On the night of the election, the President said “we have to fix that” about the long lines people endured to vote. Joining talk radio host Leslie Marshall of the Leslie Marshall Show, Project Vote Executive Director Mike Slater talked “about what has to be fixed” in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election.
“The first thing we have to do is change the way we register people to vote,” said Slater. “The easiest way to do that is to pass Election Day or same day registration.”
To address long lines at the polls, “Early vote makes a lot of sense,” he continued. “It really does cut down on the problems that we have on Election Day. It’s a good dry run for election officials to fix problems. It’s a win-win for both the American people and election officials.” Listen to the radio interview here.
On Thursday, Project Vote’s Catherine Flanagan joined Jacob Soboroff and other voting rights experts on HuffPost Live.
Flanagan discussed early voting as one solution improve our system of elections on a federal level.
“When we have all the pressure of self-governance on one single day, we see that systems fail. Systems are vulnerable,” she said. “For example, what would have happened if Sandy came one week later?”
Flanagan acknowledged the flurry of restrictive state laws designed to curb voter turnout, but warned that administrative issues are just as damaging to the democratic process and must be addressed.
“[The] voter suppression measures that we have been cursing [are] effective. But if you don’t have enough machines, poll workers, and even polling places–that’s when you can really suppress the vote.”