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Increasing Voter Turnout – Part 2

© Pamela Gordon

In my last essay I started the discussion about how we might change the voting day in order to increase the number of voters at the booth. One of my beliefs is that if ALL of America voted, we would see a radical change in our political scene. We would have new leaders who represent the people instead of "leaders" beholden to money, special interest groups, and fundraising. I want to see that day. How do we get there?

24 hour voting: All day and all night voting; a straight 24 hour period where you could go out to the voting booth and cast your vote. Is this a good idea? City dwellers may not think so during the wee hours of the morning. (Unfortunately this country isn't the safest place to live and there is a real danger of crime, especially in the very early morning hours.) If you live outside of a big town, there may not be personal danger, but most people are asleep, and there would hardly be anyone will take advantage of voting. I'm not even sure how many people in the larger cities would vote, making this a worthwhile venture. Also, it would probably be much harder to staff the polling places. It doesn't make too much sense in extending the hours that long. People want to see the tallying going on that same night, not really the next day, or next week for that matter. Finally, I would think that people want to be awake when the polls close.

Voting through the Internet: The Internet is a great new technology. It's great for a lot of things, but is on-line voting one of them? What a way to ditch the lines! The problem here is security. How do you know that the Mary Smith who logs on is the real Mary Smith in the voting records? Absentee voting requires a signature, which can be verified with your registration. On-line voting can't achieve that, right now. There's also a concern of vote tampering. Hackers may be able to go into the on-line voting records and change votes in favor of their candidate. We don't want another way of altering the voting records do we?

A task force study was done recently by the State of California publishing results in January 2000 about Internet Voting. (link: http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/ivote/) The task force outlined what internet voting should look like, and what steps need to be achieved before there can be full, internet voting, at least in California. The first step they suggested is Internet voting kiosks. These kiosks would be set up in secure locations, most likely in voting polling places that already exist. The idea here is to "watch" the voting, to ensure the security. If all goes well, then move into the actual Internet voting, where you can log on and cast your vote from the comfort of your home. As I mentioned there's a security problem with signature verification. Right now the technology just isn't there to handle this. On line signature verification needs to resemble absentee voting, where you sign your name and that signature can be verified with other records.