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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 2/18/22

America Needs To Listen to Canada About an "Elections" Agency

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Thom Hartmann
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Reprinted from hartmannreport.com

The easiest and most efficient way to clean up our elections and make them open and transparent is for Congress to create an "Elections USA" agency as soon as possible

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The United States needs a national elections system run by professionals with complete transparency and not vulnerable to politics: Canada did this 102 years ago and we should take a lesson from their successes to create an Americanized version.

With almost 40 percent of all the mail-in ballot requests coming out of heavily-Democratic Houston being rejected because of the GOP's latest anti-voter law - and over a dozen other Republican-controlled states following suit with the newest thing in election suppression - by the end of this year's election it should be obvious to all Americans that we need to change our elections systems.

This won't work now:

We won't be able to get rid of the Electoral College that has recently put two election losers - George W. Bush (lost by 500,000 votes) and Donald Trump (lost by 3,000,000 votes) - in the White House: that's in the Constitution, so the only practical way for all actual winners to become president is if enough states pledge to throw their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote.

That'll require states representing 270 or more electoral votes to participate in the national popular vote movement, but so far member states are only up to 195 as GOP-controlled states refuse to participate. We need to keep pushing for it with the folks at nationalpopularvote.com, but for the moment it's not going to solve the Electoral College problem and definitely won't help with this wave of voter suppression sweeping the country.

But this could:

What we can do, however, without a constitutional amendment or the participation of the states, is for Congress to create a single, nonpartisan, professional national federal agency that sets standards for and runs elections in all 50 states.

Here in Oregon our election is 100 percent by mail and voter registration is automatic when you apply for a drivers' license, which has put us among the top states in the union for voter participation (75.5% in 2020).

Texas, on the other hand, makes it difficult to register to vote and, even when you succeed in registering, the voting process can be arduous, particularly if you live in a precinct that's heavily non-white or that regularly votes Democratic, driving down voter participation (60.4% in 2020).

Voter registration also reflects these dynamics, with 67.6% of citizens registered to vote in Oregon compared with only 53.8% in Texas. (The best in the nation is Alaska at 82.8%; the worst is Wyoming at 46.1%.)

But this is the best way:

We need national standardization. Every American citizen should be able to easily register and vote, and the process, while being secure, should also be as easy as mailing an envelope or showing up to mark a ballot in person.

In a federal republic like the US, your ability to vote shouldn't be a function of where you live; that's a clear violation of Americans' right to vote that flies in the face of the guarantee of a "republican form of government" found in the Constitution.

If there's enough of a turnout-driven backlash to the voter suppression sweeping across the country and Democrats can hold the House and increase their majority in the Senate, 2023 might see the real possibility of significant election reforms.

A starting point would be to establish a single national election administration that's functionally an appendage of the government but is immune from political manipulation. That agency, rather than the states and counties, would administer elections and tabulate and report the votes.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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