Democrats Plan to Assess Voting State by State

NYT:
By JACQUELINE PALANK
Published: August 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — The Democratic Party will announce on Thursday a state-by-state effort to identify potential problems in how elections are administered before the 2008 presidential election.

In the 2000 and 2004 elections, there were widespread instances of voters being turned away from the polls because of a shortage of voting machines or the illegal removal of their names from registration lists. And despite changes made in federal election law in 2002, the 2004 election demonstrated that many states and localities were not enforcing them.

The committee will ask staff members to interview election officials in the country’s more than 3,000 counties, said Anna Martinez, director of the committee’s voting rights institute. Ms. Martinez said the interviews would address type of voting machines, how many are sent to a polling place and how absentee ballot requests and voter registrations are handled.

The 2002 law expanded the government’s role in regulating elections and voter registration.
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