WASHINGTON — Ambitious efforts to modernize the nation's patchwork voting system were finally supposed to pay big dividends in the 2006 congressional balloting, but instead election day could bring a new round of problems, confusion and partisan rancor.
Unproven electronic voting machines, stricter voter identification requirements in many states, new databases and partisan disputes over registration campaigns are all contributing to the concern. So are the closely divided nature of the American electorate and the rising stakes in this year's voting as Democrats appear poised for major gains.
"The Nov. 7 election promises to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections: a divided body politic, an election system in flux, and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide," said a report released today by the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project.
"As the midterm elections approach, machine failures, database delays and foul-ups, inconsistent procedures, new rules and new equipment have some predicting chaos at the polls at worst and widespread polling place snafus at best," said the report, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and is available on the Internet at \o7electionline.org\f7.
Some election officials insist such pessimistic predictions are overblown.
"It is a lot of new technology," said Deborah L. Markowitz, president of the National Assn. of Secretaries of State. "But we did have test drives, which were our primary elections this summer and fall, and by and large, things went pretty well." Markowitz, a Democrat, is Vermont's secretary of state.
But Caltech political science professor Michael Alvarez said election systems in most states remain works in progress, and goals for preventing another debacle like Florida's ballot counting in the 2000 presidential election have yet to be reached.
"States have made some progress, and you continue to see some improvement. But it doesn't appear that we have fully fixed a lot of the problems with voting," said Alvarez, who is co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project.
"The bottom line here is that we are in a period of closely contested elections in the American body politic," Alvarez added. "Nobody would care about this if elections weren't so close."
