Some registration scandals have been comic. In Broward County, Florida, for example, an eight-year-old girl successfully registered to vote. The erro… - John Fund

It does not take a visionary to see that, in the absence of clear rules, we can expect campaign lawyers to attempt to turn the most implausible legal theory into a court ruling in their favor. Vague rules on provisional voting could create a nightmare in which the results of a presidential race aren’t known for days. Recall the 35 days it took Colorado officials to decide just one congressional race.

Local registration and election boards should be composed of citizen appointees. All such boards should have equal representation from both major political parties and at least one independent or third-party member. We’ve seen over and over, from St. Louis to Palm Beach County, how conflicts of interest are created if election boards are run by officials who have to run for offices themselves—often as partisans. ‘I think you’ll see most of the problems in bad management of elections occur where the top position isn’t nonpartisan and where most of the oversight is by people deeply involved in the political process,’ says Mischelle Townsend, the registrar of voters in Riverside County, California.

[I]n the United States, at a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only seventeen states require some form of documentation in order to vote. ‘Why should the important process of voting be the one exception of this rule?’ asked Karen Saranita, a former fraud investigator for a Democratic state senator in California. Americans agree. A Rasmussen Research poll finds that 82 percent of Americans, including 75 percent of Democrats, believe that ‘people should be required to show a driver’s license or some other form of photo ID before they are allowed to vote.