The Electoral College prevents electing a vice presidential candidate separate from a presidential candidate

Recently, news about a startup campaign to elect the vice president separately from electing the president has popped up. As the vice.run movement describes itself, its goal is to “reinstate the vice presidency as a democratically elected position. Vice.run’s goal is to create a vice presidential ballot line in the 2020 election in all 50 states.”

It sounds like a fascinating idea. But under any scrutiny, it just won’t work. That’s because the Electoral College doesn’t function this way.

To begin, it’s entirely correct to say that states don’t have to list a particular president-vice president combination unless they seek ballot access for that combination, and it’s possible to think about alternative arrangements to how we typically look at elections. A couple of historic examples come to mind. In 1836, the Virginia Democratic Party despised Martin Van Buren’s running mate Richard Mentor Johnson. While most states’ electors ultimately voted for Van Buren and Johnson, Virginia’s electors voted for Van Buren and William Smith. That prevented Johnson from receiving a majority of electoral votes, so the election was sent to the Senate, which elected Johnson over runner-up Whig Francis Granger.

In the same election, Whigs chose not to field a single candidate, but fielded multiple candidates that they hoped each would receive sufficient support over the Democratic candidate, prevent the Democratic candidate from securing a majority of electors, and send the race to the House of Representatives to choose among the top three vote-getters, potentially yielding a Whig candidate.

All this is to say we’ve seen some interesting and creative attempts to use the Electoral College framework to achieve particular ends. But what about a separate vice presidential candidate?

The logic (although there isn’t much law) spelled out on the vice.run site goes as follows: a vice presidential candidate could be a separate line on the ballot. The people could then choose to vote for a particular presidential candidate and an entirely different vice presidential candidate. Particularly attractive independent vice presidential candidates may force presidential candidates to choose them as their running mates.

All interesting ideas. But utterly unworkable due to the Electoral College.

Each state receives presidential electors equal to the number of senators and representatives they receive—say, Vermont receives three. On Election Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, when voters cast a vote for Clinton-Kaine or Trump-Pence, they are actually casting a vote for three electors pledged to support Clinton-Kaine or Trump-Pence. (“Pledged” I use very loosely—some states have formal pledges, some are legally binding, others are mere informalities or general expectations.)

Then, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, Vermont’s three presidential electors meet in the state, along with electors from the other states in their respective states. The electors cast two votes: one for president, and on a distinct ballot, one for vice president. (The headline of my post is a bit misleading—in fact, presidential electors are required to vote for a separate president and vice president. This post is about the people voting via ballot separately.)

Suppose now there is an election with a separate line item for president and vice president. How would we choose the electors? We simply couldn’t. We can’t pick three electors for president and another three electors for vice president; that would require a state to choose six electors, which it couldn’t do. So we’d need the same electors for president and vice president—which means we couldn’t have separate lines unless the electors were the same, or aligned with one another, which would seem to defeat the purpose of having separate lines.

Instead, the only feasible opportunity to have presidential and vice presidential candidates elected separately would look as follows: the state legislature chooses three electors; it designates that those electors must be bound to vote in accordance with the popular vote of a presidential candidate and a vice presidential candidate; then, those electors would have to vote for whichever presidential and vice presidential candidate were selected.

It’s not clear that this is permissible. Federal law requires that the electors be appointed on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It’s not a straw poll to bind existing electors. So it’s unclear to me that a state could appoint its electors before the election. Additionally, if Election Day is about the appointment of electors, then there has to be a fixed number equal to the state’s total, which means you need a president-vice president slate of electors, not independent lines.

There are other confusing ways to think through this problem, like assuming there’s just one slate of electors representing all the names on the ballot, but I’m not sure these are feasible, either. And I’m also assuming the state can compel the electors to vote for the candidate they’re pledged to support—something I think is right, but certainly not uncontested. (Of course, faithless electors are a common problem in any Electoral College reform scenario, so I don’t dwell on that.) It also increases the likelihood that voters in a state choose a president and a vice president from their own state, if there are pluralities or tradeoffs in voting, which is impermissible under the Constitution—electors must vote for at least one candidate who is not an inhabitant of their state, and a president-vice president slate usually avoids this.

