How We Vote, Reprise

Another election, another bunch of attempted voter suppression in way too many states, which brings me to contemplating what we should change in this country when it comes to running elections.

First of all, we should have a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. Believe it or not, that's not in the Constitution anywhere, per se. I'm fine with elections being run by the states and counties, but they need to have some standards that are consistent across the country. Here's my list from a 2016 post:

• Make voter registration easy: at the DMV, online, and as preregistration at school a year or two before voting age. Or, better yet, make it automatic. (That's if we can't somehow move to mandatory voting.)
• No ID required to vote or register. People affirm they are citizens and have the right to vote at the address they supply under penalty of a hefty fine and prison sentence.
• Allow same-day registration when voting, whether on election day or at early voting. Require either an ID with address, utility bill with the person's name and address, or a registered voter from that precinct who can vouch for the person's identity and address. (This is how it's done in Minnesota.)
• Allow early in-person voting for several weeks, including Sundays, with enough locations to make it accessible. Most likely, base the number of locations on a percentage of Election Day locations. Distribute the early voting locations spatially in parallel to Election Day locations (i.e., not all downtown). Include curbside drop-off of ballots for people with handicapped parking tags.
• Standardize the number of registered voters per Election Day precinct so that wait times are as close to equal as possible. Determine a fair ratio of poll workers and booths/stations to number of registered voters per polling place and make it consistent across the country.
• Maintain bipartisan representation among the poll workers.
• Increase the security of mail-in ballots so they cannot be as easily manipulated as they are now.
• Require all balloting systems to include a paper trail (nothing all-electronic).
• Don’t move polling places without good reason between elections. Only change them if the location is no longer available or is found to be not accessible.
• Make sure all polling places are physically accessible, including resting spots along the entrance and exit paths. (The idea that people with disabilities are all in wheelchairs is wrong. )
• Accept ballots cast outside of precinct if the voter has waited at an incorrect precinct.
• Allow felons to vote as soon as they are released from prison, even if they're still on probation or parole (or, ideally, allow them to vote while incarcerated, as is done in Maine and Vermont).
• Count incarcerated people at their last address, rather than their prison address, for legislative apportionment.

Hours should be standardized as well: I think 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. would make sense. I would also be in favor of ranked choice voting. For presidential elections, I would decrease the length of the process to under a year. Even January is too early to start, but I could live with that.

Oh, and if a state's Secretary of State is running for governor (or anything except SoS), s/he should have to step aside from running the election. 

In thinking about the runarounds people are given with IDs and name matches, I also wanted to share two links:

• One to a post of mine from 2012 about the failed Minnesota voter ID law (and the Star Tribune story that inspired it, which told the story of people from a nursing home who spent seven months trying to get IDs).
• The other to a current Washington Post story that gives examples of the cost involved in getting the underlying documents needed for a state ID in Texas.

Remember, there was no voter registration in this country at all before the Civil War. (In other words, it wasn't until black men were supposed to be able to vote that anyone bothered to keep track of it.) They still don't have it in North Dakota.

It's not an eternal requirement, and it can be changed.