That’s Doug Chapin’s argument, in response to my NYT Room for Debate piece and the arguments I make in The Voting Wars.

As I’ve been telling the press, I’m under no illusions that national election administration is on the horizon any time soon.  Indeed, I’ve written that it will take a meltdown worse than Florida 2000 to get us there.  And in fact I have called for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to focus solely on the question of how to alleviate the long lines problem: this is a doable goal, with an easy to measure metric in the next election to judge success.  But getting Congress to successfully tackle this problem and to show a successful national role in fixing the problems would be a good first step.

But I won’t back off my long-run argument: we should join other mature democracies in having national, professional nonpartisan election administration: uniform rules, uniform ballot, universal voter registration and national voter i.d.