Erik Herron wants you to forget about 2020.
The election, that is, the WVU political science professor said.
He wants you to forget about what happened at the polls.
Or, what didn’t happen at the polls, depending upon your view.
Rather, he wants you to think about the act of voting – an act as simple as it is complex, on the canvas of democracy.
That’s why he and a handful of colleagues were waiting in the Rhododendron Room of WVU’s Mountainlair this past Tuesday.
They were there to moderate a seminar titled, “Election Integrity in the Mountain State,” which was, in effect, a Voting Booth 101 primer of sorts.
High school students, college students and others were among the 50 people who came out for the evening.
Attendees including WVU President Gordon Gee took seats at circular tables to mull over, well, everything, attached to casting a ballot in 21st century America.
Which is something, Herron mused, that we may not be quite as sure of as we once were.
“Over the last few years, Americans have become less confident in elections,” he said.
“It has also been difficult to talk about politics because we are so wrapped up in how everything affects who wins and who loses.”
The WVU event was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities initiative, “A More Perfect Union.”
Call it a big schedule of big ideas, in the form of like-minded events such as the one above that will go until 2026 – the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Meanwhile, WVU’s election integrity forum goes on the road Sept. 20 to West Virginia Wesleyan and Oct. 4 at Glenville State.
Herron said the planning of the event was a perfect union of creative democracy.
Sam Workman, a fellow WVU professor who directs the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs here, helped organize it, along with Coty Martin and Joshua Squires, who are political science professors at West Virginia Wesleyan and Glenville State, respectively.
He was heartened by the students who were there, too.
Travis Weller and Corrine Conner of WVU helped facilitate discussions, as did Scott Soucier of West Virginia Wesleyan. WVU student Paige Wantlin was also part of the organizational process early on in the planning.
Participants, meanwhile, dove into the politics and particulars of absentee voting and same-day voter registration – the conclusions of which Herron preferred not to divulge, given the upcoming appearances at the other schools.
In a state where people still talk about then-presidential candidate John Kennedy’s campaign swing of 1960 and its allegations of vote-buying still attached, Herron said West Virginia does have integrity at the polls.
Integrity, he said, in that the process is legitimate.
People can vote, and their votes can be counted, he said.
And that’s even in shifting political landscapes in the shadow of the mountains, he said.
West Virginia’s rule on voter identification is a good example, he said, in that it has options rather than simply turning away a person who can’t provide a photo I.D. at the polls.
You may not have a driver’s license, he said, but you most certainly will have a utility bill containing your name and address.
“This is a nice compromise,” Herron said.
If all politics is local, he added, the compromises which are always part of the endeavor are universal.
“When we think about how our elections should work, we have to balance priorities like security, efficiency and access,” said Herron, who studied elections in Ukraine as a Fulbright scholar 20 years ago and is fluent in Russian.
“Sometimes these priorities can be balanced,” he said, “but sometimes increasing one may decrease the other.”
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