America's voting system is unreliable and racist

Should money really determine whose votes get counted in a democracy?

What a pleasure to see the master campaigner, Bill Clinton, back on the stump in Pennsylvania yesterday, showing how John Kerry should be doing it. What a pleasure, too, to see Arnie Schwarzenegger strutting the stage again in the Republican cause. George Bush needs the moderates and, beside his own tub-thumping absolutism, the Terminator sounds positively reasonable.

But there is only one reason why John Kerry and George Bush are wheeling out their chief crowd-pleasers in the last week of the campaign. For the second presidential election running, the race is so close that either could win and every vote will count. For every vote to count, however, every vote has to be counted. And the scandal of the US electoral system is that, even after the aborted Florida recount of 2000, there is still less of a chance that every vote will be counted than in many other democracies.

A few, very specific, defects have been remedied. The punch-card machines that caused so much controversy in West Palm Beach four years ago have been replaced. Vast sums have been invested in shiny new electronic voting machines in some Florida counties - but not in others. A system of "provisional" voting has been introduced for those who believe they have been unlawfully excluded from the electoral roll. Their claim will be examined afterwards. Predictably, both main parties have already hired thousands of lawyers to challenge results they expect to be dubious.

The greatest defect of the system, however, remains. The Presidency of the United States is the country's highest elected federal office. Yet the criteria for registering to vote, the physical method of voting, and even the dates and times when it is possible to vote, differ not just from state to state, but from county to county within each state. This was so four years ago and it still obtains now.

The standard defence of these discrepancies is that the US is a federation of states which delegate part of their power upward. It is not a top-down system and no branch of federal power - not the legislature, not the executive branch, not the judiciary - has the authority to lay down a uniform electoral practice for the states. To which there is, or should be, a conclusive objection: if the US is a one-person, one-vote democracy, it is surely unacceptable that some people should have to fulfil more criteria than others to register to vote for the President, that some people should have a better chance of having their votes accurately counted than others, and that some people should have a broader "window" in which to cast their vote than others.

Yet this is what happens. Different states have different rules about disenfranchising those who have served prison sentences. As black Americans make up a disproportionate percentage of prisoners, a disproportionate number of blacks lose their right to vote in states where such a rule applies. Different counties and officers apply different rules for establishing residency; they demand different documents as proof of citizenship.

That different counties have different types of voting machines - of varying reliability - came as news to many Americans as the drama of the last election unfolded. Yet the machines have still not been standardised. West Palm Beach may have new electronic touch-screens, but some other Florida counties have invested in machines that supply paper confirmation of the vote. As in so many aspects of American life, money supplies an advantage: should it really determine whose vote gets counted in a democracy?

As for the opportunity to vote, there have long been complaints that polling stations are fewer and further afield in poor counties than they are in rich ones, meaning that those with worse access to transport have greater difficulty than others in reaching the polling station, and that when they arrive they face longer queues to vote. Poorer Americans are therefore less likely to vote.

One effort to increase turn-out, however, risks distorting the electoral process in another way. Increasingly, some polling stations in some counties are opening as much as a fortnight in advance of polling day. This subverts the whole significance of an election day on which everyone votes on the same terms. Early voters can hardly ask to recall their vote if one or other candidate is seriously compromised in the last days of the campaign.

There are many grounds on which the USA's democratic credentials can be challenged by outsiders: the use and abuse of big money, the lies that candidates' support teams spread about their rivals, and the gerrymandering of constituencies that has left few truly marginal districts. The electoral college system - and the ways in which the states allocate their college votes - is a whole separate issue.

The right to vote, though, and the right to have that vote counted, are the absolute basics of democracy. Any country that aspires to spread democratic values, as the United States and its current President have set out so unapologetically to do, risks having its advice flung back contemptuously in its face if it cannot guarantee these utterly fundamental rights at home.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk