Matthew Yglesias sez:
Meanwhile, if you want to reduce the number of bad forms submitted, you have basically three options:
1. Make voter registration much easier and more automatic so as to reduce the need for registration drives.
2. Let registration organizers toss out forms.
3. Stop all registration drives by conflating good faith errors with systematic, criminal fraud.
Conservatives like option (3) because they don’t like it when large numbers of people vote.
Some might take this as an attack on American conservatives. Which is fair – but I would ask those to explain why, when John McCain was presented with the opportunity to simplify voter registration and increase the number of active voters, he voted against it.
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Every single senator who voted against that bill was a Republican.
Coincidence? You decide.
Is John McCain a Reform mp?
One of my personal pet peeves is the false equivalency between voter fraud and voter suppression that gets brought up as a “D vs R” story every election cycle. Voter fraud may be bad, it may be illegal, but no matter how many times some jerk registers Mickey Mouse to vote on election day Mickey Mouse isn’t going to show up to vote. And, as in this present case federal law REQUIRES these forms to be submitted. Voter suppression, on the other hand, often subverts the legal process, in some cases through a state’s Secretary of State office (as was the case in Florida) so people basically get to pay for the privilege of having their franchise rights wrongly taken away.
One of these activities is stupid, but causes very little real harm, and one is evil, and denies a citizen the constitutional right to vote. The dreaded “liberal MSM” invariably brings them up as two sides of the same coin.
Sorry, didn’t mean to get ranty, but seeing all this ACORN stuff three weeks out is making me dread the coming “people turned away at the polls” story on Nov 5.
That’s funny. One of my personal pet peeves is the false equivalency between voter registration and actual voting. When you hear some right-wing yahoo bemoaning the claim that a man registered to vote 72 times in a month – guess what? He still only VOTES the one time.
Of course, its always interesting to note that the same people who kick and scream and moan at the thought of ACORN signing up homeless people to vote – because, my god, where is the accountability! – are more than happy to turn our actual vote counting and recording over to Premier Election Solutions fully electronic paperless auditless voting machines (for those who don’t know PES, they used to be called “Diebold” before they were forced to change their name out of pure unmitigated shame).
I have absolutely no doubt that when Obama wins in a landslide in November, the wingnut fringe will be howling about ballot stuffing and double voting in the face of zero credible evidence. I would put money on it.
They don’t want people to vote. The election is not in the hands of the people but the electoral college. Someone could win the popular vote but still lose the election,this boggles the mind.
Every time there’s a bill to increase voter registrations it comes down to a party line vote.
Every single time. Just sayin’.
Actually, there’s at least one option that Matthew Yglesias didn’t point out, and that’s the system used in my home country of Sweden. You keep an up-to-date register of all your legal residents and whether they are Swedish citizens or not. Permission to vote in elections comes from this register by automatic data extraction (citizen? above 18 years old? lives in which precinct? EU citizen? resident of Sweden for how long? etc etc) so there is no separate registration to vote. No forms to fill in, means no bad forms.
Of course, you have to establish this register of residence in the first place. Nobody here finds it intrusive, as we’ve been doing it since sometime in the 17th century, but I imagine some people on the other side of the Atlantic would find it very much so.
Well, Miching, there’s the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which I think is a very elegant solution to the electoral college problem. (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/)
Basically it’s an agreement between the states that directs the Secretaries of State, or other chief designator, of every state in the compact to designate all a state’s electors for the winner of the national popular vote. States in the compact aren’t required to participate until states representing at least 270 electoral votes are in the compact.
Here’s the legislation for my state, which did not pass (http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2007/Bills/House/HTML/H1645v1.html). Now I have a political job with the state and sometimes get constituent mail. 100% of the mail I recieved against this piece of legislation self-identified as conservative/republican.
Miching Mallecho: “Someone could win the popular vote but still lose the election,this boggles the mind.”
Technically, if I remember right, that was to prevent elections from turning into the politicians campaigning in the 10 largest cities in the country and nowhere else. when you have to, essentially, win state elections it forces you to talk to people in those states and, in theory, perhaps show some concern for their interests.
If it was a simply majority vote, the most cost effective campaign tactic would be to never learn the cities.
Oh please – here’s a simpler solution: stop requiring any kind of registration.
Canada doesn’t have it. It’s simple ALL citizens (well, apparently excluding Canadians with no fixed address or have changed it within the weeks before an election – thank you Mr. Harper for trying to make us just a WEEE bit more American) have the right to vote. Anything that gets in the way of that is unconstitutional.
While we’re at it, when did the federal government become the functionaries of the political parties? Up here, Elections Canada runs the elections – nothing more. It’s up to the parties to figure out and fund their nomination campaigns. In the US, the government funds primary elections which really just reduces the real primaries to two: Democrats and Republicans.
Finally, turn over running federal elections to the federal government. Have you *seen* an American ballot? It’s a frigging PHONE BOOK. Since the feds just hand big wads of cash to the states and then say ‘go have an election’… every state and even every country in every state has a different way of doing elections – different rules – different systems – different hardware – and everyone piles everything they can onto the election because – you guessed it – the feds are playing for it.
Great system.