What so incensed Republicans (and White supremacists) so much is not that the 2020 election was actually “stolen” or there was rampant voter fraud, or even that it was rigged, but that their rigging didn’t work. Voters actually came out to vote in record numbers, despite a raging lethal pandemic that should have deterred people from the polls.
What got them most upset were the accommodations that were made because of the deadly coronavirus pandemic – expanded use of mail-in-ballots, no-excuse absentee voting, ballot drop-offs, and because of the huge increase in mail-in ballots, allowing ballots to count that were received beyond election day (if postmarked by election day, especially with the sabotage by Postmaster General Louis Dejoy).
But these measures to facilitate voting should have been in place all along in a country that purports to be based on democracy and free and fair elections, rather than the tried-and-true methods of voter suppression, gerrymandering and other systemic measures of disenfranchisement. In this cause, the Electoral College has been a key tool, rigged so that a one-vote margin in three battleground states could have countered Biden’s 7 million popular vote advantage.
Republican strategist Paul Weyrich infamously declared in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote…our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” And Trump, hysterical over the accommodations for mail-in-ballots, raged, “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
But the vote, we did in 2020 often with a determination not seen since the 1960s, and it has paved the way for the best opportunity for voting reform since 1965.
States are in charge of election rules, resulting in 50 different systems which in itself accounts for most of the 60-plus lawsuits the Trump campaign filed.
Here in New York, until this year, notoriously ranking among the lowest for voter turnout and highest for voting obstacles, Cuomo is proposing to make permanent many of the reforms put into place to address the pandemic that produced such strong turnout. These include expanding access to early voting; no-excuse absentee voting; more time to request absentee ballots; and allowing county boards to begin processing ballots as they are received.
But though states decide their own election rules, there should be minimum standards set by the federal government, just as the 1965 Voting Rights Act did.
The ruling premise of election/voting reform must be that every citizen is entitled to vote and have their vote counted equally – anything else violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection. If there is a question about a ballot, the “tie” should go to the voter’s intent.
The For the People Act (H.R. 1), passed by the House in the last Congress but deep-sixed by Majority Leader McConnell in the Senate, would provide major structural reforms on redistricting, voting rights, ethics, election laws and election security – only a possibility because of the historic election of two Democratic Senators from Georgia.
Here’s my list: there need to be standardized requirements for access to polls and voting machines (days, hours, logistics in terms of distance and numbers per population); early voting; voter ID; rules for voter registration and rights for voters who are purged; absentee voting (allow voter opportunity to “cure” or fix a mistake, ability to track their absentee ballot); felony prosecution for election fraud for interfering with the ballot, voter registration or access to polls including spreading misinformation or intimidation; require paper ballot back-up and mandatory audits to insure voting machines or count not hacked or altered.
Campaign Finance Reform: Pass the DISCLOSE Act requiring campaign donors to be identified. Overturn Citizens United which violates the foundational principle of equal protection.
There should be provisions in place to accommodate an emergency – climate (Superstorm Sandy days before the 2012 election); health (pandemic); civil unrest.
More challenging reforms include ending the tyranny of the Electoral College system – an archaic relic that preserved the political power of the slave-holding, small and rural states over the industrialized, unionized, urbanized states. That would require a Constitutional Amendment but there are changes that states could make, like joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in which states agree to allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. Another idea might be to allocate the electoral votes proportionately to the state’s popular vote, instead of winner-take-all (but only if all states followed that pattern).
The Senate has become undemocratically imbalanced – Wyoming and South Dakota citizens have more political power than anyone from California or New York, so that Senate Republicans, representing about 40 percent of the population controlled 53 percent of the seats and the majority. To immediately counter this and be fair to the citizens of the District of Columbia, with greater population than Wyoming and Vermont, DC should become a state. The events of January 6 demonstrate clearly why the district needs to be a state with the ability to control its own security and not have to beg for the Department of Defense.
Puerto Rico should also be considered for statehood (3.2 million citizens who are unable to vote for President and lack representation so could be dismissed after hurricanes, earthquakes; Trump considered selling it to China), but they can if they move to Florida or New York and vote.
Gerrymandering is one of the most insidious tools of disenfranchisement.
In 2021, every state will use the results of the 2020 census to redraw its legislative districts and apportion seats in Congress.
Most states allow partisan state legislatures to decide, with the ability to eliminate some congress members’ districts (effectively tossing out people they don’t like) or redistrict to pack, crack or stack voters to dilute their power.
Redistricting should be through independent or nonpartisan commissions, with fair standards for apportionment (for example contiguous, rather than those salamander-looking creatures).
