“Universal Voting”: The “No Lines” Solution To Long Election Lines
As we wonder whether the sensible bipartisan recommendations of the president’s “Lines Commission” will gain any real traction, WaMo Contributing Editor (and former Oregen Secretary of State) Phil Keisling reminds us once again in a piece at Governing that there’s one election reform available that makes the whole issue moot:
During the 2012 election, an estimated 10 million voters spent at least 30 minutes — and some of them many hours — waiting in line. Amidst contentious partisan accusations about “voter fraud” and “voter suppression,” perhaps we can’t expect more than a catalog of small to mid-sized fixes to build a better polling place.
However, the core problem with America’s election system – or, more accurately, with its 8,000 separately administered election systems – isn’t too-long lines or poorly run polling stations. The real problem is our insistence on polling stations, period, and the small-ball assumption that voting lines can only be shortened — rather than abolished entirely.
The way to abolish them entirely, of course, is to adopt a universal vote-by-mail system like those already utilized by Oregon, Washington, and–beginning this year–Colorado.
Universal ballot delivery fundamentally upends the election-administration universe. In 47 states, governments require registered voters to seek out their ballots, either by going to a polling place (refurbished or not) or by applying for an absentee ballot. Meanwhile, America’s three “voter-centric” states require the government to mail ballots to all registered voters.
By eliminating polling places and the need for so many election-day workers, Oregon taxpayers save millions of dollars each election cycle. Ballot processing and verification procedures — checking all signatures against voter registration records, which also renders moot the whole photo-ID debate — can be more uniformly applied than at the precinct-by-precinct level. Recounts… are based on individual paper ballots, not software code.
Creating such a voter-centric election system also significantly increases voter turnout, especially in elections where the absence of lines is the real problem. In the 2010 mid-term elections, Oregon and Washington ranked first and second in percentage of registered voters casting ballots. (Across all 50 states, the same turnout rates would have meant about 25 million more votes cast.) More dramatic still, party-primary turnout rates of 40 percent or higher in states with universal ballot delivery are double, even quadruple, the rates in most states.
I’d note that California utilizes a limited version of this system, allowing one to register as a “by mail” voter who will automatically receive ballots (and background materials on issues and candidates) by mail that can be cast by mail or in person, so long as the voter keeps voting. The percentage of California ballots cast by mail rose to 65% for primaries and 51% for the general election in 2012.
Voting by mail is obviously more convenient for most voters–particularly those who work on Election Day–but as Keisling points out, it also eliminates much of the chicanery attempted by local election officials with respect to in-person balloting, whether it’s done before or on Election Day.
And there are no lines between your kitchen table and the mailbox.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 13, 2014
“A Regular Joe He’s Not”: Among The Common Folk, A Breakfasting John Boehner
From the “Politicians—they’re just like us!” file today, we have something seemingly aimed straight at one of my pet peeves, the habit of Blue Collar Chic among politicians (and to an even greater extent, certain bigshot media figures). Esquire magazine asked John Boehner to “endorse” something, and what he came up with was “breakfast at a diner,” which he says he has “most mornings when I’m in Washington.” You may have thought the Speaker was a merlot-sipping, golf-playing gent who had risen above his hardscrabble roots. Au contraire!
I sit at the counter in jeans and a ballcap. Order eggs, and sometimes sausage, but never on Fridays. (And never the bacon. My diner makes lousy bacon. I don’t know why.) I’m there maybe 15, 20 minutes.
It’s pretty much the same thing on the road. I’m always looking for new diners, and when I find one I like, I stick with it.
It’s an anchor to my day, a way to feel like I’m home in Ohio no matter where I am. That’s why I endorse breakfast at a diner.
Mr. Speaker, if you’re eating eggs and sausage at a greasy spoon every morning, legislation isn’t the only thing getting clogged. But how wonderful to know that just like ordinary folks, you wear “jeans and a ballcap”! Since you presumably go to work after this breakfast, do you get dressed in your jeans and ballcap, then go back home and change into the suit you’ll wear the rest of the day on Capitol Hill? Why not just put on the suit, get the breakfast, and then proceed to work? Is the costume change really necessary?
