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Vote Fraud WhitehouseWash;
The Half-Baked Baker Carter Commission
By David Swanson
www.OpEdNews.com
Photo Gallery:
http://www.davidswanson.org/photos/bakercarter/index.htm
So, Jimmy Carter and James Baker are sitting at a table, and Carter
starts talking about the disastrous election of 2000 in Florida....
It sounds like the start of a joke. It was actually the start of
the first meeting of the Baker-Carter Commission on Federal Election
Reform in Washington, D.C., on April 18th. Baker didn't
do much bragging about his role in Florida. In fact, there was more
than one occasion during the meeting on which Baker notably kept
silent. But, more on that later.
http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/index.htm
The primary question in the minds of many people I spoke to in the
meeting and outside it was: "What the heck is James Baker doing on a
commission to reform elections?" Former President Carter said more
than once that Baker had been his first choice to co-chair the
commission and was his second favorite Republican (second to Gerald
Ford). Carter and Baker once worked together on monitoring
elections in Nicaragua. Baker said he was encouraged to participate
by President Bush and Republican party leaders.
Some background on the creation of this odd-couple commission can be
found on Brad Blog, which reports that a group called the American
Center for Voting Rights appeared out of nowhere on March 17th,
was the only voting rights organization to testify at a U.S. House
committee hearing on the 2004 election on March 21st, and
praised the Baker-Carter Commission on March 24th just 24
minutes after its creation was announced to the surprise of real
voting rights groups. ACVR, as Brad Blog reports, was created by
Jim Dyke, the Communications Director for the Republican National
Committee and Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, the lead National Counsel for
Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. The group's tax status is 501c3, which
requires that its activities be non-partisan, and its representative
never mentioned in congressional testimony its relationship with the
RNC and Bush/Cheney.
http://www.BradBlog.com/ACVR.htm
http://democrats.com/blogcall8
Those involved in voting rights issues are aware that, unlike
Republican-chaired hearings in Washington, hearings held in Ohio in
the months following last year's election included many points of
view and resulted in a 102-page report on election fraud in that
state. The driving force behind those hearings and the subsequent
January challenge to the Ohio results in Congress was Ranking
Democratic Member of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers.
http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/final_conyers_ohio_report_105.php
Hence the second question in many people's minds on Monday: "Why the
heck wasn't Congressman Conyers testifying at this meeting?" The
short answer is that the commission would not allow him to do so.
This letter that Conyers sent to Carter on April 11 should shed some
light on why.
http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/ltrtopotuscarter.pdf
In this letter, Conyers does two things that were not done by any
speakers on Monday. He questions the inclusion of Baker on the
commission, and he questions the validity of the official results in
the Bush-Kerry election.
That's right. An election reform commission has been created in the
wake of massive public outrage over an election, and following the
historic challenge in Congress of the Ohio results, and not a single
speaker at Monday's meeting raised the question of whether the
election system functioned adequately to conclude that Bush won the
2004 election.
Monday's meeting was not referred to as a public hearing, and the
public was not invited. The 21 commission members heard
presentations from 12 speakers on three panels, then met in private
for an hour, posed for a photo, and held a press conference at which
Carter and Baker took four questions from the press.
At the press conference, Carter predicted what the commission might
do in its report, planned for September, following a June 30th
meeting at the Baker Institute at Rice University. Carter and Baker
listed various things that the commission would not do, and a number
of area in which it would likely produce recommendations to
Congress, to the Democratic and Republican Party leaders, and to
state legislators and secretaries of state.
The most definite prediction, as well as the most encouraging, was
one Carter made a number of times. "We might very well," he said,
"recommend electronic voting systems with a paper trail." More than
once, Carter described what he has in mind for a paper trail. In
various countries where the Carter Center has monitored elections,
he said, people vote on an electronic machine, which prints out a
paper ballot, which the voter can check and then place in a ballot
box. Random checks can then verify an accurate electronic count by
comparing it to the paper count. "I have no disagreement," Baker
said of this proposal.
Paper ballots have been a top demand of numerous organizations
seeking to reform U.S. elections. At Monday's meeting this demand
was voiced by Prof. David Dill, Professor of Computer Science at
Stanford University and founder of VerifiedVoting.org. The
Secretary of State of Kansas, Ron Thornburgh, argued against paper
ballots, not because he claimed electronic machines could provide
reliability on their own – no one claimed that – but because some
new, as yet unimagined, technology might someday be able to do it,
and because the disabled prefer electronic machines.
Carter pointed out that the law could always be changed if
technology changed, and that audio could be added to the machines to
help the disabled. In fact, it seems entirely possible to make
machines and polling places far more friendly to the disabled while
producing a useful paper trail. Changes like adding wheelchair
accessibility, parking, and trained staff, and updating voter
databases with data from Medicaid offices don't conflict with
requiring a paper trail.
