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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.'"
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
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.
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
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?
I think that voting is truly an example of a quantum reality: attempting a measure affects the outcome.
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
Actually, the bigger issue is not "voting for the winner," but voter discouragement when it looks like the candidate you WANT to win is behind. If you think your guy is going to lose anyway, why go out and vote?
Funny, I'd have the opposite reaction "hey he's losing, he NEEDS my vote more than ever".
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
'At the same time, this isn't a system that can evolve naturally from current systems...'
The proxy/recovery approach you describe could probably be applied in other contexts. (Investment decision-making comes to mind, but it might not be a terribly good example.) Once the technology is proven for other applications, adapting it to function as the decision-making process of a large political system would probably be an easier task.
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.
The problem is less the complexity of the implementation.
How do you avoid votes being bought?
By lack of assurance that you get what you pay for, just like the current system.
And how do avoid a reversal of power? In other words, how do you avoid that you empowering your proxy doesn't give him the power to coerce you to make him your proxy? The anonymity of the voter is a very important part of democracy.
There's no reason to eliminate anonymity here - not unless the central server keeping track of everything in compromised. You simply make sure that you can only check upstream for where your vote(s) are going, but an't look downstream to see who listed you as their proxy. You can get a count of how many proxy votes you have, but not a list of who they are.
Which brings it back to complexity of implementation issue, because the issue is security of the system. Because the system needs to keep track of all this data it needs to be aware of who is giving their proxy to who, and who voting for what. Presuming that that's a computer system, that's fine - unless the system is compromised and it is possible for someone to actually access the full dataset. Presuming the system is secure there needn't be issues.
No I'm not claiming to be able to write said secure system.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Let's get this straight. I don't give a good goddamn who won or lost. What I do care about is being ABLE TO TELL. If there is one unverifiable vote out there, that is one too many. If, for whatever reason, a recount is needed, how are we to proceed?
We don't.
The problem, as you see it, is incorrect. A 'huge' number of people are no longer needed to fix an election. The majority of e-voting machines are insecure, unreliable, and are subject to a single point of failure, be it of hardware, software, or human.
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.
--
make install -not war