I have written this new piece for Slate. It begins:
Hillary Clinton spoke at Texas Southern University last week, where she put forward some good and provocative ideas for improving our elections. She wants Congress to fix the part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. She wants to expand early voting periods nationally to at least 20 days. And most provocatively, she advocates automatic universal voter registration across the country, including a program to automatically register high school students to vote before their 18th birthdays.
But the partisan way she’s framed the issue—by blaming Republicans for all the voting problems—makes it less likely these changes will actually be implemented should she be elected president. Instead, she’s offering red meat to her supporters while alienating the allies she would need to get any reforms enacted.
Another snippet:
Slate readers may welcome Clinton calling out Republicans who are acting in bad faith. I understand that impulse, because I agree that Walker and Perry support restrictive voter ID laws not because they believe voter fraud is a real problem but to help get Republicans elected through suppressing the Democratic vote.
However, there are moderate Republicans who are willing to work with Democrats on election reform when the issue is less politicized. Consider the work of thePresidential Commission on Election Administration, headed by President Obama’s former head lawyer Robert Bauer and former Mitt Romney campaign head lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg. They proposed common-sense election reforms to improve our election processes—work that is being carried forward on a bipartisan basis by groups like the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Pew Charitable Trust’s election reform project. Doug Chapin’s Election Academy brings professionalism, not partisanship, to the field. And with a newly functioning Election Assistance Commission, moderate technocratic steps to improve our elections are possible.
Or consider how Republicans and Democrats have come together in many places to support online voter registration, a great move to aid the convenience of voters who are new or who have moved since last voting. The Florida legislature passed this reform with great bipartisan majorities, and Gov. Rick Scott reluctantly signed the law, even after his handpicked Secretary of State Ken Detzner fought against its passage. The Republican Ohio Secretary of State, Jon Husted, is pushing hard for online voter registration, despite opposition from Republicans state legislators.
It concludes:
On Twitter I complained that a campaign is the last place to have a rational conversation about our dysfunctional election system. Clinton’s lawyer Elias responded: “Wrong—it’s the best place to expose voter suppression for what it is. Worst place is in academic papers no one reads.”
That may be a great position to take in the campaign. But it’s not the kind of talk that is going to get Republicans in Congress to go along with a Voting Rights Act fix proposed by a President Hillary Clinton or any other meaningful reforms that will require bipartisan support. Clinton would do the country a service by leaving election reform to sober policy discussions and not campaign rallies.