"Electoral Dysfunction," Mo Rocca-style: "As an American, I'm proud that I have the right to vote. Or do I?"

"I'm Mo Rocca, American, and as an American, I'm proud that I have the right to vote. [Pause] Or do I? For answers, I consulted the Constitution."

by Ken

And, Mo reports, in the video portion of "The Right to Vote," " the first of four NYT "Op-Docs" based on the forthcoming feature film Electoral Dysfunction: "A close reading of the Constitution didn't turn up anything about the right to vote."

Electoral Dysfunction, which was screened Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Montreal World Film Festival and is scheduled to be shown today at the Democratic National Convention in advance of a theatrical opening (at NYC's Quad Cinema) on September 21 and PBS telecast in October, is a collaboration between Mo and documentary filmmakers Bennett Singer, David Deschamps and Leslie D. Farrell that set out to answer the big questions, like: Where is the Electoral College -- and does it have a winning football team? (You can view a two-minute trailer here.)

As Mo writes in the text portion of the "Right to Vote" op-doc:

Yes, the United States is one of only a handful of nations whose constitution does not explicitly provide the right to vote. (Singapore is another, but it doesn't even allow you to chew gum on the street.)

I imagine you're surprised. I know I was. Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in -- the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill -- and yet they neglected to include the right to vote. (I know, it was a long, hot summer. Hard to stay focused.) It got me thinking: What else don't I know about voting in our country? How does voting really work -- or sometimes not work -- in America?

So I did what any concerned citizen would do when trying to get to the bottom of things: I teamed up with some documentary filmmakers, took a road trip across America, and created "Electoral Dysfunction," a feature-length documentary from which this Op-Docs -- the first in a series of four -- is adapted. Along the way I met all kinds of people at the heart of our nation's elections -- voters, election workers, elected officials, even “electors” (you know, the guys and gals who end up picking the president).

Spoiler alert: The way we run elections in this country is, as kids today might say, totally busted. Because the Constitution leaves key decisions about voting to the states, what we think of as our "electoral system" is really a crazy quilt of local, state and federal systems: 13,000 different voting districts, in fact, each with its own rules and regulations.

The second of the four Op-Docs, "Voter ID Wars," appears today, and Mo begins the text portion with a shrewd observation:

If you've only got 30 seconds to make your case in the debate over photo ID laws -- which require voters to show up at the polls with a government-issued photo ID -- it's much easier to argue in favor of the laws.

"You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or rent a movie from Blockbuster. Get over it!"

While investigating voting in America for the documentary film "Electoral Dysfunction," I heard versions of this line over and over from the laws' backers. The message is clear: "If you're too lazy to get a government-issued photo ID, then you probably don't deserve to vote. And please, let's not forget 9/11." (The airplane reference is a handy conversation-stopper.)

"But voting rights are worth at least 60 seconds of our attention," Mo insists. "So here's why these laws hurt more than they help."

The only crime these laws address is voter impersonation -- someone showing up at the polls and claiming to be someone else in order to cast a fraudulent vote. (I know, sounds almost delightfully madcap.)

There are so many problems with the way we run elections in this country. Voter impersonation is not one of them. Indiana, one of the first states to pass a strict photo ID law, has never convicted anyone for it. Ditto Pennsylvania, which passed an even stricter law.

It's an extremely rare crime -- 10 cases nationwide over a 12-year period during which hundreds of millions of votes were cast -- and for good reason. The penalty is severe -- up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and the perpetrator nets only one vote. If you're going to steal an election, there are far better options. (Hire a 16-year-old to hack into the computer touch-screen voting system -- the one without a paper trail -- in use in about a third of American states.)

These laws are a solution in search of a problem. Why not a law criminalizing child abduction by space aliens? Well, can you prove it isn't happening?

But even if these laws prevent only a tiny number of fraudulent votes, aren't they worthwhile? No.

(Mo proceeds to explain the nature of the hardship these laws impose on poorer voters -- and to explain why neither the airport nor the Blockbuster analogy holds.)

In the video portion of the voter-ID Op-Docs, we're reminded that the Supreme Court, in upholding Indiana's strictest-in-the-land law aimed at stopping non-existent voter fraud, underlined that no such case had been presented to it. And both the text and the video take pains to explain the real hardship posed by the voter-ID requirements. In the video, Mo asks a wrathful-looking old geezer if he's worried about election fraud,. Naturally he is. Mo asks what kind of election fraud he's worried about. It takes the fellow just a moment to come up with an answer: "Democrat."

Of course, anyone who's sufficiently informed to deserve to vote knows that this is nonsense, that the intent here isn't to safeguard the electoral process but to exclude certain classes of voters from it, and that in fact it's Republicans who have made election-stealing an increasing priority going back at least to the giddy days of their theft of the 2000 presidential election, when the final "You Stole It, You Got It" Certificate of Successful Election Theft was issued by none other than the Supreme Court of the United States.

Electoral Dysfunction, by the way, is claimed to be nonpartisan, and I have no difficulty believing that this is just another of the increasingly frequent occasions -- now that the Right is irrevocably committed to, and certified for, a policy of "all lies, all the time" -- when those damned facts are biased.

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