By Maryann Bird
Many US voters may be wishing today that they lived in the bizarre cartoon world of South Park, where even children have the right to “declare Shenanigans” if they believe they’ve been cheated by a crooked carnival operator.
Tuesday’s midterm elections featured numerous glitches with new electronic voting machines, as well as downright dirty tricks that again have besmirched the hallowed American democratic process that the Bush administration is so keen to export. Shenanigans, indeed.
“We’re getting reports from all over the place,” said Warren Stewart, policy director of the watchdog organisation VoteTrust USA. “I can’t get them on the website fast enough. Machines of all different makes are breaking down.” In Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Ohio, Colorado (home of South Park) and elsewhere, people complained of machines recording their votes incorrectly or otherwise malfunctioning. Repairmen were sent for, lawsuits were threatened, machines were impounded, provisional paper ballots ran out, frustration and blood-pressure levels rose, investigations were opened.
Whether what Stewart calls “an unmitigated disaster” was due to over-reliance on technology, programming incompetence or shenanigans -- the machine manufacturers have political affiliations of their own -- will be argued vigorously over the coming weeks.
But in the dirty-tricks department, technology and shenanigans clearly came together, and most of the trickery was attributed to Republicans. According to various press reports:
-- Democrats in Virginia received voice-mail messages telling them they were not properly registered to vote and that they would be criminally charged if they turned up at their polling stations.
-- In some states, Democrats (particularly black voters) were phoned and falsely informed that their voting precinct had changed.
-- Black voters in one Virginia county received fliers with a bold headline reading “Skip This Election”.
-- In districts around the country where tight races were run, Democrats and independent voters were bombarded with “robo-calls” – negative, computer-generated calls that often came late at night, in an apparent effort to anger them and put them off voting at all.
-- In Arizona, Hispanic voters were stopped and intimidated outside a Tucson polling place.
-- Sample ballot sheets distributed in Maryland identified the Republican candidates for US senator and state governor as Democrats.
-- A conservative radio talk-show host, Laura Ingraham, derided a voter-protection hotline set up by the Democrats, while repeatedly giving out the phone number; the resulting hoax calls hindered voters with bona fide complaints.
-- Telemarketing techniques normally used to steer consumers to products were employed in Montana, Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri and Ohio – where Senate races were close – to present voters with false or distorted information about Democratic candidates.
Given that election day complaints are, well, as American as apple pie, the US Justice Department reportedly dispatched over 850 observers to 22 states, while some 10,000 attorneys for the Democratic and Republican parties also fanned out on trouble-shooting duty. Clearly, there is a serious electoral mess – reminiscent of Florida’s “hanging chads” fiasco of 2000 -- that needs to be dealt with, particularly with the next presidential election just two years away. “There is more regulation and oversight of slot machines than of voting equipment and election administration in the United States,” declared Steven Hill, director of the New America Foundation’s political reform programme.
Apart from not provoking coups or riots, the process hasn’t been much of an example to the world in recent years. The electronic glitches, one suspects, will be far easier to fix, however, than the tendency to engage in the kind of dirty tricks that undermine democracy. As South Park’s little Kyle shouted at the carnival operator: “That does it! Shenanigans! SHENANIGANS! … I’m declaring Shenanigans on you. This game is rigged.”
