You can't make this any easier, and half the state still does not vote.
My Washington statistics come from: http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx
You can't make this any easier, and half the state still does not vote.
My Washington statistics come from: http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx
While I understand that voting booths are farm from perfect, moving exclusively to mail-in ballots seems to me to trade convenience for security, robustness and and auditability.
When I go to a polling station, I am relatively well assured that my vote is actually being tabulated, and that I have at least asserted who I am, and that no one has voted in my place.
I don't know what safeguards the mail-in ballots have, presumably there are some but I don't think it's a panacea. In fact, I would say if your participation rate went much higher I would be suspicious.
You mail in two sealed envelopes... You sign the inner one, which is discarded once verified. You get a barcode with your ballot that you can use to verify that your ballot was counted. I remember reading a big 'voting transparency' page years ago, but I can't find anything today that documents everything.
So, knowing that signatures are checked feels good, even if it's a random sampling, they'd be able to gauge whether deeper auditing is required. Fraud would require intercepting mail, which means:
A) Intercepting received ballots.
B) Intercepting sent ballots.
For A: Ballots are delivered across the state in a very tight window. Prior to the ballots, voting pamphlets are sent to everyone, telling them when to expect their ballot. It is assumed that any meddling with the ballots on a large enough scale to affect the election would be reported well before the election.
For B: Fraud would occur in three ways: Trashing the ballots, modifying the ballots, replacing the ballots. Trashing would be identifiable by concerned citizens monitoring that their ballot was counted. Modifying would be identifiable by the security envelope that was signed by the individual. Replacing would be identifiable by matching signatures.
There certainly is an opportunity for Fraud, but the organization to pull off an attack that is wide-scale enough change an election would be big enough that it would likely set off other alarms.
For example - my wife and I fill out the ballot together as a family on the dining room table.
It's certainly possible that one of us influences the other, and that by voting in the open, one of us isn't free to vote their conscience.
The one thing that's now possible is coerced voting, but apparently Washington believes that this is outweighed by the benefit of improved turnout.
Electronic Collection of votes seems very logical, if you then immediately generate a paper record (like a punched card) of the results of that particular ballot. Those paper results could then be tabulated and compared to the electronic results.
There's really no reason every citizen shouldn't vote, but electronic voting would certainly reduce voter suppression and (IMHO) increase confidence in the process. I'd certainly be happier with a cryptography-oriented process rather than one relying on humans, which can be reliable en masse, but are also easily fooled.
>increase confidence in the process >increased visibility into whether your vote actually counts
IMO this is exactly wrong. We've had a LONG time to figure out how to count paper ballots by hand in ways that are resilient to fraud. Each ballot (and its corresponding tally mark) is handled in view of observers representing the opposing candidates. If there is something fishy about the count, at least one of the people who observed the counting process has the information and incentives necessary to attract more scrutiny.
>would certainly reduce voter suppression
Only if people do it from home, in which case there is no paper trail. Unless you mail in the paper trail, in which case you may as well have mailed in your ballot.
Fast results, strong paper trail, failure of the electronic part of the system doesn't hamper voting.
EDIT: I actually like Belgium's model - you don't have to vote, but you do need to show up at the polls and register attendance. You can abstain if you'd like.
If anything, I'd prefer a fair voting test, where the person pulling the lever has to have _some_ kind of background knowledge.
The tests were predominant in the South and were designed so that nonwhites would fail them.
Here is a sample: http://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf The instructions alone made my head spin.
More from PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html
Plus there's the whole freedom thing. We should keep the list of "things the government forces you to to do" as small as possible.
</another unsubstantiated comment>
"I think we probably had a better election. Think about this: We cut Obama by 5 percent, which was big. You know, a lot of people lost sight of that. He won, he beat McCain by 10 percent. He only beat Romney by 5 percent. I think that, probably, voter ID helped a bit in that."
2 Pennsylvania GOP officials (Mike Turzai and Rob Gleason). There you go, it's substantiated!
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/st...