I was hoping voting wouldn’t be an issue this year, so I’m glad Senator Coons proposed this:
Efforts to improve election administration and address the long lines that greeted voters on Election Day shifted to Capitol Hill on Thursday as House and Senate lawmakers unveiled related bills.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., introduced legislation that would establish a competitive-grant program within the Justice Department to provide states with incentives to improve their voting processes.
The problems were “profoundly concerning and upsetting to me,” Coons told reporters at a briefing. “That a dozen years after the debacle of the 2000 election, that we should still have these challenges and problems all across the country … I thought it was time to do something.”
His bill is a multipronged effort to improve access to the polls. It asks states to create flexible registration opportunities, emphasize early voting periods, promote no-excuse absentee voting, provide foreign language assistance, improve accessibility for disabled voters, train election officials, audit polls with long wait times and create contingency plans for voting during natural and other disasters.
Good stuff to be sure, but the real problem is corrupt Republican Governorships and private ownership of voting machines. So isn’t the real solution a nationalized voting system?