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Election Day May Go Away... In Florida
That's Unpossible! writes "The Orlando Sentinel is reporting about a proposed change to the way Florida will run future elections. Due to the popularity of this year's 'advanced voting' trial run, it seems likely that the voting process can be streamlined by spreading it out over two weeks, allowing people to vote when and where they can. 'Fewer polling places would reduce the number of voting machines and would require fewer poll workers, which could cut salary and training costs. It also would reduce the chances of human error and electronic glitches, supervisors said.'"
Oregon has been doing vote-by-mail for a few years like this.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
But, when will the children get the use of their gymnasium back! Half-court basketball just isn't the same.
"human error and electronic glitches" - or just reduce the change of the errors being detected?
I'd be happier if there was some way we could get of elections -- period -- in Florida. They voted for GWB twice in a row now. If that's not enough to disqualify a state from having a say in the presidental election, I don't know what is.
I've always wondered why voting isn't done like this in the first place. Why all the cramming into one day, and therefore driving away would-be voters because of the crowds?
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I, for one, have to question the idea of reducing the number of poll workers. Doing so may increase the possibility of error, as well as provide more potential for someone to mess with the system.
On the other hand, I think that requiring the polling places ot be open on weekends as well as weekdays should improve voter turnout, since currently, a lot of people can not seem to get away from work to go vote.
To me, the most important thing is to ensure that whatever system is used provides a paper trail. I would gladly pay a little more in taxes to make sure that every vote is counted accurately.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Is democracy damned when people don't vote? The damned view believes that non-voters don't have fate in the system. On the other hand perhaps these people think everything is just fine.
But would spreading voting out over more then a day really help? Those who "forget" to go would still forget and you would also miss the effect of having voting day. One clear day on wich everyone knows that today is the day to vote with everyone remembring people around them.
Sure sure economic effect of people taking an hour of to vote (or even a day). So what? Cost of doing business. If a company really really needs all its people there let it open a polling boot inside.
Also would candidates still be banned from campaigning during the entire two weeks?
As for mistakes and cost of salaries. Well now the ballot boxes have to be guarded for 1 day. The staff needs to be paid for 1 day and only take 1 day of from their day job. You just increase the cost because now the polling station has to be guarded for 14 days and nights. The cost for foreing volunteers to observe the elections also goes op (hmmm might US elections not withstand foreign scrutiny?)
Few polling stations? Oh goodie, means longer distances to travel. No problem for the rich and middle classes but poorer people might have to spend more money they don't have to get to their polling station. Isn't the entire idea of having so many stations to make them easily accesable to everyone?
Lets review
Is it really that much of a problem to go and vote?
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Explain to me how running the electronic voting for a longer time will reduce glitches. Try running a windows machine for two weeks. Now run the same machine for one day. Which period do you think is more likely to have bugs arise. Sure Diebold machines aren't windows machines, but the point is the same. If a computer gives buggy results over a short period of time, running it longer won't smooth things out. Human error, on the other hand, will probably be reduced dramatically. I agree with that.
Malarky. Having fewer voting centers would not guarantee fewer 'electronic glitches'. On the contrary, it could exacerbate the problems.
If you haven't checked recently, you need to catch up on what's happening in Florida. Also interesting is that apparently Keith Olbermann is under extreme pressure to lie about Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org, likely by TPTB. Probably to discredit Keith and Bev as he basically in the only one in the media that had any fortitude to actually perform a proper media role in questioning the elections voting integrity.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
This could be a step towards continuous voting:
I'd probably prefer a condorcet-style ranked election method over the plurality method outlined on the page cited above, however.
It would increase the chances of voter fraud and ballot stuffing. This last election showed how easy that is. One case as an example. One polling place had lever machines already having 1500 votes tallied when the poll workers showed up in the morning. They were told not to worry about it.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
After having to wait in line for nearly 3 hours to vote early in FL, and delivering water to other early voting places where people were waiting just as long... WTF?
In Ohio, some people waited up to 9 hours to vote. We need more polling places, more machines and more poll workers, not less. While I'm all for a 2 week voting period, using one as an excuse to reduce the number of machines and locations is insane. What about people who have a hard time with transportation? Will they no longer be able to go to their local polling place? Will we just cut out polling places in poor areas or rural areas, tell those folks they've got 2 weeks to go stand in a long line miles from home to exercise their Constitutional rights?