Unless I’m missing something—correct me if I am!—this scheme simply can’t work absent the legislature wholesale taking over the choosing of electors and having a straw poll of the people sometime before Election Day. The Electoral College anticipates one set of electors chosen on Election Day. That set of electors can exist however one sees fit, of course. But if voters have to make a choice of a president and a vice president on separate lines, there’s no feasible way to pick one common slate of electors like the Constitution demands.

Statehood, the District of Columbia, and the Twenty-Third Amendment

There’s a renewed effort for statehood for the District of Columbia in the new Democratic-controlled House, and H.R. 51 is the proposal to do so. (DC’s non-voting representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has snagged bill #51 as a symbolic gesture in the past, too.)

I’d recently wondered about whether electors of the District of Columbia could cast votes for presidential and vice presidential candidates who resided in the District. As you may know, the Twelfth Amendment requires that electors cast two votes, one for president and one for vice president, “one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves .”

DC isn’t a state, but the Twenty-Third Amendment gave DC presidential electors. So, could DC electors vote for an all-DC ticket? No, due to a clever phrase in the Amendment: “they shall be in addition to those appointed by the states, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a state.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, whatever parts of the Constitution refer to “state” in the context of presidential electors? Those apply to DC’s electors, too.

But back to H.R. 51. The bill, like many bills, excises several blocks from the District when creating a new state. Those blocks are still the seat of government of the United States, and not a part of the state. So a bill like H.R. 51 would create a new state out of the old District, but it would basically split the District into two: new-state-District, and seat-of-government-district. The seat-of-government-district being quite small, essentially residuals made up of several federal buildings and the like.

Of course, the Twenty-Third Amendment comes back into play: “The District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct.” So if DC becomes a state, it gets two Senators, at least one Representative, and at least three presidential electors. But the residual district—remember, just a few federal buildings carved out—is constitutionally entitled to presidential electors. No more than a few dozen people may live in this new seat of government—after all, the residences of DC have been put into the new state.

A little Googling revealed this point has been raised before. That is, before DC can become a state, it ought to be conditioned on a repeal of the Twenty-Third Amendment, lest an anomalous residual set of a few federal buildings is entitled to a slate of presidential electors. That hasn’t been a point of emphasis, of course—getting popular support for statehood for DC is a high hurdle, and the first one that must be surmounted—but it struck me as notable.

"Why not continue the political struggle in partisan-gerrymandering cases?"

I have this piece up at SCOTUSblog entitled, “Symposium: Why not continue the political struggle in partisan-gerrymandering cases?” It begins:

“In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people’s representatives.” So wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter in his dissenting opinion in Baker v. Carr in 1962.

It was, of course, a dissent. A majority of the Supreme Court in short order reorganized state legislatures according to its own understanding of fair representation — that population should be roughly equal in each legislative district. And the majority’s basis for doing so, Frankfurter’s dissent chided, “ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in [the Court’s] moral sanction.”

The political process is a messy thing. It is laborious to educate the public on a matter and convince them of that matter’s significance. It is time-consuming to wait through election cycles to enact political changes. Impatient litigants demand the federal courts to intervene when the political process moves too slowly.

Two cheers for Florida's Amendment 4

I spend very little time on this blog on matters of policy, or the wisdom of particular laws. I spend almost all of my time discussing what the law, including the Constitution, authorizes or forbids. Occasionally, I dip into practical concerns of changes to laws, but these are Burkean by nature and tend to be contextual, offering some view of the law working with other laws, or how the law fits into a longstanding regime.

Florida enacted Amendment 4, which the people of Florida undoubtedly have a right to enact. I thought I’d dip into policy for a moment: the good of the Amendment and, in my view, the bad. And I thought I’d use the overused expression, two cheers for the amendment.

Amendment 4 amended Article VI, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution as follows (underlined text added):

(a) No person convicted of a felony, or adjudicated in this or any other state to be mentally incompetent, shall be qualified to vote or hold office until restoration of civil rights or removal of disability. Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.

(b) No person convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense shall be qualified to vote until restoration of civil rights.

I have a lot of complicated views of suffrage laws, who ought to be eligible to vote in our democracy. But post-conviction felon disenfranchisement laws are an easier case for me. I don’t understand them and generally oppose them.

