I’ve been voting since 1996, and I’ve spent a TOTAL of an hour in line! (live in reliably “blue state” w/o early voting AFAIK)
I’m baffled by this whole thing. I live in Northern Virginia and in 2008 I had to wait in line almost four hours to vote. And I vote in a district that is fairly wealthy, predominantly white and has both electronic and paper ballots. It wasn’t because of voter suppression or anything like that, it’s just that fact that EVERYONE wanted to vote before work because people in this area tend to work long hours and traffic is terrible, so voting after work either isn’t possible or it means not seeing your family that night just to vote.
So, at least in my experience, I’m not sure what they could have done to fix the problem. It’s a bandwidth problem. To have brought that wait down to something reasonable would have cost a lot of money and it was more of a one year thing. I voted in a different precinct this year, but it still took about an hour and a half to vote, but again, I was voting before work and I was also showing up later in the morning, so I can’t say how much worse it would have been if I weren’t working later hours now than I was in 2008.
I’m also really failing to see how this servers as voter suppression against Democrats. Why would a 3 hour wait to vote be more likely to disincline a Democrats than Republicans? I could see someone not caring enough or being too busy, but I’m not sure how that would break down ideologically.
I’m more shocked that one of the poll workers didn’t notice her and do something to help accomodate her needs. I know here, besides offering absentee voting to everyone, they’ll also do curbside voting for the elderly, handicapped, and they’re done in a matter of minutes.
Personally, I’m more frustrated about the wait time, not in that they don’t have enough machines, but that people will go into the machine and take 5-10 minutes to vote. I researched the ballot ahead of time, knew all my votes before I got in line, and was done with the machine in less than 30s. Frankly, it seems to me like a lot of the issue could be solved if voters took a few minutes to prepare and decide ahead of time and make the process more efficient rather than just throwing more money at it for more worker, more machines, and all of that.
In the case of Franklin County, Ohio in 2004 it is that County’s Board of Elections directed by Matt Damschroder. In the unlikely event your request for education is sincere, you may want to read a (pdf) analysis prepared by Professor Walter Mebane:
[QUOTE=Matt Damschroder]
“I have been quoted as saying the 11/04 allocation decision was calculated using `a little bit of math and a little bit of art.’
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Walter Mebane]
… it is clear that shortages of voting machines in Franklin County caused delays in people waiting to vote that in turn reduced voter turnout
The DOJ report states plainly that “there were fewer voting machines in black precincts than in white precincts based on registration” …
Using the November active voter counts, there are on average more active voters per voting machine in the precincts that have high proportions African American (242 voters per machine) than in the precincts with low proportions (213 voters per machine). … Using the registered voter counts there are on average 23.7 percent more voters per machine in the precincts with high proportions African American than in the precincts with low proportions …
To reach an average of 100 voters per machine in the April electorate, the county needed 5,023 working voting machines, not 2,800.
… to say that it was appropriate for Franklin County officials to rely on an assessment of the size of the active electorate made in “mid-summer” would be to say it was appropriate for them to ignore the clear signs during the late summer and fall that the November electorate would be substantially larger. If nothing else, the surge of applications from new registrants should have been a clear indicator that plans made based on the earlier information would not be sufficient.
Conclusion
The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African Americans when measured using the standard of the November, 2004, electorate. In precincts with high proportions of African American voters there were 13.6 percent more active voters per voting machine than in precincts having low proportions of African American voters.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know what the setup is in Florida, but here in PA to vote I fill out a paper ballot and drop it in a big, locked, metal box. No poll worker touches it after they hand it to me (well, except later when they count them). At which point they’d no longer be able to tell who’s ballot was who’s. Oddly when I first registered to vote, in person at the county courthouse, my voter ID card did state that I was White. And I’m only in my 20s.
I live in John Boehner’s district, which I believe has 2 Democrats, and would have had an hour had I not (inadvertently) line hopped. First time in my lifetime that I’ve ever not just walked up and voted.
Damn Republicans! You’d think that if they’re going to conspire to block the vote, they’d not sabotage their own party.
This is why I don’t understand people making this out to be a partisan issue. At this point I honestly don’t care whose fault it is or who stands to gain from it or whatever. I just want it to be fixed. Personally I think the answer is a return to paper balloting, or at least to have paper ballots as a spill-over option if the machines get backed up. But I’m sure other people could come up with good solutions as well. Bickering about mean Republicans and whiny Democrats will get us nowhere.
How much will it cost to do that?
If you don’t know the answer to that question… on what basis do you believe it’s not unreasonable?
Between 10 to 20 cents per paper ballot. Next question?
I’ve never waited for longer than 15/20 minutes in a voting line. I’m not sure why it happens, but it seems to me that adopting strategies to avoid it need not cost a lot of money - my voting precincts have never had fancy touch-screen voting machines, for example.
In any case, regardless of where people are coming from, they should be able to vote without waiting three hours in line.
No one is saying white wealthy people don’t have to wait in long lines, but we are saying that it is statistically more likely that poor minorities have to wait in long lines to vote. For the wealthy white suburbanite, it becomes “remember that one year we had to wait four hours?” while for the minority urban dweller, it becomes “why do we have to wait four hours to vote every presidential election?” (Note that it also is “remember that one year we had to wait four hours?” for the minority wealthy suburbanite and vice versa - no one’s saying segregation still exists.)
Again, it’s a statistical argument that urban minority voters will more frequently have to wait in longer lines, and therefore even if there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of electoral patience, the urban minorities are exposed to long lines and wait times more frequently, and will therefore more frequently not vote, and that urban minorities tend to vote Democratic. There are probably other tricks, discussed upthread, that Democratic election commissioners can use to discourage Republican voters without being obvious about it.
