It's an interesting day for the New York Times Editorial Board. While it has been stumbling around the last couple of years trying to find its feet as conservatism collapsed and it was faced with a Democratic president aping Republican policies they'd been volubly against for years, it found itself sinking into a mire of irrelevance and confusion, becoming more often a local scold than the national conscience it was during Bush's first term and half of his second.
Lately there has been some attempt to regain its old stature. Unfortunately, that attempt has too often consisted of following behind blogs in opining about the previous days' events. Read it in firedoglake on Monday, TPM on Tuesday, and on the NYT ed page Wednesday, pretty much. Today they broke the mold a little by introducing a couple of important topics that haven't been heavy blog topics and have in fact been largely ignored by everybody, blogosphere and mass media alike. Neither of the issues is new and neither editorial has much of anything new to say about them, but both are important and the fact that the NYT is raising them at all might help bring them back into prominence, at least for a little while.
Fact-esque has been on this subject like white on rice for years with eRobin leading the way agitating for voting machines that generate paper ballots as a physical confirmation of the vote. Years after two national elections might not have been stolen if she'd been listened to, the NYT has noticed that she was right all along: without a paper trail, you can't trust electronic machines.
Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted. In 2008, more than one-third of the states, including New Jersey and Texas, still did not require all votes to be recorded on paper.
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In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft — by malicious software or computer hacking — did not change the outcome. If there is a close election, there is also no way of conducting a meaningful recount.
Put this in the "better late than never" category but give them credit for bringing it up while there's still time to do something about it. The putative motivation for the ed is Rush Holt's bill, still making its way through the House calendar at the speed of an impacted glacier. Holt introduced his bill years ago. I don't know its history as well as I should (Rob probably knows) but I suspect it's safe to say it hasn't been on a front burner in the House. Ever. The NYT Board says it ought to be, and they're absolutely right.
Mr. Holt’s bill would require paper ballots to be used for every vote cast in November 2010. It would help prod election officials toward the best of the currently available technologies: optical-scan voting. With optical scans, voters fill out a paper ballot that is then read by computer — much like a standardized test. The votes are counted quickly and efficiently by computer, but the paper ballot remains the official vote, which can then be recounted by hand.
The bill would also require the states to conduct random hand recounts of paper ballots in 3 percent of the precincts in federal elections, and more in very close races. These routine audits are an important check on the accuracy of the computer count.
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The House leadership should make passing Mr. Holt’s bill a priority. Few issues matter as much as ensuring that election results can be trusted.
A democracy where the voting can't be trusted is a) not a democracy at all and b) an invitation to steal elections as the GOP did in 2000 and 2004. One has to ask: At this point, what's the big deal? Why haasn't this been done yet? It's a no-brainer, and if there's one thing we have a surfeit of in the Congressional Democratic Congress, it's no brains. Or are the Senate ConservaDems planning to maybe steal a few elections of their own? Make sure no damn progressives or liberal FDR Dems sneak past their vigilant eyes in the primaries?
Don't put it past them. If they have no ethical problem with the state secrets policy, torture by Americans, invading citizens' privacy, or the continued existence of Gitmo - and they don't - they're unlikely to have an ethics problem with a little thing like stealing elections. I mean, doesn't everybody do it?
This needs to get put on a front burner at least long enough to get 'er done. Let's hope the weight the NYT maintains, however slighted by the diminution of its once-glittering reputation, remains significant enough to get this issue the attention it deserves to have.
President Obama, to his great credit, is - despite all the crises that have been demanding his attention - already moving to address the problem of polluted oceans and overfishing. This week he "ordered a new task force to develop a national oceans policy". Not a sexy subject but damned important to life on this planet. The NYT ed gives it some cachet.
He said he wants a more unified federal approach to ocean issues, now spread across 20 different agencies operating under 140 separate laws. He also wants a plan for allocating resources among competing interests like fishing and oil exploration.
A more immediate measure of the administration’s commitment is the steps it is taking to meet a 2006 Congressional mandate to end overfishing in America’s coastal waters by 2011. The most important of these is an effort led by Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist who runs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her mission is to persuade America’s fishermen to broadly adopt a market-based approach known as “catch shares” to manage their fisheries sustainably.
It's a Bush idea and as such must be recognized as limited in its ability to do what we need it to do, but it's a start and unlike the sad waste of time we're spending on "pollution credits" - a terrible idea - it might actually be more appropriate in this area. They ain't exactly beatin a drum in this ed but, hey, at least they noticed. That's always good.
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