How to Hold an Election

In a democracy, it is said, all other rights rest on the right to vote. Citizens vote in elections which are conducted by their government. Citizens should expect elections to be conducted fairly, regardless of the outcome. A recurrent theme at Sense from Seattle is that in a democracy the process is at least as important as the outcome. Such is the case with elections. They need to be conducted as fairly as possible and the fairness needs to be apparent to all reasonable citizens, regardless of how they voted.

The 2000 Presidential election was not perceived as fair by a significant number of Americans, including this writer. Fairness concerns were raised in particular about the Florida vote, covering issues at three stages of the process, pre-election (questionable rolls purging), on election day (misleading and defective ballots and voting equipment and lack of provisional balloting for challenged voters) and post-election (U. S. Supreme Court intervention to stop the re-count).

In the Ukraine, masses of voters took to the streets to protest improprieties in the first two stages of the process. The Ukranian high court in the third phase ordered a new election, which produced an opposite result through a process the citizens seem to accept as fair. No hue and cry seems to have arisen from the Afghan election, perhaps since most accepted the outcome as a forgone conclusion and as a necessary part of a long transitional process. Elections are about to be conducted in Palestine and in Iraq, both under very challenging conditions, especially since neither of those electorates have experience or established rules for the process. The UN and impartial international observers are trying to help administer and monitor the process. Iraq is the greater challenge because of strong internal animosities and voter intimidation, blatant by the insurgents and subtle by the occupiers.

Today the US Congress is considering a Democratic challenge to the electoral vote of Ohio. The challengers admit the Ohio votes should be cast for Bush and that he should be declared the winner, but they are using the electoral college process in Congress as a platform to point out how the Help Americans Vote Act, adopted after the 2000 election, has not been properly implemented and is need of improvements. Republicans are responding by saying the Democrats are wasting time and just trying to cast doubt on the election result in a sour grape response. The fact is Republicans are not ordinarily concerned about addressing fairness issues of the pre-election and election day phases, because they think problems in those phases work to their advantage. Republicans also seem to think they are not in need of addressing post-election fairness issues, because the US Supreme Court not only surprised most constitutional law scholars by agreeing to hear the Florida recount case, but then voted along party ideological lines 5-4 in favor of the Republican.

Here in Washington State, the shoes are now on the other feet. The Republican Secretary of State, the State Supreme Court by a 9-0 vote and every County Auditor are in agreement that the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, has been elected Governor by the slimmest of margins, and she has been officially certified as the victor. Her Republican challenger, my compadre Dino Rossi, is now the one giving the sour grapes response, arguing that some late absentee military voters were disenfranchised, some invalid ballots may have been cast and an entire new election should be held to remove any doubt. Never mind that the rules that addressed these issues were all fairly applied and the issues resolved by the rules, Rossi doesn’t like the taste of losing, particularly since he made a fool of himself during the recount by proclaiming himself Governor-Elect. A court challenge to the vote is still possible, and though the State Supreme Court would be expected to reject the challenge 9-0, the US Supreme Court still includes the 5 Justices who "elected" the Republican President in 2000.

To steal a phrase from Don Rumsfeld, hopefully with better results, you have to conduct an election with the rules and equipment you have and you have to accept the results. But that does not mean we should stop working to insure the rules are as fairly written and fairly applied as can be, so that the results of the next election will, as much as possible, be seen as legitimate in the eyes of all reasonable voters.