State Election Chiefs Discuss Ways to Reform Voting Process

Pumping gas, buying groceries and using an ATM to pull money from the bank shouldn’t be easier than voting. But they are.

“We do billions of transactions every day with high degrees of accuracy. There’s no reason the election system can’t do that,” said Maryland Secretary of State John T. Willis, one of a dozen election officials from various states who met Saturday to talk about reform.

About 20 different plans aimed at preventing another Florida fiasco have popped up in Congress and more are coming, said National Assn. of Secretaries of State President Sharon Priest, Arkansas’ secretary of state.

Priest heads the group’s voting reform task force, which is meeting this weekend to make sure that the folks who actually run the elections have a say in the national dialogue. They’re discussing uniform polling hours, voting methods, technology, standardized ballots, poll staffing, voter education and election night media coverage. The task force will make recommendations to the association when it meets next month to consider and possibly endorse a plan.

“The recent election and subsequent civics lesson illustrate the kinds of things we’ve been dealing with for years,” Priest said.

Asked what is most needed to fix the system, Priest said: “We probably can answer that with one word.”

“Money,” the election officials said in a chorus.

But Congress doesn’t often dole out money without tacking on instructions for how it should be spent. That’s a fear among the election officials, who say each state has its own needs.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” said Donetta Davidson, Colorado’s secretary of state.

The officials generally opposed the idea of a uniform national ballot.

The election officials also said that difficulty in finding poll workers is reaching crisis levels in some states and that better training is needed.