The felon (and the criminal more generally) has broken the social compact (the best of a number of imperfect ways of putting it) and merits punishment. Imprisonment is the most common form of that punishment. I think we overuse imprisonment, particularly as we overvalue incapacitation as a reason for punishment. But the release from imprisonment should, I think, mark a return to society, and that includes attempts to reincorporate the ex-felon into the ordinary things of citizenship.

Collateral consequences, then, typically are not the stuff we view as what the felon merits as his just deserts. They are sanctions we attach to the ex-felon as prophylactic stuff of society—don’t work in this job, don’t live near this park, don’t seek a security clearance, don’t vote, because, well, you’re dangerous, or we simply don’t think you ought to really be a part of our society. In a way, the felon has broken the social compact and is permanently barred from certain aspects of society, even after serving time in prison.

It might be that we as a society think that the felon merits these penalties. But, I think, to the extent we desire to restore the felon into the community, I don’t know that long-standing penalties that extend well after imprisonment (again, to the extent we value imprisonment as the primary form of punishment) have much place in a criminal justice regime. I could probably spend much longer thinking and discussing such things, but this is my high-level approach right now.

But a few points about the specifics of this particular amendment.

First, I think those who have been convicted of an election-related felony should be permanently disenfranchised. This is assuredly a very narrow category, and perhaps too narrow for a carve-out in this constitutional amendment. But I do think that if you have tampered with an election—voter fraud, voter intimidation, voter bribery, etc.—you, perhaps, ought to be permanently excluded from participating in future elections. It is a natural consequence for your disruption of democracy that you are no longer allowed to play this part in it. (Of course, you may play many other parts—advocate, campaigner, endorser, opinion-writer, etc.) I think it’s an area where the punishment ought to haunt you the rest of your life, and the punishment feels particularly tethered to the crime committed. But, again, perhaps that’s too narrow and too picky.

Second, the law carves out two easy targets, murderers and sexual offenders. One sad element of these carve-outs is political. The hasty rejoinder from a proposed law that enfranchise ex-felons is, “So if you’re convicted of murder, that person can cancel out your vote?” Of course, murderers spend most, if not all, of their lives in prison (indeed, some in Florida are executed). And perhaps general extension of ex-felon enfranchisement is better than no extension at all.

But worse, I think, are how we treat sexual offenders. Rape and child molestation are two particularly heinous crimes. Others, like statutory offenses in “Romeo and Juliet” cases, far less heinous. But in all of them, we spend little time thinking about the punishment these felons merit, and far more time seeking to maximize punitive consequences as long and as far-reaching as possible.

Disenfranchising murderers or sexual offenders who have served their time of imprisonment does not seem terribly well-fitted to a theory of punishment, except that we strongly dislike their offenses and want to keep them at the periphery of society. Maybe something about their offenses merits it. When it comes to voting, however, I’m not so convinced.

I understand that the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. But, in some ways, I wish we’d spend more time thinking critically about the nature and purposes of punishment of crimes more generally, and how disenfranchisement fits in that scheme. I think Florida’s new Amendment 4 mostly gets it right.

As a final note, the amendment is the latest of a number of remarkable decisions of the people of the several states to dilute their own voting power, from enfranchising the freedman to enfranchising women to enfranchising 18-year-olds. It’s a remarkable and rather selfless decision of the people, not foisted on the people through a judicial construction. Every decision to broaden the franchise dilutes the voters’ votes who’ve approved that broadening. It’s probably a topic worth exploring another day, but I close on that thought.

How changes to the Democratic presidential primaries may affect 2020 voting

One common phrase I’ve heard at conferences discussing proposed reforms to presidential primaries is something along the lines of, “Reformers are always targeting last cycle’s election.” That is, sometimes reformers are too myopic in trying to fix last cycle’s changes and fail to recognize the unintended consequences it could have on the next cycle—or that changes in events may alter how we view the next cycle.

I want to focus on two items for consideration well ahead of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. The first are changes to the Iowa caucuses. The second are changes to the primary calendar. Some speculation follows the observations of each change, with an assumption that a significant number of Democratic candidates (say, at least 10 and probably more than 15 viable candidates) will run, similar to the number in the 2016 Republican presidential nominating contest.

