As I read the Democracy Index, I found myself discouraged and sometimes angry at what I felt were misrepresentations of various issues.  I’ve written about a number of them.

Sometimes though, I just found a disagreement that could only be called philosophical such as this statement.

“Any outsider to this debate would think that we are required to make some existential choice–convenience or integrity, making it easier to vote or preventing fraud–in creating an election system.  But both values matter, and the best we can do is make sensible trade-offs between them.” (Page 30)

Integrity is a value, convenience is not.  When I go to the store to get a gallon of milk at 1am, that’s convenient.  When the storekeeper charges me the advertised price, that’s integrity.  If he decides to close at 9pm and not stay open all night, he’s not a bad person.  There’s no lack of values there.  If he knowingly charges me more than he advertised, there is a lack of values.

Convenience and integrity should not be placed on the same plane.

Gerken’s the attorney, but I believe in a legal setting, when discussing our rights as individuals, we typically would not talk about convenience, but rather about burdens.  I have a right to petition my Congressman.  That right does not extend to providing me free postage which would make it much more convenient.  At the same time, it does mean that I don’t have to be unduly burdened, let’s say by presentation of an ID with my letter.

Now, is convenience something that we should be striving for in elections?  Yes, but it’s not traded off against integrity but rather against cost and against the rights of others.  For example, early voting is growing increasingly popular across the country.  It has certainly made voting more convenient for people.  At the same time, it comes with additional costs.  Are election administrators to spare no cost in the provision of early voting?  Of course not.  So we all, in conjunction with input from our elected representatives and the public, make a determination as to how much money we want to spend to increase convenience.

Now let’s say that in order to protect the integrity of ballots, each early voting center has to have a representative judge from the Democratic and Republican parties.  There’s a fixed amount of money in the budget that allows for five early voting sites.  It’s possible to double the sites, if we just agree to forego the two party requirement and allow just one party to be represented at each site.  Hopefully, that’s a tradeoff that no one would agree to.

Further, increasing conveniences can actually do damage to the rights of others.  Illinois just passed a law that allows absentee voting, without excuse, up until the day before the election.  We can guess that we’ll have an hour to two hour wait in a presidential election year on that day as we did the last day of early voting last year.  Typically however, in the last days of absentee voting we see people with emergencies come to our office.  A death in the family is taking them out of town or an unplanned business trip is thrust upon them.  We literally have had people stop by our office on the way out of town.  Many of those people are now going to stop by to find a line an hour long and not be able to stay.  The  convenience provided to some has burdened another person’s right.

Similarly, proposals to alter the registration process and do things automatically will no doubt be more convenient for some people.  However, in the ensuing chaos I anticipate many voters to be burdened as their registration is mistakenly updated.

Integrity involves many items.  It should mean only eligible people vote.  It should mean that every ballot is counted as intended by the voter.  It should mean that the winners of elections actually won.  While we shouldn’t unduly burden voters or election administrators to achieve these integrity goals, we also shouldn’t relax rules so far that integrity is compromised or to the point that the public loses faith in the integrity of the system.  Spending more money to expand the convenience of the voting process but then having battle after battle in the country over the integrity of the process is not a tradeoff that I want to see made.  Let’s make voting more convenient without giving ground on integrity.

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