Democracy in a black box must earn public's trust

06/06/2003
BY BILL BAUMBACH

Most people in this country and in Collin County do not vote. In fact less than one-fourth of those living in Collin County voted in the November 2000 general election.

When I ask my friends and co-workers why they don't vote, the most common answer is, "It doesn't make any difference; my vote doesn't matter!" Obviously, this country suffers from voters'crises of confidence in our electoral system.

Our government should be in the business of encouraging confidence in elections, in making certain that every election is professionally run, is fair and appears to be fair. Collin County, unfortunately, does not have a perfect record on that front.

Last month, the residents of McKinney were told that they had a new mayor, elected by a slim majority. Several days later, after a recount requested by her opponent, the elections office admitted that it had made a mistake. Suddenly, McKinney had a different new mayor, this time elected by a more substantial majority.

I worked in the polls that election day. Our first job when turning in the ballots was to be certain that the number of voters equaled the number of ballots. Why didn't the elections office do the same?

In 2002 election and again in the 2003 McKinney election, voter rolls wrongly put people in districts they did not live in. Candidates for the McKinney school board and the McKinney City Council report that some of their constituents were denied the opportunity to vote because they supposedly did not live in the district.

In one notable case, a candidate for the school board was not allowed to vote for himself. He was told he did not live in his district! In 2000, many precincts in Allen received ballots that did not have the bond issues on them. As a poll watcher during early voting in 2000, I witnessed a voter being told by the election judge that she should just forget about voting this year. "Just reregister and you can vote next year."

Because in Collin County, if you believe the voter roll is wrong, you will be shown a long list of criminal penalties and told that your name will be given to the district attorney if you want to avail yourself of your right to vote by challenge affidavit.

I served as an alternate election judge on Election Day in 2000. In our precinct, we turned away almost two out of three voters. They were in the wrong polling place. Other precincts reported similar numbers. We had some residents leave totally disgusted; they were at their third polling place, and still were wrong. How many times can voters be turned away before they believe their votes are not welcome?

The elections office didn't have enough phone lines or staff, so we could not call it for the first half of the day. The result was confusion, frustration and a lot of voters who simply gave up.

Yes, redistricting caused many precinct boundaries to move, and voters do not take the time to look up their polling place in the newspaper, but it is also true that polling places seem to move to a different location every election and that polling places are consolidated or moved at the last minute. Can we not find a better, easier way to help our citizens?

These are systemic problems that discourage residents from voting, and now, thanks to Texas' interpretation of the "Helping America Vote Act," we will be asking our voters to trust the system even more. For in 2004, Collin County will be using new touch-screen electronic voting machines.

Disregarding the statements of both major parties, the Collin County Commissioner's Court approved a contract with Diebold Elections Systems for these new "black box" voting machines. The Collin County Republican Party chairman said the machines were the least-qualified system reviewed; the Democratic Party sent a resolution to the commissioners urging them not to approve the contract without proper paper-audit trails.

Although their manufacturers claim their machines to be error-free, how many of us have bought computers or software that was perfect? Can we trust the corporation and its programmers? We can only hope so, since all the program code used in the machines is not subject to independent review.

We can only hope that future elections will not suffer from the errors of the past. We can only hope that our commissioners, our political parties and our citizens take seriously their responsibilities to ensure a fair and free election.

We can only hope that our friends will believe their vote matters and will be counted.

Bill Baumbach is a resident of Wylie and one of six Voices of Collin County columnists and can be reached at bill@baumbach.org. A different Voices columnist will appear every Friday.