I give a lot of guff to FairVote and their Executive Director, Rob Richie, because of their stance on instant runoff voting. (They love it. I hate it.) But there's a lot more topics in the sphere of technocratic election reform, and on almost all other issues, we agree vehemently. But I especially want to call out Richie's (and Andrea Levien's) latest in the Huffington Post, on the topic of voter ID laws.
Richie and Levien point out something I hadn't even noticed: That voter ID proponents play fast-and-loose with measures of voter turnout, in order to minimize the apparent problems with it. In short, ID proponents cite measurements of turnout among registered voters as evidence that voter ID isn't problematic, when measurements of turnout among eligible voters tells a very different—and probably more truthful—story.
Read the whole piece, and remember two things. One, that you always need to be precise when defining what you're measuring. And two, that, despite the things we disagree about, election reform advocates still have a lot that we can agree on.
good call.
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