Hasen: Let’s Run Elections Properly
Rick Hasen has the correct proposal that would let us avoid these every-two-years allegations of voter fraud and suppression — do voter registration like other modern democracies:
The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.
This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not have to use the system for their state and local elections, but most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.
Since some people drop out of high school, you would need some other entry points. But that’s the basic shape of the system — a nationally administered registration scheme that keeps track of what’s going on, instead of a system that relies on “registration drives” to get people signed up, and a whole bunch of separate authorities to keep track of whether they’re signed up legitimacy.
53 Responses to “Hasen: Let’s Run Elections Properly”
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November 2nd, 2008 at 9:56 am
The obvious gateway is Selective Service registration, which is required for all men, and could/should be extended universally.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
First that is probably a non-starter, politically. We don’t have a national driver’s license or national education standards. The Republicans would claim such a move would open up the floodgates for massive voter fraud- without evidence, of course, but when does truth mean anything to this gang anymore?
But wouldn’t such a scheme potentially create a dual registration system? The constitution gives Congress wide authority over Congressional elections but not State and Local elections. Every Congressional election year there are state officials (Governor, Secretary of State, legislature etc) that are also on the ballot.
If you have a default registration system for Congressional elections, it would take an act by each state to piggyback on that system for registration of state and local races. It might seem obvious that the states would choose to do so because the costs of printing two separate ballots and training poll workers to run two separate elections might be prohibitive. But a state who is controlled by a party with a vested interest in voter suppression might choose to run a dual election for their state level races and force voters to be registered twice, which might enhance suppression.
The current partisan system with high barriers to registration doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Just unload the voter registration program onto the Selective Service registration apparatus. It is useless and does roughly the same thing.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:23 am
My one problem with this is that, characteristically, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the government having that sort of data tracking everyone’s whereabouts. On the other hand, that particular bridge was crossed decades ago; I’m uncertain whether I think this makes it noticeably worse or not.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:24 am
sluggo: I believe that since the Civil Rights Act, the national government does have some judicially proven right to pass and enforce a national standard of elections. So far, it has mainly used that right in terms of negating state legislation: negating poll tax, negating citizenship tests, etc. But it could be used to pass national voting standards.
Whether or not it could work politically is another issue. I have more optimism about its feasibility in terms of passing an election… but the devil would be in the details.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 am
I read recently that Brazil (!?) had a national election carried out entirely electronically. Googling doesn’t reveal stories that there were significant problems. Does anyone know anything about this? Apparently, Brazil (!?) has been doing their elections this way for some time, even loaning their machines to other countries. Maybe we could …. Nah.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
Jadagul: I think the only information that the voter registration would have to include is the information that we repeatedly give to the Federal Government every time we interact with them. I mean, our name and address is known to the Federal Government; it just doesn’t always have the ability to make sure the right people know it when they need to know.
After all, think about the information that the Social Security Administration has, the information that the DMV has, the information that Selective Services has, that the IRS has. A verification of your name, address, and citizenship status is the one thing that all of them need.
I had a strange situation where I was naturalized at the age of 8, and only at the age of 19 did I discover that the Social Security Administration still thought I was on my green card. It’s not like my citizenship status was information the government didn’t know: it just didn’t get to the right people. And I almost was barred from employment. Luckily, that was easily sorted out.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:34 am
I absolutely loathe agreeing with George Will on anything, but in this case I am forced to do so: there should be a bit of effort involved in voting. I agree that our voter registrations systems can be annoying and confusing, but if a citizen is not able to navigate them what are the odds he will be able to navigate the streams of baloney emitting from the campaigns and news organs? That he will be able to make intelligent choices of candidates and voting strategy? Very low.
Cranky
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:42 am
As the U.S. becomes a one party state, does it really matter how the general elections are conducted. Since in the future most political seats will be open once a generation, does it really matter how an election where 99% of the winners will be known moths in advanced.
If you really want to help elections, standardize the rules for all state primaries (where the reall elections will occur in the future) and have all primary elections in September. Why risk having the presidential election decided in January 2016 whehn the inaugural will not happen until January 2017.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 am
ROYALpublicans claim to love democracy, but they don’t. The proof? They make us stand ten hours in line to vote, even in the freezing rain. Our 64-year-old moms, in the freezing rain? Let them freeze is worse than “Let them eat cake.”
Kates hate democracy, and the courts, and Social Security, and the Constitution, and Magna Carta.
Royalpublicans own 8 houses.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
Ummmm, why do you need to register?
Why not just show up at the correct polling station with proof of address and valid photo ID? Then each station just needs to keep track of names and addresses of people who’ve voted (an Excel spreadsheet would work, though something a bit more stable would be preferable) and not let anyone do it twice. This isn’t hard.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:49 am
The problem with that is that it might enfranchise all people equally. And, we can’t have that!
