A Messed-Up Voting System

Sure, every vote counts, but it’s far from clear that every vote cast Tuesday will be counted. With public opinion polls predicting a dead heat, the presidential election may well be as protracted as that of 2000, and perhaps as bitter. Incompetence, fraud and conflicting state rules and court decisions have raised serious voting-rights questions in several states.

All this was avoidable. Congress could have given far clearer instructions to states two years ago when it passed the perversely titled Help America Vote Act. Once Congress returns, it surely must do so. A revised law should at least impose clear national voter-eligibility standards and insist that states speed up establishment of statewide electronic voter lists.

Already the challenges and screw-ups are alarming. When three white residents of a rural Georgia county challenged the registration of 95 of the county’s 123 Hispanic voters solely on the basis of their last names, the county registrar required the would-be voters to present documents proving their citizenship. Florida election officials can’t locate 58,000 absentee ballots that Fort Lauderdale-area voters requested weeks ago, leaving those voters in limbo.

Republican Party officials plan to station thousands of recruits inside polling places to challenge newly registered voters they suspect are ineligible; Democrats fear that these observers will intimidate only John Kerry supporters. Huge registration drives have added thousands of would-be voters to the rolls. Add in the inevitable technology snafus and watch the tempers rise.

The two parties have each hired more than 10,000 lawyers, already stampeding to courthouses. Justice Department lawyers, on the other hand, are arguing that only they can challenge denial of a voter’s rights. This brushoff of decades of precedent carries a whiff of the fox in the henhouse.

These preelection skirmishes are to some extent a manifestation of deep partisan divisions. But the hand-wringing also flows from decisions that Congress ducked. Passed in 2002 in response to the bungled 2000 election, the Help America Vote Act left each state to interpret its many requirements for registrations, poll worker training, even ballot technology. The result is a patchwork of arbitrary laws and court rulings.

For example, the law requires that new voters who register by mail present identification the first time they vote. Colorado officials have applied that rule to some long-time voters. Most states accept a driver’s license or any government ID, but in one South Carolina county, poor or older voters who do not drive can’t show their Medicare or Social Security cards instead. The law also directed that individuals who claimed they were unfairly denied the right to vote be issued a provisional ballot. But court decisions in recent weeks leave states differing widely on which of these ballots to count.

Four years after the Supreme Court ended up choosing a president, the right to vote is just as unsettled. Even if this election is conclusively decided by voters -- not by the courts -- and by a big enough margin to dispel suspicion, Congress owes voters and democracy itself a better law.