Election Updates

Just received the following promotional information for Ron Hayduk's new book on immigrant voting rights. I've not had a chance yet to read Hayduk's new book, but will report on my reactions when my copy arrives.

Democracy For All:
Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S.
Ron Hayduk

2005: 256 pp
Hb: 0-415-95072-4: $95.00
Pb: 0-415-95073-2: $24.95



Voting is for citizens only, right?Not exactly. It is not widely known that immigrants, or noncitizens, currently vote in local elections in over a half dozen cities and towns in the U.S.; nor that campaigns to expand the franchise to noncitizens have been launched in at least a dozen other jurisdictions from coast to coast over the past decade. These practices have their roots in another little-known fact: for most of the country's history-from the founding until the 1920s-noncitizens voted in forty states and federal territories in local, state, and even federal elections, and also held public office such as alderman, coroner, and school board member. Globally, over forty countries on nearly every continent permit voting by noncitizens.
Legal immigrants, or resident aliens, pay taxes, own businesses and homes, send their children to public schools, and can be drafted or serve in the military, yet proposals to grant them voting rights are often met with great resistance. But, in a country where "no taxation without representation" was once a rallying cry for revolution, such a proposition may not, after all, be so outlandish.

Democracy for All examines the politics and practices of noncitizen voting in the United States, chronicling the rise and fall-and re-emergence-of immigrant voting in the U.S. In addition to making the case for noncitizen voting, this book takes a close look at the politics of and actors in recent campaigns that successfully reestablished noncitizen voting, others that failed, and ones that are currently underway. Democracy for All explores the prospects for a truly universal suffrage in America.

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About the Author

RON HAYDUK teaches political science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Gatekeepers to the Franchise: Shaping Election Administration in New York. Hayduk has worked in government, consults to policy organizations and is co-founder of The Immigrant Voting Project (www.immigrantvoting.org).

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Reviews

"Democracy for All is the most thoroughgoing exploration we have of non-citizen voting in the United States, past and present. The issues raised by Hayduk's book-particularly at a time of high rates of immigration-ought to inform public debate in communities across the nation."
- Alexander Keyssar, Professor of History and Social Policy, Harvard University, and author of The Right to Vote

"This is an immensely valuable and promising book tackled in a serious and thorough way. It has a chance to speak to a broad national audience in a clear and accessible manner."
- Jamin Raskin, author of Overruling Democracy

"This passionately argued and thoroughly documented work is the best single study of whether to grant electoral rights to immigrant non-citizens. Hayduk carefully, clearly, and compellingly dissects the past, present, and future of one of our era's most important civil rights challenges."
- John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City
University Graduate Center

"Millions of long-term non-citizen residents abide in the United States without any formal representation in its democratic political system. Hayduk provides a thorough, and much-needed brief outlining the history, contemporary status, and arguments for (and against) non-citizen voting in the U.S. An excellent source for an important question in American politics today."
- Michael Jones-Correa, Department of Government, Cornell University

NASS has released a report detailing how states are doing in complying with the various aspects of HAVA that come due in the next year. All told, 43 states responded to the survey. Among the key findings:

• Forty-one of the 43 respondents will be fully compliant with HAVA’s mandates by the time they hold their first federal elections in 2006. Twenty-four states will be fully compliant with the law by the January 1 deadline.
• Only two of the states said they will not have their statewide voter registration databases in place by the time they hold their 2006 federal elections.
• The seventeen states that will miss the January 1 deadline for having fully compliant voting systems gave the following reasons: (some states gave multiple answers):
• Seven states said they were held up by the RFP process;
• Seven states said contractors/vendors caused the delays;
• Six states said the late release of federal guidelines caused them to miss the deadline;
  
• Four states blamed state legislatures that were slow to act; and
• One state said it received insufficient federal funds.

States noted similar problems with meeting the voter registration database requirements. It will be interesting to see how effectively these systems work in practice.

