by Mario Hernandez
Daily Lobo columnist
Since the dawn of civilization, there has been the need for government.
Whether it be some form of individual hierarchy or a full-blown bureaucracy to govern the masses, it has always been necessary for a society to establish rules and enforce them. In a democracy, where the government is either run by the people or is held accountable by the people, it is necessary to tabulate and count votes. This is the principle on which a democracy is based. So it follows that the population has trust in those who receive and count their votes to make sure their votes are counted and that no extra or erroneous votes are taken into account. In many democracies around the world, this process has been under scrutiny, even more so with the advent of voting technology and computers.
For many years, the question of election fraud has gone relatively unnoticed in this country. This is not due to the lack of occurrences, but rather the scale of the elections called into question. In 2000, however, many accounts of election fraud and voter disenfranchisement came under national scrutiny because of the scale at which they took place. The presidential election of 2000 exposed a deeply rooted problem within our government and our election system,
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
threatening to undermine the foundation of our government.
It has always been a widely held belief that the American democracy is the best and most sophisticated in the world. We are supposedly the model upon which all democracies are based, right? Wrong. When one takes a look at the details of how our elections are carried out, it would be nearly impossible to come to the conclusion that our system is the best.
The U.S. puts the incumbent government in charge of running the elections of the country. This can lead to problems when trying to reach a fair and honest outcome and could be the reason why only 18 percent of the world's democracies do it this way. Problems can ensue when the delegation of election duties falls in the hands of a highly partisan secretary of state, like Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio or Katherine Harris of Florida.
In addition, the U.S. has thousands of separate lists of registered voters, and many of them are incredibly inaccurate. Also, most states don't even require proof of citizenship to make your way onto these lists. As Robert A. Pastor said in the political magazine American Prospect, "If ID cards threaten democracy, why does almost every democracy except ours require them, and why are their elections conducted better than ours?"
When the people in charge of elections are the people whose job is at stake, we cannot fully trust the elections to be fair. Also, when instances of fraud do occur, our lack of ability to prove wrongdoing is setting us up for a vicious cycle of fraud and frustration. We need to undergo drastic policy changes and take a serious look at our system and how it is making junk out of one of the things we most treasure - our right to vote.
We lack uniform standards, a paper trail for all voting machines and a verifiable way to tell if a vote is counted correctly.
With the frequency of election fraud and corruption we experience in the U.S., it has become essential that we either improve the system or implement an alternative system altogether. Either way you slice it, our system is broken, and continuing to ignore the problem won't help. We have one of the most corrupt democracies on the planet. Isn't it time we demanded a little more from those we elect to represent us?
Mario Hernandez is a UNM political science major.
