[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Columnist: Voting and Counting

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Op-Ed Columnist: Voting and Counting

October 22, 2004
 By PAUL KRUGMAN 



 

If the election were held today and the votes were counted
fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the
votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement
of minority voters may determine the outcome. 

Recent national poll results range from a
three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll
released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the
Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this
week from the most to the least favorable to President
Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47
percent. 

This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters
usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're
talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls
also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent,
putting him very much in the danger zone. 

Electoral College projections based on state polls also
show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided
voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions
give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes. 

But if you get your political news from cable TV, you
probably have a very different sense of where things stand.
CNN, which co-sponsored that Gallup poll, rarely informs
its viewers that other polls tell a very different story.
The same is true of Fox News, which has its own very
Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread
public impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead. 

By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential
because of its illustrious history, report a large Bush
lead when many other polls show a dead heat? It's mostly
because of how Gallup determines "likely voters": the poll
shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered voters.
And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out
(using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger),
Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much
smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than
the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000
election. 

A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is
in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted
vote count. 

Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent
Florida polls suggest a tight race, which could be tipped
by a failure to count all the votes. And votes for Mr.
Kerry will be systematically undercounted. 

Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000
election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively
shows that Florida was thrown to Mr. Bush by a combination
of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These
included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck
thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective
voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record
votes in poor, black districts. 

One might have expected Florida's government to fix these
problems during the intervening four years. But most of
those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't
had those rights restored - and the replacement of
punch-card machines has created new problems. 

After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb
Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting
technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled
ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper
ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to
problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly
white Florida counties. 

But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he
ignored state officials who urged him to "pull the plug" on
a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a
judge forced the state to make it public - just days before
he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the
state will vote using touch-screen machines that are
unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper
trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise
27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black. 

A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win
convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by
refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush
win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the
systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the
media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of
skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr.
Bush's popular support. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?ex=1099497043&ei=1&en=f88f7ad8ad288187


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