According to Newsday, the state of Connecticut has scrapped their ongoing efforts to procure a new voting system that is compliant with HAVA. The article explicitly notes that:

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said his office has contacted the U.S. Department of Justice to make sure it understands Connecticut's situation and does not penalize the state for the delay. "We're satisfied that this decision is legally sound," he said, referring to Bysiewicz's decision to stop the process. In a letter to state officials, the Department of Justice said it is willing to "work cooperatively with Connecticut" on achieving full compliance with the federal law.

One interesting aspect is that the procurement is being made very difficult because "state law has been interpreted as requiring that any voting machine show the entire ballot for a voter." The rationale for why a state would require a full-face ballot to be presented to the voter is not clear in any of the academic literature on voting. In fact, Susan King Ross's article, Disenfranchised by Design, has identified many problems with the current lever machine technology, part of which is associated with the ballot size.

Although we normally focus on election reform issues, this story on podcasting is quite interesting (especially given Mike's ongoing work podcasting aspects of our election reform blog). Podcasting is becoming popular among candidates and political operatives because it allows them to communicate directly to voters without media filtering. It also allows them to communicate with audiences who do not use traditional media, such as newspapers or network television to garner information.

Given the expanding usage of Ipod's and other MP3 technologies, use of podcasting is expected to keep growing. As the article notes,

As the medium gains traction among average Americans, podcasting is expected to garner even more momentum among politicians when congressional races begin to heat up next year.

"They're hot right now," said Henry Brady, a political science professor at the University of California. "People are doing them because they're exciting and new and interesting."

One question will be how effective these podcasts are. There are tens of thousands of podcasts, and getting through to people who do not normally care about politics may be difficult. Instead, podcasts may simply reinforce the biases people already have in politics.

This story came across my email today:

Manama, Jan. 3, (BNA) Bahrain IT Society will organize on January 24 25, the first forum of its kind in the Middle East under the theme of "Bahrain Forum for Electronic Voting", in cooperation with the United Nations Information Technology Development Program.

The forum will review electronic voting and election- related application technologies and discuss experiences of some establishments and countries in the field for common benefits. The electronic voting system is one of the modern technological systems applied in advanced countries, mainly in elections for being easy and speedy, Director of Elections and Referendum, Shaikha Muneera bint Abdulla Al Khalifa, said in a press conference held in Manama on Tuesday. " This system mainly serves those, who for any reason, cannot go to polls on time as their votes will be electronically counted", she said, adding that the forums is a good opportunity for conferees to exchange viewpoints and be familiar with Bahrain's experience which used electronic voting at a narrow scale in its previous parliamentary and municipal elections. On his part the Deputy Chairman of Bahrain IT Society, Adnan Mahmoud, said a world elite, specialized in computer applications and legal and administrative matters relating to elections, will take part in the forum as key speakers along with More than 150 Representatives of Bahrain and GCC establishments and societies who are also expected to attend.

The Los Angeles Times has an article today--which quotes Mike--about the uncertainty that surrounds voting systems as states enter the final stretch of meeting the HAVA requirements for accessible voting technologies. The article notes that,

In some places, voters are facing their third balloting system in five years.

In California, counties have lurched from one voting system to another as the state has written and rewritten standards. Several counties are scrambling to redo their June election plans after the state's top elections official raised new questions last month about an electronic voting machine in use for years.

Miami officials talk of scrapping their 3-year-old electronic machines, while Mercer County, Pa., officials want to keep theirs but were ordered by state authorities to take them out of service after glitches during the 2004 presidential election.

"It pretty much left the county up a tree," said Tom Rookey, elections chief of the Steel Belt county on the Ohio border.

In Connecticut, the secretary of state is tussling with the federal government over how quickly the state must replace its decades-old lever-style voting machines with electronic machines.

Indiana's largest county has sued the company that sold it electronic voting machines. Across the border in Ohio, the same company has sued the state.

"It's been crazy," said San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas, who said he is returning to paper ballots because the state refused to recertify more than 10,000 electronic machines the county bought two years ago. "Everyone is in uncharted territory here."

The Times notes that the 2004 election had fewer problems than occurred in 2000, but there is still a need to develop a meaningful mechanism for regulating all voting technologies, but especially electronic voting machines.