The right, or privilege if you prefer, has existed in Florida for a number of years; how many I don’t know. The rationale for changing the existing law was to eliminate, or greatly reduce, voter fraud. Historically there have been effectively no voter fraud charges filed in Florida and certainly no convictions for such. The new law wasn’t needed and met with a lot of opposition locally. It’s a case of a law in search of a violation. One of the more serious effect of this law is on third party groups (the DAR, for instance) who attempt to register voters. Such groups now have to submit the requisite forms within 48 hours or face fines of up to $1,000. Previously, IIRC, that time period was two weeks. This is a front page story on today’s issue of St. Petersburg Times; I believe it can be accessed from tampabay.com. There are other issues concerning this law that are touched on in the article.
As a sidenote, I remember reading “somwhere” that the DAR is considering not registering new voters because of the time of form submission requirements. I don’t know if that decision has been formally taken as of today.
Traffic congestion and lack of parking are two that come to mind also. Oregon does mail-in voting, which I think encourages people to participate in the process.
For the 2010 election I had to be three hours from my house by 8:30am. I managed to get back to my polling place about 6:30pm. I live in Brandon, Mississippi, which is a small suburb of the lovely Jackson, Mississippi. The like had at least five hundred people in it.
There was no waltzing in and out. Mississippi’s legendary efficiency was absent, strangely enough.
Remember, too, that part of the reason there are few lines on election day is because of early voting. I don’t know how big of an effect it has, but saying “We don’t need absentee voting, there are no lines” might be like saying “we don’t need trash collectors, I don’t see bags of trash sitting around.”
Why are we all talking about absentee voting? Again, early voting in FL is when select polls open a week or two early so people can go cast their votes without the election day rush. But you still have to physically go to the polling place, it has nothing to do with absentee voting, which isn’t effected by the recent change (presumably because its favored by more GOP leaning demographics).
In the case where the practice existed and is now being taken away for what appear, given the lack of an actual problem that matches the stated rationale, to be purely partisan reasons, I think you could fairly describe the change as “reducing voting rights”.
I’m not comfortable when portions of the voting rulebook that are disproportionally used (so far as the news reports indicate) by one political party are circumscribed by an incumbent politician of the other party.
One thing i’ve always been amazed about in the United States is how poorly-organized and managed how controversial the whole voting procedure seems to be in many cases.
The idea of waiting in line for an hour to vote is gobsmackingly ridiculous, but it happens quite a lot. When i lived in Baltimore, some of the polling stations, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, had lines around the block and people would sometimes wait for well over two hours to cast their ballot.
Of course, the fact that the election itself is on a Tuesday is probably one of the dumbest ideas ever invented. Have it on a Saturday, and far fewer people would have to “duck out of work” to do it. Of course, if i had to wait in line for hours, i might not be very keen on giving up half my Saturday just to go to the polls, so Saturday voting would have to be accompanied by a much more efficient system.
And all this in a country where, most of the time, barely half the voting-age population can actually be bothered to drag their asses to the polls. Can you imagine the problems if a respectable percentage of Americans could actually be bothered participating?
I came of voting age in a country where compulsory voting means that voter turnout on election day is typically about 95-98%, and i never once waiting in line more than 5 minutes to cast a ballot. And i lived in high-density neighborhoods in the largest, busiest city in the country.
I think part of the problem in the United States is that petty despots in some places have turned the voting process itself into another partisan battle in the political process. Ensuring that some people find it difficult or impossible to cast a ballot seems to be a key motivation of some politicians in America. Rather than seeking to sway voters with the content of their policies and the strength of their arguments, there are some people who think that the best way to tilt the election in your favor is to arrange it so that your opponent’s supporters have a hard time casting a vote at all.
What the San Fernando Valley has going for it is that it is, overall, a fairly well-off area. To the extent that waiting for long periods to vote is a problem in the US, it tends to affect low-income and minority voters more, and to be more prevalent in the South.
Here’s a recent Notre Dame Law Reviewarticle (PDF) about what the author calls the “time tax” paid by some American voters in order to be able to participate in the democratic system.
Check out the table on page 193. In the 2004 election, 42% of voters had to wait in line to vote, and of those who had to wait, 43% waited more than 30 minutes, including 19% who waited more than an hour. That’s about 8% of all voters who waited more than an hour to cast a ballot.
The 2008 election had a slightly lower percentage of people waiting (36%), but of those who waited, 28% waited more than an hour. That’s about 10% of all voters.
The North Carolina Legislature is doing the same sort of thing, “to save money.” Unfortunately, the state version of the CBO has determined that it is actually more expensive to cut a week of early voting, because more poll workers will have to be hired on election day.
That’s kind of the point. I live in Florida. In the 2008 election I stood in line for about an hour a week or so BEFORE the election. Polls in Florida seem to move especially slow because the retirees that work the polls move especially slow. Scott is trying to make it harder to vote.
An excellent point, Counselor! How long, and to what extent, are we willing to coddle these slackards? Our founders realized the importance of solidity, of a personal committment to the community, and they further realized that such virtues are best demonstrated by men of property and substance! Now, we are given to understand that homeless people, persons of no fixed abode and hence no demonstrated value, are to be regarded as equally entitled to vote!
And this doesn’t even touch upon the epidemic, the tidal catastrophe of rampant voter fraud! In my own state, incidents of possible or potential voter fraud have doubled…doubled!..in the past few years. To be sure, two is not all that many, but the trend is apparent!
I commend the Counselor for his vigilence and courage in protecting the substantial and worthy citizens of our great nation from this erosion of standards.
On the one hand, I usually get bothered when I consider that the anti-vaxxers each have the same influence on elections as I do. On the other hand, I am heartened by the fact that I have considerably more influence than my brother in law, who thinks that voting is a giant conspiracy and that his vote wouldn’t count. Granted, we live in Texas, so the Republicans are almost sure to win in any race, but don’t burst my bubble here.
In my voting district, the lines are usually short. The only exception to that was the 2008 election, where the lines went around the block. I think that the historic element of that election drove high voter turnouts where I live.
Otherwise, I can usually be done in about a half hour and that includes walking to the polling station and back. We had a special election recently and there were two other voters present when I went to vote after work.
But it is. California election day procedures are, in general, much more efficient than in many other parts of the country, hard as it may be for you to believe.