Are we ready for the election?

From the American Progress Action Fund:

Four Years Later, Are We Ready?
After the debacle that was the 2000 election process, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to "help prevent a replay of the Florida punch card-counting embarrassment that left many Americans wondering about the reliability of our voting system." Underfunding and ongoing political machinations, however, have left election reform gridlocked. Ongoing problems: although HAVA authorized the government to spend up to $3.9 billion over three years on new voting equipment, states have thus far received less than half of that. The law requires every state to create a computerized database of all registered voters; today forty states have been able to bypass this requirement, having been granted waivers of their obligation until 2006. And although, as the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project reports, "punch cards have the highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots over the last four presidential elections," 32 million voters still live in jurisdictions that will use those very same punch card ballots.
ASHCROFT'S COUP: Watching over voter integrity is the job of Attorney General John Ashcroft and lawyers in the Justice Department. A new article in the New Yorker asks, "Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud—or to keep voters from voting?" One looming issue: under Ashcroft, the method of hiring lawyers has changed. In the past, Justice Department lawyers were supposed to be apolitical, hired to spend their careers in government. The hiring program, known as the Attorney General's Honors Program, was run by other mid-level career officials known for their political independence. No more. In 2002, Ashcroft changed the system, putting political appointees in charge. Now, "lawyers inside and outside the department say that the change in the Honors Program has already had an effect, especially in politically sensitive places like the Voting Section."
VALID VOTERS STRUCK FROM ROLLS: Florida is one of only seven states in the union which denies former felons the right to vote, even after they've completed their sentences. In 2000, the state hired an outside contractor to implement a "felon list." Riddled with errors, this list struck thousands of innocent voters from the rolls. Lessons have not been learned. This past May, the Florida Division of Elections quietly distributed a brand-new purge list for the upcoming election. The outgoing head of the division, Ed Kast, sent a memo to election supervisors on May 12, 2004, detailing how to keep the list out of the hands of advocacy groups that wanted to double check the names, "citing statutes about the privacy of voter registration information and the will of the legislature – even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns." Later that month, after CNN filed suit to gain access to the rolls, they found the new list wrongly included thousands of eligible voters and "heavily targeted African-Americans – who traditionally vote Democrat – while "virtually ignoring Hispanic voters" – who, in Florida, are often more likely to check the box next to GOP names.
ACCENTURE-ATE THE NEGATIVE: After the felon list fiasco in 2000, the Florida legislature mandated that no outside vendor perform that kind of work for the state again. The new Florida purge list, however, was put together with help from Accenture. Accenture, formerly the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, "has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida. The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials." (In 2001, the company, which was paid $1.6 million for its work on Florida elections, skipped town and relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes.)
THE RIGHT TO VOTE IS TOO PRICEY: Republican state Senator Anna Cowin, head of the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, keeps shooting down proposals from black lawmakers to come up with legislation to restore voting rights to former felons. In the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair, she explains why: "It makes elections very expensive...because you have all these thousands and thousands of people – I mean tens of thousands of people – to send literature to…The people don't come to vote, anyway."
PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE POLLS: The election system is still rife with political maneuverings. In Florida this week, the Division of Elections Director Dawn Roberts steamrolled over an injunction preventing Ralph Nader from appearing on the Florida ballot, directing 67 county voting supervisors to put his name on overseas absentee ballots. (Her excuse? Hurricane Ivan.) A Florida judge ordered election officials to abide by the injunction until the case is heard by the Florida Supreme Court this Friday.
UNDER INVESTIGATION: According to The New York Times, the Pentagon has contracted the handling of overseas ballots to a firm, Omega Technologies Inc., which has had been in trouble in the past for shady business dealings. "In 2002, a resort in Nashville, Gaylord Opryland, accused Omega of failing to pay a bill for $136,187 that the company had incurred in running an Army symposium at the resort. In its lawsuit, Gaylord said the Omega president, Patricia A. Williams, falsely said the payment had been sent and on one occasion provided a fictitious Federal Express package tracking number. Gaylord also said Ms. Williams sent a $50,000 check that bounced."