Electoral Dysfunction

Two Republicans in separate states were taken into police custody during the past week for allegedly attempting to test how easy it would be to commit voter fraud.

It was 6:10 a.m., cold and dark on a dimly lit street. “Who are you?” an obviously harried woman asked as I stepped out of my car. I told her I was there to work at the polls.
“Good,” she said. “Two of my people have had their phone numbers changed and another two aren’t answering.

You didn’t know it at the time, but when you logged into Facebook on Election Day, you became a subject in a mass social experiment. You went about your day, clicked around Facebook, and you may have voted. Now your behavior is data that social scientists will scrutinize in the months ahead, asking one of the core questions of democracy: What makes people vote?

Voters from ages 18 to 29 represented 19 percent of all those who voted on Tuesday, according to the early National Exit Poll conducted by Edison Research. That’s an increase of one percentage point from 2008.

President Barack Obama set a new goal for himself during his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning. As he spoke in Chicago, he thanked everyone who cast a ballot “whether you voted for the first time, or waited in line for a very long time” — then he quickly added, in an evident ad lib, “by the way we have to fix that.

Now there are so many other, subsidiary dramas to pay attention to, many of them not about the preferences of voters but about the act of voting and the counting of votes. What happened to those people who were standing in line to cast early ballots in Florida? Will the provisional ballots in Ohio matter, and if so, who is going to count them – and when? Are people being turned away from the polls because they do not have required ID documents? Whose lawyers are going to court and where? Will there be a split between the electoral vote and the popular vote? The subplots thicken with each election cycle; occurrences that seemed strange and anomalous in 2000 have now become routine.

This is the day when voters raised on a reverence for democracy realize the utter disregard their leaders hold for that concept. The moment state and local officials around the country get elected, they stop caring about making it easy for their constituents to vote. Some do so deliberately, for partisan reasons, while others just don’t pay attention or decide they have bigger priorities.