US Elections Need To Come Into The 21st Century

The US elections system has become one of the most dysfunctional and backward systems in the modern world. Although we are living in the 21st century, our elections process reflects a system out the 19th or early 20th century. We are now one month out from the election and the votes at still being counted. At present, Hillary Clinton is approaching a popular vote lead of nearly three million votes and her current lead has now grown to over 2%. I’m guessing that people and pundits might have had a slightly different attitude about Trump’s election, the effect of James Comey, and the failure of the Electoral College if they had know about the true extent of Clinton’s popular vote victory on the night of the election.

At present, each individual state is responsible for many of the details surrounding elections. This has created a hodgepodge of differing rules and standards across the nation. Some states allow felons to vote, while other do not. Some states require voter ID, others do not. Registration requirement differ from one state to another. Some states allow highly aggressive partisan gerrymandering, others have non-partisan commissions creating legislative districts. Some states have many days of early voting and a generous number of voting locations, others do not. And, as we are seeing with the recount demanded by Jill Stein, the legal framework within which to contest elections also differs widely from state to state. All of this ends up meaning that, as far as voting goes, there really is no equal protection under the law (unless, of course, the Supreme Court invokes that legal precedent for just one case only in order to get George W. Bush elected).

Even worse, certain states have been notoriously lacking in investing in the very machinery necessary to even hold elections that can withstand scrutiny. The most classic case of this was the “hanging chad” in Florida in 2000. And we see it again this year in the recently aborted recount in Michigan. Because of Michigan law, one third of the machines in heavily Democratic Wayne County would not have been eligible for a recount and a shocking 60% of the machines in even more heavily Democratic Detroit were similarly ineligible. That is because Michigan law forbids the recount where the poll book, that is the number of people that were signed in to vote, does not match the vote totals from the machines in that polling location. In rare cases, this differential is due to human error by poll workers but it becomes even more likely when the machines recording the vote break down or get jammed and the vote needs to be resubmitted. In those cases, poll workers must manually adjust the vote counter on the machine. This does not effect the vote actually registered. In most cases the differential between the poll book and the machines was just one. According to Detroit’s elections director, 87 machines broke down on election day which accounted for much of the precinct vote differentials. But even just that differential of one can invalidate a recount in that precinct under Michigan law, which, of course, seems totally counterintuitive, since a discrepancy actually signals that something is wrong.

As much as we revere the Founding Fathers and the flexibility and prescience of the Constitution, it seems pretty clear that the entire American electoral system needs a complete overhaul. With the failure of the Electoral College for the second time in 15 years and a Republican party that believes its own electoral prospects rely on limiting the right for certain groups to vote, Americans will continue to lose faith in democracy unless serious electoral reform takes place.