Second in a series on election problems in battleground states.

In Missouri, election administration issues have been especially controversial because secretary of state Matt Blunt—who administers the system—is also running for governor. In 2000, Missouri came in second only to Florida in the number of allegations made about both voter fraud and vote suppression, leading to a consent decree with the Department of Justice. Moreover, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri has been the national point man on the voting fraud issue for the last four years.
State election laws passed in Missouri after the 2000 election and the enactment of the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), recent policy choices related to HAVA implementation and court decisions that have interpreted HAVA restrictively, all compound the likelihood that major problems will arise again in the state this year.

Voter ID

HAVA requires only a small segment of voters to present identification to vote. Nonetheless, in 2002, Missouri decided to go much further. It passed legislation requiring all voters to show ID when voting. However, there is one exception: if the poll workers know the voter, that voter does not have to show ID.

This is a huge opening to abuse of the ID requirement and selective enforcement. It is not difficult to imagine who poll workers might allow to pass through undisturbed, and which voters they will make demands of. There already were allegations of selective enforcement of the ID rules during the primaries in other states. Will this also present an opportunity to file equal protection based litigation?

Provisional Ballots

Under HAVA, any voter who does not appear on the voter list or is told by the poll official he or she is not eligible to vote, but believes he is a registered voter in that jurisdiction, has the right to cast a provisional ballot, the legitimacy of which will be determined later. The purpose of that change was to ensure that no voter would be turned away from the polls.

Missouri state law (enacted since HAVA) mandates that provisional ballots be thrown out if the voter cast the ballot in the wrong polling place. The state Democratic Party filed a federal suit against the Missouri secretary of state alleging that these provisions violate HAVA and defeat the purpose of provisional ballots. The party also argued in an equal-protection claim that in Missouri's 2002 election, African-Americans were significantly more likely than whites to have their provisional ballots thrown out. A District Court judge ruled on October 12 (PDF) that provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct must be discarded—provided the voter was given the correct polling site by a poll worker.

Both sides claimed a win in this decision. However, the question now is, how can that ruling be enforced? How does anyone prove whether the voter was told the correct polling site by the poll worker? Will both parties be required to sign something affirming that conversation took place? Will this just add to what already may be a highly contentious battle over the counting of provisional ballots?

Machines

HAVA provided $325 million for the replacement of punch card and lever machines. Nonetheless, because of inaction by election officials, a majority of Missourians will continue to use both lever machines and the same punch card systems that were the center of criticism in Florida in 2000.

It is notable that these systems are used in many urban centers, including St. Louis and Kansas City. In addition to being widely recognized as the least accurate type of voting technology, we know that punch card machines record the votes of minority voters even less accurately than the rest of the population. Moreover, more accurate technology, such as optical scan machines, will be used in other parts of the state. That raises the prospect of a possible equal protection, Bush v. Gore-based lawsuit.

Military Voters

In a controversial way, one group of Missouri voters will have an easier time of voting this year: military personnel. That is because Missouri, by the secretary of state's choice, is one of two states that is allowing military personnel overseas to email their ballots. This is troubling for two reasons: those who choose this option are implicitly waiving their right to a secret ballot. More importantly, the e-mailed voting choices will be sent to a Pentagon contractor, who will then fax them to elections officials in Missouri. There have been allegations the contractor has partisan ties.

The role of the secretary of state in Missouri as both head of elections and a partisan candidate—not only for re-election but election for governor—underscores the problem of partisans running the administration of elections. Unfortunately, most states do it this way—voters everywhere will remember the role Katharine Harris, Florida's elected secretary of state, played in the election of 2000. Maybe the silver lining of a problematic election in Missouri will be renewed calls for getting politics out of election administration in the United States.

Tova Andrea Wang is a program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation. She is most recently the author of an issue brief entitled Playing Games with Democracy, on how the Help America Vote Act is being used to disenfranchise voters.