cellio | thoughts on election day (not about candidates)

Voting reforms I would like to see (unlikely as they may be):

1. No "vote straight party" options. The right to vote is important and was hard-won; it is not too much to require that you actually vote for candidates.

2. All voting is write-in. If you can't bother to learn, or write down, some approximation of the names of your chosen candidates, why are you voting for them? All reasonable permutations of spelling accepted (to be determined in advance for each candidate). Nice side bonus: it might reduce negative campaigning, which repeats the opposition candidate's name all over the place...

3. No handing out of campaign literature at the polls. Signs are fine (at distances specified by law), but no hand-outs that subvert #2 and create a waste problem.

The goal of all three: a more-informed electorate. When asked who you voted for you should be able to say something more specific than "the Democrat". It might take a little longer to vote and a little longer to count the results, but isn't it worth it?

And finally:

4. Ranked voting, so that people can vote for perceived dark horses without feeling they've implicitly voted for the greater evil among the front-runners. (You see this all the time -- "I'd like to vote for X, but the bad guy is ahead so I need to vote for the less-bad guy who could actually win instead". So other parties get few votes and the cycle continues.) There are merits to both the Worldcon-style "Australian ballot" (do Australians actually vote that way?), where you keep eliminating the lowest vote-getters until a majority emerges, and point tallies, where top position is worth N points, next on N-1, and so on, and most points wins. Either scheme is better than what we do now.

Now that would be an enpowered electorate!

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For me, voting involves going to the polls, getting the ballot which is a sheet of paper with names on it and ovals next to the names, and we use a marker to fill in the oval next to the name we want.

No option to vote party line. In any case, not all offices have candidates from all parties, so, in practical terms, you couldn't.

Not sure I want to make voting into a spelling test. If you're dyslexic enough that you CAN use a ballot, if you familiarize yourself with it, but CAN'T reliably write a name, I don't see that you should be penalized. If you've had a stroke, and are perfectly lucid, but have trouble with fine motor control, I can imagine you might be able to fill in an oval easier than you could write a name.

Our polling place has a line painted on the ground with "ELECTION LIMIT" on it. Most places I've voted that have been polling places for decades have similar painted lines. Any electioneering has to happen on the far side of that line.

I don't mind campaign literature, because I've been handed actual brochures when approaching the polls, which laid out information in fair detail.

I've never seen a paper ballot (except for absentee ballots). I used to vote by pulling levers and now I vote with a touch-screen of dubious reliability. (In no case is there a paper trail; I have a receipt that shows that I voted, but no official record of the vote.)

The party-line option votes for the chosen party in all races where they have a candidate and skips the others. I presume that you can then go back and edit (you could with the levers, I know; I experimented once to see how it worked).

I wasn't trying to make voting into some sort of literacy test. I would prefer that votes be cast positively, using recall, instead of by matching the party designation under the name or recognizing the name. Maybe it would be sufficient to remove parties from the ballot? As with the first item, what I'm really trying to do is push this toward actually voting for people instead of applying a rule like "Green" or "no Democrats".

Aren't there accommodations for the handicapped of any flavor? Blind people, dyslexics, and people with limited motor control can't use today's ballots without assistance either.

They have paper ballots here. They're of a type with the stardardized-testing answer sheets people use in grade school--you fill in the oval next to your choice. Presumably they're later scanned by some kind of scoring system.

When I was in Pittburgh they used the lever-pull machines. Probably it's just too expensive to replace them in anyplace where they have them already, and they don't seem to break much (that is, they're clearly from decades ago, yet still functioning) so there's not much need.

Maybe it would be sufficient to remove parties from the ballot?

This is not an absolutely accurate description of Washington state ballots, but it echoes

xiphias' experience: for most races, the candidates may (but are not required to) list a "party preference" but the state actively tries to avoid anything that smacks of treating the voters as members of a fixed party. Like, say, registering your party affiliation. This has a couple of immediate implications: in the prior major election, many Republican candidates listed their preferences as "GOP" or ducked the question altogether to avoid being associated with the Republican brand at a time when it was electoral poison.

The other implication is that party primaries collapse below the national level (where it can't be avoided - we don't get to tell Obama and McCain that we just don't do it that way). At the state and local level, we have "jungle primaries" where everyone gets tossed in the same pot, and the candidates with the two largest pluralities move on the the general election regardless of party. This gets us around the problem where the primary is the de facto election in places where one party dominates, but that also means that parties who don't make that filter are shut out of the debate during the general (which can be part of moving toward acceptance even when you lose in the short term) and the whole mechanism means it becomes significantly harder for the party machinery to curate "their own" nomination since candidates can list whatever they want.

I will bet that you did. If that's the case, there IS a paper trail. Touchscreen machines print to paper rolls while you vote, as well as making electronic copies to RAM and to flash cards. The RAM gets saved during election close and it and the flash cards are the data that are used to produce the election results. The paper rolls, plus other materials preserved by your poll workers, are what will be used in the event (absit omen) that the election must be reconstructed for some reason.

Interesting -- thanks for the info! I did hear that but I assumed it was a cute sound-effect built into the software, not actual printing.

and I'm glad that I sat there for an hour checking for signatures and initials and ballot styles while my co-workers were working on other closing matters, because it looks as if there are going to be TWO recounts in our county, one triggered automatically because the race is so close and one because the loser can't believe he lost (to the incumbent and by a comfortable margin). We counted our paperwork twice by hand, now some other poor souls will have to count it again and look at not only the paper rolls from the touchscreen machines, but all the paper ballots from the Optiscan AND its printouts of its flash cards. (People forget that an Optiscan is an electronic medium as well.) They'll find ours in excellent order. We didn't turn anything in until everything balanced.

Well, I guess that's reassuring. The sound was really annoying me as I filled in the only "write in" box on the ballot -- thus assuring everyone in the room that I was NOT voting for the career incumbent to the PA Assembly (running with no opposition).

I have no reason to worry about people knowing who I'm voting for, but for some people/in some areas I'm sure that this is not the case. Having that string of beeps to alert everyone that I was opposed to the incumbent really bugged me. I feel a tiny bit better knowing it was there for a reason (but only a tiny bit).

--Pamela

Broadcasting that you were doing something more than just checking a name on the ballot? Oh, not cool. :-(

thoughts on election day (not about candidates)

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Did you hear a sound like an old-fashioned line printer while you voted on your touchscreen?

Re: Did you hear a sound like an old-fashioned line printer while you voted on your touchscreen?

It's a damned good thing it's there, too

Re: Did you hear a sound like an old-fashioned line printer while you voted on your touchscreen?

Re: Did you hear a sound like an old-fashioned line printer while you voted on your touchscreen?