Conyers Brings Election Reform to House Floor
By Rep. John Conyers
I, along with Rep. Maxine Waters, offered an amendment on the House floor that represented the first time we were able to vote on a post-Ohio election reform issue. I thought Republicans would have seen the logic in assuring that we have a fair allocation of machines between the cities and suburbs, but I was unfortunately wrong. The Stakeholder has a summary describing how the entire debate went down today.
"I thought Republicans would have seen the logic in assuring that we have a fair allocation of machines between the cities and suburbs, but I was unfortunately wrong."
— Rep. John Conyers |
But despite the defeat on the floor, I am proud that we finally got a vote on at least one issue, and we can assess some accountability on the issue. However, I assure you, we will not give up with this one vote.
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Summary of Stakeholder article:
House GOP Votes Against Fair Allocation of Machines and Poll Workers
In another astounding display of political hubris, today every single Republican voted against a Conyers-Waters amendment to provide that states provide a minimum required number of functioning and accurate voting machines and poll workers for all precincts.
The purpose of the amendment was simple, and one would have thought, non-controversial — to avoid the misallocation of voting machines and poll workers that led to lines of ten hours or more in the Ohio presidential election and disenfranchised tens of thousands of thousands of minority voters. (The amendment was offered in the context of an arcane continuity bill, providing for expedited elections in the event of an attack on Congress — so for procedural reasons, it was limited to the special elections).
By now it is widely known that in Franklin County that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush, while six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry. The Washington Post found that election officials in Franklin County decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines, and that in Columbus alone the misallocation of machines reduced the number of voters by up to 15,000 votes.
We also know that a New York Times investigation revealed that Franklin County election officials reduced the number of electronic voting machines assigned to downtown precincts and added them to the suburbs. "They used a formula based not on the number of registered voters, but on past turnout in each precinct and on the number of so-called active voters - a smaller universe. . . . In the Columbus area, the result was that suburban precincts that supported Mr. Bush tended to have more machines per registered voter than center city precincts that supported Mr. Kerry."
What did the Republicans have to say about this common sense proposal to protect and preserve the right to vote — essentially, nothing. Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI) said there are a lot of election reform bills out there, and we?ll deal with them in due course — of course you could say that about every single legislative proposal known to man. Next, none other than the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, said we needed to pass the continuity bill to strike a blow against terrorism — basically, he was saying lets just have the special elections, and the hell with whether or not they are fair.
Its amazing that with all of the holes and problems in our regular elections, as evidenced by the debacle in Ohio, the Republicans are more interested in creating new types of special elections we may never have instead of fixing the elections we know we will have. Fortunately, every single Democrat voted for the motion, which failed on a party line 196-223 vote.
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