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:54 am
Cranky’s and George Will’s argument is utterly fallacious for at least two reasons. First, it’s wrong on principle. This is a republic, not an aristocracy. People are granted the vote, and not as a privilege they must earn further. There is no clause in the Constitution saying that you have to be 18 and sober enough to navigate further obstacles. A healthy democracy in fact depends on widespread voter participation, which is one reason we get dominated by special interests and why there are no ill consequences period from the broader participation in other nations.
Second, it relies on a fiction, that this elite passing the obstacles is better motivated and a more informed citizenship. On the one hand, people who are unable to register face obstacles disproportionately aimed at blacks and the poor, and the system is set up that way intentionally. Class war ensures that some have more time to go through the hassles. They own property, cars, and whatever else it takes to establish identity. They don’t have to move constantly in search of work. And still other differences are more insidious, with active efforts to purge voting lists illegally, requiring money and access to fight back.
On the other hand, the ruling class shows no evidence at all of making a greater effort to inform itself. We see again and again the willed ignorance of those who distrust the “liberal media” and get their news through the prejudices of the right-wing bubble. In other words, Cranky, this is nonsense, so get the chip off your shoulder about how wise you are and how you alone deserve the vote.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:54 am
I don’t know the exact figures on high school drop outs, but it’s not close to being a majority of the population. There would be ways for these people to register if they wanted to, but this proposal deals with pretty much everyone. It seems so much more simple than what we are doing now, of course, so I doubt it’s going to happen.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 am
Its probably too late to get the requisite IT systems on line in time for the 2010 census. A big reason computerized voting machines turned out to be such a clusterfuck is that the government threw a lot of money at a problem with a short, fixed deadline (i.e., in time for the next election.) So what we got was expensive systems that didn’t get the time they needed for a proper shake-out of both the design and the implementation.
A project like this would probably take three years, probably closer to five. Mandating it by 2010 is giving it one year. Anything that could be delivered by then would be overpriced and very buggy. And of course the Republicans would harp on these flaws to discredit the whole system.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 am
The problem with this is, as noted, the differing state regulations on eligibility to vote for state and local offices. Constitutionally, the ability of the federal government to interfere there is limited. We would probably have to get the states to agree to a consistent rule regarding the eligibility of felons to vote, which would probably be more restrictive than many states currently.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:17 am
The next republican administration’s version of Karl
Rove is going to love this idea of having everything to do with
with voter registration controlled by the federal government.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:30 am
I completely agree that Americans have already been registered with the Panopticon, and we might as well get some utility out of this in the form of universal federal voter registration. Actual election fraud may or may not be rare, but the creakiness of the system(s) permits the perception of widespread fraud to flourish, leading to the self-reinforcing belief that all election outcomes are illegitimate. Apathy-driven low turnout also permits what fraud exists to be that much more decisive. Universal registration would alleviate these problems.
On a purely academic level, however, requiring citizens to actively seek registration has heretofore been useful during discussions of Consent Theory. Whenever some snot-nosed punk tries to claim that he never personally ratified the Constitution and therefore he is a Freeman living under tyranny, I usually ask if he’s registered to vote.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:39 am
For what it’s worth, in Canada we are given an option when we file our Income Tax returns of ticking a box allowing Revenue Canada to pass our name and address on to Elections Canada to keep the Electoral Register up to date. I don’t know what the compliance rate is but it’s always seemed sensible to me. Prior to this, people would come round door-to-door prior to an election to verify the rolls. Now the register is considered permanent. Here’s a better source of information:
http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=ins&document=national&dir=nre&lang=e&textonly=false
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:41 am
What if a city lets sixteen year olds vote in municipal elections, or non-citizen legal residents? What about primaries - is Congress going to keep track of who’s in the New York working families party, or the Minnesota Reform party?
I don’t think the problem with voter registration is that it’s per-state. I think the problem is that the election system piggy backs on other government systems - mainly the DMV. Maybe it’s time we stop depending on the DMV to manage identification cards. We should have a single, state issued ID card that indicates if we are eligible to vote (and where) and whether we are licensed to drive.
A magnetic strip could link it to a record in a central database, so that, if you move years after your card is printed, your card is linked to your new address electronically, and you can swipe it to verify your eligibility to vote in a particular district.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
National ID runs up against the stupid problem that the fundamentalists think it’s the first action of the Antichrist. (Goodness, can you imagine if Obama proposed it — heads would explode).
So it’s a proposal with a loud, vocal minority opposed, and no equally loud constituency in support. Which is recipe for failure.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:26 pm
On a tangent, what’s with America’s fetish for voting machines?
