The Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) issued its report on January 22, and it was a welcome surprise.
The bipartisan panel’s conclusions and recommendations were unanimous, and Project Vote can’t disagree with any of them. (Of course, we’d go further, but we’re voting rights advocates, not election administrators, so that’s our job.) The Commission’s charge, as the members understood it, was to improve the voter experience. Even that goal was a refreshing change from the partisan rhetoric we’ve been treated to so often lately, on the theme of how can we make voting as hard as possible? As to long lines at polling places, the specific issue about which President Obama famously said, “We have to fix that,” the mandate is that no one should have to wait more than 30 minutes. As I said, a welcome surprise.
The PCEA examined many factors that might contribute to unreasonably long lines and produced a series of recommendations and best practices, most of which would require no new state or federal laws—though, to be sure, some would benefit from stepped-up enforcement of existing laws. We were heartened by the Commission’s recognition that voter registration problems and inefficiencies are major contributors to polling place bottlenecks. In that connection, they urged states that have not already done so to implement online voter registration, which makes registration easier for applicants, improves the accuracy of voter rolls, and saves time and money for election administrators.
In addition, the Commission endorsed early voting, no-excuse absentee voting, and other pre-Election Day options that spread the election over a longer period of time, with obvious benefits to voters and election officials alike. Both online registration and early voting are among the positive reforms that Project Vote has been urging upon Congress and state legislators for several years, and both have gained traction, at least on the state level.
The PCEA also urged more robust enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), particularly Sections 5 and 7, which require DMVs, offices serving the disabled, and public assistance agencies to offer voter registration to their clients. They found that even agencies that try to follow the law do not always transmit applications in a timely manner to the Board of Elections, thus creating confusion at the polling place for a voter who has done everything right but does not appear on the precinct list—and adding to the waiting time for every person behind her.
Coincidentally, though not mentioned in the PCEA report, a brand new kind of public assistance agency is also covered by the NVRA: the health benefit exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act. With all of the attention in recent months devoted to the problematic rollout and the cumulative tally of enrollees in various age groups, this requirement of the health benefit enrollment process has gone largely unnoticed and certainly unenforced.
In a letter sent on January 22, the same day the PCEA report was issued, Project Vote and Demos called upon President Obama to correct this omission in the protocol used by the federally facilitated health benefit exchanges (FFEs) in enrolling Americans and to comply fully with the NVRA. As the PCEA recognized, every Section 7 violation by a public assistance agency is a lost opportunity to provide an eligible citizen with a convenient way to register to vote. This is no less true of FFEs, which have already interacted with millions of citizens and largely failed to provide that opportunity.
Yes, Mr. President, we have to fix that.