The State of State Elections

While the major news media outlets cover every imaginable aspect of this year’s presidential election, there are hundreds of races around this country that have received little to no attention: state and local elections. With the exception of Missouri’s own Todd Akin, very little time has been spent discussing any congressional or senate races, let alone any races for state legislatures.

It’s easy to argue that the less than 60 percent voter turnout rate in the last five presidential elections indicates a clear trend of apathy towards politics in America, but an even scarier statistical trend is the 40 percent turnout rate in midterm elections when both national and many state congressional candidates as well as 36 governors are elected.

Forty percent. Less than half of all eligible voters choose to participate in the election of their senators, congressman, state representatives, and governors. For many people, there is a perception that who they put into office in their state government doesn’t matter nearly as much as whom they elect to national office. What they fail to realize however, is the vast power that state governments have over their citizens and even how much state law and policy can affect national policy decisions.

One of the most important ways state governments wield influence at the national level is determining voting laws. While the constitution guarantees the all citizens the right to vote and to elect their representatives, how those elections actually function is entirely up to the state. Your state legislature and governor decide who in your state gets to vote, when they get to vote, and where they get to vote.

This may not sound terribly important until you remember that state legislatures not only determine how a state is divided into voting districts for its own legislature, allowing a republican-controlled legislature to create districts that allow their incumbents to more easily win reelection, for example, but they also control the districts of all national congresspeople, which are the same districts used in presidential elections. Thus state legislatures actually hold considerable influence over national election outcomes.

More broadly, state governments also are the sole decider of voter laws within their states. They control when polls open and close, who is eligible to vote (in some states felons can still vote, for example), when there will be early voting and who is eligible to vote early, what sort of identification is required to vote, and even the type voting machines used. If you don’t think these are important, remember that one of the key ways that suffrage was denied to African Americans in the south was through restrictive voting laws such as poll taxes that denied black people the right to influence elections on all levels.

More recently, look at the controversies regarding voter ID in states like Pennsylvania or early voting timing and eligibility in Ohio. These restrictions to voting law were put into place by state legislatures, whom, at best, were elected by roughly half of the eligible voting population and yet simultaneously seek to restrict a significant portion of their own citizens from voting.

State governments also serve as a model and proving ground for many new policies that later are adopted at a national level. Supreme Court Justice Brandies famously called the states a “laboratory” of democracy. Mitt Romney’s health care overhaul in Massachusetts, for example, served as a model and example for several attempts at health care reform on the national level including the recently passed Affordable Care Act.

Currently contentious issues like gay marriage, medical marijuana legalization, women’s reproductive rights issues, are being debated right now in state legislatures. The results of those debates are going to be far-reaching and the decisions made and the laws passed on the state level are going to serve as the model for any legislation that passes on the national level.

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