Long lines, disputed counts: Why elections stumble
In the 2012 election, Robert Bauer was President Obama’s campaign counsel and Benjamin Ginsberg was the top lawyer for Republican opponent Mitt Romney. Now they have joined forces to co-chair the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, studying the problems elections face. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Long lines, unreliable voting machines, disputed ballots: Why don’t elections in the U.S. work better?
Ginsberg: There are 8,000 different jurisdictions that are responsible for putting on some part of our elections. It is a process largely fueled by volunteers. They don’t have adequate training in most cases.
Bauer: We don’t commit nearly the resources that we need to, to the election administration process. Our administrators, who are generally overlooked when things go well and harshly criticized
when they don’t, by and large have to deal with very tight budgets in which the priority is never very high for the work they have to do.
Q: Do you think voter fraud is a big problem?
Bauer: There isn’t any evidence of widespread fraud, and there certainly isn’t the sort of evidence that would justify some of what we’re seeing in the legislative and political sphere today, which ... results, in our view, in disqualifying voters that should be permitted to cast their ballots and participate in the democratic process.
Ginsberg: When there are examples of fraud, if you want peo- ple to have faith in the system, and to give the appearance that it is a one-person, one-vote system, then some simple measures that
are common in everyday life, like showing photo ID, is to me a useful step to take.
Q: Do problems with the way elections are run contribute to the dissatisfaction with politics generally?
Ginsberg: Polarization and the issues that cause that are probably what happens because of election results, not because of the actual process of voting.
Bauer: The extent to which we honor voters on the day in which they should be reigning supreme is a critical factor in how they think their government thinks of them. If somebody is stuck in a line for seven hours, if the budgets for election administration are insufficient, if thousands of votes go uncounted or are counted incorrectly because of bad machinery or inadequately trained poll workers, then the government and the political process is making a statement to voters, and the statement is: You don’t count.