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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."

27 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. New electron designs via crowdsourcing? by Neil_Brown · · Score: 2

    Finally, a positive news story.

  2. 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.

      --
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    2. Re:Easy is easy by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Its not as much nonsense as you make it out to be. Look at the statistics for low income families and their ability to get proper identification.

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      Good-bye
    3. Re:Easy is easy by cold+fjord · · Score: 2

      Good point. The best you can do is to get the facts out and try to make a good argument.

      Not a Race Card

      Voter ID Is Not Jim Crow

      --
      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
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Easy is easy by WhiplashII · · Score: 2

      Where I live there are buses that pick up homeless / projects residents, and then go from precinct to precinct voting.

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    6. Re:Easy is easy by tick-tock-atona · · Score: 2

      There is a very simple way to make elections more accessible: make voting compulsory. As an Australian, I simply cannot fathom how the US seems to constantly struggle with issues such as electoral "accessibility". The advantages of compulsory voting are numerous:

      ... compelling voters to the polls for an election mitigates the impact that external factors may have on an individual's capacity to vote such as the weather, transport, or restrictive employers. If everybody must vote, then restrictions on voting are easily identified and steps are taken to remove them. It is a measure to prevent disenfranchisement of the socially disadvantaged. Countries with compulsory voting generally hold elections on a Saturday or Sunday as evidenced in nations such as Australia, to ensure that working people can fulfill their duty to cast their vote. Postal and pre-poll voting is provided to people who cannot vote on polling day, and mobile voting booths may also be taken to old age homes and hospitals to cater for immobilized citizens.

      Fraud is easily identified when everyone has to cast a vote - you cannot tick off a name more than once.

      The arguments against compulsory voting generally boil down to thinking that the government asking for one's opinion qualifies as totalitarianism. But there is a simple solution to this.

      If voters do not want to support any given choice, they may cast spoilt votes or blank votes. According to compulsory voting supporters, this is preferred to not voting at all because it ensures there is no possibility that the person has been intimidated or prevented from voting should they wish.

    7. Re:Easy is easy by SETIGuy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, but without proper documentation we won't know if they are legal eligible to vote.

      Yet somehow we survived as a country without such requirements in the past.

      But unfortunately, elections in this country are decided by who doesn't vote. And conservatives (i.e. Republicans) have recognized they they are the one who win when people don't vote. So they make it difficult for people who vote for Democrats to vote. That would be the poor, primarily. The primary attributes that poor people have in common are frequent address changes. So the "voter ID" laws are designed to disenfranchise anyone who has changed their address within a year of the election. You do that by putting the registration deadlines as early as possible. You have to show an ID to register, and if your address has changed by the election, you won't be able to vote. Especially because the Republicans are printing flyers threatening arrest if you show up with invalid ID.

      Similarly, they disenfranchise students by making a gun registration form acceptable ID, but a student ID is not.

      And, if course, that guy living in a doorway on main street isn't going to have valid ID even though he is as elligible to vote as the Mayor is. Maybe moreso, because if the mayor is a Republican, he's probably a felon.

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    8. Re:Easy is easy by SETIGuy · · Score: 2

      Identification Cards should be provided for Free (once per year) and paid for by taxes.

      And if a person has moved since their free ID card was provided they lose their right to vote? How about people that don't have an address? Do they lose their right to vote? How about students? What address does their ID say? Do they have any choice in where they vote? How about people whose birth certificate has errors, or the electronic record for their birth has errors. Who pays the price for rectifying those errors. How about people who have changed their names? How about people who haven't changed their names but use their middle name as their first name on every record but their birth certificate? How about people who have multiple addresses? How do you handle their choice of voting district. Personally I think you shouldn't be voting due to inability consider the consequences of your actions.

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    9. Re:Easy is easy by SETIGuy · · Score: 2, Informative

      Anonymous cowards tend to be morons and I'd put you in that category. The problem is often not the lack of photo ID, but the lack of a photo ID that is a character for character match for birth records. What happens when you move. The people who move the most are the people who can't afford $13 every time them move. How long does it take the voter registration change to be enacted? How does someone who is living on the streets (but still entitled to vote) prove their eligibility?

      How many people truly can't afford one of the above?

      It doesn't matter. If the answer is one or more, it is unconstitutional. Ever elligible is entitled to vote. Any law that prevents someone who has a right to vote from voting is illegal. Vote early/vote often is a strawman argument from the right that doesn't actually occur. Whereas Republican Secretaries of State (Blackwell, Harris) preventing eligible voters from voting is well documented and thousands of times the votes of any alleged voter fraud.

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    10. Re:Easy is easy by cold+fjord · · Score: 2

      Its not as much nonsense as you make it out to be. Look at the statistics for low income families and their ability to get proper identification.

      Here are some interesting statistics:

      Not a Race Card

      American University found that less than one-half of 1 percent of registered voters in Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi lacked a government-issued ID. A 2006 survey of more than 36,000 voters found that only 23 people in the entire sample would be unable to vote because of an ID requirement. . . . .

