Rob Richie is director of FairVote. See his page at fairvote.org for more information.

The Nation Magazine editor’s Katrina vanden Heuvel has been a consistently clear, powerful voice for electoral reform. My hat is off to her for her terrific new call for action on electoral reform in the new Nation.

We’re of course pleased to see her feature our reform agenda: proportional representation, instant runoff voting, universal voter registration, a constitutional right to vote, fair, secure and accountable election administration and a national popular vote for president. But we know that more must be done for us to truly claim democracy.

232 years ago, our nation’s founders signed the Declaration of Independence establishing that we are all created equal and that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. In terms of representative democracy, those principles demand changes to our current rules. Vanden Heuvel is a true patriot — and it’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and get busy!

Rob Richie is director of FairVote. See his page at fairvote.org for more information.

Rhode Island governor Donald Carcieri on Wednesday vetoed having Rhode Island enter into the National Popular Vote agreement. His action follows on the heels of him vetoing a bill to establish age 16 as a uniform advance voter registration age — both lead priorities of our vibrant FairVote Rhode Island partner led by the intrepid Ari Savitzky.

Gov. Carcieri’s arguments against 16-year-old voter registration were weak enough — founded allegedly on a worry that it would be “too complicated” to have young people pre-register even though Hawaii has done this for years and Florida just adopted this policy for its much bigger, more complicated electorate.

But his veto message on National Popular Vote is simply laughable, showing absolutely no understanding of the U.S. Constitution and the role it delegates to states for structuring presidential elections. The Governor accurately states “Our Founding fathers established a process by which the American people would elect a President and Vice President.” He then bizarrely goes on to say: “The appropriate forum to change or eliminate the Electoral College is through a constitutional amendment to the United States Constitution. The state legislature should focus on legislative matters that are germane to our state and leave federal matters to our congressional delegation.”

Come again? The governor is right that the Constitution establishes a process to elect the president. But that process is to have states establish rules for allocating electoral votes. They didn’t want the President or Congress making this decision — they gave plenary power to the states. During the first 40 years of our nation’s history, when many of our founders were playing key leadership roles in their states, states regularly acted on this authority, modifying their rules for allocating electoral votes again and again.

Eventually, as our party system became stronger and local partisan majorities wanted to give all their state’s electoral votes to the winner of their state, states established today’s dominant rule — the “unit rule” that awards 100% of electoral votes in a state to the winner of that state’s popular vote. But this isn’t a “more constitutional” system than other options — it’s just the one most states do now. The Constitution makes it clear that this rule should be regularly evaluated by states to see if it’s in the best interests of their state and the country.

It’s not. The current system is a democratic travesty. In 2004, 99% of all campaign money spent in the peak season of the campaign was focused on only 16 states. Voter turnout among eligible voters was more than 30% higher in the 10 closest states than the rest of the nation. George Bush’s campaign was the richest in history, but in the final two years of the campaign never polled a single American living outside of 18 potential battleground states. Our Presidential Elections Inequality report makes an overwhelming case against the validity of the current system.

What most Americans want, what most Rhode Islanders want (more than 70% in a recent poll) and what common sense establishes as the best way to elect the president is to have a president elected by we, the people of the United States. of America. Every vote should be equal, with the president equally accountable to all Americans. The candidate with fewer votes should never defeat a candidate with more votes. It’s how we elect all our governors. It’s how we elect all our U.S. Senators. It’s how our founders structured elections for governor in most states in our nation’s early years. It’s how we’ve elected every U.S. House member who has ever served in Congress.

And it’s what the National Popular Vote plan establishes with absolute certainty — once activated when states representing a majority of the Electoral College have adopted it, the National Popular Vote plan will guarantee that every presidential election is decided by the voters in a straight-up popular vote. Every vote will be equal, whether cast in a firmly “blue state” like Rhode Island, a firmly “red state” like Utah or a swing state like Florida.

Gov. Carcieri is showing utter disrespect for the U.S. Constitution and his state’s voters by telling Rhode Island legislators to not take action to reform how it allocates electoral votes. He is telling the legislature to reject the responsibility assigned to it by the Constitution — even though Rhode Island is a quintessential “throwaway state”, as columnist David Broder terms states that he argues should be ignored in presidential elections because of not being evenly divided.

