Democracy: Coming to America (Voter Registration Issue)

[Wilms]

Thanks to dzika for posting this on the Daily Election Fraud, Reform, & Updates Thread

Guerrilla Network News

Democracy: Coming to America
Making voting easier

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 09:18:47 -0600

By Rob Richie and Steven Hill

How to have clean and complete voter rolls
Our country’s strength flows from its willingness to innovate and improve upon the American experiment in democracy. Recent presidential elections underscore the importance of revamping the way we register citizens to vote.

Currently, there are two widespread failures. First, our voter rolls are not clean and lead to uncertainty about voter fraud, such as people voting in two states and some places like Alaska having more registered voters than adults. Second, our voter rolls are not complete, with nearly a third of eligible voters—about 60 million Americans—not registered to vote. It’s time to establish clean and complete voter rolls to preserve the integrity of elections and keep close elections in the hands of voters rather than judges.

Having so many unregistered citizens hurts voter turnout and causes great problems in elections. Under current laws, we naturally see major voter registration drives during election years. The result is a surge of registrations right before an election, leading to long lines at polling places, voters not receiving information about where to vote and turmoil over provisional and absentee ballots.

It all too easily leads to potential partisan fraud such as a Republican-linked voter registration firm in Nevada allegedly throwing out forms collected from voters registering as Democrats, and accusations of Democratic urban machines registering dead people to vote in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago. The inevitable result is judges getting involved in deciding close elections.

Pointing fingers and name-calling won’t help fix the problem. The way forward is to set a goal of 100 percent voter registration by establishing registration as a mutual responsibility of citizens and their government. It’s the best way to bring together conservatives concerned about fraud in elections and liberals concerned about low voter registration. We need a coherent system that ensures all of us can vote, but none of us can vote more than once.

-snip/more-

Rob Richie is executive director of FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy.
Steven Hill is an Irvine Senior Fellow with the New America Foundation and author of Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics.

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/1206/Democracy_Coming_to_America