I spent the day today at NPR in Washington, D.C. working on a couple of pieces for Sunday Soapbox. I also had a chance to step out for an iced tea with Andy Carvin, online genius for NPR, who streamed part of our chat live online with his QIK cam. Pretty awesome.

Tuesday night in Houston, Texas the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University held a screening of HBO Films’ RECOUNT, which we discussed here yesterday. The screening reunited the namesakes of the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

While this RECOUNT is for fun and profit, the Houston Chronicle reports it’s also a wish of the filmmakers and those involved to spark a discussion about the state of our voting system, much like we try to do.

“There’s still a degree of unfinished business out there when you look at the election system in our country,” Baker said.

Carter said the most important change would be requiring the use of a “paper trail” — receipts of a sort, that would help voters verify that their ballots have been cast as they intended on electronic voting machines. Paper trail equipment has been put to use in some states; Texas officials have resisted it.

Baker said the nation most urgently needs unified voter registration lists and the photo ID requirement. Democrats in the Texas Senate shot down a photo ID proposal last year; this year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the requirement in Indiana.

Still, Carter said the country has made progress on the issue since 2000, if for no other reason than the commission headed by the two men made recommendations that can still serve as an election reform bible. Baker proudly pointed out that Supreme Court justices mentioned the commission report in some of their opinions on the Indiana case.

For more information about RECOUNT, click here.

This morning I went to The Grove in Los Angeles where HBO, promoting their new film RECOUNT, set up the actual Votomatic Florida voting machines used in the controversial 2000 Presidential Election, complete with butterfly ballots and hanging chads, so that people can judge for themselves whether they could have effectively cast their ballot. RECOUNT premieres May 25 on HBO.

On Friday controversial nominee Hans von Spakovsky took his name out of the hat of possible Federal Election Commissioners. The way is now cleared for some interrupted business at the Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with “enforc[ing] the Federal Election Campaign Act - the statute that governs the financing of federal elections,” including hearing public financing inquiries from presidential candidates. The AP gives the back-story:

Democrats have objected to Mr. von Spakovsky’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he oversaw voting rights matters. The standoff has held up other Senate confirmations to the six-member commission, which is without a quorum and has been unable to conduct business […] Democrats have accused Mr. von Spakovsky of trying to suppress voter participation through new restrictions like voter identification laws and purges of voter rolls.

Republicans say a recent Supreme Court ruling upholding a strict Indiana voter identification law vindicated Mr. von Spakovsky’s stance on the issue.

I met Spakovsky at an April 2, 2008 lunch meeting of the Los Angeles Federalist Society that I found out about online. Spakovsky’s lecture was called “Litigating Elections: the Campaign Process in 2008.” After his talk we chatted (see photo), but he declined to be interviewed by Why Tuesday? for our vlog.

Oregon is the only state in the Union that votes entirely by mail, and as NPR’s Ina Jaffe reported last week, that’s not only changing the way campaigns conduct their get-out-the-vote efforts, it also removes the tradition of the secret ballot entirely from Oregon’s voting system. Yesterday I met with United States Postal Service Communications Program Specialist Larry H. Dozier to learn more about voting-by-mail.

NPR’s Ina Jaffe took a look yesterday for Weekend Edition Sunday at the vote-by-mail election system in Oregon, and how the rules there make campaigning a unique experience.

A big critique of vote-by-mail, which has been echoed here by Norman J. Ornstein, is that the process negates the secret ballot. “We got rid of that big reform that guaranteed secrecy in the voting booth,” said Jim Moore, political science professor at Pacific University, “and got rid of the idea that no one can come between you and directly placing your ballot in the box — a sealed locked box.”

Listen to Jaffe’s piece here. My piece this week for NPR Sunday Soapbox, which was teased on Weekend Edition Sunday, was about how super delegates are shifting the election reform debate from our voting systems to our party system.

The New York Times is reporting this morning that the debate over voter ID is moving to Missouri, where lawmakers there may vote to enact proof-of-citizenship requirements at the polls.

All this just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that an Indiana law requiring photo ID at the polls is constitutional. Watch our report for a recap.

Thanks to those who let us know Tom Brokaw shouted us out during MSNBC’s election-night coverage on Tuesday! If you missed it, watch the video. Here’s a transcript of Brokaw’s remarks. You can learn more about us here and find out why we vote on Tuesday by clicking here. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you were in touch to let us know about Tom Brokaw mentioning our efforts on MSNBC last night during the election coverage. Here is the transcript of his conversation with Chris Matthews, from MSNBC:

MATTHEWS: Tom, you know, back in—we watched the movie that other night in that Washington showing of the film about the recount in 2000, and if you think about what happened after that vote, and the Supreme Court’s intervention, it was African-Americans in the Congress.

Remember how zealous they were in trying to get that rejected, that Supreme Court intervention? It was the strongest community in the country on the hottest issue and the hottest group—community of concern about that matter, the way that was decided in 2000.

BROKAW: Well, they continue to feel—Andy Young is—led a real crusade in this country to have more focus, once again, on the Voting Rights Act. He thinks they need to go to the next step now. “Why Tuesday?” is the name of his campaign, because so many African-American voters and people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, whatever their color, can’t always get to a polling place on a Tuesday.

And then there’s the Supreme Court decision now which has caused some controversy in Indiana that you have to have a photo ID of some kind. I think that may be less important in the final analysis. But it’s worth examining how you can make it possible for working class Americans, especially African-Americans, many of whom work two jobs, that they can get to the polling place easily.

So Andy Young, who is an old soldier, of course, in Dr. King’s crusade, and then the other young black legislators who are coming up in the South, those who were already in office, people like Harold Ford, we’ll be hearing from tonight. They have a big stake in all of this in making sure that their vote counts and that they are a new kind of constituency, not just on autopilot for the Democratic Party anymore.

If you’re new here, you can learn more about Ambassador Andrew Young and other members of our team. Do you know why we vote on Tuesday? If not, find out here.

Screen grab of Brokaw, Brian Williams and Tim Russert from MSNBC.

Why Tuesday? Board Member Norman J. Ornstein

One of the most interesting and significant recent Supreme Court decisions concerned the Indiana voter identification law, in which the court by a 6-3 vote upheld the law despite zero evidence of in-person voting fraud in the state. In a major surprise, Justice John Paul Stevens led the opinion, saying the state’s interest in preventing such fraud justifies the Legislature’s action. Stevens did leave the door open to challenges to other states’ laws if they create too much of a burden on many voters.

Indiana’s law was better by far than the awful Georgia law that was overturned by the courts; in Indiana, the state would provide voters with the appropriate government-issue photo ID for free, while Georgia charged a significant fee, the equivalent of a poll tax. But Indiana’s requirements are plenty burdensome.

Elections need to be fair, and fraud is a real concern, especially in an era where the stakes are very high and the parties are close enough that many elections will be decided by razor-thin margins.

If a person cannot present a passport, driver’s license or other similar form of official identification, he or she must supply an official document, such as a birth certificate, to get the free ID, and getting a copy of a birth certificate is quite costly. The fact is that many elderly people and many poor people don’t drive, don’t fly and don’t have copies of their birth certificates. Read the rest of this entry »