This is only a solution if it increases overall availability of the polls to all voters, anything less smells of poll taxes and literacy tests.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
We could reduce the burden of elections (by one) even further if State Legislatures would just have the intestinal fortitude to pick Presidential Electors themselves. Having a statewide vote & locking in electors is a cop-out.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
For the presidential election see the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, paragraph 4.
That's for Electoral College votes (only 538 of those each election). So I guess it depends on if Congress has enacted a law which would prohibit the states from using that as the "Time of chusing the Electors" (that's what we do on election day) or not. There is a similar statement covering the two houses of Congress. I'm not familiar enough with Federal Election laws to be sure what if any limits Congress has passed covering this. However, I'm guessing it's not incredibly illegal otherwise Florida couldn't have done it this year. Presumably, it's the same provision that makes Absentee ballots legal. I know several people who voted early in Nebraska (where I live). One I believe was thru a local polling place that accepted absentee ballots early when given in person.
Kirby
I don't know what you're talking about. In Florida, only old people vote for George W. Bush.
If there are fewer polling places won't that just make it easier for shinanegans at one polling place to affect more people. Fewer poll workers means fewer people to bribe. Fewer polling places means you are losing statistical redundancy. It might help exit poll accuracy, but it also means there is more time to spread out inconsistencies, and make them seem less catastrophic.
There are reasons 100% uptime computer systems use redundency all over the place. Spreading the voting over time adds redundancy, but if they are expecting this to save money, then I bet they plan to cut the number of polling places so that the removed redundancy is greater than that added by the longer term.
The last thing we need is for this to actually put MORE possibility of error into the system.
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
Fewer polling places would also make it harder for the poor to reach 'super' polling places especially if they were located with ill intent. Remember that there were long lines at many of the 'super' polling places open early in Florida this year all through the voting season. Having fewer places open longer is not necessarily a panacea.
Florida will be a cinch in 2008.
...doing this in Florida. Everyone knows that nobody down there knows how to vote anyway, so what difference would it make?
The problem is that in many places, especially in Florida, there are a substantial number of voters (especially elderly) who are not willing (or really able) to travel farther than their local precinct.
Early voting here, in Pasco and Pinellas counties, took place at three locations in each county in county government buildings. These buildings (more so in Pinellas than Pasco, which is a more rural county) are in fairly heavily populated areas, and many elderly are unwilling to travel to such areas due to the traffic congestion and the uncertainty involved in travelling farther from home. Further, many are barred from travelling farther than a certain distance from their primary health care provider. Lastly, many can travel only short distances due to the logistics of their limited mobility.
If voting locations are going to be open for two weeks, I don't see how they'll get around this - they're certainly not going to be using churches and schools, the current precinct poll locations, for two weeks straight.
I voted early here, and loved it... but I live about 5 minutes from one of the three locations in Pasco county where I could vote, so it was trivial for me. I think we still need to have a small window where people are able to vote locally. Otherwise, this could effectively disenfranchise a lot of people.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Oregon, as someone mentioned, has done vote by mail for quite a while but when my company was hired to do some work for some Oregon campaigns I found out that the information on who has or has not voted is published daily. The campaigners keep hounding the people who haven't voted yet.
It seems like there is much more possibility for illegal pressure or influence (payoffs, etc.) when people don't have the option of voting at a polling place. You may tell someone how you will vote but the booth is private. That's not the case when someone can watch you fill out your vote-by-mail ballot.
Still, I'm all for looking at alternatives. Something must be done to ensure that everyone is sufficiently close to a polling location and that the wait time is short.
I walk 2 minutes to a polling place with nobody in line and am done and back home in less than 10 minutes total time. People in Ohio lined up for hours into the night. It's hard to argue that access to voting is equally distributed and that's a serious problem.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
A bigger window for voting also means a bigger window for fraud. At least with the current one-day polling, you can have volunteers from both parties monitoring the election. Once it becomes a multi-week process are we going to have sufficient volunteers so both parties can keep the ballot boxes under observation full-time? This of course excludes Badnarik and Nader fans, as well as Greens, but somehow in the current environment I doubt it would be possible to get Democrats and Republicans to cooperate long enough to disenfranchise minority parties.
I guess it's time to insist that ballots be kept in a multi-keyed vault, kind of like the safety deposit box in a bank. Then at least you get rid of the off-hours problem.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We've had this in North Carolina for a while, but I believe this was the first year that we were able to vote for president early. Almost 18% of the vote was cast in the two weeks before election day.
I went to vote early, but it was still going to take three hours so I waited for election day (and an hour and a half wait).