I realize I’m making too much of this. And of course, when a magazine asks you to do something like this, you’ll be conscious of the image you’re projecting. Unlike a political “endorsement,” this endorsement is not about explaining to readers the wonders of breakfast at a diner, but telling them who you are, and if Boehner had endorsed an earthy yet whimsical Chateau Latour, he would have been mocked for an entirely different reason. But I find the efforts of politicians to convince us they’re just ordinary joes so insufferable, especially when it’s this transparent.
It’s only partly their fault, though. Every election season we’re treated to an endless discussion about which candidate is more reg’lar and can do a better job relating to the common folk, without any explanation of what that has to do with their potential performance in office. Here’s a little piece of the column I linked to above, when the question consuming some in the media, none more than Chris Matthews, was whether Barack Obama was too much of an effete swell to win the Pennsylvania primary over the (allegedly) slightly more down-to-earth Hillary Clinton. We knew he wasn’t, because he committed the horrible sin of being a crappy bowler:
Every night at 5 and 7, Matthews acts like a psychic channeling the spirit of the working class. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, he insightfully informs his viewers, are just not the type to whom Joe Sixpack takes a liking: “Pennsylvania prefers a beefier sort to either of these people, Matthews claimed, “a more rustic, tougher sort than either of them.” When neither Obama nor Clinton turned out to be particularly skilled bowlers, Matthews said gravely, “Maybe that tells you something about the Democratic party.”
In the days since, he has returned to the alleged symbolic importance of Obama’s lack of bowling skills so often, and with such a combination of glee and indignation, that you would have thought that before launching a gutter ball, Obama had donned a powdered wig, sipped from a snifter of brandy, then smacked Rocky Blier across the face with his riding crop. “This gets very ethnic,” Matthews said at one point, a preface that no doubt made his producers whisper, “Oh God, please don’t.” He then went on, “But the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.” Makes you wonder what, exactly? Whether he would be a better president, were he a better bowler? No, what Matthews wonders is whether Obama can “woo more regular voters — you know, the ones who actually do know how to bowl.”
According to the Times Magazine article, Matthews makes a salary of $5 million a year. When it comes time to relax, he doesn’t head to the Jersey shore, where the typical blue-collar Philadelphian might go to get some sea air. Instead, Matthews repairs to his $4.35 million house on Nantucket.
I don’t mind that Chris Matthews has a house on Nantucket; maybe I would too, if I made as much money as him. And I don’t care whether John Boehner prefers a fine wine to a downmarket beer. My problems with Boehner have nothing to do with his personal tastes in food and recreation. The thing about politicians is that they take positions and perform official actions that give great insight into whether and how much they care about regular people. That’s the place to look if you want to know who they really are. You don’t have to ask where they eat breakfast.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 17, 2013
“Moment Of Truthiness”: Stuck With Politicians Who Gleefully Add To The Misinformation And Watchdogs Who Are Afraid To Bark
We all know how democracy is supposed to work. Politicians are supposed to campaign on the issues, and an informed public is supposed to cast its votes based on those issues, with some allowance for the politicians’ perceived character and competence.
We also all know that the reality falls far short of the ideal. Voters are often misinformed, and politicians aren’t reliably truthful. Still, we like to imagine that voters generally get it right in the end, and that politicians are eventually held accountable for what they do.
But is even this modified, more realistic vision of democracy in action still relevant? Or has our political system been so degraded by misinformation and disinformation that it can no longer function?
Well, consider the case of the budget deficit — an issue that dominated Washington discussion for almost three years, although it has recently receded.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that voters are poorly informed about the deficit. But you may be surprised by just how misinformed.
In a well-known paper with a discouraging title, “It Feels Like We’re Thinking,” the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels reported on a 1996 survey that asked voters whether the budget deficit had increased or decreased under President Clinton. In fact, the deficit was down sharply, but a plurality of voters — and a majority of Republicans — believed that it had gone up.
I wondered on my blog what a similar survey would show today, with the deficit falling even faster than it did in the 1990s. Ask and ye shall receive: Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, offered to run a Google Consumer Survey — a service the company normally sells to market researchers — on the question. So we asked whether the deficit has gone up or down since January 2010. And the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot.
