U.S. Elections in Crisis

You know, we're over seven years beyond the infamous 2000 election, which not only exposed horrible problems with our election systems, but will also forever bear the cast of illegitimacy. You would think that such a disaster would have prompted immediate reform. And yet, here we are, almost 8 years later, and we're still seeing stories like this (update: more thorough coverage here).

Now, I'm not commenting on the merits of the story -- that's not the point. The problem is that we still see stories like this on a regular basis, and we're long past the point of it becoming tiresome. We are supposed to be the greatest nation on earth and yet we appear to be incapable of holding an election and then having confidence in our returns. Any race without a huge margin of error is suspect, because we have no reason to believe in the accuracy of the results.

I put this up there with Bush's War and the health care crisis, in terms of the urgency with which we need to address the problem. I'm not sure this country can handle another presidential election that has to be decided by the Supreme Court, and our poor Constitution has been so horribly abused in recent years that I don't think it's up to dealing with a crisis.

Work is being done to reform elections in the United States on a number of fronts. Reform Elections is a project of the The Century Foundation; the Commission on Federal Election Reform is an ongoing project that was initially co-chaired by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker; and electionline.org is keeping track of election reform news. Attention is also being given to the problem on a state-by-state basis. I don't know if any of the work being done will bring us dramatic changes in time for this year's elections. I am hopeful that we'll see some improvements.