In the days and weeks following the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and after the 2002 midterms, the issue of irregularities produced by the use of electronic voting machines blew up into a major issue in the blogosphere and in the left-wing press. But for the mainstream media, not so much.
By March 2006, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman were able to sum up the outrage felt by elements of the left when they complained that no “major national publication[s] … have seriously investigated how these very electronic machines were used to help steal the presidential election in Ohio 2004, or to defeat two electoral reform issues in Ohio 2005, or to swing key U.S. Senate races in places such as Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado in 2002.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also chimed in, in Rolling Stone, asking “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” while Christopher Hitchens called the results in Ohio during the ’04 presidential race into question.
This is all to say that people were ready and waiting for the ’06 midterms to get messy. Compounding the trepidation was an October 2005 report by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office that found [PDF] that “concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”
That’s why, in the days leading up to the 2006 midterms, we took note of some stories about problems with the machines showing up in big-name publications. In the November 6 issue of Time, Michael Duffy pointed out that of the more than roughly 80 million Americans who were preparing to cast their vote, a full 90 percent “will either cast their vote on a computer or have it tabulated that way.” His piece chillingly outlined all the ways in which a machine can malfunction, either erasing a vote, failing to recognize a user, or recording the wrong vote.
On November 4, the New York Times‘ Ian Urbina checked in with his own lengthy piece about the teams of lawyers the Democrats, Republicans and private interest groups were dispatching around the country in order to either challenge — or beat back a challenge to — the validity of the results.
On October 25, Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post reported that, according to a study done by Electiononline.com, “at least 10 states, including Maryland, remain ripe for voting problems … because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules — and close races.” Just a day earlier, the Post had published a story by Leef Smith outlining some of the specific glitches that computerized voting machines were being shown to manifest — like cutting off the last names of some candidates.
On election day, blogs like Talkingpointsmemo.com and others dutifully cataloged reports of faulty machines around the country, and when taken with the foreboding stories in the mainstream press, we got the distinct feeling that this whole thing was about to get nasty.
Indeed, the early returns looked messy. In a day-after piece, the Times‘ Urbina gathered together some of these reports, while noting that “Common Cause, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said it had received 14,000 calls from voters reporting problems, about 2,000 of them in Pennsylvania,” and that the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law had received some 16,000 calls by Tuesday night, about 2,000 of which came from Ohio. Also on November 8, the Times‘ Tom Zeller Jr. wrote a piece about how blogs were watch-dogging — and cataloging — problems with voting machines around the country.
And then, a great silence fell over the land. Or so we thought.
There seemed to be little in the way of follow up. Were there big problems or not? But then again, we were sticking to the big newsweeklies and a couple of “national” papers — the Times and the Post.
In surveying local coverage across the country, however, we found a treasure trove of stories taking long, hard looks at the irregularities found in districts from sea to shining sea. In the last week or so, the Hartford Courant, Salt Lake Tribune, Buffalo News, Orlando Sentinel, Charlotte Sun-Herald, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Miami Herald, Roanoke Times and dozens of other newspapers have featured stories on local glitches with the machines. (Do a Google search, and you’ll find a ton of reporting about the headaches faulty machines caused local election officials around the country.)
The point of this is to say that it appears (and didn’t we just know this was going to happen?) that the national newsmagazines and big-name papers have moved on to other stories, while there are still very real unresolved issues dealing with the actual act of voting. In the immediate wake of the election, a national narrative quickly developed which held that the Democrats had cleaned up and the GOP had shuffled offstage to lick its wounds. This was quickly followed by the Murtha/Hoyer fight for second in command in the Democrat-controlled House, and the attendant “Can Pelosi lead?” stories that have stacked the coverage. To some extent, those stories sucked up all the oxygen that might otherwise have gone to the still-unresolved voting story and other worthy stories.
We realize that partisan fights are more fun to cover, and offer a juicier read, but the story of broken — or malfunctioning — voting machines is pretty damn important, too. Local reporters are on the story, and the national press corps would do well to follow their lead.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.