so does government. In a democracy, nothing is more important than the integrity of its elections — not even defeating the Republicans in November.