Iowa Caucuses

The Democratic caucuses in Iowa have long had distinctive features. Democratic voters show up at precinct caucus sites and publicly express support for one candidate or another. They group together in wings of the precinct site. Then there’s a period of “realignment,” where supporters of non-viable candidates (those with few supporters) throw their support behind another, more viable candidate. The caucus site names a winner; no popular vote is taken. Those caucus site winners are compiled into an overall distribution of delegates.

Multiple reforms appear to be shaping up for 2020. The caucus will resemble more of a traditional primary, if all the changes are approved. There will be absentee voting, which should dramatically increase popular participation. Raw vote totals will be released.

But it also means that this “realignment” may disappear. This was a potentially crucial opportunity for insurgent candidate Barack Obama in 2008. Reports widely circulated before the Iowa caucuses in 2008 that Bill Richardson, a second-tier candidate, had urged his supporters to throw their support behind Mr. Obama in the event of realignment (the same was true for marginal candidate Dennis Kucinich). The realignment period offered a kind of ranked choice voting. It also prevent too much fragmentation: three candidates—Mr. Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton—secured about 97% of precincts.

The Iowa caucus changes haven’t been finalized yet, but if the Iowa caucuses look more like a traditional primary, or the Republican caucuses in Iowa in 2016, we would expect to see more fracturing (no candidate broke 30% of the popular vote), more delegates awarded to more candidates, and, potentially, less opportunities for the kind of second-choice realignment that Mr. Obama benefited from in 2008.

2020 Calendar

Many states jockey for an early position in the primaries to exert their influence in the process. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina have received privileged status in recent years. But by the first Tuesday in March, other states may follow suit with primaries.

In 2016, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Vermont held Democratic primaries or caucuses on the first Tuesday. In 2020, Arkansas has likely moved its primary back to May; California and North Carolina have moved their primaries up to the first Tuesday in March.

For candidates who survive the early stages, viability may come through home-state advantages, particularly among delegate-rich pools of states. Prospective candidates Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Beto O’Rourke (Texas), and Julian Castro (Texas) all may find strength on this dates; so too would Kamala Harris (California), after California moves up its primary.

It’s worth noting that among the most viable challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination after Super Tuesday appeared to be Ted Cruz—in part because he secured over 200 delegates that day, but largely because Texas’s primary (and 104 delegates of its 155 possible delegates he won) came on that day.

The fortune of the calendar, then, might provide added strength for certain candidates.

Speculation from procedural changes

Yes, much of this is speculative. But it’s worth considering that we often look back at a presidential primary and note certain things that occurred because of the procedures in place. The changes in this cycle will undoubtedly have some impact on the Democratic presidential primaries. We won’t really know what those look like until after the fact, but I hope thinking structurally and drawing some recent comparisons offers some useful perspective ahead of the 2020 presidential primaries.

Election counts and recounts

I’ve occasionally tweeted about election margins and recounts. Given a number of (relatively) close elections, refusals to concede, and retracted concessions, I thought I’d offer a little perspective (and a very little math).

All (or, at this point, nearly all) of the change in the margin between candidates in Florida’s Senate, Governor, and Commission of Agriculture races, and Georgia’s Governor race, have arisen because of mere counting of the ballots. There are lots of (here I’ll focus on legitimate, by far the more common) reasons for late-added votes. Provisional ballots could be deemed valid or cured. Vote-by-mail ballots might permissibly arrive after Election Day in some jurisdictions. But these are typically smaller figures. Slow or inefficient counting, or simply more general administrative failures, by election officials might result in added later totals.

To put it obviously, only after the votes have been counted can there be a recount. It’s there that many hold great interest, but it’s there that little changes.

I draw on a few rough figures form past recounts. Minnesota’s Al Franken netted 527 votes in a recount in 2008 in an election with about 2,885,555 votes cast. That turned his 215-vote deficit into a 312-vote victory (post recount and post litigation). The 527-vote change was just 0.018% of all votes cast. (Note that this reflects a percentage of this change compared to all ballots cast. It is not that there were 527 votes that were added for Mr. Franken; votes were added for Mr. Franken and for Norm Coleman, but Mr. Franken gained 527 votes relative to Mr. Coleman.)

