thoughts on election day (not about candidates)

[cellio]

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!

Comments

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

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

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.

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

[cellio]

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.

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

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

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.

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

[(Anonymous)]

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

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

[cellio]

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