      The weakness of the case against voter ID has been much in evidence in courtrooms. The Indiana and Georgia voter-ID laws were upheld by state and federal courts. In the Georgia case, the federal court pointed out that after two years of litigation, none of the plaintiffs, including the NAACP, could produce a single otherwise eligible voter who did not have a photo ID or could not easily obtain one. That failure was “particularly acute,” the court wrote, “in light of the Plaintiffs’ contention that a large number of Georgia voters lack acceptable photo ID.” Similarly, in the Indiana case, the federal court noted that “despite apocalyptic assertions of wholesale voter disenfranchisement, Plaintiffs have produced not a single piece of evidence of any identifiable registered voter who would be prevented from voting.”

      The Georgia court said that the claim that voter ID is the same as a poll tax “represents a dramatic overstatement.” Imposing tangential burdens “does not transform a regulation into a poll tax” and “the cost of time and transportation” to obtain a free ID “cannot plausibly qualify as a prohibited poll tax because those same ‘costs’ also result from voter registration and in-person voting requirements, which one would not reasonably construe as a poll tax.” All of the states implementing voter ID have provided free IDs for anyone who does not already have one. As Rhode Island state senator Harold Metts said, “In this day and age, very few adults lack one of the forms of identification that will be accepted, and the rare person who does can get a free voter-ID card.”

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      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
  3. lots of things by theedgeofoblivious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Move voting to the weekend(for people who can't get away from work).

    Make it last a full weekend from Friday at noon until Monday at noon(for people who can't get away from work).

    Move voting to the spring(for people who have bad weather in early November).

    Make it so anyone can vote at any voting station rather than requiring that people go to only the one(for convenience).

    Make it so all schools and all government offices are voting stations(for convenience).

    et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

    1. Re:lots of things by theedgeofoblivious · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oh, and institute approval voting.

      Approval voting is simple. You mark the candidates you'd be okay with(not just the one you like the most), and the person with the most votes wins.

      Make it so people can just circle the candidates they'd be okay with. This would cut down on extremist candidates and would improve the chances of candidates with wide appeal, would make voting easy to understand, and would make it easier to determine people's intended choices. It would remove people's incentive to vote for the "electable" candidate, and would encourage them to vote for candidates they really like.

      The winning candidate would be the candidate who really had the most support among the voting population, not just the candidate who people thought most other people would vote for.

    2. Re:lots of things by icebike · · Score: 2

      The vote on Tuesday was because in those days you couldn't mess with the Sabbath so it had to be a week day.
      Furthermore we were an agrarian society for the most part, so employers didn't even enter in to it.
      Voting was set late in the year, after harvest, when most farmers really didn't have all that much going on.
      Travel by horse means a day to the county seat, vote, go home taking another day.
      http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2008/01/why-we-vote-on/

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  4. 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!

    1. Re:Ballot stuffing is very rare. by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      Sorry, but you are quite simply wrong about that.

      . . . two Troy city officials, the city clerk and a councilman, along with two Democratic political operatives, have pled guilty to forging absentee-ballot signatures and casting fraudulent ballots in the 2009 Working Families Party primary. The WFP is the political party associated with ACORN.

      One of the citizens whose votes were stolen was stunned at what happened. She said that she was “sure this goes on a lot in politics, but it’s very rare that they do get caught.” This voter was right on the money with that observation — fraud is so easy to commit in our election system that it is rare that fraudsters get caught and even rarer that they get prosecuted.

      . . . one of the Democratic operatives who pled guilty, Anthony DeFiglio, told New York State police investigators “that faking absentee ballots was a commonplace and accepted practice in political circles, all intended to swing an election.” And whose votes do they steal? DeFiglio was very plain about that: “The people who are targeted live in low-income housing, and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions.”

      That is exactly what former Alabama congressman Artur Davis said recently when he admitted that he was wrong to oppose voter-ID requirements. Davis says the “most aggressive” voter suppression “is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt” of Alabama, which is an area of very poor black communities. These are the very areas where the NAACP claims voter fraud does not happen. The NAACP opposes all reasonable measures to safeguard the voting process for its own constituents, even going to the extent of defending vote stealers, as the NAACP did in Greene County, Ala., in the mid-1990s. Small wonder one of its local officials was recently sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud in Tunica County, Mississippi. - Yes, Virginia, There Really Is Voter Fraud

      And more . . .

      In contrast, a subsequent media analysis showed that at least 2000 votes were cast illegally in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Since the margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes, the fraudulent votes were sufficient to affect the outcome of the election.

      That’s not an isolated example. Evidence adduced at various commission hearings suggests numerous instances of actual voter fraud. The cases involve organizations and individuals who register ineligible voters, dead people, and fictional characters. In an infamous Ohio case during the 2004 presidential election campaign, a canvasser paid with crack cocaine registered Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins, and scores of other equally noteworthy characters.

      Again, these aren’t isolated cases. A major 2001 voter registration drive in St. Louis’s black community produced 3,800 new voter cards. When some of the names appeared suspicious, elections officials investigated all of the cards and determined that every single one was fraudulent. Dogs, the dead, and people who simply didn’t want to register were among the new registrants.

