2006, Year of the Glitch?
by
Christopher Wilson
(July, 21st,
2006)
2006 has proven to be an interesting year for
election administration. We are
pitted now between two views of the situation.
On the one hand we have those that have predicted a train wreck.
So far that hasn’t been shown to be true.
And the other camp has declared this to be, at least, the year of the
“glitch.”
What is amazing about those who are angry about the existence of glitches in
2006, is that every year is the year
of the glitch. We are now dealing with two competing views in elections.
I’ll call the one side the Idealists and the other side Realists.
Idealists think that it is possible to have a nation where every vote is always counted correctly and no issues with election administration occur. This group pounces on every little flaw and issue that arises. If the post office loses an absentee ballot, they track this on their web site and argue that elections officials should somehow know better.
The realist, on the other hand, understands that given the complexity of elections there will always be problems and things that don’t go smoothly. Given that no other single industry serves as many customers on a single day as the election industry, it’s not surprising that problems do arise.
I’m not painting a straw man when I sketch out the Idealists. They really do seem to believe that any glitch is a damning condemnation of some poor election administrator. Does any other industry maintain perfection with its records and processes? No. The banks and airlines screw up just as much as the utilities and schools. We have seen recently that the scanners used to grade the college entrance exams (SATs) failed to work properly.
I’m not suggesting that we ignore glitches or discount their seriousness. I just think that in the end it will be a rather boring job to document them all. Nor has it been shown that all the glitches added up together constitute a train wreck. The much talked about “train wreck” simply hasn’t happened.
Election administrators take any irregularity seriously. A glitch free election is regarded as a Regulative Ideal. It is an end point to which we strive, but often fall short. In my experience, virtually every election office has an “After Election” staff meeting where problems and issues are discussed, and ways to correct those are addressed. This process goes on over and over, election after election. In the end, the process DOES get smoother and better, but it never is 100% perfect.
This fall certainly will prove interesting. We will have our share of glitches. We will probably have more than usual, considering how much new equipment is out there and the fact that many staff members are not adequately trained. If you couple that with the injection of politics into election administration, and the litigation that follows, you can see we are in for a rocky ride.
The Idealists are simply wrong about
this. Even if the