Using Crowdsourcing To Design More Accessible Elections

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."

Comments

Easy is easy

[cold fjord]

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.

Re:Easy is easy

[spire3661]

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.

Re:Easy is easy

[SETIGuy]

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.

lots of things

[theedgeofoblivious]

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...

Re:lots of things

[theedgeofoblivious]

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.

Ballot stuffing is very rare.

[khasim]

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!

Re:Ballot stuffing is very rare.

[cold fjord]

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

Remember, they *d8d* say "everyone"

[Barbara, not Barbie]

'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!

Voter-ID

[FatLittleMonkey]

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.

Fraud?

[CapOblivious2010]

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!