“Op-Ed: What America should learn from this harrowing election”

Franita Tolson LAT oped:

However, all the blame game does is gloss over the key structural failure in our system of elections that, even in conditions of historic voter turnout, permits states to suppress that turnout and disenfranchise a significant number of voters for no good reason.

Voter suppression and disenfranchisement cannot be explained by a polling error or political strategy gone awry. This is a first-order issue of democratic legitimacy because states make it needlessly difficult for people to vote in a system that holds itself out as a democracy. As such, having more reliable polling or running more targeted campaigns won’t solve this problem. Neither will fixing the electoral college. Even if we let the people pick the president directly, some combination of states would still make it difficult for segments of their populations to cast ballots.

Share this: