The U.S. Election System is Broken and Needs Reform
Do you think they have stopped laughing at us yet? How bemusing it must be to the rest of the world to watch our dysfunctional election system in full operation.
On Election Day 2012, Florida voters by the thousands stood in line more than five hours after the polls officially closed just to exercise their right to cast their ballots. Voters in Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee and elsewhere also endured extraordinary long lines at their polling places. In some locales there weren’t enough voting machines to accommodate huge crowds; in other places the machines malfunctioned or jammed. It seemed areas with large minority populations bore the brunt of the widespread difficulties. A nation that claims to be first world shouldn’t have waiting times for voting that often resemble third world nations.
But that’s just the start of the shortcomings. States and counties and cities have so many different voting rules that it seems incongruous to tabulate votes gleaned from different systems and think we are still comparing apples to apples. Oregon and Washington State have universal vote-by-mail systems, and their rates of voter participation rank near or at the top among eligible and registered voters, according to the United States Elections Project at George Mason University. Some localities within given states use paper ballots while others in the same state use voting machines. Some states allow early voting, weekend voting, same-day voter registration, and no-excuse-needed mail-in absentee ballots. Other states require voters to go to the polls on Election Day and only allow absentee voting under very limited circumstances. New requirements for photo IDs only add to the general chaos and confusion.
“We have 10,000 different systems. I wish there were only 50,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California-Irvine, according to AP.
And why on earth would a nation want to hold a national election on a weekday when millions of folks have to work during the bulk of the voting hours? Why not hold the election over an entire weekend?
A major cause of this disarray in casting ballots was the political meddling and tampering by partisan interests trying to shape the election to their advantage. While the United States preaches democracy and egalitarian voting to the world, the special interests and privileged classes in the nation often try to limit and suppress voting here at home. For the 2012 election cycle, several states tried to enact new photo ID laws, hinder early voting, purge voting rolls and restrict the time for voter registration. Rather than try to compete for everyone’s votes, the idea was to disenfranchise groups that were not inclined to support your candidate. Many of these efforts may have backfired by boosting the determination and enthusiasm of voters who felt their voting rights were being threatened.
In 2011 Pennsylvania went so far as to consider a proposal to change how the commonwealth’s electoral votes are counted. A Republican sponsored effort, supported by GOP Gov. Tom Corbett, would have abandoned the practice of awarding all the state’s 20 electoral votes to the candidate who carried the state, in favor of giving a candidate an electoral delegate for each of the 18 congressional districts he carried, with the winner of the statewide vote also granted two more electoral votes (the two that are allocated to each state for having two U.S. senators). Pennsylvania would have joined Maine and Nebraska as states throwing out the winner-takes-all format.
The bill, if it had become law, would have guaranteed that a Republican won a majority of the electoral votes in Pennsylvania even if he lost the statewide popular vote. This is because the GOP-led legislature gerrymandered the congressional district map in a way that favored Republicans. For example, Delaware County, which borders Philadelphia, should stand alone as a competitive congressional district. However, the GOP dumped many Democratic-leaning African American voters who reside in the inner-ring suburbs of Delaware County into one of the heavily Democratic Philadelphia congressional districts, thus creating a safe seat for the GOP congressman from Delaware County. The current Pennsylvania congressional delegation is composed of 13 Republicans and five Democrats, even though Democrats hold an over one million edge in voter registration.
The proposal was ultimately dropped, at least for now, after it split Republicans and drew heavy criticism from Democrats. Republicans pulled back in part because the bill would only help them if their candidate lost the popular vote, and at the time it was thought the Republican candidate might carry Pennsylvania. Why trade 20 electoral votes for 15? Nevertheless this proposal showed the mischief that can be done under the present system.
Pennsylvania’s aborted attempt to manipulate electoral votes is frightening enough, but the entire Electoral College system leaves a lot to be desired. In an editorial published Nov. 15, the New York Times said, “The Electoral College remains a deeply defective political mechanism no matter whom it benefits, and it needs to be abolished.” Under the Electoral College system, candidates ignore all but the “battleground states,” and in 2012 this meant candidates spent all their time and resources in nine or ten states, to the exclusion of all the others. This drives down voter turnout in “safe” states, and the percentage of eligible voters who show up and vote in the United States, even in close, contentious elections, is far below that of most other industrialized, advanced nations. The sad fact is the American people do not elect the president and vice president. The Electoral College does.
The present system has many flaws and is in desperate need of reform. Senator Christopher Coons (D-Del.) is introducing legislation that would reward states for election reform. His Louis L. Redding Fair, Accurate, Secure and Timely (FAST) Voting Act of 2012 would give federal grants to states that make voting faster and more accessible.
“(The fact that) it appears that there were tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of Americans who had their right to vote denied or compromised by having to wait in line five, six, seven hours is profoundly concerning and upsetting to me,” Coons told reporters in a statement made on Capitol Hill.
Among the innovations Coons would like to see are providing flexible registration opportunities, including same-day registration; providing early voting, at a minimum of 9 of the 10 calendar days preceding an election; providing absentee voting, including no-excuse absentee voting; providing formal training of election officials, including state and county administrators and volunteers; providing assistance to voters with disabilities, including visual impairment; and creating contingency plans for voting in the event of a natural or other disaster.
With the technology available in 2012, there is no excuse for our election system to look like a 19thcentury enterprise. The system is broken, and to keep from being the laughingstock of the world, we need to fix it.
