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Using Crowdsourcing To Design More Accessible Elections

Posted by samzenpus on from the two-votes-are-better-than-one dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission is sponsoring an online, open innovation challenge to search for creative answers to the question: 'How might we design an accessible election experience for everyone?' The goal is to develop ideas for how to make elections more accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities."

6 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Easy is easy by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What is much harder is to make it both easy to vote and make it difficult to cast a fraudulent vote. Preventing fraud is an important consideration as more and more elections in the US are decided by razor thin margins, well within the margin of being decided by fairly trivial fraud.

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    1. Re:Easy is easy by ScentCone · · Score: 2, Insightful

      and make it difficult to cast a fraudulent vote

      Especially when special interests say that even being asked to present a photo ID at your poling place is racist vote suppression. Hard to fight THAT sort of nonsense.

      --
      Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
    2. Re:Easy is easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They aren't giving it away. You still have to provide numerous documentation, which makes for an onerous requirement for some, especially the elderly.

  2. Ballot stuffing is very rare. by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ballot stuffing (or even voting two or more times) is very rare.
    So rare as to be a non-issue. Despite claims to the contrary.

    Most attempts at "fixing" the "voter fraud" issue are really aimed at making it more difficult for people to vote. They have to jump through more hoops so they might not be able to afford it in time or money (or both). Meanwhile, the people with the extra time and money CAN jump through the hoops (after all, they determined what those hoops would be). So the only "legit" voters are the people who are already prosperous under the existing system.

    So it is just a way to maintain the status quo.

    Anyway, on to improving the system.

    1. How about extending "election day" to more than a single day?

    2. And how about including a national holiday in that period? Move Presidents Day so that it falls in the middle of "Voting Week". Or the end. Or the beginning. Or even on "Election Day" if you don't want to add more days. Yay! Holiday! Get out and VOTE!

  3. Isn't that exactly the opposite of the trend? by rbrander · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I thought the US was trying to make elections LESS accessible out of concerns of voter fraud. Voter ID stuff and all that?

  4. Fraud? by CapOblivious2010 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't know how prevalent individual voter fraud is.... but I've always been a little skeptical of the claim that it's nearly non-existent, since our current election procedures are incapable of detecting it.

    In other news, I've discovered that there's no such thing as poor people, because if I close my eyes real tight when riding through downtown I never see any poor people - so clearly there aren't any!