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• "7 Things That Could Go Wrong on Election Day"
• "McCain's Struggles: Four Ways He Went Wrong"
• About Mr. Scherer

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Time magazine correspondent gives advice to voters who might encounter problems exercising their right to vote in the upcoming general election. (1:30)
 

Full interview. (11:25)
 

Tavis: Michael Scherer is the Washington correspondent for "Time" magazine and author of this week's cover story, "Seven Things that Could Go Wrong on Election Day." He joins us from Washington. Michael, nice to have you on the program.

Michael Scherer: Thanks a lot for having me, Tavis.

Tavis: Let me start our conversation with this quote, Michael, I love it - "We can go to the moon, split atoms to power submarines, squeeze profits from a 99-cent hamburger and watch football highlights on cell phones, but the most successful democracy in human history has yet to figure out how to conduct a proper election," close quotes, says Mr. Scherer. Is it that bad, Michael?

Scherer: Yeah, it is, and if you compare us to other Western democracies, notably a number of countries in Europe, they actually have nationalized standards systems that avoid a lot of the problems we have. We have a very decentralized system, and we have a real history of voter disenfranchisement. Going back to the turn of the 19th century, end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, most of our registration laws, for instance, where a lot of our problems now come from, came about for bad reasons.

In the South, they were trying to disenfranchise Black voters who had gotten the vote after the Civil War; in the North, they were trying to break up the new immigrant urban political machines - the White Irish immigrants who had come over. And so they just set up barriers to elections. So we have a lot of history we're trying to overcome here.

Tavis: Let me start by asking you how much of whatever is going to travail us next Tuesday has to do, from your perspective, with the sheer volume of people that may turn out next Tuesday, given this historic election?

Scherer: Well, it'll make things worse, but the problems will exist either way. And generally speaking, most of the problems we'll talk about tonight are only problems on the margins, so they're only going to really show up in very close contests, and it's possible we have states or districts where the vote is essentially tied. That's where this one or two percent error rate, which most of these problems produce, or can produce, shows up.

We've had problems in our elections for years but people didn't pay attention to it until Florida 2000, when we essentially had a tie vote in that state that ended up determining who was in the White House.

Tavis: And again, before we jump to the seven, what's your sense, given what you write about in this week's issue of "Time," about how we have done or not done, as it were, with learning from the mistakes of 2000, and for that matter, 2004?

Scherer: I think we've gotten better, but it's still embarrassing - that's basically the position we're in. There was an effort by Congress, there's been an effort by a number of states to improve things. It's improved somewhat, there's still problems. Some of the improvements have created new problems - we can talk about those tonight.

But it's still not the kind of system it could be, and I mentioned going to the moon and making profits from 99-cent hamburgers to show what we can do as a country. We do that stuff all the time - incredibly complex tasks we take on, we can do very well.

With elections, it's different. The federal government, the nation as a whole, has never really stepped in and said, "We're going to do this right." It's still more or less left up to the states, the states leave it up to the counties, and the counties - and so there's dozens of different rules, different regulations, different procedures, different complications.

Tavis: So is it ultimately - you see it ultimately as a lack of skill or a lack of will?

Scherer: Both. There's a long history, like I said before, in America of elections being conducted in a way that advantages one side or the other, and so it's basically an open contest now. The Democrats will hire a team of lawyers; Republicans will hire a team of lawyers.

Right now you've got dozens of lawsuits filed all over the country over dozens of different issues, and the courts end up deciding these issues before Election Day, on Election Day, after Election Day. It's not the kind of system where - another interesting fact. The Constitution has no affirmative right to vote in it.

The Founding Fathers said, "We're going to have a popularly elected government," but they more or less left it up to the states, to the various officials, to decide what that would mean.

Tavis: What's your sense of what the campaigns expect may happen next Tuesday, given - and I'm paraphrasing here; these aren't your words - given the fact that both campaigns have already lawyered up, they're both going to leave some money in the coffers just in case they need to spend it after the election as we did in 2000. What's your sense of what the campaigns expect, again, given that they've lawyered up for the post-election?

Scherer: Well, there's been a lot of pre-election posturing by both campaigns. For John McCain on the Republican side, it's been a lot of talk of this group ACORN and the registration drive they've done and some of the fraudulent registrations that came through.

On the Democratic side, it's been a lot of talk about barriers to getting people to the polls. Barack Obama is expecting that if he can get a higher turnout, he'll do better. He's trying to bring people into the polls who haven't really voted before. So if you can bring a more people in, a lot of these people, first-time voters, don't really know much about voting.

If you can bring them in and have them vote without a hitch, it helps him. On the Republican side, the concern is that people are going to be voting who shouldn't be voting or who aren't registered to vote.

Tavis: So to your "Time" magazine cover story this week, "Seven Things that Could Go Wrong - " could go wrong - "on Election Day," in no particular order, the database dilemma. Talk about it.

Scherer: This is a new concern. This is something that came out of the 2000 election problems. Congress passed a law that said every state would have to set up a statewide voter file. Those voter files are kept in databases. Congress said the states could then use those databases as they want to try and thin the rolls of registrations - people who die, people who move away, people who are felons and in some states shouldn't be on the rolls in the first place.

