A bipartisan presidential commission Wednesday finished reviewing obstacles to voting in the U.S. by providing a series of recommendations for using technology to make voting easier in future elections.
Appointed by President Obama, a report from the Presidential Commission on Election Administration said jurisdictions should develop online voter registration, periods of early voting and update equipment to replace obsolete fist-generation electronic voting machines and communicate registration records between states to prevent voter fraud.
Taking six months to consider the issue, Scott Wilson reports in the Washington Post, the commission released a 112-page report suggesting improvements in traditional ways to cast ballots in the U.S., including:
- Increase the number of schools used as polling places
- Streamline voting for military members and Americans living overseas with improved access to state Web sites
- Set up polling places closer to where voters live
Although many of the suggestions were expected, the process does help Obama make good on a promise he made the night of his reelection. Many see them as the safest ground in the politically charged debate over voting in America, avoiding some more controversial ideas such as online voting, same-day registration and other subjects that could stop the proposals before they go to Congress.
After receiving the information Wednesday, Obama called the suggestions “eminently glittering,” and that the White House intends “to reach out to stakeholders all across the country to make sure that we can implement” the recommendations in the report.
Last week, legislators from both parties submitted an amendment to the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act to strengthen requirements for voter ID, among other changes.
Access to voting, who should vote and how easy voting should be has always been a contentious issue politically, but in recent years, the conflict emerged once again.
Republicans argue that the administrations of elections are state’s issues and that the federal government should stay out. Some Democrats say threats to voting access requires federal intervention, especially in state and local practices that make voter registration difficult.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that that Congress had not sufficiently included the nation’s progress on race issues when deciding which states require federal oversight to protect minority-voting rights. The ruling affects Southern states, which have become more Republican in recent national elections.
When Obama named the committee last year, a few members of both parties immediately criticized it for its putting aside race as a way to determine access and wait times at voting places.
On the other hand, the panel did say bilingual poll workers should be available at “any polling place with a significant number of voters who do not speak English,” which is likely to concern Republicans complaining the motion would only drive up turnout of traditionally Democratic voters.
Latinos now comprise 10 percent of the voting electorate, went for Obama by more than 40 points over Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, Wilson writes.
“We discovered, as officials, experts and members of the public from across the country testified, that voters’ expectations are remarkably uniform and transcend differences of party and political perspective,” the cover letter of the 10-member commission says. “The electorate seeks above all modern, efficient and responsive administrative performance in the conduct of elections.”
“There has never been a perfectly run election in the United States or elsewhere, and perhaps there never will,” the commission concluded. “The challenge for the system, and for this Commission, is to confront the problems revealed with each election and to institutionalize processes that allow the system to learn from one election to the next.”
Commissioners did not recommend a move to online voting, since the security required for Internet balloting is yet sufficiently advanced.
Most voter-advocacy groups reacted positively to the report.
“Overall, these are a series of recommendations that make sense,” said Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office.
“But we have to analyze them comprehensively both for their civil rights and privacy implications,” Murphy added. “We welcome efforts to improve election administration in this country, which is woefully out of date in far too many jurisdictions.”
Bipartisan Policy Center committee member Heather Gerken said, “it is often difficult to find agreement in this fraught political environment, particularly in the area of election administration.”
“The Presidential Commission proves that serious-minded people from both sides of the aisles can find common ground when it comes to creating the election system the American people deserve,” Gerken said in a statement.
Since they are only recommendations, Obama and Congress must decide which of them deserve attention, a topic touched upon in the report.
“The Commission hopes that the greatest contribution of this report will be to focus institutional energy on a select number of important policy changes,” the report states, “while at the same time spawning experimentation among the thousands of local officials who share the same concerns that motivated the Commission’s creation.”
