Miscellany Central: This week, I’m breaking down the long-running debate about what election reform should look like.

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This week, I’m breaking down the long-running debate about what election reform should look like. Then I’m looking at the latest data on breakthrough infections and the recent surge in Covid-19 cases.

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EXPLAINED IN 600 WORDS

What does saving democracy look like?

Since Joe Biden got into the White House, there’s been a big push for Democrats to change election and voting laws to revitalize and save democracy — a direct response to former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and subsequent Republican efforts to make voting more difficult.

But while there’s a lot of sloganeering and posturing here, I’ve had one question eating away at me: Which electoral reforms would be the most effective at getting more people to participate in elections and stopping one party from getting an unfair advantage (that, say, lets them win Congress or the White House despite obtaining fewer votes)?

I posed this question to some experts on elections. They each gave completely different answers.

But I was able to get a better grasp of what, exactly, we’re all arguing about here — that there are really three kinds of election reform that different sides of the debate emphasize:

1) Making voting easier (or harder): From early voting to making Election Day a holiday to automating voter registration, this category is for ideas that make it easier for just about anyone to cast a ballot. It also includes efforts to do the opposite by, say, requiring very specific kinds of photo ID to vote.

2) Improving election administration: It’s a very broad category, but includes all the rules and processes for running elections as well as who performs and oversees that work. It’s the administrative apparatus that goes on in the background of elections, deciding which votes actually count.

3) Structural electoral changes: These are the ideas that could redefine sweeping aspects of the political system, whether it’s abolishing the Electoral College, changing how congressional districts are redrawn and gerrymandered, or granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico.

If you ask me, the structural electoral changes seem likely to have the biggest impact. While some studies have found that early voting and strict voter ID laws don’t have a real effect in either direction for electoral outcomes, it stands to reason that making it so Republicans can’t bank on gerrymandering or the Electoral College to get them over the edge, even if they get fewer votes nationwide, would be a big deal.

But the truth is that the evidence here isn’t great — the studies frequently aren’t rock-solid methodologically, some of the fields of research involved are relatively new, and the evidence that exists is at times contradictory.

There’s not even widespread agreement on the ultimate goal. Is it to improve participation? To make voting as easy as possible if someone does make the decision to participate? Or to make elections more secure?

Sometimes these goals can conflict. Making voting easier can work against improving election security if the latter requires new rules about what voters need to do to cast a ballot. (Which is why, given the infrequency of voter fraud, some lawmakers say making voting easier should be prioritized.)

There’s even debate about whether any of these categories matter all that much. Some experts are skeptical that, for example, any of these changes would get more people to vote. The real problem, they say, is that many people are simply unenthused about politics and feel little change regardless of who wins (partly a result of what experts call the “submerged state”).

On the flip side, there’s also an element of “why don’t we have both?” The goal should be to simultaneously make voting easier, improve security, and boost participation.

But that also speaks to how difficult it will be to get any of this done. Enacting laws in just one of these categories would be difficult enough — just look at Congress’s current gridlock on election reform for proof of that. Accomplishing all at once, while balancing priorities that can conflict? That’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

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PAPER OF THE WEEK

The problem is the unvaccinated

A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that the current Covid-19 surges are driven almost entirely by the unvaccinated.

The last couple weeks have been far from comforting for the vaccinated, between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new guidance asking everyone to mask up and a study uncovering a Covid-19 outbreak that primarily afflicted vaccinated people in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

But the Kaiser Family Foundation report suggests that it’s the unvaccinated who should remain most worried about Covid-19. Looking at states that track infections in vaccinated people (known as breakthrough cases), Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at Kaiser, and her team found that more than 94 percent of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were among unvaccinated people.

A chart of rates of breakthrough cases across several states.

“The overwhelming conclusion of all this evidence is that breakthrough events are extremely rare,” Kates told me. “They’re not the driver.”

One caveat to these numbers is they mostly cover the whole year. But a lot has changed throughout 2021, from climbing vaccination rates to the delta variant’s rise.

Still, the numbers don’t change much if you look at more recent data in states that make it available. In Virginia, the unvaccinated made up more than 95 percent of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in July — not that much of a change from the 98 percent rate for all of 2021.

The overall Virginia data also shows breakthrough infections remain very rare among the vaccinated, with only 0.034 percent of the vaccinated reporting cases, 0.0032 percent ending up in the hospital, and 0.0009 percent dying.

For now, the evidence suggests that the vaccinated can still get sick and spread the coronavirus — likely more so with the delta variant than before — but that they’re still much, much, much better off across the board than the unvaccinated.

For more on breakthrough cases, read my explainer at Vox.

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Miscellany Central

Saturday, August 7, 2021

This week, I’m breaking down the long-running debate about what election reform should look like.

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