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.

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