I hates to be the smug Canadian who tells you why your country is inferior, but I gots to be that Canadian.
Here’s how we vote: We show up at the polling station. We don’t have long line-ups (my lifetime worst is ten minutes when I made the mistake of voting during rush hour). And when we get in the booth, we take a pencil and mark an X beside the candidate we want to vote for. We get the results that evening on TV and still have time to curse out our new government before we go to bed.
So why do you guys put up with Diebold and hanging chads and wonky touch screens and line up for hours on end for the privilege?
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
In addition to what Martin says in comment 19 about registering voter information with annual tax returns, when elections (either national or provincial) are called in Canada, voter cards are mailed out to everyone to confirm their information and tell them where to find their polling station. If they either don’t get their card or get someone else’s, it’s a simple matter to go to an Elections Canada office and get the matter straightened out, or they can just show up at their polling station on election day with either a photo ID with their address or a photo ID and a document like a phone bill with their address.
There are enough polling stations that lines are rarely over 30 mins long, and then only at peak hours. And when you vote, it’s a simple matter of marking an X with a number 2 pencil on a piece of paper. It’s rare to hear of actual voter fraud (though accusations are made from time to time). And we usually know who forms the next government within 2 hours after the polls close.
That’s not to say that we don’t have problems with our electoral system. It’s just that being able to vote isn’t one of them.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Another thing you could do is to have the election on the weekend, another would be a two day election.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Because a lot of the politicians’ friends make an awful lot of money by getting huge voting machine contracts. Also, many of our leaders DON’T want more Americans voting.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Here’s an obvious change for states with electronic voting that would instantly shorten lines and remove a real complication from the voting process: allow voting at any polling location
All you have to do is make a voting machine that can take an electronic file a week before the election with every possible ballot in the state. When the voter shows up, their registration is looked up electronically (this is what happens now anyway) and the keycard they’re given for the machine is queued up with the proper precinct information.
There is one major problem with this: many states allow voters to be challenged by fellow voters if they aren’t recognized (the idea being, I guess, that historically you knew everyone in your neighborhood). You could get around this by having a photo ID law that only applies to folks choosing to vote at a different precinct. Or you could accept the votes as provisional ballots and only count them in the event of a close election where you can verify that this person hasn’t voted elsewhere.
A more fundamental improvement would be to network all electronic voting sites and link them into a State registration database to ensure that every registered voter votes once. My impression is that folks trust their credit card numbers to Internet security but not their votes, though.
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
To add to that post, another problem would be that poll workers likely couldn’t be trained to answer questions about every possible ballot that could appear before a voter. No easy way to get around that one besides good ballot design in the first place.
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:21 pm
ABCNews:
A recent study by the Department of Education found that 31 percent of American students were dropping out or failing to graduate in the nation’s largest 100 public school districts.
CNN:
Among minority students, more than one in three students drops out of school.
LATimes:
Deploying a long-promised tool to track high school dropouts, the state released numbers Wednesday estimating that 1 in 4 California students — and 1 in 3 in Los Angeles — quit school. The rates are considerably higher than previously acknowledged but lower than some independent estimates.
====
The problem is, the people that drop out of high school are the same people it is difficult to register by other means.
Unless they take some initiative on the relatively simple task of registering themselves.
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
If the Republicans were actually interested in preventing voter fraud, then yes, this would be a great system. But of course they’re not. They really just want to keep minorities and other non-Republican-friendly demographics from turning out heavily. So in their present configuration, they’re not likely to support such an initiative, no matter how illogically distorted the reasons they give for such opposition would have to be.
But optimistically, the Republican party is going to cease to be a viable party in their present configuration as of Wednesday. So we can hope that their eventual road back towards broad popularity includes a recognition that they have to have some sort of non-white support, and maybe they’ll see that dropping their “voter fraud” shenanigans and sincerely trying to raise turn-out across all demographics might be a nice olive branch to convince minorities that they’ve really turned over a new leaf.
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
While the idea sounds good overall, it leaves the door open to widespread voter fraud because of flaws in other systems. For example, to change an address, someone just needs to fill out a card and send it in. They don’t need to show a valid ID and there is no system in place, outside of people watching out for their mail not coming, to keep someone from stealing someone’s identity. I actually know someone who was a victim of this kind of identity theft - his mail was being forwarded to a four-star hotel in New Zealand!
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Before being that smug Canadian, it generally helps to be not entirely ignorant background about the way that the American political system works. In typical
European and Canadian elections there is one contest, e.g., your MP. But the American system doesn’t work this way. Americans vote for everything. For example, in the November 4th election, I get to vote on 24 distinct contests:
24 separate contests (President, Senator, US Representative, State Senator, State Assembly, Superior Court Judge, County School Board, 12 state-wide propositions, 1 county proposition, 3 district propositions, and 1 local proposition). This isn’t particularly unusual in California, and I’ve heard tell of up to 100 separate contests. Since the counting effort scales with the number of contests, machine counting starts to look very attractive.