It’s a tough call to say whether Gov. Carcieri is our nation’s worst governor this year on issues of our democracy. Gov. Jim Douglas in Vermont also vetoed the National Popular Vote plan while also vetoing campaign finance legislation and using laughable arguments to justify his veto of legislation to ensure majority rule in congressional elections through instant runoff voting.

As we celebrate Independence Day, I would suggest both Gov. Carcieri and Gov. Douglas take some time to re-read our founding documents. And I hope Rhode Island legislative leaders reject their governor’s patently false argument as an affront to the role the Constitution assigns them and overturn his veto.

Rob Richie is director of FairVote. See his page at fairvote.org for more information.

Good news for advocates of fair elections from Cincinnati, Ohio and Port Chester, New York.

Cincinnati has a proud history with its choice voting form of proportional representation, which was used every two years to elect its city council for three decades, ending in a 1957 repeal driven by concerns about how the system provided fair representation to racial minorities. My early activism for proportional representation was highlighted by spending two months in Cincinnati in 1991 volunteering on a campaign to bring choice voting back — it won 45% on a small budget. The issue has continued to simmer and nearly come to a boil, as Cincinnati has at-large, winner-take-all elections that provide uneven representation.

Now the Cincinnati NAACP is working with long-time advocates on a petition drive to put choice voting on the ballot. This time, it should have a real chance to succeed– keep an eye on this effort.

Meanwhile, in New York State, we are thrilled to have the Brennan Center for Justice representing our amicus brief arguing for choice voting in a voting rights case in Port Chester, New York. The judge is weighing allowing the Brennan Center to represent our perspective in upcoming oral arguments. As background, Port Chester has lost the case on liability and has suggested cumulative voting as a remedy. We believe cumulative voting would be better than the current winner-take-all system, but argue that choice voting is a more reliable remedy and one with a history of being used successfully in New York State and upheld in state courts. Oral arguments on remedy will take place later this month.

At FairVote, we love hearing about interesting causes that are helping to change democracy and we can put our name behind. Joe Harrow of The Point recently brought to our attention a campaign to make Election Day a national holiday. Started by The Point member Andrew G., the campaign is striving to recruit 100 000 supporters and for members to skip work on November 4^th 2008.

Upon hearing about this campaign I wondered: why is Election Day on a Tuesday and are there any countries whose election day is a national holiday?

According to the aptly named website Why Tuesday?, Election Day became the Tuesday after the first Monday in November starting in 1845 because of the agrarian nature of American society at the time. Simply put, Tuesday was the easiest day for farmers who were traveling by horse and buggy to get to the polls. Why Tuesday? believes that a Tuesday election day does not meet most voters’ needs and it should be moved to the weekend or become a national holiday.

Attempts to turn Election Day into a national holiday have been made in the past, but despite the positive impact for voters, they never seem to get much traction in Congress. There are many speculative reasons as to why attempts to create a national holiday have failed, but I am inclined to believe that it is simply not an important enough issue for most politicians. For one, some states have already created Election Day holidays and so there is no motivation to push for a national holiday.

Supporters of turning Election Day into a national holiday cite increased voter participation as the main reason for supporting legislation. As any dedicated observer of American elections knows, voter turnout in the United States is quite low compared to other Western democracies such as Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and Australia. A national holiday would also free up more public buildings and increase voter accessibility. More schools and churches would be available to turn into polling places. Finally, everyone loves a holiday.

Ironically, it appears that fewer Western democracies and more pseudo-democracies have a national holiday for Election Day. The United States, Great Britain and Canada do not have national holidays, yet Angola and Zimbabwe do for their elections. Perhaps the creation of a national holiday in these countries is just a situation of bread and circuses as they do not rank highly on Freedom House’s political rights and civil liberties index, yet the American experience has the potential to be much different and positive.

Turning Election Day in the United States into a national holiday would increase the voting opportunities for all Americans, especially for those who could otherwise not vote due to work commitments.