That sounds like a good idea. I would hope that’s implemented everywhere, but I don’t have enough experience in different parts of the country to know.
Actually, I think the best solution is to have voters receive mail-in ballots several weeks before the election like they do in Oregon and Washington. Voters have the option of either mailing in their ballots by Election Day or dropping them in ballot boxes located outside of state government buildings like libraries. That way you won’t have people waiting three or more hours to vote due either to poor pre-election planning or political chicanery.
The cost of designing, approving, printing, distributing, collecting, storing, and counting paper ballots is no more than $0.20 per ballot? Really?
Can I ask for a cite? That seems low to me, but perhaps I’m missing an economy of scale.
I can’t. I don’t have anywhere near the knowledge of the relevant factors.
Apart from the cost of paper ballots above, I have no idea what the ordering timeframes are for equipment. in the report septimus provides, for example, the author complains that the Franklin County should not have relied on numbers estimates from the summer, but should have reacted to the fall surge in registrations and thus known the polling places would likely be crowded. And that sounds reasonable – except that I don’t know how long a lead time they had to change their budget, get it approved, purchase, get shipped, install, and test the new machines. I don’t even know if their budget allowed for such a change in the middle of the year – many government agencies work on a yearly budget and simply would not have had additional funding until the start of a new fiscal year.
Was that true for Franklin County? I don’t know. But it seems to me that anyone confidently saying they should have bought new machines based on an additional, late-summer surge, can’t say that unless they DO know the answers.
Right?
I like this solution very much indeed.
Bricker: http://www.votersunite.org/info/PaperBallotPrintingCosts.pdf
Now, I can already see the gears turning behind your clever little eyes, thinking, “Ooooooh, this is the hook on which I will begin to have a big long argument about how much a paper ballot should cost to print, and how many cents it costs to transport those ballots and I will demand that people define reasonable and then I will say that reasonable is not a definable quality, and everyone will forget what we were initially talking about.”
Have fun with that. My point is that forcing people to stand in line more than an hour to vote means that we have failed in our responsibility to ensure that every citizen gets a vote. I already said that I’m willing to consider that there are other solutions besides paper balloting. NDP just mentioned one. Whining that paper ballots are sooooooo expensive and therefore forcing people to wait in line for three hours is A-OK is not an argument that flies with me, nor should it with anyone who gives two shits about the democratic process in this country.
Edit: Ha! I didn’t even see your preceding post when I wrote this one.
That cost is simply to buy them. How much to count them? How much to store them securely?
You anticipate my point, but dismiss it as some sort of a distraction.
And this goes back to my characterization of liberals as well-meaning but impractical. You cannot simply declare that because keeping wait times to under one hour is a good goal, therefore we must do it.
You try to handwave away the costs. But that’s not how the real world works. If we implement changes that reduce wait time, we increase costs. Someone has to answer questions like, “How much?” and “Where does that money come from?”
In turn, stoutly declaring that something is “Not OK,” does not magically create the money to pay for it. And believing that all you have to do is declare that democratic process is involved, and the funding will simply appear, is not an argument that flies with ME.
Good intentions do not create money.
You’re not covering conservatives with glory either, assuming you’re representing yourself as one here. You appear to be arguing that it’s OK to have long lines and difficulties with the voting process because it might be expensive to fix, you think, maybe. And since you don’t know if it’s expensive or not, then anyone who thinks it might be fixable is being an “impractical liberal” - this despite the fact that many people in this country do live in places where the election officials manage to ensure a smooth and uncomplicated voting process for all residents, thus suggesting that it is not some kind of insurmountable or prohibitively expensive task.
The next time someone raises you up on some kind of pedestal as the SDMB’s pet rational conservative, I’m going to remember this thread and how you legitimately and seriously tried to make the point that it’s OK to have significant barriers to the voting process if it’s hard or expensive to fix them. You are an embarrassment of an American.
Are you saying that no matter how expensive it is to fix a three hour wait time, it must be done?
I don’t think any rational person would agree with that.
I’m not saying what you seem to think I’m saying; that we should not fix it the situation because it might be expensive. I AM saying that we need to understand what the costs are, and then decide if we can afford to spend that much money – whatever it is. It may be the the costs are quite reasonable - I don’t know.
All I’m saying is that we need to know. We cannot adopt your attitude of whatever-it-costs-we-must-do-it. That’s crazy. Yes: it might be OK to have three hour waits for certain elections. Or it might not. i don’t know until I know what the costs associated with eliminating them are.
I’m pretty sure Bricker would be a shitty member of any country. Except maybe Libertopia.
I would be willing to wager that most of those on this thread who say that everyone should just vote absentee are some of the same people who are just fine with the USPS cuts.
It’s even worse then that! He thinks it’s OK to have significant barriers to the voting process if it MIGHT BE hard or expensive to fix them.
eta: however, expensive voter ID laws that probably are useless are just fine. But it isn’t about disenfranchisement!
No, it is not OK to have three-hour waits for any election. Yes, we need to understand what the costs are before implementing any solution. But you appear to be suggesting that there are scenarios in which it would be acceptable to force people to wait in line several hours in order to cast a ballot. No. That is not acceptable in this democracy. If we come up with a solution that turns out to be prohibitively expensive, then we find another solution that isn’t. And before you start coming up with nonsense scenarios like, “What if there’s a hurricane” or “what if an asteroid hits the polling place,” I will remind you that after a giant hole got blown in the middle of NYC on September 11, 2001, the primary election was delayed in that city, because it was considered unreasonable for people to have to wade through the aftermath of a terrorist attack in order to vote. That is an acceptable backup solution. We are intelligent, capable people, and we can devise solutions to the problem of people having to wait in long lines to vote. For you to suggest otherwise is, as I said, embarrassing.