I'm not saying I like the solution, but national ID cards would seem to be a big step towards making both sides happy. They would basically make it so that there'd be a state-subsidized way for every single citizen to be easily identifiable and get their one vote for their one person.

The Ds would be happy because there'd be no real added cost for the typically downtrodden groups; the Rs would be happy because then it'd be really easy to keep track of things. And presumably, both sides would be happy because a national ID card would make it easier to make government more pervasive.

The other benefit of a national ID card would be the creation of a centralized way to track eligibility to vote; it would be the first step in eliminating the need to register to vote as well as a need to vote in one particular place.

It's an attractive idea: Show up at any voting place in the US, swipe your card on the machine; it shows you all the races/ballot initiatives you can vote on, you vote, and walk out with a paper reciept of your votes.

Obviously, there are serious privacy concerns, as well as the logistics of a national voter database and all the additional security issues raised by the digital age. Can they be overcome, or at least brought to a point of "acceptable risk"? I don't know.

Come on, Eric, what's going on isn't an abstract argument about social justice but rather a ploy by both sides to shape voter turnout to their ends. Democrats apparently think that quasi-illiterate and unsophisticated citizens will vote for them; Republicans think that such voters will cast ballots for Dems, too. There is no "solution that would address both groups' concerns" because 90% or more of those concerns are mere camouflage for the real political interests at play.

Michael LoPrete's idea conveniently ignores the wild diversity of state election laws and the scheduling of primaries and municipal elections. Nick ignores the fact that the partisans of whichever party did NOT introduce the national ID act would condemn the national ID as creeping Communism (if the Dems introduce it) or overt fascism (if the Republicans introduce it).

The Ds would be happy because there'd be no real added cost for the typically downtrodden groups;

I'm afraid the lack of any actual cost wouldn't cut it. Here in Georgia we had a photo ID law passed earlier this year, and it's been continually attacked by Democrats as an effort to keep minorities, the poor, and the elderly from voting. I expect the same arguments, as well as other privacy-related ones, would be advanced against a national ID card.

This recent flier, comparing the ID requirement with police attacking civil rights marchers, is a good illustration of some of the Democratic response to photo ID in Georgia.

How about election reform?

The states all run elections in their own sometimes very messed-up ways. What if Americans all voted under the same rules on the same kind of machines, and then have their votes all counted the same way? That would involve a constitutional amendment, but uniformity might go far towards addressing the flaws in our current system.

Come on, Eric, what's going on isn't an abstract argument about social justice but rather a ploy by both sides to shape voter turnout to their ends.

The strategists of both parties may see it that way, but I know that many rank-and-file Republicans are indeed sincerely concerned about voting fraud and I have no reason to believe that Democrats' concerns about disenfranchisement aren't equally sincere (though, in my opinion, the latter is either unfounded or founded upon irrational beliefs held by certain segments of the population).

That may indeed be true, and a great many People Of Reasonable Minds are, properly, concerned about the voting system. (A lot of American democracy really doesn't make sense, from the county clerks to the Electoral College--and I'm referring to issues that aren't up for debate today, such as the absurdity of the primary system.) But I'm more concerned about the decisionmakers and the legislators, and although they may parrot the lines of their constituents, they really don't share the same goals in this instance, any more than an average corporate executive really, truly desires having an impartial set of directors on the compensation board.

JohnS should realize that his proposal, such as it is, would involve not just a constitutional amendment but a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the states and the federal government, inasmuch as the states would, in any plausible scenario implied by his view, become little more than prefectures of Washington.

PM, my point wasn't that it was a feasible solution (or one that I like); my point was simply that there is a solution.

Loren, I don't know, but I would assume that the law you're referring to means a photo ID (like a driver's license or a state ID) that you have to go pay for, etc. I wasn't very clear on that, but in order for my solution to be feasible, it would have to be reasonably simple for a person to procure one of the IDs, and it would have to cost them nothing out of pocket.

PM

I'm not sure I see how passing an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing every American the right to vote and allowing Congress to create a unified voting system that's fair to everyone and discourages fraud and disenfranchisement and assures me that my vote will be counted, turns the states into prefectures of Washington.

"my point was simply that there is a solution."

My point is rather different: I admit that there are certainly very good alternative policies out there, and indeed virtually any reasonable suggestion would lead to a more desirable system than what we have right now. But that isn't the "problem" that the political types in the major parties want to "solve". They have every incentive to avoid coming to a sensible compromise. Thus, there is no solution to the problem viewed on its face. Indeed, the politicians who are fighting this battle are engaged in a struggle far different from what we would (like to) suppose.

JohnS, I was being a tad hyperbolic, but enforcing common voting practices and national IDs would remove one of the principal distinctions between an American state and, say, a Japanese prefectures. That's not to say it's a crazy or even a bad idea, but it is to recognize that such an arrangement, even though it may seem trivial!, would go against many of the embedded federalist assumptions in the American system.

What I'd like to hear, though, is for people calling for uniformity in federal voting practice to explain to me a) who will guard such an obviously juicy target (imagine LBJ or Nixon getting a chance to put his man in charge of it), b) how state idiosyncracies--ballot qualifications, referenda, primaries and local elections, recalls, and so forth--would be handled, c) how the feds would oversee and man more than 100,000 precincts, and d) why such a system would be preferable to, or more effective than, state-controlled elections (instead of locally-controlled ones) under a more competent HAVA.

