Bungled ballots.

• Author: Gumbel, Andrew
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

In his review of my book, Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America, Phil Keisling ("Early and Often," October/November) suggests there is a simple catch-all solution to the problems of electoral malfeasance and mismanagement: voting by mail (VBM). That is the system he introduced in Oregon when he was Secretary of State there, so it's understandable he should feel proud, even a little defensive, of his achievement.

Unfortunately, his reasoning falls right into what, in the book, I term the fallacy of the technological fix. For the past century, reformers have fantasized that if only they could come up with the right mechanism for voting, all the problems associated with elections would magically go away. The punch-card voting machine, which became the butt of jokes in the wake of the 2000 presidential debacle in Florida and a byword for electoral dysfunction, was hailed as just such a miracle machine in the early 1960s. So, too, were the computer touch-screen machines brought in to replace punch cards in Florida's aftermath that are now viewed with suspicion by many leading computer scientists and the General Accounting Office.

The fallacious thinking in all cases is that it is the voting mechanism that needs to be fixed, when in fact it is America's political culture that is principally to blame. I'm willing to believe voting by mail can work in a state like Oregon, which has a relatively small, relatively stable population and a fair-minded political culture.

In Florida, though, things look very different. The fluidity of the population makes balloting by mail hard to organize even under honest management; often people in certain political target areas (like Democrat-leaning Little Haiti in Miami) have complained that their absentee ballot applications have been mishandled or gone unprocessed altogether. A mayoral election in Miami in 1997 was overturned after the courts found evidence of wide-scale fraud involving mail-in ballots--ballots with very similar security safeguards used in Keisline's Oregon. In Palm Beach County in 2004, the electoral authorities decided mail-in envelopes should have the party registration of the individual voter printed on the front-an open invitation to malicious intervention by anyone from the mailman to a partisan poll worker.

Given the shenanigans we saw in several states in both 2000 and 2004, there is no reason to suppose an all-mail system would be any less...