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Editorials
Wednesday, September 27, 2000
State must try harder
to cut spoiled ballotsThe issue: Thousands of ballots were spoiled in the elections Saturday.
MANY people don't read instructions carefully. This causes innumerable blunders, from the trivial to the disastrous. It is also the reason so many ballots in the primary elections last Saturday were spoiled.
The state Office of Elections estimated that 9,300 ballots did not count because people attempted to vote for candidates in more than one party.
A spokesman for the office said most of the people who voted improperly were given a chance to correct the problem but many apparently left the polling places without resubmitting corrected ballots. Those who voted absentee had no opportunity to correct their ballots.
State law requires voters in a primary election to choose only one party's candidates. Unfortunately, this requirement wasn't understood by some voters although the ballot instructions and election workers emphasized it.
It didn't help that the ballot included candidates in both party primaries and nonpartisan elections. In the nonpartisan contests, voters had an unrestricted choice. This was complicated and, for some, confusing. But a careful reading of the instructions should have prevented errors.
Two years ago malfunctioning electronic voting machines in seven precincts prompted protests and inspired a recount of the entire vote. This year the machines, which had been modified since the last election, weren't the problem. A few machines malfunctioned but were quickly replaced.
In fact the machines were helpful because they immediately rejected the spoiled ballots, giving the voters an opportunity to correct their mistakes before leaving the polling place. Election workers were on hand to explain the problem. In the system used before 1998, there was no opportunity for the voter to correct a spoiled ballot.
The ballot could have been better designed. As a letter writer pointed out, partisan ballots were on both sides of the voting sheet. The Democratic Party section was placed adjacent to the nonpartisan section while the other parties were on the other side of the sheet, confusing some voters.
It would be less confusing to group all the partisan sections on one side of the sheet and put the nonpartisan section on the other side.
In addition to redesigning the ballot, the state should make a greater effort to educate citizens about the requirements for voting in the primaries. You can vote in any party's primary but you must choose only one party.
That shouldn't be so difficult to understand, but the message has to get out to the voters -- and they have to pay attention.
State Elections Web Site
Sanctions on Iraq
EFFECTIVE economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq are being jeopardized by Russian and French flights conducted without United Nations approval. Jordan is considering similar flights.
Sanctions may be further eroded as long as a U.N. committee fails to clarify the scope of sanctions against Iraq. The United States needs to press the committee further to tighten measures against Saddam.
Three Russian planes have landed at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad since it reopened Aug. 17. Its most recent flight, arriving Saturday, carried a Russian delegation of 100, including a marching band and a soccer team and headed by the leader of a Russian-Iraqi cultural, scientific and economic organization. A Russian request for a fourth flight is pending before the U.N. sanctions committee.
Last Friday, a French flight arrived at the Baghdad airport. A second flight, carrying French politicians and intellectuals, has been chartered by a former French foreign minister and two other former cabinet members to fly to Baghdad from Paris this Friday.
These flights are an attempt by Iraq's sympathizers on the U.N. Security Council -- Russia, France and China -- to chip away at the sanctions imposed in 1990 when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. Russia and France maintain that the sanctions apply only to freight and commercial passenger flights.
Richard Butler, a former U.N. weapons inspector until the Saddam regime refused to cooperate in 1998, told a congressional committee that the United States should make clear it will not tolerate such defiance of the embargo. The flights, he said, are moves by permanent Security Council members to "pursue what they consider to be their narrow national interest...the money that Iraq owes them or some notion of wanting to twist the United States' tail now that it's the sole superpower, or whatever reason."
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she was "very concerned" about the Russian and French flights but ruled out cutting off aid to Russia because such aid is "in our national interest."
However, other diplomatic measures are needed to attain strict compliance with sanctions against a terrorist regime that continues to produce weapons of mass destruction. Toleration of such violations could lead to the collapse of the sanctions.
Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited PartnershipRupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