The problem is the databases are actually really clumsy. They don't well as people think they work. You often catch people in database purges who shouldn't be taken off the rolls. A good example of this, just as an example, is Joe the Plumber - Joe Wurzelbacher, who we've been talking a lot about the last couple weeks.

His name is spelled W-U. In his voter registration it's written down W-O. The reason is the registrar of voters couldn't read his signature on the form to see if he'd written a U or an O. Now, if the state of Ohio had decided to compare his voter registration against, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles drivers license rolls, it would have been a no match.

And there's a concern - we don't yet know how vast these purges have been, we don't know how many problems there will be, but there's a concern that a number of people are going to be showing up on Election Day in various states expecting to be on the voter rolls and not finding themselves there.

Tavis: Which leads to another one of the seven issues that you raise - some of what may go wrong next Tuesday has to do simply with bad forms.

Scherer: That's right. This is a problem from the 2000 election. We all remember the butterfly ballot which confused elderly voters in Palm Beach County. They voted for Pat Buchanan and Al Gore, and it's arguable that Al Gore would be president of the United States maybe even now if that ballot design hadn't been designed that way.

The forms problems we've had so far this cycle have been with absentee ballots and with voter registration cards. In Colorado and Ohio, there have been two forms that were produced that had an extra box on them that you had to check. In Ohio it was for an absentee form the McCain campaign had produced. It said, "If you're a qualified elector, check this box."

The problem is that that box is totally unnecessary. It was redundant with the other information on the form, so thousands of people filled out their absentee ballot forms, they wanted to get absentee ballots, they put in all the information they need to put in, but they didn't check the box. And the secretary of State in Ohio said, for a time, that she wasn't going to accept those absentee ballot applications until the state supreme court stepped in.

And in Colorado, it's an issue with registrations. If people put down their last four digits of their Social Security number as their identification but didn't check a box, the secretary of State of Colorado, who happens to be a Republican, is saying that we're not going to take those forms.

Tavis: New burdens of proof this time around.

Scherer: A number of states after 2000 instituted new voter ID laws, so if you live in states like Georgia, Florida, or Indiana, there are going to be ID requirements at the polls. That means that - there was a study done in 2001 that said between six and 10 percent of the voting-age population don't have government-issued picture IDs.

You basically in those states need to get a government-issued picture ID if you're going to be able to vote. There was a problem in the primaries in Indiana where a group of nuns, elderly nuns, had gone to the polls; they didn't have IDs, they weren't able to vote.

In addition to that, Congress has passed a law that said for all the states, first-time registrants need to have some ID. They show either when they register or when they vote. The actual ID requirements, they vary dramatically state-to-state. In some states, you can just use a utility bill or something like that; in other states you actually have to have that photo ID.

Tavis: All in all, what advice is offered to voters inside of "Time" magazine for what they can do, where they can do something, to diminish the impact that these things may have on their vote being counted?

Scherer: There's a few very simple things you can do. First, if you're concerned about not being on the rolls you can call your registrar of voters, check to see if you're registered to vote. It's not too late to fix that problem. Second, if you go to the polls - second, you should know the ID requirements for the state you're in. Bring the identification you need to bring.

Third, if you do have a problem at the polls - say the machines aren't working, say you're having trouble getting a ballot or something like that - you can ask for an emergency ballot; an emergency paper ballot. If they can't give you an emergency paper ballot, everybody can request something called a provisional ballot.

A provisional ballot is not ideal, so you should avoid it if you can, and it's not counted with the rest of the ballots initially. But after the election, you can come back and basically do what you need to do to make sure the provisional ballot counts.

And so the main point of advice that election experts give is don't take no for an answer. If you go to the polls and you're registered to vote and you have a right to vote, you have to vote on Election Day, vote the provisional ballot, vote an emergency ballot, vote somehow. And then after the election, you can come back and work it out.

If you don't have ID, you vote the provisional ballot, you come back the next day, you show your ID, your passport, whatever you need to show to have that ballot count.

Tavis: Here's an insane exit question - any reason to believe that if any or all of these seven things were to go wrong on Election Day, that it might enhance the chance of Obama or McCain to be elevated to the White House? Is there a partisan benefit here?

Scherer: Generally speaking - these are generalizations, so they're not always true - but generally speaking, Republicans are concerned about more people voting than should vote, and Democrats are concerned about less people voting. So if you have barriers to entry, things like ID requirements or things that make registration difficult, Democrats oppose them because they just want to get more people to the polls.

They think the people who aren't voting, if they vote in greater numbers, will benefit them. Republicans are concerned about fraudulent voters. They're concerned that the people who may come to the polls and say they're someone they're not - and there's not much evidence that this happens - but they're concerned that those voters might help Democrats. So it depends on the problem you're talking about.

Tavis: He's the Washington correspondent for "Time" magazine; his name is Michael Scherer. The new issue, out now, that he wrote a cover story for - "Seven Things that Could Go Wrong on Election Day." And I hope that "could" is the operative word -

Scherer: We all do. (Laughter)

Tavis: - in that sentence. Michael, nice to have you on. Thanks for your cover story and congratulations.

Scherer: Thank you very much.