In my view, the chief short‐term goal of revamping election methods should be to prevent any repeat of the near‐constitutional crisis the country went through this past January. If you share that view, then—as I argued in this space recently—this year’s endless Blue‐Red wrangling over election procedure has been largely a distraction and a sideshow. In particular, the so‐called For the People Act is almost wholly irrelevant, much of it consisting of symbolic gestures and leftovers from old fights.
That’s not the only arena of misspent energy among progressives, I argue in a new piece in The Dispatch:
One of their responses, for example, has been to double down on their years‐running theme of voter suppression, a proven base‐rouser. And yet that’s not what went wrong last year. Turnout surged notwithstanding the pandemic, including turnout among minority voters. If voting should happen to be even less suppressed in 2024, and turnout rises by another percentage point, will the country be out of the woods from the dangers of disputed succession? (Leave alone the increasing evidence that high turnout may no longer be good for Democrats, as was long the political wisdom.)
Citing an excellent new California Law Review piece by Prof. William Baude, I argue that yet a third set of reformist preoccupations is at best beside the point:
That is the insistent and loud critique of national institutions such as the U.S. Senate (fails to generate reliably majoritarian outcomes, is subject to small‐state and rural bias); the Supreme Court (too many Republican appointees who supposedly got there through an unfair, if not “rigged,” nomination process) and of course the Electoral College (all‐time perennial punching bag). Baude agrees that all these institutions are flawed in one way or another, and that they might be redesigned to work in different and perhaps better ways.
But these institutions also have something else important in common. In the clinch, they worked. The Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College not only withstood the pressure applied to each, but did not come close to failing (at least leaving aside the contingency in which Capitol rioters might have succeeded in taking a large number of senators captive). There was a serious challenge to the workings of a democratic transition, for sure, but it did not come from these institutions. Why are we asked to see them as the problem in need of urgent repair?
None of which is to leave the Red team looking good. One “cannot obtain from much of the Republican world even an acknowledgment of the problem, let alone a focused policy response.” Even when they do not endorse false claims of a stolen election, many GOP officials appear to have set their cap against convenience in voting generally, rather than focus on the smaller array of practices, such as so‐called ballot harvesting, that genuinely do pose distinctive dangers to “election integrity.”
What’s a constructive way forward? Besides fixing the uncertainties in the federal Electoral Count Act, I argue,
It’s not hard to identify the elements of what a more focused defense of electoral institutions might look like. It might include ballot security measures aimed at ensuring vote counts fully (as opposed to mostly) backed by checkable paper trails; reform of state election procedure, following the lead of states like Florida, so as to provide real Election Night vote counts and thus lay to rest suspicions that late‐reporting cities might have “dumped” anything; [and] steps to clarify the duties (and if necessary narrow the discretion) of state canvassing boards. That’s just a start.
Whole thing here.