Last week, Progressive Democrats of America and a coalition of other
organizations submitted a list of recommendations for the commission
to propose:
http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/alliances/voting-rights.php#recommend
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Constitutional right to vote for all citizens, without exception
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Paper ballots as the official record of all votes cast
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Open source code for all machines used to count and/or tabulate
the votes
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Independent analysis of all voting machine software and hardware
before and after elections
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Unified national standards for national elections
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No vote machine company executive or employee involvement in
campaign work for any candidate
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Random audit of 10% of elections
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10-day period for voting
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Election day registration
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Voter identification by any official form of identification
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Independent non-partisan administration and multi-partisan
observation of elections
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Voting rights restoration to convicted felons
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No computer networking of vote machines
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Publicly financed elections for federal offices and free access to
public airwaves to all candidates
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Fair ballot access laws and access to debates for all candidates
and parties
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Federal holiday for national elections
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Instant Run-off Voting and Proportional Representation
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Equal protection for voting rights nationwide
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Augmentation and reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act
The first of these has been addressed by a proposal from Congressman
Jesse Jackson Jr. for a constitutional amendment, but it was not
even mentioned at the Baker-Carter meeting. Also not discussed at
all was voting machine company executives' or employees' involvement
in campaign work.
Several other items were mentioned only in passing or not at all.
Among those not mentioned at all were public financing of
elections, access to airwaves, ballot access and debate access for
candidates, instant run-off voting, and proportional
representation. More than one speaker, including President Carter,
did raise the question of why over 40 percent of Americans routinely
do not vote. Each raised it as a mystery and presented no
hypotheses to explain it.
A reporter from Scripps Howard at the end of the press conference
raised a couple of the questions that had been ignored. He asked
whether the commission might look into the possibility of limiting
campaign adverting in the days before an election, and into
providing free air time. Carter replied that the United States
fails the standards that the Carter Center requires of other
countries, not just because the United States lacks national
election standards, but also because this country does not provide
candidates with free access to the news media. But, said Carter,
the questions raised refer to matters over which the states, not the
federal government, have control – a claim for which Carter offered
no evidence.
The first panel Monday morning was called "Elections and HAVA:
Current Status." HAVA is the acronym for the Help America Vote Act,
the law that came out of some, but not all, of the Carter-Ford
recommendations following the 2000 election, and which has not been
fully funded by Congress. The first panel included Gracia Hillman,
Chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which was
established to oversee the implementation of HAVA, and Kay Maxwell,
President of the League of Women Voters. Maxwell recommended not
requiring a paper trail, but rather "performance standards,"
requiring secure ballots, rather than "design standards," telling
people how to make them. Maxwell thought it would be harmful to
change HAVA while it was still being implemented, a comment that
Commission Member Tom Daschle said he supported. Hillman seemed to
believe both that everything was fine and that not the lack of
proper funding was a major drag on efforts to implement HAVA.
But the two people on the first panel whose proposals spoke most
directly to the concerns of citizens were Chellie Pingree and Henry
Brady.
Chellie Pingree, President of Common Cause, described problems
encountered in 2004, including people waiting in line for hours,
malfunctioning machines, arbitrary demands for identification,
deletion of people from rolls, and unfulfilled requests for absentee
ballots. "These are as serious as hanging chads," she said and
asked that the 2004 election not be judged just by its having been
resolved out of court. Pingree recommended:
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easing barriers to voting,
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requiring all machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot,
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providing better training to poll workers,
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making permanent federal and state commitments, not federalizing
elections,
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and listening to the many concerned voters around the country.
Henry Brady, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the
University of California, Berkeley, supported a recommendation from
the Carter-Ford Commission that has not been acted on, namely
creating a national holiday for election day. He also suggested
that the HAVA requirement of statewide voter registration systems in
each state by January 2006 appeared unlikely to be met by a number
of states. If it was met, he said, it was not clear they would
allow communication between counties, and was clear that they would
not allow that between states. Brady proposed that the databases of
registered voters in all states be accessible in real time at the
precinct level, which would mean eliminating provisional ballots and
allowing election-day registration. "We can check data in banking
transactions," he said. "There's no reason we can't do it with
voting."
Photo Gallery:
http://www.davidswanson.org/photos/bakercarter/index.htm
The second panel dealt with "Access and Integrity." The first
speaker was Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director of the Lawyers'
Committee for Civil Rights. She worked with the Election Protection
coalition which, she said, received 110,000 calls to its hotline on
election day alone, and had written up 43,000 incident reports.
