Commission Creation
Another dangerous election bill.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First
February 26, 2002 10:00 a.m.

hile conservatives have been absorbed in the progress of so-called campaign-finance reform in the House of Representatives, the Senate has been working on an election-reform bill that may prove to be even more damaging to our political system.

Just before its February recess, the Senate began debate on a compromise version of S.565, an election-reform bill originally offered by Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) and cosponsored by every Democratic senator and Jim Jeffords (Whatever, Vt.).

S.565, "The Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act," is now the Dodd-McConnell-Schumer-Bond-Torricelli bill because of justifiable Republican concerns about vote fraud. While liberals vociferously complain about Florida ballot designs, they have remained all but mute on the subject of flagrant vote fraud in many other jurisdictions, such as St. Louis, where a former Alderman, Albert Villa, registered to vote in 2001 despite having been dead for ten years.

Unfortunately, S.565 creates a permanent "Election Administration Commission," an action which will ultimately benefit liberals far more than conservatives.

The problem with all such federal commissions is they must be staffed. There are few Republicans, let alone conservatives, who have devoted their lives to election procedures. (This is why Al Gore expected to easily win his legal challenges in Florida.)

By contrast, Democrats enjoy a considerable oversupply of liberal extremists like Lani Guinier who live and breathe election procedures and who would be more than eager to serve on any Election Administration Commission.

This vastly different level of interest in election matters was explained by Jonah Goldberg in another context when he wrote: "Democracy, socialism, Communism, liberalism, these sorts of -isms have an endpoint in mind, a utopian goal or standard of some kind. Conservatism, however, does not. . . . Politics is not supposed to be about everything."

However for the liberal, and especially the extreme leftist, politics is precisely about everything. Elections are religious activities (so long as liberals win). Thus anything that keeps liberals from winning elections or reduces confidence in government becomes a demon which must be exorcised.

What all this means is that, over time, ideas once consigned to the crackpot regions of academia become transmuted by federal commissions into conventional wisdom. The amount of harm that a federal Election Administration Commission can do may be judged from its potential impact on bilingual balloting requirements.

This commission would be charged with, among other things, conducting "periodic studies" on such election administration issues as: "methods of ensuring the accessibility of voting, registration, polling places, and voting equipment to all voters, including . . . voters with limited proficiency in the English language."

Now bilingual ballots actually do not help limited-English-proficient people vote. As I noted in an earlier column for National Review Online, bilingual ballots are susceptible to translation errors.

Multilingual voting is also expensive. In a June 7, 1996, "Dear Colleague" letter, Ed Pastor and Lincoln Diaz Balart admitted that "the average cost of providing written assistance . . . cost[s] an average of 2.9% of election expenses or less." That average may or may not have included Hawaii, which spent $34,246.29 in 1994 to print one particular ballot which was used just four times — a cost of nearly $9,000 per ballot.

As long as Clinton Executive Order 13166 remains on the books, any federal funds given to states for voting machines carry with those funds multilingual mandates which apply to "[p]rograms that serve a few or even one LEP person."

Senate Republicans would do well to remember that there was an attempt to use the failure to provide bilingual ballots as a means to swing the 2000 presidential election to Al Gore.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, NAACP spokeswoman Jean Ross announced the organization's plans to file a lawsuit against Florida's voting practices because, in part: "Violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 took place . . . We are charging that poll workers were inadequately trained . . In Haitian neighborhoods, there were supposed to be bilingual ballots. They were not available."

The Washington Post had also pounced on the language issue, noting on November 7, 2000:

In Miami, a number of Haitian Americans, many of them first-time voters in the United States, said they were turned away from polling stations after complaining the ballots confused them. They claim to have been denied translation help and other assistance that was supposed to be available from election officials.

Republican leaders should remember that a compromise between those who want to do something and those who want merely to stop something always benefits the former at the expense of the latter. S.565 belongs in the same dustbin as the Florida-ballot chads.