Our Eyes Off the Ball

There is much discussion in the blogosphere, some of it seeping into the mainstream media, about questions of election fraud and incompetence in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere.  Some is compelling -- for instance, how many people did the many-hour waits in Ohio deter from voting? -- and some dubious.  There have also been highly tendentious rebuttals in the mainstream press (watch the Daily Howler rake her over the coals)

I worry, though, that by obsessing over the more dubious claims we may suck the wind out of efforts to achieve meaningful electoral reforms.  This is a more serious issue than bellyaching over the Electoral College, which most sensible people realizes isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  Here, expending serious energy and money chasing after illusory fraud hurts rather than helps efforts to clean up the process.  Yes, I know that puts me at odds with some of my liberal friends.

Much as I want to believe them, I haven't seen much that convinces me there were shenanigans in Florida on a sufficient scale to have tipped the election to Bush.  Yes, a few hundred votes here, a few thousand absentee ballots there, and those absolutely should be investigated.  A disclaimer: I haven't analyzed these data myself.  But then again, most of the people talking about election fraud haven't, either.

A source I trust, Walter Mebane in the Government Department at Cornell, found no evidence of irregularities in the Florida returns, at least in regards to a comparison of optical scan and electronic voting.  You can read his initial letter here and a follow-up rebuttal here.  Those of you who are gearheads can read more technical treatments by Jas Sekhon of Harvard and by Jonathan Wand of Stanford.  The bottom line is that the apparent irregularities track closely with the Dixiecrat region of Florida, people who register Dem but increasingly vote with the GOP, hardly a new phenomenon in the South.

I should note that he came to the opposite conclusion with regards to the 2000 Florida vote due to the peculiarities of that election.  Mebane shows that by analyzing both the overvote data and the butterfly ballots, on either count the state should have been awarded to Gore.  Not that it makes us feel any better now.  Further papers by Sekhon and others on related topics are found here (again, for gearheads only).

I would like to see this kind of energy put into straightforward, sensible reforms that would consistently increase turnout numbers in more states than just Florida, such as restoring voting rights to ex-cons who have served their time.