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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.