Voter ID, drop boxes, and food and water “bans” have taken center stage in the national debate over recent election reforms in Georgia and Iowa. However, less discussed are parts of the laws that hold to account and punish poor local election management practices.
These specific reforms may well have a bigger impact in improving elections, but you won’t hear Democrats talking about them. After all, that would discredit their federal takeover attempt with H.R. 1 and force them to criticize their local politicians. As a former state election official in Virginia, I learned that much of what makes or breaks an election is how well elections are managed at the local level. Take the issue of long lines. The tedious work of choosing precinct boundaries and the right polling locations is key to ensuring that voters don’t overwhelm a voting location on Election Day. Lines will swell if local officials don’t properly recruit or train poll workers or if they’re unable to troubleshoot malfunctioning voting equipment. And if a local government is too cheap to pay for enough voting machines, then you won’t have the numbers of ballot scanners to keep voters moving through the polls. Systemic yet avoidable failures in these areas are what cause notorious around-the-block lines in places such as Georgia.
The state certainly has an important role, but, like schools, police, and other government services, our elections are largely administered and funded locally. Nearly all of the local officials I worked with were competent and hard-working, but there were exceptions that led to problems that would stain the perception of an election statewide. Unfortunately, the state Board of Elections had little power other than to bring the local officials in for a stern warning. Other local election officials would also coalesce to oppose any legislation that might empower the state to discipline or replace incompetent officials. Lack of accountability was a bipartisan concern.
It’s different in Florida, where they’ve done a lot of things right since the 2000 recount. Most importantly, Govs. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis utilized a provision in the state’s constitution to suspend and replace incompetent election officials in Palm Beach and Broward counties. These are Florida’s serial underperformers in elections. After losing patience with failings, the governors replaced these election supervisors with competent officials who ran orderly, drama-free elections in 2020. This was the culmination in a series of improvements that made Florida a now rightly recognized national leader in election administration.
With its recent reforms, Georgia has done something similar by requiring performance reviews and empowering the state to remove and replace local election superintendents who have demonstrated gross negligence. This will help root out poor local election practices, especially when politicians are tempted to “circle the wagons” and protect their own at the expense of their local voters. If these and other reforms in the law function as designed, we won’t need to argue over handing out water at a polling place because the lines will be manageable and water won’t be needed.
Similarly, Iowa has responded to three county auditors in the 2020 election who endangered voter privacy and election integrity by illegally mailing out absentee applications prefilled with personally identifiable information. Fortunately, the RNC was able to sue them successfully, undoing some of that damage and preempting other would-be rogue counties from doing the same. But litigation shouldn’t be necessary now under Iowa’s reforms that enhance statewide uniformity, empower the state to suspend and fine lawbreaking officials, and even provide for criminal penalties for local officials who knowingly violate the law.
Clearly, Democrats are ignoring the problem. By and large, the systemic election incompetence at the local level is in Democrat-controlled jurisdictions such as Atlanta, New York, and Detroit. Perhaps, Democrats should set their sights there instead of plotting a federal takeover of our elections with H.R. 1. Florida, and now Georgia and Iowa, are fixing these mismanagement problems that will do far more to enfranchise voters than the current sloppy attempt by Congress.
Justin Riemer is the chief counsel of the Republican National Committee.
