What - do you think it would triple the cost of running an election, or something? Seriously, it’s not gonna take the equivalent of money for another strategic bomber to fix this. And yes, it’s a hell of a lot more important.
So, Bricker, did you just miss the part about Florida Governor Rick Scott taking away extra early voting days, and not allowing polling places to reinstate them? How one of those days was a particularly heavy early-voting day? That, hey, who would have thought, the three hour lines are worse than '08 because there’s less time to vote? We know those weren’t astronomically expensive because they already had them. We know it can be done with reasonable efficiency because they already had them. This information was already in the thread on post 11, which, incidentally, was a post immediately after one of your own. It’s like you’re going out of your way to not understand the issue.
What cuts? The one being floated to eliminate Saturday deliveries? How would that impact voting by mail?
ISTR some controversy about the ballot itself. IIRC, the thing was described as being filled with an unusually large number of very lengthy legislative initiatives. Being so long, it took a long time to complete and cast, increasing the wait time in polling stations that had a small number of booths and machines.
Does anyone else have any memory of this issue?
Essentially so. Googling “lengthy ballots Florida” will provide you with a datavalanche.
If a representative democracy cannot ensure that voters have equal protection under the law, all else is bullshit. It’s a prerequisite to having a representational democracy - equal opportunity for legal voters to vote.
Maybe you’re right, that one particular solution - to buy more machines late in the summer - was untenable.
Do you agree that the situation as it stands is at least a problem, a problem that can’t be dismissed with “it might be impractical?”
I don’t care if they make every precinct in the country have a 3-hour line - if the line is shorter, you have to go into a waiting room afterward, to make it fair. I don’t care if it’s all by mail. What I care about is preponderantly urban minority voters have to wait exponentially longer times to vote than suburban and rural voters.
Absolutely. “Might be” is an absurd reason to dismiss any untenable situation. To dismiss this, what needs to be shown is that any solution anyone can offer IS impractical.
And I agree that hasn’t been shown.
Although having said that, in my opinion…
This is an example of something that’s very impractical.
But how could they have known? Florida had only been a national laughingstock for their voting fuckups for…what…a piddling twelve years! Not nearly enough time for the Republican reptile brainstem to absorb informaton and respond. Other that making it worse, that is.
Its kind of like the SeaBees motto: “Making it difficult we can do at once, making it impossible takes a little longer”.
Odd that it hasn’t come up in this thread.
So, there weren’t any claims at the time that shenanigans were behind the inclusion of so many initiatives?
We put a man on the fucking Moon, we should be able to run an election as well as your typical Third World Shithole™ .
Seriously, you’re bitching about the cost of paper ballots, the single cheapest fucking way to run an election, oh and every frigging state has some form of paper ballot anyway to use as Absentee Ballots.
If we did it one time, I bet we’d find out it’s not too expensive to fix it so no precincts have lines routinely longer than an hour.
Hey, he’s a nitpicker by profession. Gotta cut the poor guy some slack. 
It’s a side issue, so I don’t want to distract from the main points of the thread here, but lots of posts have asked “why doesn’t everyone just vote by mail” like it’s the magic fix. The reality is that the USPS is not really the reliable “you can count on it” institution it once was, and probably never will be again.
And no, it’s not just the Saturday delivery cuts, although that is a factor. If my mailbox becomes my polling place, and they no longer pick up my mail on Saturday, doesn’t that have the effect of cutting into my ability to vote by 1/6th? Above and beyond that are a number of cuts (starting with chopping more than 35,000 employees) that WILL impact the ability of the USPS to move a letter from point A to point B.
Okay, tangent addressed, it’s not a huge issue, but it’s there for what it’s worth.
Watching Becker try so hard to not acknowledge that a 3 hour wait is unacceptable for anyone wanting to vote in person is more fun than discussing the woes of the USPS. And, no, I’'m not a postal employee, nor related to one.
There certainly were. Here’s one thread about it. There were others
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=671747&highlight=Florida+Voting+Initiatives
And here’s just one article. There were plenty. You musta missed 'em
I agree, three hours is excessive. I also think that, as I said, some of that onus should be on the voters as well. There’s been a lot of talk about how legitimate electronic voting can be, but I also think that, if properly implemented, it both makes voting and counting more efficient. Efficient voting will do at least as much to make lines shorter, and efficient counting will make electoral disputes easier to solve.
As I mentioned, I was in and out in less than 30s and that included a vote for president, senator, representative, state delegate, 2 ballot initiatives and 2 bonds questions. Even assuming an equal level of preparedness, filling out a paper ballot would take longer.
Sure, I’m in and out pretty quickly when voting in a non-Presidential year, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a presidential election wait less than an hour and this most recent one was my fourth.
Admittedly, my nearly four hour wait was an outlier, but it does typically take me a lot longer to vote than most people are claiming in this thread. I only mention that I’m in a relatively wealthy predominantly white area because I wanted to provide a datapoint against the idea that this only happens in poor urban areas that tend to be heavily Democratic.
But still, I expected a long wait in 2008, everyone expected high voter turn out, and I believe it was one of the highest turnouts in recent history. I also voted at a different more popular time than usual. Still, none of my presidential election lines were anywhere close to your experience of 15-20 minutes.
Fair enough. But I’m still not sure how much of that has to do with voter suppression and how much has to do with a difference in funds. For instance, in 2000, I voted in a neighboring county to where I live now, they were all paper ballots. I’ve been using electronic voting machines in my present county since 2001 and onward, and I believe they were using them before I moved here too. The demographics are fairly similar between the two, wealthy suburban. So why not, for the same reason that a lot of times inner city schools are underfunded, that the voting systems aren’t underfunded for similar reasons. That is, not necessarily because of suppression, but because of lack of funding, incompetence, different priorites, or whatever.
I could understand there being a difference on a somewhat local level, if they enacted laws to increase wait times in cities but not in suburban areas, but if they’re changing how long the polls are open for the whole state, it seems to me it ought to affect everyone in the state about equally, and not necessarily favor any particular demographic in the state.
I don’t see why it isn’t more common. It seems like a simple, inexpensive solution to the reaction to the titular subject of this thread. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem that younger, able-bodied people are still stuck waiting a long time, but I think that’s where encouraging early and absentee voting along with preparing and making up your mind before entering the booth can all help a lot.
I think increasing the minimum wage to $9/hr should be OK.
– “So you think we should increase it to $99/hr ?”
I think increasing the top tax rate to 38% should be OK
– “So why don’t you just increase it to 99% ?”
Let’s reduce top freeway speed to 60 mph.
– “So, why not reduce it to 5 mph?”
Bricker, your assignment is to identify this fallacy, and explain why it’s frustrating to listen to. If your assigment isn’t clear, ask for explanation in the Pit.
That would be fellatio ad absurdum, the argument that twists something reasonable into something that sucks. Where’s my cookie?
I wasn’t under the impression that a 3-hour wait for an able-bodied person was that far out of the ordinary. The only time I went to vote in-person, the line was over 2 hours long (enormous college campus in a very small town).
I am open to ideas to improve the system, and if I thought the problem were only a paucity of practical suggestions, I would be much reassured. If the central problem is Republican reluctance to have too many unreliable voters empowered, fuck 'em, fix it! If the central problem is no one’s fault at all but a logistical problem, fuck that, fix it.
I don’t expect Republicans to lead on this issue, I expect they’d rather nail their pecker to a tree and set it on fire. But I think I can reasonably expect them to get the hell out of the way.