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This article, beyond being flamebait and inappropriate for HN, reflects a fundamentally poor understanding of the U.S. government. The comment about national elections, for example - the United States has _zero_ national elections except for the meeting of the electoral college in December of presidential election years.
Followup. Because I buried the lede.
No legislative action is needed. Jurisdictions can normalize election administration. Just by comparing notes and adopting best practices.
This is how it's always been. National associations and organizations have always done this. For instance, the national groups and local affiliates working on disability issues advocated for touchscreens and other ADA stuff.
There would be immediate benefits to providing better resources for these efforts.
Additionally, there'd be immediate benefits to creating a new study groups with the charter to normalize administrative and bureaucratic stuff. Just like every other discipline in every industry already does.
If they did nothing more than compile and then critically analyze all the rules and procedures in effect, listing who does what, it'd be a huge service.
re OC #2 No uniformity in national elections
HAVA and Election Assistence Commission (EAC.gov) were very modest initial efforts to codify and normalize our elections. Do you object to HAVA and EAC.gov?
Do you object to NIST creating standardized, uniform weights and measures?
If you support NIST but oppose EAC, why? What's the functional, practical difference?
re OC #3 No national election management body
There's a lot of daylight between our current non-system and nationalized election administration.
We don't even have a nationalized election observers, reporting on key metrics.
Rhetorical question: How does one manage what one does not measure?
_"except for the meeting of the electoral college"_
That Foreign Policy did not advocate democratic reforms, like abolishing Electoral College, shows their restraint. The obvious reforms they did suggest are less controversial than standardized accounting rules (FASB's GAAP).
What's fun with the electoral college is the president and VP are voted for separately. Mike Pence got more votes than DJ Trump in 2016.
The number one threat to election integrity is change, begetting chaos.
We must lock down the rules during an election cycle. To only be changed under extreme circumstances. With those parameters also spelled out.
We must also slow roll changes to election administration. Any change whatsoever is disruptive and will disenfranchise at least as much as its intended to help.
There are many, many needed changes. And I'm only cautioning about administration, gear, procedures. I still advocate ambitious, aspirational democratic reforms, voting rights, etc.
Source: Decade working as poll worker, election integrity activist, lobbying. Started as a Black Box Voting style firebrand, transformed into a Good Government style reformer.
It's easy to forget that "the United States" has meaning and is not just a catch name for a country.
I understand #2 and #3 (and #9) to be features, not bugs.
The lack of national standards or national election management body create a system that's especially resilient, because the decentralized, diverse system can handle many failures and still produce something pretty close to a representative result.
This list misses the biggest problem of them all. The two party system with entrenched interests that just don't reflect the population.
In many other countries, parties are routinely bootstrapped from the ground up and the big dogs need to form alliances for majorities. This also has it's flaws but also solves many problems.
Imagine crooks from Republican led state governments gerrymandering North Carolina but ultimately losing majority vote to Outer banks party because the entrenched ruling party don't give fucks about the outer banks flooding due to climate change.
A more constructive way to restate your points might be:
FPTP begats a two-party system (cite Duverger's Law) and we need something like ranked choice voting (RCV) for executive positions to make our representation more democratic.
Our current system of redistricting is also problematic. (We now call politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians "gerrymandering".) We can largely moot this problem with something like Proportional Representation (PR) for assemblies.
> In many other countries, parties are routinely bootstrapped from the ground up and the big dogs need to form alliances for majorities.
That's essentially a function of the electoral system, though. The US system more or less makes a two-party system inevitable.
If democrats were ok with guns and republicans ok with abortion we could get a lot more done.
But that's the point about two party systems. You are asking people to be ok with things that they might feel strongly against.
With a multi-party system, the focus goes away from these extremes to things that actually affect the congressional district.
This, when used with representational electoral college (aka, not first past the post in a state), pretty much forces all the parties to moderate down on everything. It becomes very hard to have extremist positions.
I believe these two issues I cited can no longer be discussed logically. How can either side proceed without objective discussion of the issue?
What if I’m pro abortion and pro gun? Does that mean I’m held back by party affiliation?
By supporting a 3rd party that could potentially support both of these.
Also, voters are more fluid than you think. See: Evangelical christians supporting lying, cheating and womanizing Trump.
With FOUR times the population of the US, I think India (the largest democracy in the world) conducts elections in a much more efficient & transparent way. The types of analysis, projections, data mining / ML employed has been particularly impressive the last decade or so.