Glenn Reynolds has an article up over at TCS Daily where he preemptively calls for cleaning up the election system to make it more transparent before the 2008 elections. Frankly, when you have a politician who might be Speaker of the House making a preemptive call of, "We won or they cheated" there is an urgent need for improvements.
As I write this, nobody knows how the elections will turn out. That hasn't stopped some preemptive claims of fraud, though:
Pelosi cautioned that the number of Democratic House victories could be higher or lower and said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count — from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans will try to manipulate the outcome.
"That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?''
Hmm. I thought there was also the variable of how the voters decide to vote on Tuesday. Pelosi seems to regard that as a foregone conclusion, though the polls have been wrong before.
But this sort of talk — destructive and self-serving as it is — merely underscores a point I've made before: An election system that is less than transparent is one that's open to conspiracy theories and fear of fraud, whether or not fraud is actually present. And I've heard quite a few other Democrats echoing Pelosi — and quite a few Republicans speculating that a Democratic Congress will ride in on a wave of votes from dead people and illegal immigrants. That sort of thinking seems much more common among respectable members of both parties than it was a few years ago, and I think there's reason to fear it's getting worse.
He's right. We need to make sure the next election is as clean as can be. You can already see partisans going off on both the left and the right right now and that has got to stop. Voter IDs and paper ballots are a good place to start.