Am I saying that voters are stupid? Not at all. People have lives, jobs, children to raise. They’re not going to sit down with Congressional Budget Office reports. Instead, they rely on what they hear from authority figures. The problem is that much of what they hear is misleading if not outright false.
The outright falsehoods, you won’t be surprised to learn, tend to be politically motivated. In those 1996 data, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to hold false views about the deficit, and the same must surely be true today. After all, Republicans made a lot of political hay over a supposedly runaway deficit early in the Obama administration, and they have maintained the same rhetoric even as the deficit has plunged. Thus Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House, declared on Fox News that we have a “growing deficit,” while Senator Rand Paul told Bloomberg Businessweek that we’re running “a trillion-dollar deficit every year.”
Do people like Mr. Cantor or Mr. Paul know that what they’re saying isn’t true? Do they care? Probably not. In Stephen Colbert’s famous formulation, claims about runaway deficits may not be true, but they have truthiness, and that’s all that matters.
Still, aren’t there umpires for this sort of thing — trusted, nonpartisan authorities who can and will call out purveyors of falsehood? Once upon a time, I think, there were. But these days the partisan divide runs very deep, and even those who try to play umpire seem afraid to call out falsehood. Incredibly, the fact-checking site PolitiFact rated Mr. Cantor’s flatly false statement as “half true.”
Now, Washington still does have some “wise men,” people who are treated with special deference by the news media. But when it comes to the issue of the deficit, the supposed wise men turn out to be part of the problem. People like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the co-chairmen of President Obama’s deficit commission, did a lot to feed public anxiety about the deficit when it was high. Their report was ominously titled “The Moment of Truth.” So have they changed their tune as the deficit has come down? No — so it’s no surprise that the narrative of runaway deficits remains even though the budget reality has completely changed.
Put it all together, and it’s a discouraging picture. We have an ill-informed or misinformed electorate, politicians who gleefully add to the misinformation and watchdogs who are afraid to bark. And to the extent that there are widely respected, not-too-partisan players, they seem to be fostering, not fixing, the public’s false impressions.
So what should we be doing? Keep pounding away at the truth, I guess, and hope it breaks through. But it’s hard not to wonder how this system is supposed to work.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 16, 2013
“Camouflaging What They’re Up To”: GOP Bets Voters Aren’t Paying Attention To Their Obamacare Obstructionism
The House GOP leadership reportedly feels confident that they’ve defused the fanatical right’s push for a government shutdown fight over defunding Obamacare. The leaders apparently think that shutting down the government is, as a general matter, a bad idea because it tends to irritate voters who want those elected to govern to actually, you know, govern.
This prompts Greg Sargent to wonder why the GOP doesn’t get in more trouble for its general refusal to govern. The short answer, I think, is that Republicans think voters aren’t paying attention.
Sargent cites a new report from NRO’s Robert Costa outlining the House GOP leaders’ plans to avoid a shutdown and continue the battle to derail Obamacare. The latest idea: Demand an Obamacare delay in exchange for raising the debt ceiling (a legislative version of “delay Obamacare or the economy gets it”). Costa quotes veteran GOP pollster David Winston as saying that the GOP wants to avoid a shutdown because people expect them to govern.
Sargent writes:
The idea appear[s] to be that staging a shutdown to force the destruction of Obamacare — rather than offering an alternative — constitutes a failure to govern. But if that is so, why is not doing everything Republicans can to sabotage the law short of pushing for a shutdown, while offering no alternative, also a failure to govern?
I would think the answer is fairly obvious: A government shutdown is a high-profile and very unusual event and one that generally involves a fairly clear villain. If there’s a shutdown, it’s because one side is being obstinate – to wit, if House Republicans refuse to pass a bill to keep the government open without simultaneously defunding an existing law, they’ll be responsible for it regardless of how many times they claim that it’s Obama’s fault because he refuses to go along with their demands.
On the other hand, everything else the GOP is doing to make sure the law doesn’t work – from refusing to work on bills which would correct its faults to refusing to accept federal funding for a Medicaid expansion (Jonathan Chait has a great rundown of these tactics) – is not as eye-catching as a shutdown and falls into a different media narrative, one of generalized congressional gridlock. If Congress can’t pass a bill which would, to take an example from Chait, fix the law so it doesn’t force many church health insurance plans to disband, it’s easy to ascribe it to generalized gridlock (a pox on both their houses!) rather than GOP obstinacy in the larger context of a refusal to cooperate with the very routine legislative work of trying to fix a law’s problems.
