Even before the pandemic, voting in the United States was too difficult and vulnerable to foreign manipulation. Our electoral system has been infected by systemic racism and efforts to block younger, poorer and non-White voters, which is why House Democrats passed H.R. 1 (the “For the People” Act) last year to remedy many of those infirmities. The bill included anti-corruption and campaign finance elements, but the core of it was to protect and secure voting rights, such as by making Election Day a federal holiday, expanding early voting and same-day voter registration, preventing voter “purges” and re-enfranchising those with felony convictions. The bill also focused on upgrading our aging voting infrastructure to prevent tampering and manipulation.
The legislation followed recommendations from the nonpartisan Protect Democracy’s Roadmap for Renewal, which urged Congress to “create automatic registration, make voter registration portable between every state, restore voting rights to former prisoners, require that polling location and registration status be available online, and increase federal resources for state and local election boards” as well as updating and restoring the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
The coronavirus pointed to another critical failure in the system: It creates hurdles to voting from home, preventing participation from the elderly, the sick, caregivers and any other Americans who find it inconvenient to go to the polls.
The system is difficult enough to manage when all parties are acting in good faith. When one party is dead set on constricting voting rights, blocking voting from home, limiting early voting and engaging in other conduct to discourage voting, we risk disenfranchisement and loss of faith in the security of elections.
Should former vice president Joe Biden get elected and enjoy a cooperative Congress, voting reform should be at the top of the list of priorities. (With expanded voting, other priorities that enjoy supermajority support such as climate change and gun safety will become easier to tackle.) Following the pandemic and President Trump’s effort to delegitimize an election he’s likely to lose, we know what that reform should include:
- Automatic registration.
- No-excuse voting from home in all 50 states, preserving voting in person for those who want it as well as drive-by voting and voting at home with a ballot drop-off option.
- A uniform deadline for voting (e.g., all postmarked on or before Election Day).
- Legislation to settle the faithless electors problem in all states. (The Supreme Court recently ruled that state laws requiring members of the electoral college to follow the popular vote are constitutional, but not all states have them.)
- A method to resolve possible competing slates of electors.
- Clear rules for resolving a 269-269 electoral tie. (Does the old or the new Congress vote for president? Each state gets one vote, but what if the delegation is evenly divided between D’s and R’s? What if the House and then the Senate, charged with electing a vice president who could be the acting president, both deadlock?)
Voting reform should also require adequate funding for machinery, software, personnel, training and ballots — something Republicans have assiduously resisted.
The entire focus of voting reform must shift to a single objective: Every U.S. citizen age 18 and older should have the opportunity to vote. The legitimacy of our democratic system depends on universal enfranchisement, but Republicans’ obsession with the virtually nonexistent issue of fraud spurred states to make it increasingly difficult to vote, especially if you are poor, have a disability or live in a disadvantaged community. That must end. Faith in the sanctity of our elections must be our top priority, as we are learning from the potential nightmare scenarios in the 2020 election. To make this happen, however, requires a party that believes in representative democracy to win big in November.
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