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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.'"
In theory it is to stop early voting trends affecting the way people vote. Consider it this way: it took a lot of work to get the media to shut up and hold off on publishing their exit polls until after voting had closed. Despite that various exit polls were still published on-line. Now consider voting stretched over 2 weeks or more - can you really imagine exit polls not slipping out and getting published. Can you really imagine the mainstream media holding their tongue for 2 weeks?
If you have a running exit poll every day for 2 weeks of "how the election is going" thatv is going to effect how people vote. It may not change your or my decision, but a surprising number of people vote on trivial reasons like "wanting to vote for the winner", and hence knowing who is head right now makes a difference. At the same time there are all the people who will be discouraged from voting because they think their person is already fated to lose/win. It has the potential to seriously mess with the numbers in strange ways.
Jedidiah.
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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
Sure Diebold machines aren't windows machines
Ummm. Diebold machines are windows machines. They run MS Access as the database too.
Scary, I know.
badness 10000
Elections in the U.S. are required to be secret, to prevent vote-selling, among other things. It's also illegal to force people to present credentials to vote - because, among other things, this was used to prevent black people from voting in the South during the heyday of Jim Crow laws.
In Australia, general elections are not only held over several weeks, but voting is compulsory. See here, mate.
This sig no verb.