Voter Reforms
Gustavo Cruz
04-6-2024
The U.S. may be a democracy, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. From universal white male suffrage in the Jacksonian era to the 15th and 19th amendments, the U.S. has always been reforming the way we conduct elections and who’s allowed to participate in them.
Although there are many reforms to our election processes that are considered every day, Let’s focus on four proposed reforms to the U.S. electoral system and the issues they seek to resolve.
1. FELON VOTING RIGHTS
Even though voting is a right, that right seemingly gets taken away when someone gets a felony conviction. Some argue that this simply isn’t right, as one doesn’t lose other rights like the right to free speech for the right to not have to face discrimination when one gets a felony conviction. Although the specifics vary from state to state, for the most part, at the very least while they’re in jail, felons cannot vote, which is why the very simple reform of allowing them to vote has been proposed. Although allowing people currently in prison to vote hasn’t been too popular, the U.S. has slowly but surely been moving in the direction of restoring voting rights for those with past felonies.
Source: Axios
2. UNIVERSAL REGISTRATION
Another proposed reform is the concept of universal voter registration. Although the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 went a long way to increasing accessibility to registration through the ensuring of access to registration locations like DMVs, the fact remains that many people simply do have the time to go out of their way to register to vote. Additionally the process may be confusing, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Universal registration, or 100% voter registration, would be achieved through various reforms, starting with the concept of automatic registration. With automatic registration, instead of going out of your way to register to vote, you’re registered and your registration info is automatically updated when you interact with a government agency like the DMV unless you opt-out. This has been adopted by 23 states and, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, has led to a large increase in registration. Beyond automatic registration, letting people register to vote on election day at polling places, and efforts such as pre-registration, or allowing 16 and 17 year olds to register so they’re automatically added to voter rolls upon turning 18, would help achieve universal registration.
3. PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
Currently, most states have single-member, winner-take-all elections. This means each congressional district represents 1 member of congress, and whoever wins the most votes, even if they didn’t win a majority of votes, wins the election. In systems with proportional representation, each district would have multiple members. To put it simply, voters would vote for parties, not candidates, and that district’s seats would be given to candidates based on percentages. Say there was a 10 seat district with our current 2 parties, Democrats and Republicans, running. Under a proportional representation system, if democrats won 40% of the vote and Republicans won 60%, then the Democrats would get 4 seats and the Republicans would get 6. By having multi-member districts, the effects of partisan gerrymandering would be combatted as districts would always serve as accurate reflections of the true preferences of the voters living in them. Additionally, proportional representation could make it easier for smaller third parties to start winning seats in Congress, as depending on the specific amount of seats and parties running, even just 5% or 10% of the votes in an area could win third parties a seat in that district. This is obviously a huge oversimplification, and there are many possible ways to calculate how seats are distributed, whether or not its parties or candidates running, or a number of other factors, but the gist is that this would lead to a more accurate representation of partisan divisions in the nation. If you want to learn more about proportional representation and the many ways it can be achieved, check out this link.
4. RANKED CHOICE VOTING
In most U.S. elections, whoever gets the most votes wins the election. Sometimes, depending on the state, if no one wins a majority of votes, the top two vote getters go into a runoff election. Ranked choice voting takes this runoff concept one step further. As the name implies, ranked choice voting involves the ranking of candidates when one goes to vote. Under this system, if your top choice has no chance of winning, your vote automatically gets counted for your second choice, and so on down the ranking until someone gets a majority of votes. In this voting system, it would be ensured that everyone felt their vote mattered a little more, as through their rankings they would make a difference even if their top choice didn’t win. This would also mitigate the effect of spoiler candidates, since votes for them would be transferred to another candidate. The ending of spoiler candidates would also lead to more third-party candidates as they would no longer have to worry about being spoilers. The proposed Fair Representation Act would seek to combine ranked choice voting with the idea of proportional representation, which was discussed above.
Source: FairVote