Planting Liberally

Although there's been a lot of talk about Obama's picks for Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Secretary of Treasury, we've heard comparatively little about Obama's nominee for Secretary of Labor; the post remains unfilled.  Although it's a low-profile post compared to some of the other Cabinet picks, the Secretary of Labor is of paramount importance to workers and unions.  A sympathetic Secretary can improve working conditions for millions or, as we saw under Elaine Chao, Bush's Labor secretary, can make life very difficult.

On Facebook this week, Mariya Strauss jump-started the dormant conversation on the Secretary of Labor with a campaign to nominate Mary Beth Maxwell for Secretary of Labor.  Maxwell is Executive Director of American Rights at Work, a research and advocacy group which keeps an eye on union-busting, hostile labor decisions, and other threats to workplace democracy.   In recent years, ARAW has produced hard-hitting reports exposing the union-busting industry, criticizing the Labor Department and NLRB for anti-worker decisions, and lauding employers for good employment practices.

Maxwell is not the only name being floated for Secretary of Labor.  Others include David Bonior, Linda Chavez-Thompson, Dick Gephardt, and Andy Stern.  David Macaray analyzed the labor position thoroughly shortly after the election, concluding that we need a true advocate for labor, not just a careerist or generically capable administrator. Macaray's choice for the position is Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer and author of Whose Side are You On.

I don't have a real favorite in this contest, but I certainly agree with Macaray on the principle that the next Secretary of Labor should be someone who understands threat to workers deeply, is serious about enforcing and expanding labor protections, and is committed to the vision of a strong and vibrant labor movement.  Vigorous protection for labor unions is key to revitalization of our economy and of the progressive movement; it is another progressive positive feedback loop.   I'd be curious to hear whether other folks have any picks for the position, or whether there are any thoughts on other key labor appointments, like the NLRB.

The Progressive States Network's focus this week is on universal voter registration.  This is an idea whose time is long overdue.  The kind of attention and pitched battles we fight over voter registration is nothing short of ridiculous, if you stop to think about it.  Basically, the purpose of voter registration is to allow the state to build a database of eligible voters, and to locate those voters in cities and precincts.  This is fundamentally a technical challenge, and really, not a very difficult one.  The fact that voter registration is a difficult and mammoth task is, in the age of sophisticated data matching algorithms and large scale database systems, a national embarrassment.

PSN, whose focus is on state policy reforms, rightly suggests a number of incremental steps towards making voter registration easier and more widespread.  These steps include aggressively mining databases to track citizens as they move about the state, making voter registration available at more places besides the DMV, etc.

That is a good start, but it seems to me that Congress could one-up the states, without too much effort.  Simply by matching records from the social security database with the list of tax returns each election year, the federal government could produce a "pretty good" list of all 18-year-old citizens, and the addresses for each of those people.  There would be some rate of error - as in the case of young adults who live in one place when they file their taxes in April, and have moved by the time elections come around in November - but I think it would be a reasonably good approximation.  Why not make that list the default voter roll, and then allow citizens who moved, or who didn't file taxes for some reason, to add themselves to the rolls after the fact?  To make things a little smoother, citizens could be given a web-based and phone-based interface to the database, to allow them to check their own registration status, indicate an address change, or perhaps even to find their polling place or request an absentee ballot by mail.

Having worked on identifier matching algorithms in the past, I am reasonably certain that this is technically a fairly simple idea, and won't be a budget-buster.  In fact, to the degree that it allows states to slim down their voter registration infrastructure, it might even come out costing the combined federal and state budgets less than the current regime.  (A small cost would be added to the US budget, and many small-ish costs subtracted from state budgets.)

The problem, as I understand it, is one of jurisdiction: voter eligibility has always been a state concern, except where the US Constitution bars certain practices (poll taxes and sex discrimination, for example).  So while Congress can produce a first-guess voter list, it can't mandate that such a list become the default voter list for any state.  However, the simple creation of this database might be enough to get the ball rolling.  Giving states the chance to cut costs and simultaneously make voting easier for citizens could be a good enough incentive to sign on some early-adopter progressive states.  As the system gains popularity, it could eventually become the de facto standard, exerting pressure on more conservative states to follow suit.  Congress could, presumably, add more and more "carrots" to encourage states to adopt the first-guess voter list as their default.

This policy is simple, cheap, and low-profile enough that, I think, it could sail through Congress relatively easy.  It's the kind of "Government 2.0" reform which it seems will be all the rage in Obama's Washington.  And it could be a progressive positive feedback loop which would help make the country more progressive in the long run.