JACKSON - Whatever happened to the $24 million we were supposed to be getting from Washington to modernize our voting equipment and install a statewide computerized voter base?
And finally get an accurate count on how many voters we actually have in Mississippi?
Some months ago, you remember, Congress, horrified by the 2000 presidential vote-counting fiasco in Florida, was hot to trot to give states the wherewithal to junk punch-card voting machines and other antiquated devices that Florida-gate brought to light.
The U.S. House last December had passed its Ney-Hoyer "Help America Vote" bill, basically authorizing $400 million over three years for states to upgrade voting equipment, plus another $2.5 billion to help states install a uniform statewide computerized voter base.
In April, the U.S. Senate approved a similar version of Ney-Hoyer. Ever since, the once-urgent vote-counting reform legislation has been lodged in a House-Senate conference committee and is destined to stay there at least until after Congress ends its summer vacation later this month.
States like Mississippi, which meantime has put in place all the preliminary steps necessary to comply with the federal voter reforms, wait desperately for the final ingredient - money - in order to install the proposed sweeping changes in our election machinery.
One member of Mississippi's congressional delegation says the chances are gloomy that anything will happen on Ney-Hoyer until after the November elections.
Democratic Rep. Gene Taylor says that the Florida-inspired vote-counting reform measure is "too high profile of a bill to be allowed to die, however I don't see the Republican majority in the House in any particular hurry to get it done."
His guess is that Ney-Hoyer (so named for GOP Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio and Democrat Steny Hoyer of Maryland) "will probably be in the flurry of bills we always pass in November after the mid-term elections."
Congress' failure to complete the task of helping states replace old voting machines, and upgrade their election systems, has brought increasing criticism nationally as mid-term elections approach.
Particularly say some national critics, Congress doesn't have the excuse of being distracted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, because Ney-Hoyer passed both branches after 9/11.
Some states such as Maryland have not waited for Congress to come up with the cash to replace their voting equipment and have done it on their own, even in the face of tough fiscal times back at home.
Maryland has issued some $28 million in bonds to put the state-of the-art touch screen voting machines in every precinct and has been holding public demonstrations around the state to get voters familiarized with the devices. Also Maryland has hooked every county's voter rolls into the secretary of state's computer data base.
Mississippi Secretary of State Eric Clark plans to do what Maryland has done as soon as he gets the funding from the feds. Meantime, he has put Mississippi's house in order to qualify for the federal money when it does come.
He pushed through bills at the 2002 legislative session that: l. Required counties to link their voter rolls to a single computer database; 2.Set standards to prevent the massive "over-vote" and "under-vote" fiasco that left uncounted thousands of 2000 presidential ballots legally cast in Florida; and 3. Required counties to report all residual (uncounted) votes in every election in order to analyze data and find corrective measures.
All of the Mississippi election laws passed in the 2002 session, which came out of a bipartisan Election Reform Task Force Clark had assembled in early 2001, have been precleared by the U.S. Justice Department under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Clark is now in process of forming a 10-member advisory committee to recommend which computer system will be bought to link all 82 county voter rolls into a single statewide voter roll network.
In years past, Mississippi has been without a central register of voters, and consequently we have never had a true picture of how many voters were eligible to cast ballots in any statewide election. The guess has been around 1.7 million, but we really don't know.
The big reason is that we're dependent on a slipshod system of individual counties maintaining their own voter rolls. Many counties have not purged their rolls for years to remove dead people, those who moved away, or those disqualified by a felony conviction.
Clark wants to put all the tools in place so that the counties can do a much better job of keeping accurate voter lists, but he still shies away from being handed the power on his own to remove voters from county rolls.
Three years ago, without any special funding from the state (and certainly no federal money), Clark had undertaken a campaign using Board of Health and postal records to identify names of "phantom" voters still listed on voter rolls.
He had come up with 141,000 names that should be removed, but all he could do was pass the names on to the county clerks and rely on them to do it.
In that exercise, done by sending his own staffers all across the state, Clark had determined that while every county had its voter rolls on some kind of computer, there was a mish-mash of different computer systems and software from one county to the next.
"We're now in a position to clean up the voter rolls, if we just get the funding to do it," Clark declares.
But first, Congress must get off the dime and pass both the enabling and funding bills that are now clogged in a joint conference committee.
We'll see if the people in Congress are serious about preventing the 2000 presidential election embarrassment in Florida from happening again.
