Change One Thing

[jennythereader]

If you could make one change to the US electoral system to increase voter turn-out, what would it be?

I have two major ideas:
1) Have the polling places be open for 24 hours. Every polling station in the country opens at 12:00:01 am Eastern Time and closes at 11:59:59 pm Eastern Time. That triples everyones opportunity to get to a poll, and would have the side benefit of reducing the influence that early results can have on people who vote later in the day. I would let stations close early if everyone who was registered at that location had already voted.

2) When people register to vote, let them pick a secondary polling place in addition to the one based on where they live. I suspect most people would chose one near work. It would have to be limited in a couple ways, to prevent people from voting twice and from voting on purely local issues that don't affect their lives. Maybe you would have to declare a month (or a week) in advance which of your options you'd be voting at, and if you chose the non-residential one you'd be given a special ballot with only the races/issues the two locations have in common.

Comments

[tetsujinnooni.livejournal.com]

1/ Many polls are open for more than eight hours already. Depends on the state's laws. States govern voting, largely, with some requirements for how they contribute to the Big One.

2/ Your two-tiered polling notion is interesting, but seems quite problematic in that now you have created two "tiers" of voters, which means unequal representation. Vote where you live has become a strained system with the central work / dispersed home model that automobile culture engendered, but having to choose between "votes that affect who screws with my employment" and "votes that affect who screws with my house". Also... the complications of generating ballots for that many potential combinations of races would seem likely to lead to some ugly production problems, given the way single-type ballot generation gets screwed up now.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

1) You're right, I should have said "double or triple."

2) Implimentation is always the difficulty. I think making seperate ballots for each level would work best. So you'd have A. National, B. State, C. County, D. City... and so on for smaller subdivisions. So if I chose to vote near work I'd get A, B, and C but not D or lower. If Tom voted near work he'd just get A and B. But if we chose to vote in our local polling place we'd get all of the ballots.

[nounsandverbs]

There's a movement to change Election Day from a Tuesday to some day when most people aren't working. Can't say it isn't worth thinking about.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

That would also be a simple change to make. Probably simpler than either of my ideas. :)

[nounsandverbs]

It's only the beginning of a solution, though.

[inaurolillium.livejournal.com]

I would NOT have all states start at the same time. Having everyone start on Eastern time is silly, and makes things harder to arrange for those of us on the West Coast, and harder for the voters to keep track of, as many people don't know how to calculate the time difference. 9pm as starting and stopping time simply doesn't make sense. And why should everything run by Eastern time, anyway?

Otherwise, I like it.
Except, of course, that Washington no longer has polling stations, it's all done mail-in now to save money. I hate it, because I always lose or forget to mail in the damned ballot.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

I picked Eastern time fairly arbitrarily. Mostly because that's where I am. The main reason for having it be the same 24 hours is to eliminate the "some polls close hours before the rest, and when those results get reported, it can influence later results" issue. I think you're right, that the weirdness of the hours for other time zones would cancel that advantage out.