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Imagine a country on election day where you know the results the instant the polls close. The votes are counted electronically, every district and state has the same rules and the same organized voting procedure. It is managed by a non-partisan independent body. Sounds like the greatest democracy in the world, right? Try Mexico. Or France, Germany, Brazil. Certainly not the United States of America.

America has one of the world’s most antique, politicized and dysfunctional procedures for its elections. A crazy quilt patchwork of state and local laws with partisan officials making key decisions and ancient technology that often breaks down. There are no national standards. American voters in more than a dozen states, for example, don’t need ID. But even India, with a GDP just 12 percent that of ours, is implementing a national biometric database for 1.2 billion voters. The nascent democracy in Iraq famously dipped voters’ fingers in purple to ensure they didn't vote again. Why are we so behind the curve?

The conservative columnist David Frum recently wrote an excellent article for CNN.com and he tells a story about the 2000 presidential election. The city of St. Louis, Missouri had outdated voting equipment. So there were long delays in voting. But St. Louis was heavily democratic, so Al Gore’s campaign asked a judge to extend voting by three hours.

The judge agreed. But then George W. Bush's campaign protested, and the judge was overruled. Meanwhile voting had already continued 45 minutes past the legal time.

Is that how elections should work in the world’s greatest democracy? In most other democracies, an independent national body would make the big decisions. There would be non-partisan observers at the polls. And of course, there would be modern, functioning equipment. Even Venezuela, which had elections last month, had electronic voting booths with biometric technology across the country.

We’ve been criticized around the world for this. I saw a scathing 116-page report about our electoral process published by, of all places, Russia. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s translation of it: “The electoral system and electoral laws of the United States are…contradictory, archaic, and, moreover, do not meet the democratic principles that the U.S. proclaims are fundamental to its foreign and domestic policy.”

I hate to say it, but Moscow has a point. (On the other hand, we do have one thing the Russians don’t: actual free elections.)

This election season we’ve seen attempts to shorten the early voting period to further one party’s chances of victory. Our ballots can be as long as a dozen pages. In some places they are paper ballots, and in some they are electronic. And Election Day always falls on a Tuesday – a working day. Every four years we see the chaos of American elections, but nothing changes.

Last week, international election observers were banned from nine states. Some of these men and women were threatened with arrest. Maybe we should start learning from election officials from abroad, not try to throw them into jail. http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/14/americas-election-p
rocess-an-international-embarrassment/?hpt=hp_bn2]
I posted the entire article, as I don't think Fareed Zakaria will mind if he doesn't get enough "clicks" on what he has to say.

I think what he had to say is vital for this country. I know our antiquated and confusing election process benefits some, which is, in my mind, even LESS excuse for fixing it.

That last part infuriates me. Don't we FORCE election observers on other countries? Have we become a third-world country where the government is quite content to keep the rest of the world from seeing our dirty laundry?

Before we go about "fixing" the electoral college (about the existence of which I have my own disagreement), maybe there should be some kind of big push by the CITIZENS to fix our elections themselves!

A few examples:

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Miami Election Protection Workers Report Hijinks

Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, senior attorney and director of voter protection for the Advancement Project, a civil rights group, reported to HuffPost problems in two precincts. She said that she had to return to one North Miami precinct three times to assist poll workers.

In one instance, elderly residents, and residents with literacy issues sought out help from Advancement Project staff. Poll watchers intervened and tried to prevent them from assisting these voters, Culliton-Gonzalez said.

The same precinct also did not have a bilingual poll worker. An election protection worker was asked to help translate. That worker was promptly kicked out of the precinct. After much back and forth, she was allowed back in," she said. She was evicted a second time, before polling staff again allowed her back in.

In another precinct, Culliton-Gonzalez said a GOP lawyer managed to get inside the voting area. "The voters and the poll workers were all people of color," she explained. "She bullied her way in."

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Virginia Voter Questioned About Address

HuffPost reader Kira Young reported she was questioned intensely by a poll worker in Winchester, Va., this morning about her street address. Young said that when she presented her voter I.D. card to the poll worker, the worker pressed for details of where her house was located. Young said the poll worker said it was because he had never heard of Young's street.

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Voting Problems In Ohio, Texas, According To Election Protection Volunteers

Ellis Jacobs, an attorney and volunteer with Election Protection in Montgomery County, Ohio, noted that as part of a cost-saving measure, Montgomery County is operating half as many polling places this year as it did in 2008, a cutback that he said “forced a lot of people into some locations that were not necessarily suited to have a lot of people,” and created some “claustrophobic” situations early in the day.

Jacobs also said that he’d been told a woman claiming to be from ORCA -- a Republican poll monitoring program staffed by volunteers -- came to a Dayton polling location and spent time “looking over the shoulders of the poll workers” and “telling the poll workers what they should and should not be doing.” Jacobs said that the woman was reportedly removed from the polling station after staffers asked if she was there in an official capacity and she said that she was not.

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Kansas Poll Worker Asks More Than Required On Voter I.D.

A poll worker in Wichita, Kan., was matching voters' addresses on voter rolls with the address on their photo I.D. -- a level of identification not required under state law, a HuffPost reader reported. Under state law, the I.D. card has to have a photo of the voter, but does not need to show a current address. The decision to try to match the addresses was causing a backup in provisional ballots being distributed to voters at Central Christian Church.

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Thousands Of Ballots In Colorado Are Rejected

Thousands of Colorado mail ballots have been rejected because of signature issues. Voters either didn't sign them or election officials have determined there is a discrepancy.

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Forced To Vote Provisionally In Ohio

HuffPost reader Ryan Mobley reports that he and his sister were forced to cast provisional ballots Tuesday morning in Greene County, Ohio. Mobley said that while they both received confirmation from county election officials over the summer that indicated they were registered to vote in Greene County, neither of their names appeared in the voting book when they went to vote. He said he produced ID and other documents with his address and was told he was only able to vote provisionally. Mobley noted that a poll worker had to open a packet of provisional ballots for the two to use and also read the directions for provisional voting.

"I am truly disgusted," Mobley said. "I am a young voter but have exercised my right to vote many times before. I have also voted in Franklin and Montgomery counties in the past and I have never experienced a problem before today."

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It goes on and on and on...these stories come from voter e-mails, news reports from Reuters, newspapers such as the Washington Examiner, Denver Post, etc. They can all be checked out and have links to their original publications at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/2012-elections-polling-places
_n_2036228.html#71_forced-to-vote-provisionally-in-ohio

These are only the ones we KNOW of, and only those we know of that were REPORTED. I'm ashamed of my country.

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At the same time I fear that those who would have to reform it, our representatives, would somehow find a way to reform it in their favor. We must make sure that any reform happens at a time when the country is evenly divided, so that each side's finagling offsets the finagling of the opposition and no one can manage an advantage.

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It seems to me that there is a fundamental inequity about allowing different people different voting rights when it is a federal election.

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And shouldn't the aim be to make it as inclusive and easy as possible.

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If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen.

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The States and their people are pretty jealous of their rights and might not want to give them up.

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if you are after perfection in any system, you are really on the fast track to disappointment

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