Washington’s Christine Gregoire recount netted 390 votes in a 2004 gubernatorial recount in an election with 2,810,058 votes cast. Her opponent Dino Rossi originally held a 261-vote lead, but after two rounds of recounts Ms. Gregoire was declared the winner by 129 votes. The 390-vote change was just 0.014% of all votes cast. (Again, both Mr. Rossi and Ms. Gregoire increased their vote totals in the recount, but Ms. Gregoire increased them at a faster rate than Mr. Rossi, and that 390-vote difference was this percentage.)

Finally, Donald Trump won Wisconsin’s electoral votes over Hillary Clinton by a reported margin of 22,617 votes in 2016. Green Party candidate Jill Stein demanded a recount, which netted Mr. Trump 131 votes and increased his margin of victory to 22,748 among 2,976,150 votes cast. That 131-vote margin reflected 0.0044% of all votes cast. (This was a much more mundane recount in some respects because neither candidate formally challenged the results.)

The long and short of this is, recounts rarely change much in absolute terms. Even in elections with millions of votes cast, the relative change in the margin of victory is extremely low. It was enough to give Mr. Franken and Ms. Gregoire victories, but it was still very little that changed.

One basic reason that’s the case? Recounts recount every ballot—an obvious proposition, of course. But that means a challenging candidate picks up votes as well as his opponent. To successfully change the outcome of an election during a recount, then, you need either extraordinary luck, or you need to establish that there are systematically more votes for your candidate that were “missed” during the first count—mismarked ballots, hanging chads, provisional ballots that were deemed invalid, and so forth.

That can be a high bar. Typically, we’d expect errors like this to be randomly distributed. But as Florida’s 2000 election showed, one county’s procedures (e.g., the use of punch card ballots and a butterfly ballot design) might differ from another’s, which may disproportionately impact one candidate over another to the extent that one candidate’s support resides more heavily in that county. And as some observers of the 2004 Washington race and the 2008 Minnesota race might argue, out-lawyering your opponent can help net a few more votes, too.

Nonetheless, absent evidence like that, or in the event that there is offsetting evidence that may have disadvantaged candidates relatively equally, we would expect little to change in a recount.

Consider Minnesota again. Mr. Franken netted 1 vote for every 5,475 votes ultimate counted, that 0.018% margin. To win, he had to not simply gain votes; he had to gain votes faster than his opponent. And he did so.

And to Washington, Ms. Gregoire fared even worse. She managed to net just 1 vote for every 7,205 ultimately counted.

For both of them, despite these overwhelming odds, the extraordinarily narrow margins of victory—low three-digit margins—helped.

So where do things stand today?

The last update in Florida’s Senate election shows Rick Scott leading Bill Nelson by 12,562 votes among 8,184,631 votes cast. That’s 0.15%, or about 10 times the gains that Mr. Franken and Ms. Gregoire ultimately made—and that would just pull Mr. Nelson into a tie. (Again, however, recall how I opened this post—much depends on whether this is even the final count, as opposed to gains being made in the recount.)

In Florida’s gubernatorial race, among 8,218,682 votes cast, Ron DeSantis leads Andrew Gillum by a margin of 33,684. That’s 0.41%, or would require Mr. Gillum to net 1 vote for roughly every 244 votes cast. (And, of course, this is a rough figure—more ballots would likely be added to the overall total votes cast as “undervotes,” those that failed to register for any candidate, were added to the totals in a recount.)

Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture, assuredly less watched, may still be instructive once the recount dust settles. Nikki Fried leads Matt Caldwell by 5,326 votes among 8,055,348 votes cast, or a margin of 0.066%.

In Georgia, Brian Kemp needed to secure more than 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off and win outright, and 3,929,937 votes cast, or about 10,875 votes to spare, a margin of 0.28%. (The math looks a little different when looking at a 50% cut-off rather than his position relative to challenger Stacey Abrams, but this works well enough for now.)

In short—the final count matters a great deal for each of these races. Under almost no recount scenario would anyone other than the projected winners win the recount, if recent history is any guide. Only significant election administration errors—failure to count large quantities of votes in select counties, for instance—would be these margins by overcome by challengers, because they’re the kinds of things that were omitted from the count in the first place. That said, there’s a first time for everything, which is probably the news that keeps hope alive for challengers in these races.

