Editorial

New York really, really needs early voting

Posted

Americans are understandably proud of our democracy. As a nation, we represent a beacon of hope for the world. We elect our leaders peacefully. We do not usurp power in violent coups.

Heck, we founded the modern democracy. Before the U.S., you have to go back 2,000 years to find any real form of representative democracy –– in ancient Greece.

The sad thing is, our voter turnout is abysmal compared with the majority of developed democracies worldwide. According to the Pew Research Center, the U.S. ranks 28th out of 36 highly developed democracies in voter turnout for major elections.

In Belgium, where voting is mandatory, the participation level has reached as high as 90 percent. In Denmark, where it’s not compulsory, the rate is 80 percent; France, 70 percent; Mexico, 63 percent.

In 2012, the U.S.’s participation rate in the presidential election was a whopping 53 percent, despite all the hype and hoopla of the Obama-Romney matchup. It will be a while before we know precisely what the rate was this year, but early data suggests that it reached a record nationwide high of . . . 57 percent, which would move us up all of one place on Pew’s list.

Some people complain that it’s just too hard to vote. Consider this scenario: You’re the parent of a young child who must be dropped off at nursery school early in the morning as you’re rushing to work. On Election Day, typically, you have only minutes to prepare your child for the day, hurry to the school and head to work an hour away. You come back late in the day, exhausted. Though you feel that you must vote, you just want to get home, and your child is eager to eat and decompress. So are you. So you don’t vote.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed making Election Day a federal holiday, which he would call Democracy Day. People would get the day off –– giving them ample time to vote, and no excuse to skip out on their civic duty. That’s probably an impractical suggestion, though, given that we are a robust capitalist society with a busier-than-thou work ethic.

Instead, we suggest that the federal government impanel a bipartisan commission to develop a standardized set of best voting practices, aimed at increasing participation.

In the U.S., states determine their own voting policies, which leaves us with a hodgepodge of procedures –– and a wide range of voter-participation rates. According to the United States Elections Project, the rate hit 74 percent in Minnesota this year, while in New York it was 52 percent –– among the lowest rates in the country. In fact, only seven states were lower.

That’s probably because New York makes it so darned hard to vote compared with other states. Some 40 states offer some form of early voting, according to www.vote.org. New York isn’t one of them.

Early voting offers an obvious advantage: If you anticipate trouble making it to the polls on Election Day, you can cast your ballot ahead of time. In Colorado, all voters receive ballots in the mail –– and they can just send them back in. It’s little wonder that Colorado had among the highest voter-participation rates this year, nearly 67 percent.

New York needs early voting.

And why does our state make it so cumbersome simply to register to vote? Yes, federal legislation passed in 1993 allows people to register at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is easier than it was back in the day, when you had to file with the Board of Elections. But even now, you still need to physically register to vote. Paperwork must be filed. Many people forget. Others simply don’t know that they can register at the DMV.

Why not automatically register people when they file paperwork at the DMV? There would be no additional forms to file, which would save paper and labor costs. More important, people wouldn’t have to think about registering.

If we are to increase voter-participation rates, and thus become a truly representative democracy, then we have to –– have to –– make it easier to vote. It’s really that simple.