Want to vote in 2020? Do it early
vox.com
vox.com
In the US our voting is on a work day, which is not given off by law. State politicians also control where polling locations are placed and how they are staffed, which leads to significant waiting times for people at polling places (hours and hours in many situations).
The introduction of electronic voting machines has created additional bottlenecks, as you can’t scale out those machines horizontally the same way with paper ballots. You’ll often end up with just a couple of e machines in place of a location that would typically have 20 or 30 booths for paper voting.
Did a bunch of research on this before our midterms in 2018:
https://medium.com/@eagerlabs/if-voter-turnout-spikes-our-vo...
I know. I know. I just wonder why if we in Argentina (that is not the most organized country in the world) can make a reasonable election, it is so difficult there. [The elections are not perfect here anyway If you have some popcorn I can add a few anecdotes.]
> The introduction of electronic voting machines has created additional bottlenecks, as you can’t scale out those machines horizontally the same way with paper ballots.
It is weird because we once tried here with mixed voting machines. (You choose whom to vote in the machine, the machine gives you a paper version, and you put it in the urn.) And it was faster than the manual version. You just need more machines.
Anecdotally, in my circles not a single person has expressed lost faith or that their faith has eroded. If anything, the current climate has emboldened my peers' belief that it's important and effective. From my perspective, the media is doing more to try to convince people that democracy in this country is in decline than any other force, and I suspect it's financially motivated more than anything else.
This feels true to me now as well.
In 2014 there was a report[1] released that concluded that the US was an Oligarchy and that our vote did not count. Personally that seemed to align with how my friends and I felt, where corporate campaign donations and lobbying influenced our politicians decisions more than the every-person voter. Back then I had a more bleak view on the effectiveness of our democracy and I'm sure others felt that way as well. I still voted though, I have always voted since I turned 18.
But ever since the 2016 election (and the 2018 mid-term elections) we've seen just how important voting is. If every eligible voter in the US got out and was able to vote, we'd have a much different government right now.
That's a dicey assertion to make, because we don't know how those who stayed home would have leaned. All of the conventional widsom in 2016 pointed to someone else in the White House, and yet here we are. It's just impossible to gauge how those who stay silent truly think.