In the constant and fruitless search for fraud in American elections, one focus has been on the question of whether some Americans are voting in more than one place.
President Trump’s new federal commission on election integrity has already seized on examples of people who are registered to vote in more than one state. It’s likely that the commission, led by people dedicated to making it harder to vote, may seize on supposed double-voting to impose even more restrictions on all kinds of voting.
That’s madness.
It’s not just that people who are registered in more than one place are almost always guilty of nothing more than moving.
The problem with this thinking runs deeper. It should be perfectly OK to vote in more than one place – so long as you’re not voting more than once in the same race.
Voting in more than one place is common in a globalized era. Dual citizens vote in more than one country. I help lead a Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy with a Swiss-Swede journalist who votes in more than one country, and, within Switzerland, more than one locality.
Here in the U.S., people maintain homes in different places. So why not let people vote in local elections in more than one place? As long as they’re not casting more than one vote for president, what is the harm? If voting in your community is a duty, shouldn’t people be voting where they have interests?
For a time in the previous decade, I was living and working both in Washington DC and California. Given the pace of my working life, I wasn’t particularly concerned about voting at all, in either place. But in retrospect, I should have been able to vote locally in both places.