Advantages and Disadvantages of Turnout

There are few things that frustrate me more than tribal politics and gridlock getting in the way of legitimate, important priorities for our nation. Given that improving our system of voting and ensuring that everyone who wants to vote can vote is high on my list of those priorities, it shouldn't be any surprise that editorials like this one from the Wall Street Journal irritate me quite a bit.

As far as I can tell, their primary complaint is that trying to mimic parts of California's voting system for the entire country is going to increase Democratic power across the entire country. They point out a few things about California's system (such as automatic registration, automatic distribution of mail-in ballots, and people being allowed to collect ballots for others) and complain that states should be allowed to decide for themselves how much or how little of that to mimic.

About the only bit of it that I agree with is the concerns about voter harvesting; I agree that it creates too many opportunities for voter fraud and intimidation. Of course, that's also the part that's not in the nationwide bill the House Democrats have put up, so its relevance to those changes is rather low.

Everything else, frankly, comes off as a cheap attempt to poison the well regarding a number of very useful ways to improve voter turnout for everyone by associating them with the biggest Democratic stronghold in the country. The actual arguments against it mostly amount to "it makes voter fraud easier" (which we know because California is still catching those bad automatic registrations) and "states should be able to decide" (which ignores the legitimate interest the federal government has in promoting the health of the entire country's election system). As reasons why we shouldn't take steps to improve turnout, they fall quite badly short; the benefits for the health of our democracy outweighs arguments like those.