During the last presidential election, multiple hour-long lines prevented an estimated 200,000 people in Florida from voting. For reference, that’s more than twice President Barack Obama’s margin of victory in the state.
Meanwhile, poll workers in many states, including vital battlegrounds like Ohio, mistakenly turned away voters on the basis of proposed voter identification laws that were debated but never enacted.
And this is not just idle complaining. The history of the world changed entirely with the 2000 election as a direct result of Florida’s proud tradition of incompetence at organizing a legitimate election. Had Florida’s voting machines not malfunctioned due to the now infamous “hanging chads,” would we have started two disastrous wars? Had ballots in multiple precincts been designed so that votes for former Vice President Al Gore weren’t counted as votes for Pat Buchanan, would we have lived through the Great Recession? Of course, it is impossible to say one way or the other. But it is dangerous any time that the process of voting overrules the will of the people.
The single largest factor in the dysfunction of our voting process is that many states are fundamentally incompetent at designing their ballots, choosing their voting machines and staffing their polling places.
It is also clear that we cannot trust the elected politicians of some states—including our own—to run fair elections, just as we couldn’t trust them not to disenfranchise African-Americans before the 1965 Voting Rights Act or to provide ballots in languages that our citizens most easily understand. The situation would be greatly improved by entrusting the federal government with the responsibility of competently administering fair elections.
Of course, there is a segment of the population that would view this takeover as a tyrannic power grab by the feds. However, this group largely overlaps in membership with people who think their backyard bunkers and caches of rifles are the last line of defense in the battle between autocracy and American freedom.
The real threat to our freedom is the prospect of unfair elections. Our own Gov. Scott Walker is exploring the idea of assigning Wisconsin’s electoral votes proportionately based on congressional districts won instead of popular vote. Because of shameless Republican gerrymandering in the 2012 election, Obama won only three of Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts despite winning the state by seven percentage points. How Wisconsin’s two remaining electoral votes would be allocated under this scheme is not clear.
The prospect of rigged electoral vote distribution coupled with the kinds of voter suppression tactics we’ve come to expect from our state officials suggest our elections are becoming less and less legitimate.
The federal government has an advantage over states in running an efficient election for the simple reason that it provides standardization. There are three main goals that the federal government should pursue:
The first goal is to standardize voting machines and ballots. One electronic voting machine in Florida had a software glitch that caused votes for President Obama to tabulate for Gov. Mitt Romney. As I mentioned before, ballots from precincts in Florida in the 2000 election became jammed in machines and would not tabulate. Other ballots are confusingly designed, causing voters to unknowingly vote against their own interests. This would not happen if one method were exhaustively tested and chosen as the standard.
Second, precincts should be adequately funded. As it stands now, lines are much longer in inner-city areas because they can’t afford to purchase as many voting machines or hire enough poll workers. It’s undemocratic to make voting harder for some citizens. There is absolutely no excuse for requiring voters to wait in line more than 15 minutes to register their opinions on the elected officials of the nation.
Third, polling places should be staffed with well-trained workers. As it stands, most polling places are staffed by volunteers who are not necessarily fully trained in proper polling procedures. Paying workers and ensuring they are adequately trained to a federal guideline would ensure that the people actually handling the democratic process are experts at their jobs.
In today’s insane political climate, we’re lucky that the past two presidential elections were decisive. President Obama is already viewed by a mind bogglingly high segment of the population as illegitimate. Imagine if he had won in a hotly disputed election in the style of the 2000 election. We must be proactive now and create a federal election system that ensures the legitimacy of the winning candidate.
