As I anticipated yesterday, the editors of the New York Times are complaining about Donald Trump’s kvetching about the popular vote today:
The long-running Republican war against the right to vote has now gone national at the instigation of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promoted the lie that millions of illegal votes were cast in the presidential election.
There is not a scintilla of evidence for this claim, and Mr. Trump’s own lawyers have admitted as much, stating in a court filing opposing a recount in Michigan that “all available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.â€
Yet one after the next, leading Republicans are spreading this slander of American democracy, smoothing the way to restrict voting rights across the country.
Actually, as Pew Research helpfully pointed out, there is plenty of reason to think that there are substantial problems with our system or rather systems of voter registration. 30 million bad registrations are a lot of errors.
We have no way of knowing who benefits from our lousy system. It could be Republicans, it could be Democrats, it could be a wash. We can’t know without rolling up our sleeves and fixing it.
They say that the first step towards recovery is recognizing that you have a problem. Rather than denying the problems that actually exist I wish the editors of the NYT were championing a movement to reform our systems of voter registration.
I didn’t have to provide i.D. when I voted, they simply asked for my address, then volunteered my name.
If you can imagine an address, and remember it on election day, you are a voter!
The procedure followed in Illinois is that you give your name and address. If you’re registered, they issue you a ballot which you sign. The signature is then compared against the signature on file.
If you’re not registered, you’re given a provisional ballot. In theory you’re supposed to show evidence that you live in the precinct but that’s pretty loose.
I remember in the days of youth, and hanging chads, that I read an Illinois Supreme Court decision involving a recount of a similar punchcard system. The over- and under- count percentages were larger than those in Florida. I was shocked at how innacruate the voting machines were, and the apparent indifference (at best, corruption at worst) this evidenced. IIRC, only Cook County (Chicago) and Sangamon County (Springfield) had those machines at that time, not places known for non-partisanship.
Frankly, I think there is a broken-glass approach that needs to be taken in which the vote and the process needs to be taken more seriously. There was a Madison County election judge that was charged w/ fraud last month for voting for her late husband. She and her husband had served this role for many years and she knew how he wished to vote. Its one vote, but that she thought it was appropriate and wouldn’t be caught suggests room for systemic abuse in local elections.