It’s an unfortunate tendency in our current political climate for legislative initiatives to be viewed as an all or nothing proposition.  It’s delayed the passage of good legislation and probably caused the passage of imprudent legislation that lacks a broad consensus.

So it is with much in election reform.  It’s this climate that allows Rick Hasen to write of me “Don’t Modernize My Voting System” because I oppose a particular plan to do that.  Anyone who spent a week with me would know that I’m continually working to modernize.  For example, I was tracking voter turnout by time of the day six months before Heather Gerken suggests it in the Democracy Index.  Hasen doesn’t think that is any indication of my willingness to modernize.  There is only one litmus test for modernization.  It’s the Committee to Modernize.  Anything less is unacceptable.

Hasen and the Committee to Modernize will no doubt be disappointed with the halfhearted effort of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to modernize.  He has company, because Congressman Gregg Harper wasn’t particularly excited either.  Both sides ought to take a deep breath and adopt the modest changes necessary in HR 1719 to make it secure and safe.

HR 1719, as drafted, allows for currently registered voters to update their addresses on a secure website.  This is a modernization tool that I would welcome, as would many other election officials.  Implementing it for many jurisdictions would be a challenge within their current software packages.  In time, I have no doubt those could be worked out.

But there are plenty of concerns with HR 1719.  First, it’s less than apparent as to whether these updates would come with a mandate to verify information against driver’s license and social security databases.  It’s also unclear as to whether first time registrants would somehow be enabled to use the system.  Further, there is a mechanism within the law to have emails as a substitute for regular mail.  While this can provide some cost savings, its important that every address change be followed by a piece of regular mail to verify the legitimacy of the registration.  Finally, as drafted, the legislation appears to take out the confirmation process whereby election officials are able to remove voters from the registration rolls when attempts to send them regular mail fail and they do not vote in consecutive federal elections.

I’d be surprised if the drafter’s intent was to eliminate all regular mail and to eliminate the process to remove voters from the rolls.  If those issues can be eliminated, then the biggest barrier to this modernization is what to do about first time registrants, and what to do about registrants whose information cannot be verified.  These two issues can be resolved using the reforms enacted in states like Arizona and Kansas as a template.

As compared to the radical proposal put forward by the Committee to Modernize, the online registration updates as proposed in HR 1719 are proven and don’t change the “opt in” nature of our registration system.  It takes the best of what we have now, and improves it.  That’s what good election reform should be about.  Hopefully, both sides can get together and make this bill work.

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