Discussing America’s broken voting system
Everyone at Why Tuesday? is excited about the opportunity to blog this week at TPMCafe. In fact, we consider this platform a true embodiment of what the overarching mission of Why Tuesday? is all about: sparking a national dialogue about the state of America’s voting system in order to increase voter participation.
Election reform. It is an issue we don’t hear nearly enough about. Indeed, much of our mainstream media doesn’t cover or educate Americans about the state of election systems at home or abroad, even though voting is the right upon which all other rights depend.
Americans want their vote to matter, and they want voting to be convenient. Yet American voter participation is so low that, over the last half-century, we rank in the bottom twenty percent of all nations in voter turnout. It’s forums like Why Tuesday? and TPMCafe that will help us change that.
Last week on the WT?BLOG we posted about several important election developments from around the world that were groundbreaking for vastly different reasons. In Switzerland, Geneva announced they would use quantum cryptography, an “unbreakable” security barrier, to protect votes cast on electronic machines. The news from the United States, on the other hand, was less-than-revolutionary. The Department of Justice was accused of practicing partisan voter-roll purges, and separately, electronic voting machines heralded as the solution to disasters like the 2000 Florida recount, were said in some states to be headed to the scrap pile because of security concerns. No wonder American voter confidence is so shaky.
At Why Tuesday? we work to make election reform an issue that our politicians cannot afford to avoid, and we start by asking a simple and straightforward question: why do we vote on Tuesday, a day smack in the middle of the workweek? We’ve asked everyone from Hillary Clinton to Duncan Hunter (on video), and most didn’t have a clue, yet all of them agreed that election reform is an issue worth discussing. Today, confidence in the integrity of our voting system is perilously low, and even those who turn out to vote are often unsure of whether their votes will matter, let alone be counted. Isn’t it time for an upgrade?
The question “why do we vote on Tuesday?” is the first of many about fixing America’s broken voting system. There is no silver election reform bullet. That’s why we launched an interactive documentary video blog to examine the state of voting in America. Every Tuesday, we post a new episode exploring best and worst practices in American elections, what our elected officials can do to make a difference, and we ask you to participate.
While it will be various pieces of federal and state-level legislation which make voting more accessible and accountable, the potential to drive this change lies in our ability to spark a national discussion about the importance of creating a system that invites, encourages, protects and celebrates voter participation.
All week members of the Why Tuesday? team and I will be posting on TPMCafe about the state of our voting system. If there’s a particular place we should start or an issue we should explore, let us know in the comment thread. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at what the 2008 presidential candidates are saying about election reform. So far, they’re not saying much, and we’re trying to change that.
My question for you is: Who are you guys? By which I mean, what exactly do you care about when it comes to voting? Your website (and name) seems to indicate that you all simply want to make voting "easier," by, for example, voting on the weekend.
So, I guess my question is this: do you care about voting or do you care about elections? Do you care about how elections actually work, i.e. the way that election design produces political outcomes; or do you simply care that people get to vote under the existing election design?
It's a big, big world out there, and there are plenty of better ways to design our election system. To be effective, we would probably have to amend the constitution to make a difference. But then again, so would moving elections to the weekends.
October 14, 2007 11:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why is it on Tuesday?
I thought it had something to do with it sometimes taking people a day or more to get to and from polling places back in Colonial times so Tuesday meant you could leave Monday, vote Tuesday and be back Tuesday night or Wednesday morning...
Is that right? Or just a pre-urban legend?
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 15, 2007 12:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey Reece. You can see who we are by clicking here. We don't think that voting should be "easier," we think it should be as convenient as possible for eligible voters. And unfortunately, there isn't one solution that will increase voter participation. So for us, asking "why Tuesday?" is just the starting point in what we hope will be an open and honest discussion about how to make voting more accessible, secure and reliable.
So to answer your question, we care about both voting and elections. That's why we created an interactive documentary video blog to explore and discuss the state of our voting systems nationwide. Not just the day we vote, but the way we vote too.
October 15, 2007 12:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Constitutionally, we now have a pseudo-republic with the military institutions of the British Empire. Those would be (i) no well regulated militia at all and (ii) a property-qualified franchise. These are the furthest thing from the original Swiss/Roman vision that Federalists and Republicans originally, if briefly, shared.
They are manifestly incompatible with economic nationalism and national security -- as if those mattered to crony or mafiya capitalists here or abroad.
The traditionally republican rights and responsibilities of citizenship are nominally more "inclusive" but actually diluted to undignified pleading by hired lawyers or ineffectual whining by paid advocates. Majority rule is reduced to negotiated settlements of various client interests, great and small.
Instead of government en echelon, with sovereignty vested originally in (a) the people, then, (b) the several states, and, finally, (c) three seperate, but equal, branches of federal government, we now have a mish-mash of "public/private partnerships" with ultimate power in hands of a Supreme Court of judicial peers.
This is "A World Turned Upside Down" from that which began at Yorktown.
