Today's USA Today includes an article, "Many eyes will watch the polls," about the record numbers of observers who are scheduled to monitor this year's elections. The story's structure reminds me of similar reports from Egypt during election time: Human rights and legal groups strategize about how to identify and prevent fraud everyone knows is going to happen. But USA Today's story doesn't just sound like a report about Egypt and not America--it sounds like a report from Egypt, where very few newspapers even pretend not to be politically biased, and not America.
The story consistently refers to groups who are doing the most to monitor this year's elections as "liberals," without qualifying the label with any kind of example of what makes them that way. The reporters contrast "liberal" strategies for observing the polls with more laissez-faire methods Republican organizations apparently favor, without really backing up this distinction (they dole out quotes even-handedly, but to do so as proof of the party-affiliated difference would be a circular argument). Does concern about election fraud really run along party lines--especially now? The story gives no satisfactory evidence, taking for granted that caring about fraud is related to other touchy-feely political sensibilities.
If I were a Republican, I'd be just as worried about having a fair shot at the polls this year as if I were a Democrat. Much is at stake. Would anyone pretend otherwise?
Conor Friedersdorf @ November 1, 2006 - 11:13pm
Here's the thing: Democrats care a lot about the kind of voting irregularities that keep people from voting, because usually its poor people, felons and minorities -- aka groups that vote Democrat more often than not -- that are kept from voting.
Meanwhile Republicans mostly care about the kind of voting irregularities in which people are wrongly permitted to vote, or vote twice, because the people who do this tend to vote Democrat more often than Republican.
So yeah, both sides do care about a fair shot at the polls, but self-interest leads them to focus on very different problems at the polls.
Democrats try to ease voter registration to minimize the number of people wrongly prevented from voting, while Republicans try to guard against voter fraud to minimize the number of people who illegally cast votes.
I suppose a non-partisan observer would say that an illegal vote wrongly cast and preventing someone eligible to vote from casting their ballot has the same effect -- disenfranchising one legitimate voter -- and that a balance that minimizes the sum of the two is ideal.
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