The upside of the chaos of the last two presidential elections has been an increase in mainstream public attention to the problems with our electoral system. The fact that Time Magazine has made the topic the subject of its cover article a week before the election is evidence of this growing attention.

Time’s list is spot-on if you ask me. It’s one of the most concise summaries of the biggest potential electoral problems of 2008. It’s not comprehensive, of course, but hits on most of the biggies.

The two problems on the list that are the biggest concern to me:

The Database Dilemma
The introduction of statewide voter databases has made it possible for voters to be disenfranchised en masse, due to typos and data entry errors. Registration records are required to be matched against other state data, such as driver’s licenses. If the match is not perfect, the voter could be erroneously struck from the rolls.

In Wisconsin, an August check of a new voter-registration database against other state records turned up a 22% match-failure rate. Around the time four of the six former judges who oversee state elections could not be matched with state driver’s license data, the board decided to suspend any database purges of new registrants. But database-matching continues elsewhere. In Florida, nearly 9,000 new registrants have been flagged through the state’s “No Match, No Vote” law. (Their votes will not be counted unless they prove their identity to a state worker in the coming weeks.)

The Voting-Machine Fiasco
Much attention has been given to the frailties of electronic voting, but still only a minority of states require a voter-verified paper trail of the ballots cast electronically. From Time:

About one-third of voters this fall will use electronic machines, usually touchscreen systems that produce no paper record of the vote. If the machines are miscalibrated, they are known to malfunction, sometimes causing the selection of one candidate to show as a vote for another. But the bigger concern, which has been echoed by computer scientists, is that the machines have no independent paper backup. A memory failure or a corruption of the data leaves no route for a recount. The 2006 congressional election in Florida’s 13th District produced the nightmare scenario. Republican Vern Buchanan won the contest by a margin of 369 votes. But in a single, Democratic-leaning county, more than 18,000 voters mysteriously failed to record a selection in the congressional race, an undervote as much as six times the rate of other counties. There is no way to know for sure what, if anything, went wrong.

The other thing that’s so good about this article is that it draws attention to the role that partisan politics play in many of these election administration decisions. Reporter Michael Scherer calls out both Republican and Democratic officials who seem to make decisions based on the advantage it will bring to their own party, rather than on questions of fairness.

takepart Verify your registration and polling place at http://www.866ourvote.org/

(Hat tip to Alicia for recommending the article!!)