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November 11, 2004
Voting Reforms I Like
If I were a national or state legislator one of my pet issues would be voting reform. Although I am not particularly bothered by the example in this article about a house candidate who won without being on the ballot, I am bothered by gerrymandering and other voting problems. It is one of those situations where it is fairly obvious to me what the solution is, but no one wants to fix all the problems, just the problems that their political opponents are guilty of so nothing gets fixed.
Here is my list of reforms that I think everyone should support no matter your politics.
1. Eliminate gerrymandering and make all congressional districts based primarily on geography. It may take the Supreme Court to enforce this since it seems that neither party is too interested in doing this. Maybe we could double the number of representatives while we are at it to make the races more competetive.
2. Make sure the person voting is allowed to vote (non-felon where relevant, citizen, at least 18, not dead or a cat, etc.) and only allow them to vote once per election. To do this you need to eliminate the practices like same day registration, make sure all states coordinate their voting registrations so that people are not registered to vote in more than one place, and require a state or federal issued photo ID to vote.
3. Have non-partisan third party observers/inspectors. These people will have the tricky job of making sure there is no intimidation and that there are no symbols of any candidate or any other form of campaigning near the poling place. Who will these people be? Maybe people from big accounting firms or some other neutral place.
4. Paper trail. Each electronic vote spits out an encripted (update: see comments) receipt like an ATM that goes into a sealed box. This allows for recounts and lowers the incidents of conspiracy theories when one side loses.
5. For really important elections (like president) just have a sheet of paper with big print for the name of the candidates with huge boxes next to each name. Then give everyone voting a pencil.
This last reform will never happen.
Update: Iowa has solved problem #1 by having a third party do its redistricting. Instapundit thinks this is a big issue now because right now gerrymandering benefits Republicans more than Democrats. I think this could be a winning issue for centrist Democrats and Republicans and do not care who it benefits in the short term. I care more about the long term health of our democracy than I do about who wins any particular election.
Posted by Pete at November 11, 2004 03:03 PM
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Comments
It's interesting to note that Representatives used to represent far fewer people than now. The House used to have a fixed ratio (one rep for so many people... get a increase of so many people, a new rep position is created), but then changed to a fixed House size where a set number of reps is apportioned among the states. The current number of 435 hasn't really changed much since 1911 when it was set at 433. There were about 92 million people in the U.S. in 1910. That's about 212,500 people per representative. The 2000 census pegged the population at about 281,500,000. That's 647,000 people per rep, a threefold increase in the past 90 years. We definitely need to increase the number of reps. The numbers are from here: http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/apportionment.html.
Posted by: Dangerous Dan at November 11, 2004 05:38 PM
I disagree with the part in point 4 about an encrypted receipt. If it's encrypted, then the voter can't be sure that the receipt says they voted for who they intended to vote for. This would only allow for more conspiracy theories. The receipt would best be a print-out optical ballot that clearly shows who was voted for so the voter can be confident in it and so it can also easily be fed through an optical counter or manually counted in the event of a recount.
Posted by: Dangerous Dan at November 11, 2004 05:43 PM
The "encrypted" receipt is not that important to me compared to the receipt part. The encrypted part would be to allow less of a chance to tell who voted for what or to alter receipts by hand.
Posted by: Pete at November 11, 2004 07:29 PM
I doubt that people could fake a thermal scanner with a time code that matched a voting ID from the place they pick it up to the place they put it in the "audit box" (at least that is how I'd design it) . I agree encrypted is just more problem, have the ballot plain english and then a scanner barcode (or whatnot) next to each vote so that when they are read through you can again match the words to the scan to the vote to the "this ballot exists."
Posted by: Mosey at November 12, 2004 10:52 AM