Nairobi Star (Nairobi)
Maina Kiai
28 October 2008
column
Florida — Kenyans and Africans have often regarded the American electoral system as mature; even as a system to be emulated. But the American system has two significant flaws: voter registration, and partisan oversight at the state level, both of which were exposed in the last 2 presidential elections.
Voter registration is especially complicated for non-native English speakers and for those with limited education, and in both 2000 and 2004 thousands of voters were disenfranchised because of minor errors in the registration such as social security numbers wrongly transcribed in the forms. In 2000 the partisan nature of state electoral officials was exposed in Florida where the Governor Jeb Bush's appointee, Katherine Harris was indispensable in shifting and awarding the state to George Bush over Al Gore. She was later rewarded in 2002 with the Republican nomination for a "safe" Congressional seat in Florida that she won.
It is conventional wisdom that low turnouts and less registration favor Republicans because their voters are generally better heeled and therefore have greater flexibility with respect to voting. Conversely, new voters and high turnouts of many people who have experienced barriers with regard to registration, let alone voting, would generally support the Democratic Party which is seen as more pro-poor and pro-middle class.
Over the last few weeks, the McCain campaign has accused the Obama campaign of working with an NGO called ACORN to perpetuate electoral fraud. ACORN stands for Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now, and one of its objectives is to increase voter registration across the USA, as part of its community empowerment strategies. This year alone ACORN has registered more than 1.3 million new voters, mostly from minority and poor backgrounds.
ACORN is one of the groups--registered across many states--that assist state governments in registration of voters. In most of these states, there is a legal requirement that all voter registrations-flawed, wrong or not-must be turned in to the state authorities. What ACORN then does is to point to the authorities where anomalies may exist so that the authorities can correct them or discard the registration.
ACORN is a group that Obama has done legal work for in the past, and which essentially leans Democratic. However, this is it not to say that it is partisan in terms of voter registration. It pays workers to register voters; the workers are paid for each twenty applications filed for registration. Many of these workers are poor and not so educated and include ex-prisoners. And like many of us in Kenya do, some of them cut corners and make up names to fulfill their quotas. So you have registrations taken from telephone directories in certain areas and, in one egregious case, in the name of Mickey Mouse the fictional cartoon character famous in America!
Once the forms are filled however they must be turned in, and ACORN reports that they then flag these forms as they submit them to the authorities, and concurrently fire the workers who perpetrate this fraud. Indeed, no less than the Republican Governor of Florida-an important swing state for both candidates-has discounted the notion of systematic fraud, with his election officials (all Republican) stressing that ACORN officials have indeed brought their attention to the fraudulent cases.
At present, it is expected that 1 percent of ACORN's forms (about 13,000 forms) could contain fictitious names, and as many as 25 percent could be double registrations. But what gives confidence is that clearly fictitious, made-up names cannot vote, and the systems are technologically wired to catch double voting if in fact someone tried to do that. (How I so wish that the ECK had not rejected, out of hand, the offers to technologize their entire operation. But then again, maybe in rejecting the offers they knew something that we didn't know...)
Some Republican Party supporters are turning these incidents into racially tinged issues. Brian Kettenring, a Florida based spokesperson for ACORN told the Miami Herald that since McCain's remarks on ACORN and possible electoral fraud at the last debate with Obama, ACORN has received "hundreds of hostile emails, many of them containing racial slurs," in their 87 offices across the USA. He said that the bulk of the emails were "flat-out racist" or had racial overtones.
The gist of the matter is this: the larger the turnout and the more new voters who register and vote, the more likely that they sway towards Democrats and towards Obama. This is one of the reasons that the Obama campaign has been harping on its supporters to get out and vote early; not on November 4, but as early as some states allow, significant among these states being Florida which opened its polls on October 20th for early voting till November 1st. For poor and marginalized voters, early voting means that if there are challenges or questions about their ballot, these can be rectified and dealt with on time to allow the voter to cast his or her vote and ensure that it counts. In 2000 and 2004, a significant number of voters were sent away in Florida and Ohio on the basis of questionable registration, something that Obama must overcome if he is to win the election.
The accusations are of course worrying and the rightwing TV channel Fox News has mentioned ACORN related stories more than 300 times the last few weeks. So much so that the Obama campaign has asked for an independent prosecutor to deal with the charges, rather than the FBI and the Justice Department which has a record of partisanship in political issues. This was especially true in 2006 when the then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was in charge and, in fact, targeted ACORN.
If there is something that Kenya can in fact teach America about elections it is that the electoral bodies managing elections must not only be impartial and independent, they must be seen to be so. One of the reasons for the crisis that engulfed us from January was that it was reasonable to dispute the election results that ECK released because Mwai Kibaki, in ignoring the IPPG recommendations that he benefited from in 2002, was seen to have manipulated the results by having his men and women on the ECK. In early 2007, in discussions with key government officials I raised this matter, arguing that in a close election, the fact of Kibaki's abrogation of the IPPG agreement would mean that the only acceptable result was one where anyone but Kibaki would be declared victor, since the ECK was Kibaki's and would rule for him. We saw what happened in December 2007, and how I wish I had been wrong!
And on that note, let me repeat here what I told key government officials in 2004 regarding accountability for past injustices: "Dealing with the past can indeed be painful, hard and divisive. But not dealing with impunity is way more costly and those who get away with it will come back and bite harder than they did the previous time." As politicians and their self-interested lawyers and henchmen proceed to run from the Waki report, let it be clear that they are really laying the ground for an even larger crisis than we suffered this year, and next time, I doubt the world will rally around us as they did this year.
I have a feeling, whether Obama wins or not, that if we don't deal with Waki's recommendations and initiate credible investigations, we could well become the Cote d'Ivoire of East Africa, or worse.
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