I have written this piece for Slate, part of its ts “How to Fix the Constitution” Hive. It begins:
My field is election law, and in this area it’s really easy to come up with a sexy but risky fix that might improve the U.S. Constitution: Abolish the Electoral College. Overturn Citizens United and the flood of corporate money in elections. Establish a national initiative allowing voters to vote directly on legislation instead of going through Congress, making the United States more like California. I have a change that will sound less sexy but is more needed than all of them: Create an independent, nonpartisan agency to run our federal elections.
The United States is one of the few mature democracies that leaves the rules for counting elections in local hands, and, in a majority of states, that means partisan officials are in charge. Think about it: We have people running our elections whose ultimate allegiance is not to the integrity of the vote count but to the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.
So when Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott defends his latest purge of voters as necessary to keep illegal voters from voting, why should we believe he is doing this in the best interest of the integrity of the elections rather than to give Romney and edge over Obama in the perennial swing state? And when Obama’s Justice Department objects to the purge, why should we believe it is acting to preserve voter access to the polls rather than trying to give that edge to Obama?
As I document in my upcoming book, The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, the fights over election rules, especially over controversial new voter identification rules, have gotten much worse since Bush v. Gore in 2000….