"Cyber Interference in Elections and Federal Agency Action"

I have this piece up at the Harvard Law Review Blog, Cyber Interference in Elections and Federal Agency Action. It begins:

Pop quiz: which part of the federal government is tasked with preventing cyber interference in our elections?

Congress has refused to say. We have reached a point of a significant gap between an important federal need and existing federal power. And in the absence of that federal power, federal agencies have stepped into the gap and extended their authority into domains unanticipated by Congress.

A few thoughts on the tempest in Randolph County, Georgia

When election officials in Randolph County, Georgia engaged in the routine practice of election administration, they probably didn’t anticipate a campaign of fearmongering littered with falsehoods to be waged against them.

Randolph County is a rural county with about 4300 registered voters spread over nine precincts. About 55% of registered voters are African-American. Most of the voters—about 60%—are concentrated in just two precincts. Those precincts are 63% African-American, and coincidentally 63% of voters in those two precincts preferred Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

There are seven other precincts spread around the county, but they are smaller, and in some cases much smaller. One of those precincts, for instance, has just 73 registered voters.

Keeping polling places open on Election Day can be costly. Voters increasingly vote before Election Day, casting absentee ballots or participating in early voting. Many don’t vote at all. Election officials also noted that these polling places require costly upgrades to make them compliant with disability access laws. They proposed closing these seven of the least-used districts.

Before 2013, election changes like these would have needed prior approval from the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court in 2013 held that “things have changed” in the South, and that seeking prior approval was no longer needed. Critics of the Supreme Court’s decision have hastily pointed to this episode as demonstration that things haven’t changed and that voter suppression pervasively rears its ugly head in the South. The facts show otherwise.

The American Civil Liberties Union began a public relations campaign demonizing county officials. It led with sinister charges” “7 of 9 precincts” or “75% of polling places” would be closed. “Precincts with 40% of the county’s voters” sounds much less dire, even if that’s more truthful.

The ACLU then claimed that these were racially motivated closings, noting that the county’s population is a majority African-American. But that, too, is a misleading charge. The seven precincts that will close are mostly white and just 42% African-American. Those precincts supported Donald Trump in 2016 with 55% of the vote.

If this is a sinister plot by white officials to suppress African-American voters, it’s the most incompetent plan one could develop. The precincts that will close disproportionately affect white voters and Republicans.

Do the closures affect African-Americans? Certainly. They also affect white & Hispanic voters. But claims of "suppression" suggest that election officials targeted African-Americans, a tough claim to make given that white voters face the brunt of the closures.

Individual precinct closures may disproportionately affect African-Americans. Consider the proposed closure of one precinct with 318 registered voters there, 96% African-American. Then again, we can pick out other precincts, too. There’s one precinct that's 89% white that will close (just 73 registered voters); another that's 83% white will close (just 103 voters).

These facts didn’t stop the ACLU from cherry-picking the 318-voter precinct. They found an uncritical media eager to help spread the misinformation. The Associated Press repeated a series of allegations levied by the ACLU against Randolph County election officials, reading more like a press release than journalism.

This isn’t to say that Randolph County election officials did a very good job. They proposed shuttering these polling places weeks before a statewide general election, and these sites had been used just weeks earlier in the primary election. A longer lead time with better communication to the public might have prevented the fallout.

It might be the case that some voters do have a harder time getting to the polls, or that some voters have to switch to early voting or absentee voting. Those are difficult tradeoffs every election administrator must face, Randolph County included. One hopes they’ve thought through this process more carefully than their action plan suggests.

But administrative mistakes hardly rise to the level of voter suppression, the conscious and deliberate effort to prevent African-American voters from participating in the political process.

That said, the right result was reached--given the lack of information and late notice, it was a welcome decision when the county opted not to close polling locations this fall.

That said, it's worth emphasizing that the political process worked well--no litigation, no order from a judge. Indeed, even in the absence of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a rural county's poll closures became national news. Perhaps for the incorrect hyperbolic reasons described above--but a non-judicial solution nonetheless.

In these anxious political times, fearmongering seems to be the weapon of choice among partisans. But careful attention to detail reveals that the allegations of nefarious plots in Randolph County appear to be no more than less than ideal choices by government officials acting in good faith. Let’s hope that the rhetoric cools ahead of Georgia’s 2018 election.