Election Fixes That Make Sense

A lot of pessimists in the Democratic Left say that voting is rigged and no matter what happens the Republicans will always find a way to win and blah blah blah. There are serious concerns with the process by which we elect candidates, but just like the fact that there are available solutions to global warming, there are available solutions to voting issues as well. Mark Green, a former New York City mayoral candidate, has written a book about restoring democract which is excerpted in this HuffPo blog post that offers some concrete solutions we could institute tomorrow. Some of these fall under a larger banner of a "pro-democracy agenda," but others are strictly about voting:

• Voting should occur on a Saturday in early November called "Democracy Day," combining a day honoring veterans who died for our democracy with a non-work day where we practice it.

• States that have experimented with mail-in ballots, same-day registration, and early balloting (voting any time over a specific period pre-election day) have seen turnout increase by 10 percentage points and more.

• Electronic voting machines are the future, but they musthave paper trails (as ATMs manage to do) to deter or detect fraud.

• Instead of felony disenfranchisement laws, all ex-offenders in non-capital cases who have paid their debt to society should become full citizens, including the right to vote.

• Instead of political gerrymandering rigging "elections" so they destroy electoral competition, a nonpartisan system of former judges should oversee the drawing of the legislative lines, as in Iowa.

• Congress should enact three campaign reforms--a) establishing a system of public matching funds for qualifying candidates so that small donors diminish the sway of big donors; b) providing guaranteed TV/radio time for qualifying federal candidates as a condition of holding lucrative Federal Communications Commission licenses; and c) prohibiting lobbyists from picking up the tab for congressional junkets and from hosting fundraisers in the Washington, D.C. area.

There are a lot of other proposals he has over at the post, but I'm zeroing in on these voting issues. I don't even think that any of these are particularly partisan; most of them seem like common sense. Anything that increases democratic participation and eases barriers to entry for people to enter that process is positive in my view. You're free to see it otherwise.

In addition, Larry Sabato wrote an excellent essay some months ago about the Presidential primary process that is incredibly insightful and comes to what I think is a great conclusion.

The Congress should be constitutionally required to designate four regions of contiguous states (with contiguity waved for Alaska and Hawaii, and any other stray territories that might one day become states). The regions would surely look something like the ones on the map below, with natural boundaries denoting the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. These regions have about the same number of states: Northeast (twelve states plus DC), South (thirteen states), Midwest (twelve states), West (thirteen states). All of the states in each region will hold their nominating events in successive months, beginning in April and ending in July. The two major-party conventions would follow in August. This schedule, all by itself, would cut three months off the too-long process currently prevailing in presidential years.

The presidential nominating system would still be state-based, so each state would be free to choose any date it wished within the region’s month, and further, it would be free, as currently, to choose either the primary or the caucus method of selecting delegates. Of course, it is possible that all the states in a region will try to front-load their contests on the first possible day, but that actually makes little sense, except perhaps for the first region in the series. Even in that first region, a state may have more influence coming later in the month, perhaps standing alone on a particular day—a situation that will encourage presidential candidates to spend time and money in the stand-alone state. After all, the postprimary headlines will belong solely to the candidate who wins that stand-alone state. If there are ten states on a particular day, the headlines as well as the candidates’ time and money will be split ten ways. Note, too, that the regional system concentrates the candidates within a single region for a month. They will have a better opportunity to get to know the problems and peoples of the region and its states, and the geographic proximity of the campaigning will cut down on the wear and tear on the candidates, to some degree anyway.

This makes too much sense for it to actually happen, right? But breaking the Iowa-New Hampshire monopoly is key, I think, to sustaining our democracy by giving the whole country an opportunity to have a voice in the primary process rather than a few people. The DNC just instituted a new primary calendar that puts Nevada and South Carolina in the mix with Iowa and New Hampshire. It's an OK start, but it still adds to the front-loading of the primaries that does nothing but drag out the process and make it costlier. Sabato's solution is the perfect antidote.

Electoral reforms are not only crucial, they're extremely realizable if people advocate for them and break the status quo. The result would be very beneficial for democracy.

UPDATE: The California State Senate just passed a bill calling for them to appropriate their 55 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote for President. I think it's an amazing idea, and you can get information about the plan here. It would only kick in when states totaling 270 electoral votes or more sign it into law. It's bipartisan, too.