These, she said, told a very different story from that told in the
media, in which the election went smoothly last year. Arnwine
described cases of polls that did not open or opened late or closed
early, discriminatory challenges, untrained poll officials, too few
voting machines, and failure to provide assistance to the disabled
or those needing linguistic assistance. She recommended exploring
the ideas of election-day registration and early voting.
In an effort to head off the arguments that she knew were coming,
which would shift the focus to alleged fraud by individuals
improperly voting, Arnwine said that incidents of ineligible voter
participation were far less than one-tenth as widespread as the
sorts of problems she had described.
The second speaker was John Fund, a member of the Wall Street
Journal Editorial Board. Fund immediately focused on the question
of ineligible voters, although he did not present any evidence or
even claim that the problem was widespread. He proposed requiring
photo IDs and requiring that states provide them free of charge
through divisions of motor vehicles. He also recommended allowing
provisional ballots only in a voter's precinct, because local
officials would, among other things, best be able to tell whether
someone "looks as if they belong in the neighborhood."
Colleen McAndrews, a lawyer from Santa Monica who served as
treasurer of Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for governor of
California, generally agreed with Fund. "There's paranoia in the
country... I share Johns view that it's not fraud but
incompetence." McAndrews recommended a new voter ID system. But
she did not explain how that would address people's concerns, most
of which have been over issues like those Arnwine described.
McAndrews did express support for three proposals not yet
implemented from Carter-Ford: full funding of HAVA, a national
holiday for elections, and uniform poll closings in order to avoid
the calling of elections, which suppresses voting in the West.
The fourth speaker was Arturo Vargas, Executive Director of the
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. He
supported full funding of HAVA, electronic voting with a recountable
paper trail, better training of poll workers, and reauthorization in
2007 of those parts of the Voting Rights Act that will then expire.
Vargas argued that requiring IDs suppresses voting by qualified
voters. He offered as an example cases in which a change of address
is made on voting rolls but not yet made on a driver's license.
Arnwine added that requiring people to take time of work and travel,
sometimes long distances, to a DMV to obtain an ID will result in
their not voting.
Asked about voting by ex-felons, Fund claimed that only states can
address that issue, while Arnwine recommended that for federal
elections states could be required to allow those who have served
out punishment to have access to vote.
The third and final panel, dealing with "Voting Technology and
Election Administration," is the one on which Dill and Thornburgh
spoke. Also speaking were Jim Dickson, Vice President for
Governmental Affairs, American Association of People with
Disabilities, and Richard Hasen, a professor of law at Loyola Law
School.
Hasen presented statistics to show how little trust Americans have
in our election system, but then proposed a federal voter
registration and ID, including fingerprints, in order to boost voter
confidence. But, again, no evidence was produced to suggest that
any significant sliver of the distrust has anything to do with fraud
by individuals.
Congressman Conyers released a statement following the commission
meeting that pulled no punches:
"The first meeting of the Baker-Carter election commission was
disappointing and, at times, outrageous and tainted with
racially-charged innuendo. Let me make absolutely clear that I
greatly admire former President Jimmy Carter and believe he was
insightful and on-target throughout the hearing. However, given the
incredible lack of balance and profound lack of good faith
demonstrated by some of Carter’s fellow commissioners and many of
the witnesses at this hearing, at times he seemed to be a very
lonely voice of sanity.
"The remarks of Mr. James Baker, III, which were echoed by a number
of right wing political operatives called as witnesses, seemed to
have a singular purpose of spreading hoaxes and conspiracy theories
about ineligible Democratic voters being allowed to cast votes. The
remedy was cleverly repeated like a broken record, 'photo ID, photo
ID, photo ID.' Right wing pundit John Fund was called as an 'expert'
witness by the hearing and offered racially charged proposals with
racially charged rhetoric....
"What can be said of a commission that holds such a hearing? What
hope is there for the recommendations of such a Commission? I am
scheduled to meet with Commission officials this week and I am
trying very hard to have an open mind. But, frankly, at this point –
seeing this first hearing – I think we should all be very wary of
this Commission’s objectives."
Conyers' full statement:
http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000063.htm
At the press conference at the end of the day, Baker announced that
the commission had decided not to take on "really volatile issues,"
including the electoral college, redistricting, or voting rights in
the District of Columbia.
Mark Plotkin of WTOP News Radio in Washington, D.C., asked why DC
voting rights were off the table. Carter replied that he and Baker
both supported DC voting rights but could not deal with that issue
on this commission. Plotkin expressed surprise that Baker would
support DC voting rights and asked the former Secretary of State to
confirm that claim. After all, Baker had just called the issue
"really volatile." Baker stood and silently smirked. When pressed
to speak, he said that the commission would not make any
recommendations requiring constitutional amendments.
The next meeting of this commission will be on June 30th
at Rice University.
David Swanson is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America
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