One interesting side effect is that the infamous last minute "surprises" that the candidates like to spring are much less releavant. Well...at least now they'll have to pull them two weeks before the election...
- When does campaigning stop?
- How do you exit poll across a two week span? (which with no paper trail, seems to be the only way to even kinda-verify the results)
- Will there be daily backups of the systems?
Seems like a recipe for a whole new set of disasters.The longer the voting period, the more potential there is for individuals casting multiple ballots. Yes these problems can be fixed, but they aren't currently. In a few states an ID is not neccessary to vote since that is discriminatory towards people without ID.
In Afganistan they were in an uproar that permanent ink used to prevent this problem wasn't string enough. Here we have huge percentages of voters voting with absentee ballots unneccessarily and people voting without IDs!
If voting periods are lengthened will will continue to see me counties with more votes cast than there are registered voters. And yes these things still happen.
Spencer Ogden
Don't do anything until voting integrity is insured. Everything else is a waste of time.
Did your vote count?
Until the voters of Florida can answer that question with certainty no other question needs to be asked.
This is a smoke screen distracting us from the real problem. Our voting system is a joke. Fix it.
Votes have value. Treat them as such.
No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
This will just encourage more voter fraud. Next thing they'll be saying is that people won't have to show ID to vote. Oh, wait...
Comes down to this. Lose elections, figure out a way to make sure you can win.
Whether it's redistricting in Texas, or recounts until you get the result you want in Washington, stuff like this shouldn't happen.
FTFA:
"Florida's election supervisors are proposing one way to make voting easier"
In Florida, elections are for dumb people
In Australia, general elections are not only held over several weeks, but voting is compulsory. See here, mate.
This sig no verb.
How about if we just eliminate voting in Florida? It would be nice not to hear about any more botched elections again. We can have a lottery to select government officials, and have the state legislature choose the electors for president every four years.
(No, I'm not serious)
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I realize it sucks when your candidate loses an election. But just because you lose doesn't mean that the other side cheated. There is a reason a lot of this evidence doesn't go anywhere. It is pretty much all grasping at straws. Very little of it is hard evidence. Consider the sheer number of people who would have to be in the deception. Someone would eventually talk.
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In Texas, we have a 2-week period of "early voting" that ends the Friday before election day. There's usually a handful of polling sites in big cities, probably 1 in rural counties. They are open 9-5 and later on some days. You can vote at any location in your city and if there's no city elections, anywhere in the county. They are usually open on at least 1 Saturday also. Everything is watched by representatives from all political parties, so there's no more of a chance of hanky-panky than on election day.
On election day, there are a gazillion neighborhood polling stations, and you have to vote in the one close to where you live. In urban areas it's rare that you have to go more than a mile or two to vote, and lines are usually 0-10 minutes. Of course poll watchers are watching everything.
You can also vote by mail but only if you are unable to get to the polling place or are away from home on election day. Astronauts get to vote by fax.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Doing away with a lot of the precincts, replacing them with voting centers. Won't this create a problem for those who may wind up having to travel further?
With 2 weeks to vote, there's plenty of time to call up your friends to make sure they've all voted.
I can see this increasing the voter turn-out. Particularly because there would be 2 weekends in the 2 weeks of voting.
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Mod parent down: -1, Off-topic
This only works when there are enough voting centers in neighborhoods where they are needed. Duval County, FL only had a single early-voting site situated on the southside of town (the "middle-upper class" section), limiting access to those of lower socioeconomic background from the Westside and the Northside. A trip from the Westside to St. John's and Beach on the bus would take about 2 hours each way and 6 transfers. This could easily be a way to limit those votes to a certain group.
The way Florida does it, eliminating Election Day will also move the submission of votes out of the public eye, out of the oversight of pollwatchers, out of the reach of exit pollers, and entirely into the corrupt hands of the partisan vote fraud fixers running the state elections. Today (and in this November's election, and in the last election in 2000), that balloting czar, the Secretary of State, is also the head of the Republican Party campaign for Florida. An outrageous conflict of interest that has made "Florida" synonymous with "vote fraud". Next time around, after Jeb Bush is gone, that job could easily be filled by a Democrat vote fixer, pulling on Florida Republicans the same dirty tricks, suppression and fraud now perpetrated by Republicans.
Florida has a lot more repair of its voting in store, before it gets to work on "more convenient". Those changes need to be made in public, and tested free of fraud before they hide its workings deeper in the offices of the unaccountable criminals who count the votes, and control the elections.
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