"Make Voting Easier. Weekend Elections Would Be a Start"

Norm Ornstein offers this Roll Call commentary (paid subscription required). A snippet, for those who have been following the Carter-Baker Commission controversy:

Moving Election Day to the weekend is no panacea. It ought to be done in conjunction with a series of other reforms, some of which have been suggested by election officials and others of which were included in the recommendations by the Carter-Baker Commission on election reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.

Their commission has been given a bum rap, heavily criticized for one of its recommendations — that we move to a required photo ID for voting. Carter-Baker had made this recommendation with a series of caveats. Under current federal law, there will be a requirement in a few years that a photo identification, the REAL ID, be used for homeland security purposes. If such a requirement is to exist anyhow, why not use it as well for voting? At the same time, the commission said that any photo ID requirement must provide the IDs free of charge to everyone who lacks them and make them readily accessible. The panel did not accept the noxious Georgia standard, which is a latter-day poll tax.

But leave the controversial ID requirement aside and the other recommendations are important and necessary. These include moving rapidly to update statewide voter registration lists, to make them interoperable across states, to make sure that polling places have enough machines with adequate paper trails for validation and recounts, and to have enough trained poll workers.

Posted by Rick Hasen at November 9, 2005 08:11 AM