One of the most distressing things about the recent ACORN/voter registration/voter "fraud" flap has been the further loss of legitimacy for the voting system in this country.  As it stands, both the right and the left fundamentally distrust the machinery of democracy--the way elections are administered.  Regardless of what you think of the other side's complaints, I think that we can all agree that confidence in our electoral system is a foundation of democracy--and that the current situation serves no one very well.  Behind the fold I unveil the first in an occasional look at the problems of our voting system, and what we can do to fix it.

First we need to deal with the proximate causes of this lack of trust--our archaic and exclusionary system for registering voters.  Now, some people and some parties have a vested interest in the status quo--there's no denying this.  But before we begin that fight, it makes sense to know what we should be fighting for.

To that end, I'm going to lay out one principle--a vote is a vote is a vote.  All votes are created equal, and everyone--subject to a few basic restrictions--gets to cast one.  This is a basic tenet of democracy, but it leads to some useful applications.

For starters, any action that prevents one legitimate voter from casting a ballot is as bad as allowing one fraudulent vote.  In a strictly mathematical sense, the "benefit" of casting a vote is the odds that that vote will be the decisive one in the election.  Let's assume an electorate of 1000 eligible voters, and further assume that there is no way of knowing the results of the election in advance (this is inaccurate, but doesn't affect the example, and it's a reasonably good model for an election that is close).  The odds that any one voter will prove decisive are roughly 1 in 1000; illegitimately disqualifying one voter will do damage equal to 1/1000 of affecting the election.  Similarly, adding one false vote would do the same damage, but spread out over the entire electorate rather than concentrated on the single disqualified voter.

Having established this principle, we can see that it's just as important to allow all qualified voters who want to participate to do so as it is to exclude false votes.  So what's the biggest problem? We know that voter fraud is extremely rare--even people who have every reason to seek it out, like Republican pundits and Bush DoJ officials, can only find a few insignificant examples.  Meanwhile, simple mistakes in database administration--never mind any attempts at caging or other techniques--are preventing thousands from voting.  It's clear that we should focus our efforts on improving the accuracy of voter rolls and allowing everyone who's allowed to vote if they so desire.  Tomorrow (because it's late and this is already blog-long) I will go into more detail about some best practices we could use to improve this area of our shaky electoral infrastructure.