(calculations about how long it takes to count this kind of election by
hand here).
As for “Diebold and hanging chads and wonky touch screens and line up for hours on end for the privilege?”, this merges a lot of issues into one. Let me
try to disentangle them a bit for you.
There are two basic kinds of machine vote counting: Direct Recording
Electronic (DRE) [this is often called touchscreen, but not all of
these are touchscreens] and optical scan (pencil/pen
and paper but machine scanned like the SATs). Think of punch cards
like were used in Florida as an early form of optical scan.
There’s a lot of controversy about whether DREs are a good idea,
but the value proposition behind them is supposed to be better user
interface, especially handicapped accessibility. Without taking
a position on whether that’s a good tradeoff, it’s not one that
only has been made in the US. Other countries are trying out similar
systems as well.
I realize that “hanging chads” have become metonymy for brokenness,
but that’s a little confused. Any paper-based elections system,
whether punch card, optical scan, or hand count, has the problem
of ambiguous marks. Say that the user is supposed to put an X
in the box, but there’s a single dot instead. Do you call that
a vote or not? Ultimately, these become questions of interpretation.
Now, some systems have higher rates of ambiguous votes than others
(DREs have no ambiguous votes, at least not in this sense, though
users do complain about the system interpreting their input
in the wrong way), and it just happens that hanging chads are one
of the kinds that happens with punch cards. Incidentally, punch
card voting is quite rarely used in the US now, partly as a response
to the Florida issues.
Finally, there’s the question of lines. Lines are more or less
a direct result of the time it takes to fill out the ballot,
plus a lack of parallelism. DREs are a particular problem here
because they are expensive to buy and provide a hard limit
on the number of people who can be voting in parallel. But even
with opscan, you can run out of room in the polling place for
people to fill out their ballots.
None of this is to say that the American election system is
perfect; clearly it isn’t. Nor do I mean to say that one couldn’t
do a better job of managing the election technology given the
rather larger scale of an American election. Likely, one could.
Similarly, you could argue that Americans should vote on fewer
questions. However, given the current structure of the political
system, it’s always going to be a much larger challenge to run
an American election than one with only one contest on the
ballot as is true in many other countries.
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Get me rewrite! The iron law of being a pedant strikes again.
“ignorant background” should read “ignorant”
“24 distinct contests: 24 separate contests” should read “24 separate contests”
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Yeah, I hadn’t realized myself that in the Canadian national elections there’s only one thing on the ballot until having a conversation with a Canadian friend recently in which he said, “So, there’s a whole bunch of stuff on your ballot?” He also noted that there’s no mechanism in Canada for if you like your particular Member of Parliament but don’t like the party’s national leader. It’s like having the Speaker of the House be the Head of Government. Also, Canadian Senators are appointed, not elected. Also, they have a Queen and a Governor General.
I live in California and have 23 items on my ballot:
Pres/VP (one vote for two people)
U.S. Congress
State Assembly
5 Judges
12 state propositions
1 County measure
1 Community College District measure
1 vote for my water district board representative
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:18 pm
No Voter Registration At All. Just make it incumbent upon citizenship. You turn 18, you can vote. Why “register”? If parties want membership lists, they can have them. But being an adult American should be all of the “registration” I need.
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:29 pm
I hate to post the same damned comment everywhere, but since everyone’s quoting the same damned thing with approval:
have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections
is a really stupid idea. It’s legislating the impossible, actually. Even if the run-up to the 2010 Census was proceeding smoothly, it would be exceedingly difficult to add a major new operation into the process at this late date. And the run-up to 2010 is unfortunately fraught with problems and complications.
It’s worth thinking about for 2020, but I expect we’d kinda like to fix voter registration before then.
November 2nd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Thanks
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:31 am
I think this is a great idea. Congress would have to jump a few hoops to satisfy the Federalist gods, but so what. Just mandate the format of any ballot that contains U.S. Congressmen or Senators and prohibit states from adding any other issue to the ballot unless they conform to the same standard. Mandate that all Congress elections be held over a four day weekend, Friday through Monday. Prohibit states from adding anything else unless they keep the same schedule.
If a state wants to make it’s own local ballot that’s screwier than the Federal one, who cares. Let it be accountable to it’s own citizens.
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Wouldn’t the obvious point of entry for the system be the IRS? File your tax returns, and check a little box “register me at this address” at the bottom of the form. It seems to me that they’re already well equipped for this task - they verify identities and know your primary address, why wouldn’t that work?
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
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