Election Reform is Way Overdue in the United States

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon

Our country's election laws, policies, and procedures are antiquated and way too diverse. Nothing is uniform. In any given election, computer ballots, optical scan ballots, and standard paper ballots are all used all over the country. The way elections are run vary widely from county to county and from state to state. 

When I was young and before I could vote, I remember large steel gray voting booths with curtains at the front. You'd walk in to the booth, a lever was pulled, the curtain closed behind you, and you'd click a lever selecting your candidate of choice.

In every election I've voted in, I've been handed a large cardstock ballot and led to a small booth where I've had to darken in a circle next to the name of the candidate I want to vote for. I've then had to place the ballot in a large lock box or feed it into a machine that presumably scans and records the selections.

And I'm sure if you were to ask people throughout the country, you'd hear of all kinds of different ways people vote.

There are too many ways to vote in this country. In order to avoid any electronic tampering, it would seem the easiest solution would be to standardize and simplify the way we vote in this country. 

The cardstock ballot seems, at least to me, the easiest way to do things. Everybody is given these ballots, they're all collected in a tamper-proof box, and when the polls close, the boxes are all taken to a central location where the ballots are all fed into a machine connected to a computer (a computer that is not connected to the internet or a network), where a member of the county elections office records the results. Then the results are recorded and sent to the state secretary of state's office for certification.

Eliminating computers and opportunities for cyber-criminals to compromise networks and change election results should also be a priority; cyber-security in elections wouldn't need to be as extensive if elections were streamlined and simplified. 

Yesterday's Iowa Caucus devolved into a train wreck and a circus as the results have apparently been compromised due to an untested mobile app that was designed to report the caucus vote of each of Iowa's precincts. Several county chairs reported issues with the app. Many of them could not get the app to work. When the app failed, several chairs tried phoning in the results, causing the phone lines to be tied up for hours.

As of now, the caucus results have still yet to be released. 

The caucus debacle also brings up another issue — the inconsistencies in the American presidential primary process. In addition to Iowa, Nevada, North Dakota, and Wyoming hold caucuses; and they all follow different rules. In addition to these states, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands all hold caucuses.

We should really rethink how primaries and candidates are chosen. I think there is a very strong argument for making every state run their primary election the same. 

While we're at it, abolishing the electoral college doesn't sound like a bad idea. I understand if the electoral college would be abolished our history books would look different, but I firmly believe the electoral college has outlived its usefulness. If electing people to every other office via popular vote has worked, there's no reason why the popular vote shouldn't be used to elect the president. 

There are just too many moving parts to our current electoral system. There are too many complex pieces that have to work in unison to make sure elections go off without a hitch, and that rarely happens. 

There is merit in simplifying things. Keeping it simple would make things a lot easier.