Political junkies understand what the GOP is up to. But the party is gambling that medium- and low-information voters who couldn’t help but notice a shutdown won’t bother themselves with the ins and outs of daily governance (or lack thereof).
It seems a safe bet in the short term, but we’ll see whether voters figure it out as they actually start to tune in and get ready to vote next year.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 13, 2013
“The B-Word”: Paul Ryan And The GOP Think Voters Are Dumb
Do House Republicans think voters are stupid? Why yes, yes they do, judging by the latest messaging the GOP is preparing to roll out in its big budget push. In the Republican view, simple voters find notions like “balance” confusing when it comes to issues of taxes, spending cuts, and the budget.
Politico has an article up raising the curtain on the Republican PR effort around the budget plan Rep. Paul Ryan will unveil next week. About halfway through, it contains this nugget on the Republican messaging strategy
“Democrats’ calls for a ‘balanced approach’ are clearly poll-tested, but it’s because people associate the word ‘balanced’ with a balanced budget — exactly the opposite of what Democrats’ budgets actually do,” the aide said. “Look for Republicans to go on offense on Democrats’ ‘balanced’ rhetoric by pointing out that there is nothing ‘balanced’ about Senate Democrats or the president’s budgets — in fact, they never balance at all.”
In short “balanced,” in the view emanating from Paul Ryan world, is some sort of magical word which simple voters are easily confused by. They hear “balanced” and—apparently incapable of absorbing the words around it in a given thought—just assume it means “balanced budget.” Now I get the concept of the low information voter—people who pay only passing attention to politics and so have details and often entire facts wrong—but this is an assumption of a low intelligence voter. You voters are too stupid to realize it, the messaging goes, but you really agree with us. You just need to understand that you’re easily confused by concepts like “balance.”
While we’re here let’s quickly reality-test the assertion, just for kicks. What do polls say about a balanced approach? Do voters really prefer Obama’s balanced way of dealing with deficits, and if so is it because they’re ensorcelled by the b-word, or do they get the substance? Conveniently, PolitiFact.com recently checked out the assertion that most voters agree with Obama’s approach. Their conclusion: “Obama said of a balanced approach to deficit reduction that ‘the majority of the American people agree with me and this approach, including, by the way, a majority of Republicans.’ … The majority of the polls we found support the president. We rate the president’s statement Mostly True.”
They didn’t check whether simpleton voters were just entranced by the “b-word,” but they did cite poll after poll after poll where the word wasn’t used but rather the concept—dealing with the budget deficit with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases—was explained, and majorities of voters favored it over a spending-cut-only approach. This is in line with the preponderance of polls which also show that most voters favor notions like compromise generally.
In short, “balance” polls well on the substance so Republicans are trying to neutralize the concept as a talking point by—in a Orwellian bit of redefinition—muddying the meaning of the word.
The rest of the Politico article does provide some insight into Ryan World. The budget won’t cut much more than last year’s, it says, even though it balances the federal books twice as fast as the last version (Ezra Klein explained why yesterday). And, reporters Jake Sherman and David Nather write, Ryan aides are unafraid of a backlash against the plan:
Politically, House Republicans think it carries next to no risk: Conservative truth-telling, they say, is in vogue. Two years after Ryan’s decision to transform Medicare into a voucher-like system, the party’s presidential ticket won seniors by 17 percentage points and House Republicans are still comfortably in the majority, even if Mitt Romney did lose the presidency with Ryan as his running mate.
What’s a presidential level thumping between friends? Especially when voters are such nimwits. What’s striking is what a hoary talking point this is. Has there been any point in the last, say, four years when House Republicans would have said that “conservative truth-telling” wasn’t in vogue? (And the notion of “conservative truth-telling” is especially funny when it comes to Paul Ryan and his budgets.)
A line much later in the Politico piece nicely sums things up: “All of this doesn’t mask a larger problem for Republicans: Their budget messaging stinks.”
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 7, 2013
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