      The problem isn’t only that canvassers are being paid to produce manifestly fraudulent voter registrations; it’s also that voter rolls throughout the country are being padded with hundreds of thousands of false and fraudulent names. For example, testimony by John Sample before the Senate Rules Committee showed that Alaska had 503,000 people on its voter rolls but only 437,000 people of votin

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      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
  5. Remember, they *d8d* say "everyone" by Barbara,+not+Barbie · · Score: 3, Funny

    'How might we design an accessible election experience for everyone?'

    1. In the long-time tradition of letting the dearly departed cast their ballot, it's time they make it official policy to "bring out your dead." Zombie votes have always been cast anyway - just legitimize the practice.

    2. Furthering the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), people with ADHD and Aspergers should be allowed to better express themsleves by letting them "vote early, vote often". Keep pulling that lever as much as you need to!

    3. Since the secrecy of the vote is an integral part of the election process, everyone will get a secret ballot, same as in Soviet Russia. "Do not open the ballot, citizen! It's called a SECRET ballot for a reason!"

    4. To avoid discriminating against people who live on the west coast or other time zones, election results will be available nationwide 6 hours before the polls open, EDT. This will allow for more celebrations for the election of our dear leader.

    5. Remember, it's not election fraud unless we say it is!

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  6. Holiday by Dracos · · Score: 2

    Make election day a holiday for whatever jurisdiction (federal, state, county, etc) is on the ballot.

  7. 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?

  8. Best Solution IMO by no-body · · Score: 2

    So, forgo all the electronic gadgetry, do a simple mechanical trustworthy traceable process with paper and be done with it! Do it locally with many eyes watching over everything happening.

    It's not hip enough and the results cannot be shown on live TV screens as instantly and the voting equipment companies won't do so much business - so what!

    Apparently, some entities are using straight paper ballots for the sake of transparency and simplicity. Switzerland appears to be one of those. No complaints about lack of trustworthiness.

    1. Re:Best Solution IMO by FatLittleMonkey · · Score: 2

      Australia has pencil-and-paper voting and we still get to have live results TV coverage. The only time we don't get a same-day result is when it comes down to one seat, and it's within the margin of postal-ballots. (Or recently, when neither party got a majority and the independents took their sweet fucking time deciding who to support.)

      Although I would suggest the US separates Federal, State and Local elections to different times of year, and where possible, different years. That would make things easier both for voters and for counters.

      --
      Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
    2. Re:Best Solution IMO by no-body · · Score: 2

      Good points - another idea is to move elections from Tuesdays to Sundays where most people don't work.

  9. Voter-ID by FatLittleMonkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    special interests

    You need to drill down into the history behind the issue. Conservatives are easier to motivate to vote, and almost only vote Republican. Groups that are easy to discourage (young, black, poor) tend to overwhelmingly vote Democrat. High turn-out elections favour Democrats, low turn-out elections favour Republicans.

    Hence the Republican powers-that-be tend to (quite rightly) see voter registration drives, "Rock The Vote", "Vote or Die", as a pro-Democrat mechanism. So they push back by making voting more difficult. Hell, I saw a conservative editorial recently describing voter-registration drives and anything that encourages voting as "anti-democratic".

    Hence the push for voter-ID systems. And it polls well with non-Republicans, as an anti-fraud measure, making it easy to hide their real intent. (Along with less publicised anti Voter Registration Drive measures, like making it effectively illegal to hand out voter registration forms, etc.)

    Here in Australia, we have mandatory voting (well, mandatory turning-up-and-getting-your-name-crossed-off, you can still leave your ballot blank). There's a $50 fine for non-voting, although it's apparently easy to get out of. And we have over 95% turnout at Federal and State elections. The left-wing party supports mandatory voting, the right-wing party opposes it. For exactly the same reasons, and with each using exactly the same poll-friendly lies to defend their positions.

    This is all part of the long and nasty history of efforts to keep the "wrong" group from voting.

    --
    Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
    1. Re:Voter-ID by ScentCone · · Score: 2

      I don't know! What's it like to make spurious, adolescent ad hominem snarks, knowing that that's your only method of saying anything without actually addressing the substance of the matter? I mean, I appreciate your tacit acknowledgement of the underlying issue, which is the routine submission of thousands of fraudulant voter registrations by activist groups, and the inevitability that some of those are connected to actual fraudulant votes. I'm sure it probably is maddening to you that not everyone hushes up on the subject, since it's kind of embarassing and all. But don't you feel a little childish blaming the messenger? Never mind. If you did, you wouldn't have opened your yap to say it. Carry on. You're not kidding anybody anyway.

      --
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  10. 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!

  11. Hmmmm by ettusyphax · · Score: 2

    Well for one you could do away with gerrymandering that marginalizes poor people, or neo-Jim Crow Laws (see Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" 2010), or bring back organizations like ACORN which helped to rally ethnic minorities and the economically disadvantaged (before being gutted by the GOP on verifiably baseless claims), or eliminate the electoral college, or pursue more direct-democracy solutions based on Switzerland's thousand-year-old system, or any number of other things. But no, let's waste our time rehashing buzzwords from 2006 so that rich white people can feel good about themselves. Thanks.