Hire experts to check electronic voting

Peggy Engel
pengel@freedomforum.org

Margaret (Peggy) Engel, Nieman fellow 1979; President, Alicia Patterson Foundation, former Washington Post reporter.

Here's my two-cents:

1.      GET OFF THE BUS. Literally. Stop wasting resources and energy dragging along on the press planes and buses for virtually no payoff. Use pool reports for the rare glimmer of news that may surface and I don't mean the mangled pronunciation of small town names or cute asides about local foods the candidates encounter.

2.      Spend much more time checking out candidates' backgrounds and friends, donors, platforms, how the party is organizing its volunteers, media outreach and events.

3.      Hire IT experts who can dig into the electronic voting and the worrisome trust issue.

4.      Bore in on the voting registrars and Secretaries of State on the issue of voter roll erasures. Why is there no national standard for how voters can be flushed from the rolls? What rules and actions on voter access, absentee ballots and erased registrations have taken place, state by state, before the election. Why is America missing so many voters?

The press let citizen smear groups define the 2004 election. How much worse can the process get than that? The only correction is real reporting with iron-clad facts.

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