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.'"

Comments

Nothing really new

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Oregon has been doing vote-by-mail for a few years like this.

Re:Nothing really new

[skinfitz]

I tried that - I sent:

"Vote democrat"

I got a reply:

"Nothing happens."

With a footnote that to keep playing the VBM I had to pay the monthly fee.

Re:Nothing really new

[danknight]

I think the phrase is, you're likely to be eaten by a republican

Think of the children!

[Craig Maloney]

But, when will the children get the use of their gymnasium back! Half-court basketball just isn't the same.

Hmmm

[MikeXpop]

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?

Re:Hmmm

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[Enrico Pulatzo]

I think that voting is truly an example of a quantum reality: attempting a measure affects the outcome.

Re:Hmmm

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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".

Re:Hmmm

[britneys 9th husband]

This is exactly what happens every four years in the primaries. New Hampshire and Iowa and maybe a couple other states vote for someone, and that gives them enough momentum to get the nomination. This is why states keep holding their primaries earlier and earlier, like they're all competing for "fr0st pr1mary" or something.

This could be a good idea

[Bimo_Dude]

I do believe that this should be implemented throughout the whole country, but slightly differently.
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.

Weird

[SmallFurryCreature]

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

• Increase distance to polling station wich affects the poorer people most.
• Decrease public awareness of "voting day".
• Give the postponers more excuses to not vote because they will just do it tomorrow until it is to late
• Increase security risks because the ballots have to be guared for far far longer.
• Increase costs to volunteers because of time of needed
• Increase likelyhood of failure in machine and electronics.
• Impose a 2 week gag order on parties OR have campaigning during voting.
• Cuts in staff are unlikely because you would have more people coming to the station and therefore more of a chance of a rush at peak times (like me who votes before going to work like all the other people in the que or is that just in holland?)

Is it really that much of a problem to go and vote?

Re:Weird

[phyruxus]

I'd like to see a system where voting is year-round, for the whole term. I want to be able to set my vote on the first day after the election, and change it anytime before the next one.

Before computers, this would have been a tall order. Now it's realistic, if not easy. One national database, one PKI set, and no more chads or impounded ballots or fraud of any kind. Everybody wins, and most importantly, it'll probably drive the cost of holding elections way down.

Re:Weird

[hab136]

One national database, one PKI set,

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.

Reducing electronic glitches

[trevdak]

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.

Re:Reducing electronic glitches

[NotoriousQ]

Sure Diebold machines aren't windows machines

Ummm. Diebold machines are windows machines. They run MS Access as the database too.

Scary, I know.

Re:Reducing electronic glitches

[schmink182]

Bad analogy. Try keeping a Windows machine running for two weeks working on not-so-intensive computations. Now try keeping the same machine running for 1 day with very heavy workload for the entire day. Which is more likely to crash? Probably the latter. Plus, if there's a bug in the former early on in the process, it can still be fixed and run without much disturbance. An hour of downtime is much less critical in a two-week setting than a 1-day setting.

Cover for problems

[SpaceLifeForm]

It also would reduce the chances of human error and electronic glitches, supervisors said.

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.

Continuous voting

[dhilvert]

This could be a step towards continuous voting:

Continuous elections may ... be organized through a system of automatic voting machines similar in principle to an automatic teller machine. Instead of depositing or withdrawing money from a bank account, each voter would be depositing or withdrawing his vote from a particular party or candidate.

I'd probably prefer a condorcet-style ranked election method over the plurality method outlined on the page cited above, however.

Re:Continuous voting

[Coryoth]

The most interesting voting system I've ever heard of was called "Dynamic Recoverable Proxy", and was essentially a form of continuous voting like this. It was very ingenious, and is only possible now that we have powerful computing and communication resources, so ought to fit in well on Slashdot. Let me give you a rough overview of how it would work:

At the base level it is a direct democracy on every issue. For every issue, every bill, everyone gets a vote, one vote per person. Of course most people don't care to follow every issue, nor take the time to vote on them. That's okay, because under this system you can pass your vote on to a proxy, who will vote for you. You can nominate anyone as your proxy - your wife, your brother, some professor you happen to think is intelligent and informed, or a politician who campaigned to get your proxy. In turn, the person with your vote can pass their (and all the votes of the people who nominated them as a proxy) on to yet another person. This essentially amounts to a concentration of votes into a small number of representatives - their voting power weighted by the number of people they are the effective proxy for. As you can see, keeping track of that tree of proxy voting requires some computing power, especially given that anyone can change their proxy at any time.

Now, besides being able to change you proxy at any time (so there are no fixed terms, no fixed voting days to decide representatives), you can also, at any time, recover your vote. That means that if some issue does arise that you do have an interest in, you can, if you choose, cast your vote individually on that particular issue yourself. This can happen at any level of the proxy tree, so if you gave your vote to your brother, who in turn passed it on to some politician, your brother can recover and vote for both himself and you (unless of course you recover your vote). This means that you can always be sure that your vote goes the way you want, regardless of what your upstream proxy believes, on any issue you care about.

The two major problems with this system that I can see are implementation, and getting such a thing instituted. To track all the votes, and allow anyone to cast their vote individually requires a strong secure network with some powerful mainframes to keep the tallies. Implementation is far from trivial. At the same time, this isn't a system that can evolve naturally from current systems, it would require a ground up restructuring of whatever democracy decided to implement it - it's a revolutionary rather than evolutionary change. That means, realistically, it won't be implemented by any current modern democracy, but instead possibly by some future newly formed democratic republic.

Jedidiah.

Re:Continuous voting

[dhilvert]

'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.

Re:Continuous voting

[Coryoth]

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.

Fewer Polling Places? WTF!!

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

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.

Hmmm, I wonder what laws cover that.

[ComputerSlicer23]

Congress has the powers allow or disallow that.

For the presidential election see the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, paragraph 4.

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

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

Fewer polling places may not be that good an idea.

[Mick D.]

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.

This could profoundly distort the results

[tm2b]

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.

Window for fraud

[dpilot]

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.

WF?!?

[James.Stanton]

How can this possibly be workable? I never understood how early voting was allowed in the first place (my state, MA, doesn't do it).

• 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.

More potential for abuse

[spencerogden]

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.

Smoke Screen

[ignatzMouse]

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.

Australia does this and more

[dacarr]

In Australia, general elections are not only held over several weeks, but voting is compulsory. See here, mate.

Not far enough

[raider_red]

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)

Re:Election fraud

[teamhasnoi]

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.

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.

fix it in public first

[Doc Ruby]

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.