Electoral Dysfunction: Most Proposed Solutions Are Just Bad

The “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” is all the rage at the moment. Literally.

It’s a bad law.

It purports to aim to solve the problem of non-citizens voting in federal elections by requiring federally-accepted documentation of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

This is bad for two reasons:

non-citizens voting in the U.S. is not a problem; seriously, it almost never happens
the proposed solution depends on federally-accepted documentation being widely held by citizens, which it most certainly is not

The bill, of course, is not actually being proposed to address non-citizen voting; as I said, that’s not really a thing that happens and its certainly not a real problem. No; the bill is being proposed under the assumption that these additional requirements will stop some percentage of Democrats from voting.

Because of course it is.

But it’s not just Republicans trying to block Democrats from voting who are proposing changes to “fix” problems with elections.

Last week, Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times published a column titled “California can have both easy voting and quicker election results. Here’s how” that has several bad suggestions.

To his credit, he is trying to address an actual problem: California takes a ludicrously long time to process the ballots and announce results in elections, which creates an opportunity for lunatics and grifters to fill the public with conspiracy theories.

Though, in my opinion, that is a secondary problem behind the simple fact that it takes weeks to certify a result.

Regardless, this is a real problem.

My preferred solution, of course, is to make Election Day a holiday and for everyone to just vote on the same day; that’d speed things up a lot.

And some of Barabak’s suggestions are good: increased funding for electoral processing, for example, would be absolutely necessary no matter what other steps you take.

But a few are just plain bad:

more state-level control: the highly-distributed administration of elections in the U.S. is important for maintaining security and trustworthiness
“sign, scan and go”: while largely a good idea, it retains the myth that signatures are in any way meaningful in validating voters; a method with such massive error rates is not useful
“ballot swap days” for ballots submitted in the wrong county: ugh; just turn your ballots in to the correct location; sheesh

So, four suggestions, only one of which is good, one is kinda good and two are paste-eating levels of bad.

Not the best ratio.

I don’t want to pick on Barabak; at least he was looking for ways to address a real problem and frankly his good/terrible ratio is pretty typical for this topic.

And it’s much, much better than the “SAFE Act” which tries to solve an imaginary problem with documents that most citizens don’t have.

Not the best showing for democracy.

Or the American education system.