In fact, it is the predictable result of the Washington-centric, anglophile coalition of Northern and Southern Whigs that (i) ended Reconstruction in Washington, (ii) created and still protect red/blue state political monopolies, and, most recently, (iii) re-branded the peculiarities of "Jim Crow" as the empty generalizations of "bi-partisanship".
So, "Election Reform" is what we have had too much of: These are cosmetic, half-baked, legalistic, bi-partisan schemes to disarm the people (except for "gun owners"), to keep political parties "barefoot and pregnant", and to protect self-perpetuating incumbents from competition for votes, instead of competition for the "donations" of bi-partisan concession-tenders, now mostly just mercenaries handling the domestic affairs of our international creditors.
This is done on the pretext of solving largely mythical problems, such as "voter fraud", or masking major problems, like economic discrimination, behind make-work over marginal ones like "racial discrimination".
What we need today is something on the order of Jefferson's periodic revolution -- a counter-coup, to be blunt -- not more goo-goo, bi-partisan, eye-wash.
Whining about the Tuesday date, sounds like reformist minimalism and petty pleading.
::JRBehrman
October 15, 2007 12:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yup, you've got it. The short answer is that Tuesday happened to be the most convenient day for the times (the law was set in 1845 by Congress). We've got the long answer on our site.
October 15, 2007 12:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
The distinction between “easier” and “as convenient as possible” escapes me.
This may sound sacrilegious, but is the quality of elections improved by cajoling voters who are uninformed and/or truly do not care about the outcome of an election to cast a vote? Should not such voters be able to express their apathy by staying home?
October 15, 2007 2:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that they're not. Having more "Low information" voters will not lead to better choices made by majorities.
But... not everybody who misses an election does so because they're apathetic. If you have to work, you have to work and most people work on Tuesdays. A lot of white collar workers can skip out to vote because they have their cell phones and blackberries if a work emergency arises. But a Best Buy salesperson or a factory worker or a teacher cannot just slip out for an indetemerminant amount of time in the middle of the day.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 15, 2007 2:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
It should be noted that you can only vote early or with a no-excuse absentee ballot in 35 of our 50 states. If you live in one of the other 15, it's Tuesday or bust, and that's when situations like the one described above by destor23 become a problem.
October 15, 2007 3:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Do you guys have a position on Instant Run-off voting?
Seems to me that would be a way to get folks back to the polls.
CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com
October 15, 2007 3:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
IRV is promising and addresses many of issues that make Americans feel disenfranchised with the system... to the point that only 50 percent of of eligible voters have cast their opinions since WWII. And perhaps, they're disenfranchised because they only see two options, neither of which they like. At Why Tuesday? and in America, we know that life is not Black or White, it is more accurately infinite shades of gray. And so common sense tells us that IRV opens up more options and better serves the people.
There are still many other topics that IRV does directly not address. Increasing campaign costs, negative campaigning, gerrymandering districts (redistricting), frustration with an electoral system, and general inconvenience are all other parts of the interconnected whole we call our voting system.
We're going to look closely at IRV in a future episode of our vlog.
October 15, 2007 6:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Americans want their vote to matter
Some would say this means they want their vote to be counted and that is a technical important part of the problem, but this will not drive more people to vote.
The problem of low voting numbers is that when elected the politician forgets about the citizens. To the Citizen there is no relationship between voting and the quality and relationship to the voter by the politician.
I am particularly talking about local politics where the voter can see, feel, touch, and actually follow the elected in office. The local politician is as bad if not worse as the ones in Washington, but locally the effects are felt everyday.
The citizen will talk about the US as a democracy but turn around and say the local politicians are not following their wishes and why vote. Democracy is more that just voting.
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Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking
October 15, 2007 10:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know I looked through your website but did not find the answer to the question "Why Tuesday?"
I would submit that a small blurb easily accessible as to why voting day is on Tuesday would be helpful. Not answering the question is too clever by half.
October 16, 2007 1:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are our turnout figures accurate? How long are voters who have moved left on the rolls? Doesn't this inflate the base figure that the election district uses to determine their turnout figures? If the election rolls are stuffed with wrong addresses, voters who have moved, etc. aren't the turnout figures made artificially low?
I think this is harder to manage across all of our boundaries--compared to a country with perhaps fewer boundaries or a national voter registration system. What do you think?
October 16, 2007 3:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're right. We'll make the answer more visible on our site. And I'll paste it here too:
So, why is it that we vote on Tuesday? It’s not required by the U.S. Constitution. Election Day, “the Tuesday after the first Monday of November,” was in fact established in 1845 by federal law. In those years, Congress felt Tuesday was the most convenient day for the landed gentry, rural workers, and farmers to journey to the county seat to vote. For one thing, the fall harvest was over in November. And traveling to the polls could take at least a day, so officials did not want voters to have to leave on a Sunday, a day of national worship. In 1875 Congress extends the Tuesday date for national House elections (2 U.S.C. 7) and in 1914 for federal Senate elections (2 U.S.C. 1).
October 16, 2007 9:10 AM | Reply | Permalink