“The future of elections,” they called it. In 2017, California passed a voting “reform” bill meant to liberate the state’s voters from such old-fashioned ideas as the local election precinct, a single election day, and filling out a ballot by hand.
On Super Tuesday, the Golden State trotted modernity onto the stage beneath the glare of the national spotlight to show us the future. And it was dreadful.
Voters had to wait three hours or more in Los Angeles. Although polls were supposed to close at 8 p.m., some Angelenos didn’t vote until 11 p.m. The cutting-edge, high-tech, culturally sensitive, touch-screen voting machines malfunctioned, and many were out of order all day.
Oh, and the website for the California secretary of state went down on Super Tuesday too.
The long lines weren’t supposed to happen because every voter got a ballot in the mail. Mail-in voting is seen as enfranchising because it doesn’t require mobility or the ability to vote on Election Day. Yet most voters didn’t mail in their ballots, and many of those who did vote by mail effectively threw away their votes. More than 400,000 Californians voted for candidates who had already dropped out by Super Tuesday, mostly Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer, all of whom dropped out less than 72 hours before primary day.
“There was never a line the last several years,” voter Craig Meier told the Los Angeles Times. “At his old polling place at a church, we were in and out within 10 minutes.'”
Why the new system? The fatal conceit. It was all about embracing modernity and achieving new efficiencies through centralization and technology. LA County used to have 4,500 local precincts. Now, it has fewer than 1,000 “vote centers” for its 5.5 million voters.
If you think like a state, you see all people as interchangeable, believe that where people actually live is arbitrary, and are convinced that the greatest threat is local deviation or local control. From that perspective, this “reform” was progress.
When Orange County in 2017, still controlled by Republicans, refused to go along with this “future,” the elites were enraged. The local public radio station sniffed, “Orange County supervisors reject cost-saving vote centers.”
“Orange County will not be adopting a new voting system designed to make it easier for the county’s 1.2 million voters to cast a ballot,” the reporter groused ahead of the 2018 elections.
Come 2020, the whole state was on board, but voters like Meier would not say the modern system made it “easier to vote.”
But the touch screens, the centralization, the “efficiency” from the perspective of bureaucrats — these really may be the future. So expect to spend a lot more time standing in line.
