With its hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, the Florida fiasco compelled this country to confront an ugly reality: that… - John Fund

In November 2003, there was a power failure with one of the Sequoia machines in San Jose, California. It was repaired by unknown technicians in the middle of an election without any supervision from county officials. According to the San Jose Mercury News, no one on site could say what the technicians repaired or changed. Then, in March 2004, Sequoia voting machines failed to record nearly seven thousand votes in Napa County, California, because voters used the wrong ink on optical scan ballots. The glitch affected the outcome of numerous races in all levels of government as well as ballot initiative measures.

It does not take a visionary to see that, in the absence of clear rules, we can expect campaign lawyers to attempt to turn the most implausible legal theory into a court ruling in their favor. Vague rules on provisional voting could create a nightmare in which the results of a presidential race aren’t known for days. Recall the 35 days it took Colorado officials to decide just one congressional race.

A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard: ‘When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.’