Election reforms

Though Maine, with its statewide ballot, optical scanners and total absence of chads, hanging or otherwise, does not have most of the problems that plagued Florida in the last election, it still can make improvements to keep it among the highest in the nation in voter turnout. Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky has three proposals that are reasonable, affordable and deserve legislative support.

. LD 623 would require training for municipal clerks and registrars at least once every two years. The Office of the Secretary of State would provide the training at no cost, leaving municipalities with only the cost of the lost work time (a half-day) of the officials who attend. Maine’s worst election problem in 2000, in which approximately 500 voters in Portland were incorrectly purged from registration lists and then sent to a central location to re-register and vote, was produced by bookkeeping mistakes. It was made worse by the fact that the central voting area was unable to accommodate the total number of voters and long delays resulted in some voters leaving.

Portland already has taken steps to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again, but properly trained staff could have avoided the problem entirely. Training, in fact, is one of the few areas, in addition to improved technology, that all sides in Congress agree on for election reform. There’s no reason to wait for a federal mandate on this – Mr. Gwadosky has made the price right.

. A second proposal would study the benefits and drawbacks of a central, electronic voter registration data base. Thirty-nine states have or are about to have such lists, and they apparently save time by avoiding duplication, making changes of address in state easier to track and purging the names of former voters more accurately. Maine had the peculiar distinction in the mid-1990s of having the nation’s highest percent of potential voters registered, at just over 100 percent. This anomaly was possible because municipalities had neglected to clean what election officials call dead wood – voters who have moved or died – from their lists. A central list would help Maine keep names up to date while staying in compliance with national standards.

. Finally, LD 1686 would create a uniform time for opening polls in Maine. The bill would establish an opening time of 7 a.m. instead of the current rule of opening between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. for communities with 4,000 or more people and 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. for those with less than 4,000. All polls close at 8 p.m. Given that Maine is trying to make its polls as easy to get to as possible and that many people begin work before 9 a.m., the change seems warranted, and the consistency of opening at the same time would let voters who have moved from one town to another avoid the unhappy surprise of arriving at the polls an hour before they opened.

These are modest reforms that reflect Maine’s good – but hardly perfect – voting procedures. The Legislature should support them to keep Maine moving toward an improved election system.