Since it’s Election Day, I want to reiterate my quadrennial objections to the Electoral College:

It’s an undemocratic constitutional legacy that causes voters in 30-40
states to be ignored in favor of a handful of battleground states.
People claim small states would be neglected without the Electoral
College, but most of them are not getting much attention right now
anyway (see Rhode Island, Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc.). And any
candidate who shunned vast swaths of the country would pay a heavy
price. We should give voters more credit – they will punish national
candidates who run regional campaigns.

Also, it’s absurd that so many states like North Carolina (where I live) elect their judges — voters know nothing about the candidates and it creates perverse incentives for politicking:

[Judicial elections] are increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of our politics – nasty, partisan and money-driven…

With legal and ethical norms eroding, strategic
candidates for the bench are going to play politics — bad news for
every citizen who wants an effective non-partisan judiciary. That’s why
all judges should be appointed. Let’s hold elected officials
responsible for the judges they appoint, rather than politicizing the
law. It’s the only workable solution.

Finally, I’m unhappy with the prevalence of early voting and voting by mail. If this country either (a) voted on a weekend or (b) had a national holiday for voting, we wouldn’t need to offer early voting as a convenience option. There’s something important about voting together as a community on Election Day — it affirms our social and political equality as citizens.