PICAYUNE —
“Obama’s proposed voting commission under partisan fire from both sides.”
That recent headline in The Washington Post is hardly a surprise. Virtually every reasonable idea in the capital these days draws partisan fire from both sides. But if the extremes are agitated, the proposal probably has merit, and that’s true for the voting commission.
As outlined by President Barack Obama last week in his State of the Union address, the commission will recommend remedies for a true national scandal: the onerous difficulties encountered by Americans who simply want to exercise their right to vote. A report by the Brennan Center for Justice described the scene last November this way:
“Exceptionally long lines were not isolated to a single city or state ... In several polling places in Florida and Virginia, voters were still casting ballots at midnight, long after the presidential election had been called. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, election observers reported that long lines forced people to walk away without voting.”
In a brilliant stroke, the White House convinced two of the nation’s leading experts on election law, Bob Bauer and Ben Ginsberg, to head the panel. Bauer is a Democrat who advised Team Obama, and Ginsberg is a Republican who worked for Mitt Romney’s campaign. They know all the tricks, and how they can be fixed.
Normally, we’re not big fans of one more commission. But the issue of voting elicits such passionately partisan views that an independent and credible review of what ails the system could be quite useful. And the moment is right. As Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser, told The New York Times: “Election reform is always hard to do. But second-term presidents may be the only people who can do something like this, because they will never be on the ballot again.”
In a particularly wrongheaded strategy, liberals have attacked the commission because Ginsberg has a long history of working with Republicans on election issues. The Daily Kos website even used a particularly vile obscenity to describe Ginsberg, who is widely respected in Washington legal circles. (He’s a law partner of Cokie’s brother.)
But then the website indicts its own logic by conceding, “It is ... hard to see exactly what the administration can accomplish in the realm of election reform without a willing Congress.” Well, yeah. We have often accused conservatives of not being able to count, but liberals seem to have the same blind spot. Since Republicans control the House, it’s essential to have someone from the GOP — like Ginsberg — front and center in the reform effort.
The conservative critique of the commission was expressed by Jason Gant, South Dakota secretary of state, who argued: “We don’t want to turn over the running of our elections to some bureaucrats in Washington. We want to keep that at the local level with local elected officials.”
Fair enough; Washington rules are often rigid and wasteful. But those “exceptionally long lines” demonstrate that many states have failed their own citizens. And voting is such a basic right that federal intervention is justified when that right is being degraded.
In Florida alone, more than 200,000 citizens may have been discouraged from voting by interminable delays, according to Ohio State professor Theodore Allen. Another election expert, professor Daniel Smith of the University of Florida, adds that minority voters “bore disproportionately the long lines that we all witnessed.”
That’s a poll tax. That’s a disgrace. And in Florida and other states, the delays were at least partly deliberate, the result of a concerted attempt by conservative cadres to pass voter ID laws and other measures that actually made it harder, not easier, to vote. The authors say they were trying to prevent fraud, but their explanation is, well, a fraud, because electoral misconduct is negligible. The real reason: They were trying to prevent minorities, who tend to back Democrats, from voting.
Now there are small signs of progress. In Florida, Republican Gov. Rick Scott has backed a reform package that would extend early voting days and expand the number of polling places. The measure passed a committee of the state legislature on a unanimous bipartisan vote.
That’s exactly the sort of practical innovation the new commission should be looking at. Also on its plate: modernizing voter registration procedures to take advantage of online databases, and urging states to upgrade voting machines and hire more poll workers.
The extremes are wrong. The commission is worth trying. The right to vote is meaningless if you have to wait hours to exercise it.
(Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com)
Opinion
Voting reform could end national disgrace
- Opinion
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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