I haven’t been reading the papers in a few months, so am short on material.

I still Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog, however, which is always chalk full of interesting policy and causal questions. In the wake of the 2012 election, and the president’s apparently off-handed comment about long lines at the polling places, there is apparently some very tiny rumblings about nationalizing election administration in the U.S. For example, Hasen himself argued in the NYT’s “Room for Debate” forum that elections should be nationalized. In response, Doug Chapin gave some reasons why not, citing both the (apparently normative) virtues of federalism and the perceived gridlock and incompetence of the feds right now.

Slightly more interesting is why or why not reforming election administration is “a thing” or not, in Chapin’s language. That is, why is it so remote from the policy agenda? It’s easy to say that it’s a non-starter and that state and local governments really don’t want to centralize, but that seems like begging the question. Indeed it’s even more mysterious when (to crib another item from Hasen’s blog) a poll finds 88% of Americans supporting a uniform system!

Perhaps it’s not hard to dig up other items where the public seems to speak with such a loud voice, and in contrast to what policy is or what elites think it should be. But the fact is that usually we laud correlations between mass opinion and public policy as a good thing, and decry low or negative correlations as a bad thing, for democracy. So it would seem inconsistent to just write this off as an anomaly.