Two days before Americans went to vote this year, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow described Election Day lines as “a poll tax.” Considering the opportunity costs of waiting around to cast a ballot on a work day, the description seems apt. It’s possible that the historical parallel -- a poll tax was originally intended to price out prospective African-American voters -- is appropriate as well.
Northwestern University engineering professor Michael Peshkin argues that long lines this year disproportionately affected black voters. Analyzing a rough tally of Election Day news reports containing the phrase “long lines” (there is no actual survey of polling place delays), he found a high correlation between states with the largest African-American populations and those with the longest delays. Check out his graph:
It’s clear that the GOP has institutionalized tactics that suppress turnout among Democratic-leaning demographics: as Rick Perlstein wrote after the 2006 midterm elections, “by now it’s in [the GOP’s] DNA. They’re proud of it, and thus the smoking guns will keep coming.” But many of the barriers Americans face at the polls, like the one Peshkin identifies, aren’t necessarily related to partisan interference. Instead, they are caused by enduring holes in the nation’s election administration infrastructure, some of which could be closed quite easily.
One fix for the line problem would be a federally mandated ratio of voting stations to voters. It seems silly that such a law doesn’t already exist, but those decisions have been left to local registrars historically, a fact that helps explain why certain communities aren’t provided an equal amount of resources. Moving Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend and expanding early voting opportunities nationally would easy the voting glut too. According to the New York Times, “many of the states that allowed early voting this year experienced few delays on Election Day.”
Lines aren’t the only problem worth fixing. Trumped up concerns over “voter fraud” could be dispelled and the franchise could be broadened if the United States adopted a same-day voter registration system, too. Not only would we eliminate the need for well-intentioned but problematic third-party voter-registration drives, we could curtail the amount of “no match” situations, when a voter’s identification and registration are slightly different.
Now is as good a time as any for legislators to take action. If they don’t enact changes while the voting experience is still fresh in people’s minds, the inertia will fade and the same problems will bubble up in 2010 and beyond. Senator Dianne Feinstein authored a bill to expand early voting in 2007 that now faces better prospects of passage with co-sponsor Barack Obama in the White House. Hopefully, we’ll see more legislation in this vein when Congress reconvenes in 2009.
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