I'm not sure I see why the federal government couldn't just devise some guidelines -- even just some broad parameters, like "your voting system must have an auditable paper trail" -- and then make a bunch of funds contingent on following those guidelines, and leave it to the states from there. (Isn't this how a nontrivial amount of federal transportation and education policy is set?) The feds wouldn't need to take over the actual front-line staffing any more than they need to make all teachers federal employees.

Btw, it surely must be relevant to this conversation that the federal agency in charge of looking for & enforcing against voter fraud has said recently that, basically, there really isn't much of it?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-10-poll-fraud-report_x.htm

I suppose I'm more optimistic than Paul is that some sensible reforms can be devised that, individually, give one side a bit of the advantage it is looking for, but is gussied up in enough of the trappings of apparent fairness and/or political popularity that it would pass nonetheless. That is how somewhat partisan laws get passed, after all. A state-based version of Michael's suggestion might overall give a small edge to the Dems (for the reasons of reducing the difficulties in registering voters, I think), but would be hard for the GOP to block. Something like this might well happen as part of the general electoral reforms that I expect the next Congress to take up at some point.

Phil, my impression is that we've tried that approach, clumsily, with the Help America Vote Act, which in turn has led many to believe that the GOP has used Diebold to reelect Chimpy H. McHitler. (The H stands for Halliburton!) And HAVA hasn't really worked, because we're still having this conversation.

No doubt there will be legislation, both state and federal, that addresses these issues. But I doubt very much that the stalemate is a result of politicians not understanding the issues clearly or failing to investigate all the options. I'm quite certain that they understand the issues very well indeed.

Anyway, the key issue can't possibly be that it's difficult to register voters; both parties plus innumerable busybodies have solved that issue. The question is really more the accuracy and stringency of the voter rolls; witness GOP enthusiasm, and Dem. dismay, at the prospect of purging voters.

(It goes without saying that I don't think the Democrats want fraudulent people to vote, or that the Republicans want to ban all black or poor people from voting.)

"(It goes without saying that I don't think the Democrats want fraudulent people to vote, or that the Republicans want to ban all black or poor people from voting.)" I think the evidence is, sadly, that the latter part has a ring of truth to it -- that Republicans want, not necessarily to prevent _all_ black or poor people from voting, but to suppress their vote significantly. (And, I should add, I am not claiming this of _all_ Republicans, but rather of a significant portion of the current leadership, at the federal and state levels.) From insufficient provision of quality voting equipment to poorer districts (thus creating dishearteningly longer lines to vote in those districts) to plastering black neighborhoods with fliers falsely stating what day is election day, to discriminatory voter purges (as in Florida in 2000), to (in one recent incident) sending mailings to Hispanic neighborhoods stating falsely that no immigrants are allowed to vote. And, again, the fact that there's apparently almost no voter fraud of the sort that the GOP is so up in arms about... even while all their proposals to end this nonexistent form of fraud would just happen to have the side-effect of reducing the number of economically disadvantaged voters....

Paul, you've seen what kind of basically dishonest, bad actors the current GOP leadership is with regard to foreign policy, domestic spending, trade policy, and so on; why be surprised if they are happy to play the same games with voting rights issues too? If they can try to use 9/11 for pure partisan advantage (as with the anti-union provisions in the bill that created DHS), well, you need not be a Diebold conspiracy theorist (who aren't relevant to the conversation, anyway) to think they'd do the same for voting rights.

Moreover, HAVA really didn't have anything to do with issues of fraud or voter suppression; it was mostly about avoiding future hanging chads, and access for the disabled. (There was the one measure about provisional ballots, but that's it.) So I don't think that the fact that it didn't solve all these problems is particularly meaningful -- it didn't even try to solve them.

I would add that one doesn't have to take Democrats to be perfect angels for this analysis to make sense, but merely self-interested with a baseline preference for legal over extra-legal approaches. The numbers on improving the general reliability of voting work in their favor, since the people who's votes are not getting counted are predominantly the sort who would be voting for Dems. So just making it easier for everyone to vote legally would end up helping them -- they don't _need_ fraud.

(It's a bit analogous to how casinos don't have to be crooked in order to know that, the numbers being what they are, they're going to take in more money than they pay out.)

Phil: You're right that the Dems can (usually) just rely on increased turnout to run in their favor, and that many (although not nearly all) Republican partisan officials and candidates would not mind if a modest but sizable fraction of African-American voters were to be blocked from voting. But I'm not sure that characterizing it as "legal" or "extra-legal" is the right phraseology; what's under discussion here is, after all, the very question of what should be legal. More useful, perhaps, would be to call GOP plans "restrictive" or "stringent" (depending on what side of the aisle you sit on).

Democrats' hands aren't clean, either; it is perfectly likely that longtime Dem pols like Julia Carson (perhaps literally like Julia Carson) are content to have turnout increase because marginal voters are more likely to vote straight tickets because of a lack of information.

I'm not really content with either party's role, and I may be more upset with the Republicans on balance. What disturbs me most, though, is that both sides are trying to portray their vices as virtues, and that such a lot of people have accepted the principle that the parties--not the public--actually see this as a moral issue.

(Point taken on HAVA, but my larger argument is that the Congress is either unwilling or unable to put together a comprehensive, sensible, and flexible policy on these sorts of issues. FWIW, a national ID card would be a very good idea for all sorts of reasons, although it would have to be a national "standards" ID card instead of a card issued by the feds directly, since rolling out a federal BMV-like system would be a nightmare.)

I would suggest that we implement some kind of instant registration system akin to the instant background check system I've seen advocated for gun purchases.

Rhetorically, I think it might be advantageous for Democrats to tie the two together. It shouldn't be more burdensome to exercise one's right to vote than it is to exercise one's right to bear arms.