The History News Network had an interesting series of posts last year under the heading “Where Have All the Voters Gone?” which had some really great conclusions about what could be done to increase voter turnout :

Lengthy campaigns tax voters’ attention. Although it might be thought a long campaign would serve citizens’ needs by giving them more time to study the candidates, the long campaign actually works against an informed electorate. Most citizens are not psychologically prepared to pay close attention to a campaign when Election Day is months away. Yet, because it has been going on for months, they are also not highly attentive when it is only weeks away. By campaign’s end, they will even have forgotten much of what they had learned earlier. In 2000, for example, Americans knew less about George W. Bush’s position on gun control in October than they had known in February. Overall, our research indicates that the college-educated electorate of today is no better informed and, by some indicators, is less informed than the high-school-educated electorate of fifty years ago.

Changes in the voting laws would also help. For one thing, polling hours should be extended. Amidst the uproar over ballot irregularities in Florida in 2000, no commentator saw fit to ask why the polls in that state closed at 7 p.m. local time. Florida is one of twenty-six states that shut down their polls before 8 p.m. Not surprisingly, turnout in these states is several percentage points below that of states where the polls are open until 8 p.m. or later. Limits on polling hours go back decades and have been a convenient way to discourage the participation of lower-income workers who are stuck at their jobs during the day.

Turnout would likely also increase if Election Day was declared a national holiday, as the National Commission on Federal Election Reform has recommended. The United States is nearly alone among western democracies in holding its elections on a work day instead of on a holiday or weekend. Turnout is depressed by the fact that most people have little choice but to vote before or after work, and then within limited polling hours.

The major legal obstacle to voting, however, is the registration requirement. In nearly all European democracies, registration is virtually automatic. Government assumes the responsibility for placing eligible citizens on the registration rolls. In the United States, the responsibility rests with the individual. Americans no longer have to face the imposing obstacles, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, which once kept many of them from registering.

While we’re on the subject of “election reforms that will never happen”, here’s a few additional ideas :

Alternate methods of voting - Why are we only allowed to vote in person? I’ve never been ID’ed at a polling place. If security is that weak, why not allow us to vote via telephone or internet? When we register to vote, we should be assigned a pin number that we use in addition to our social security number to log into a system that will allow us to vote from just about anywhere.

Why only one day? - Seriously, is there some law that says there has to be an “election day”? Why can’t the polls be open for two weeks prior to the election? I got to vote early this year and I thought it was incredibly convenient.

Volunteers?? - Why are polling places staffed by volunteers? After every election, I always hear horror stories about poll workers who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

We need a new system - Simply put, the current “first past the post” voting system sucks. It marginalizes fringe candidates, encourages tactical voting, and turns our elections into a lesser of two evils proposition. Although Instant Runoff Voting is the most popular alternative voting system in this country, there are a ton of alternative voting systems out there each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There’s so many criteria out there that I don’t have a strong opinion on it (Instant Runoff, Condorcet, and Approval Voting all seem pretty good), but it’s clear that most alternative systems are preferable to the one we’ve got now.

Try enforcing corruption laws - The worst-kept secret in this country is that politicians do the bidding of whomever pays for their campaigns. Campaign finance reform is a good start, but there’s already so much corruption going on through legal loopholes that it’s ridiculous. Seeing Bush and Cheney getting arrested on the evening news for giving away billions of dollars worth of no-competition contracts to Halliburton would do more to restore people’s faith in Democracy than any other reform listed here.

Of course, this is all a moot point. As the HNN article said, there’s a pretty big roadblock standing between us and any real electoral reform :

Republican lawmakers have opposed Election Day registration, just as for more than a century, as Paul Kleppner documented in his study, they have followed a strategy of selective disenfranchisement. The 1993 Motor Voter Act, for example, was passed despite Republican opposition and then only when senate lawmakers agreed to remove automatic registration provisions from the legislation. Even then, Republican governors in seven states refused to implement the Motor Voter Act until forced by legal action to do so.

Ironically, our study found that Republicans have gained as many votes as the Democrats from the Motor Voter Act. Even though more of the new registrants have been Democrats, those who have registered Republican are more likely to cast a ballot on Election Day.

Oh well….I guess we can either bite our tongues and support the less savory candidates (”Lieberman/Sharpton in 2004!”) or just stay home and watch TV.