Presidential Commission on Election Administration releases its report
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration has released its report, The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (.pdf).
Greg Sargent writes at the Washington Post, A step towards better elections:
[The Commission's] prescriptions are very likely to please voting reformers, though they probably will cite areas where the panel could have gone farther. The key recommendations are improved voter registration through online registration and interstate exchange of voter lists, to ensure accuracy and speed the process; expansion of early voting; and improved voting technology.
One of the most important things about the report is that it unabashedly identifies our voting difficulties as a national problem that requires a national solution. “We view the recommendations as broad-based solutions to common problems evident on a national scale,” the report says. “The recommendations in this report are targeted at common problems shared by all or most jurisdictions. For the most part, they are of a size that should fit all.”
The report does discuss some regional variations, but this is a clear declaration of the scope of the problem, and the required scope of the solution. Indeed, the report recommends the creation of a national standard: “no citizen should have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote.”
“Some had eschewed national solutions, or any kinds of efforts to fix these problems, by suggesting they’re so particular and local that they can’t be solved with national policy,” Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, tells me. “This sets a national standard for judging our election performance against. Here is a bipartisan group with strong credibility from both parties, strongly putting their thumb on the scale for national solutions.”