Bassetti - Electoral dysfunction: a survival manual for American voters

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Victoria Bassetti has worked with legislative and judicial bodies of the U.S. government, including serving as staff director/chief counsel to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. She has been active in numerous political campaigns and participates regularly in election day voter-protection efforts.

The 2012 documentary Electoral Dysfunction is directed by David Deschamps, Leslie D. Farrell, and Bennett Singer, whose credits collectively include multiple Emmy, Peabody, and duPont-Columbia awards.

Mo Rocca is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPRs hit quiz show Wait, Wait... Dont Tell Me! He is a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the author of All the Presidents Pets: The Story of One Reporter Who Refused to Roll Over.

Heather Smith is president of Rock the Vote, which, under her leadership during the past two election cycles, has set the highest voter registration records in both midterm and presidential elections in the organizations twenty-year history of mobilizing millions of young Americans to the polls.

ELECTORAL
DYSFUNCTION

ELECTORAL
DYSFUNCTION

A SURVIVAL MANUAL
FOR AMERICAN VOTERS

VICTORIA BASSETTI
With a foreword by Mo Rocca
and an afterword by Heather Smith

2012 by Victoria Bassetti
Foreword 2012 by Mo Rocca
Afterword 2012 by Heather Smith
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012
Distributed by Perseus Distribution

ISBN 978-1-59558-821-0

CIP data available.

Now in its twentieth year, The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com
www.electoraldysfunction.org

Book design and composition by Bookbright Media
This book was set in Perpetua

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of my grandfather
Cecil G. Taylor (19091999)

CONTENTS

P OP QUIZ: WHICH OF THE following countries does not guarantee its citizens the right to vote?

a) Iran

b) Libya

c) The United States

d) All of the above

If you guessed all of the above, youre right. Yes, the United States is one of only a handful of nations whose constitution does not explicitly provide the right to vote. (Singapore is another, but they dont even allow you to chew gum on the street.)

Im guessing youre surprised. I know I was. Think of all the hard work our Founders put inthe revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, the having to write the entire Constitution with a quilland they neglected to include the right to vote. (I know, it was a long hot summer. Hard to stay focused.) It got me thinking: What else dont I know about voting in our country? How does voting really workor sometimes not workin the U.S. of A.?

So naturally I did what any concerned citizen would do when trying to get to the bottom of things: I took a road trip across America. Along the way I met all kinds of people at the heart of our nations electionsvoters, election workers, elected officials, even electors (you know, the guys and gals who end up picking the President). Of course, no road trip is complete without a bus full of nuns turned away at the polls. (More on that later.)

Spoiler alert: The way we run elections in this country is, as kids today say, totally wacky. What we think of as our electoral system is a crazy quilt of local, state, and federal systems. Thirteen thousand different voting districts, in fact, each with its own rules and regulations. In Iowa and Minnesota, you can register and cast a ballot on the very same day. In Texas and Pennsylvania, youve got to be on the voter rolls a month before an election. In North Dakota, you dont even have to registeryou just vote. In Oregon, theres no actual place to show up and voteyou do it all by mail. And if you live in D.C., you can vote for President, but not for a Representative in Congress. Instead, your voice in Congress is called a Delegate, and shes not allowed to vote on the House floor. During my road trip, I met herDelegate Eleanor Holmes Nortonand she pointed out that taxation without representation remains a reality for 600,000 Americans. Who happen to live in our nations capital. (Ah, irony.)

Then theres that Electoral College, without question the countrys most elite institution. As you probably know, when you and I vote for President, were actually voting for a select few who vote for President for us. And who are these sage men and women, these stewards of our electoral destiny? Theyre people like Ben Leatherbury of Salem, Indiana. Hes a really nice guy. A really nice guy who was all of nineteen years old when he served as an elector.

I also met folks like Tom Tancredo, an outspoken former Congressman from Colorado and onetime presidential candidate. Hes not shy about saying that voting isnt a right but rather a privilege to be earned. (Hes not shy about much, actually, which is one of the reasons why hes great to talk to.) Tancredo believes that Americans should have to pass a civics literacy test before being allowed to cast ballots, even if its not a very tough one: I dont care if we publish the test on great big billboards and tell them what the answers are, he told me. I dont care. I just want [voters] to know something about the government that theyre voting on!

Then there are those nuns I was telling you abouta group of eighty- and ninety-year-old sisters in South Bend, Indiana, who tried to vote at the same place theyd voted for years, but didnt have valid state-issued photo identification. Yes, election officials carded a group of elderly nuns and turned them away. That incident got me thinking: Do stringent ID laws, on the books now in a growing number of states and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, hurt or help our electoral system? Do they deter voter impersonation, as proponents argue, or do they make it harder for qualified voters to actually vote, as critics charge? Thats one of the questions we explore in this book.

But while some people are being turned away from voting, millions of others havent even managed to register. Guess how many. Five million? Ten million? Try fifty. Thats right51 million peopleor one in every four eligible voters. (And lets take bets on how many of those vote regularly on American Idol, or at least on The Voice.) John Fortier, a scholar with The American Enterprise Institute and the Bipartisan Policy Center, put it to me this way: I think both sides would agree that our registration system is broken. Fortier went on to share his ideas for how to make the voter registration system unbroken (or at least a little less broken).

One of those unregistered votersuntil recently, anywaywas Flo Perkins of North Vernon, Indiana. After serving her sentence for a felony conviction incurred several decades earlier, Flo thought she wouldnt be allowed to vote in Indiana. (That is the case in some states, like neighboring Kentucky.) After get-out-the-vote organizers knocked on her door and informed her that she was, in fact, eligible to vote, Flo registered, and I went with her as she cast a ballot for the first time in her life. It was a very emotional day for Flo, who, as she fed her ballot into the optical scanner, asked: Does it shred them as they go through?