On Voting
Loading ...Browsing around some of my frequent blogs and websites I noticed quite a few people stating they were voting absentee this year. The vast majority of these doing so, not due to necessity but out of convenience. I also happened to notice a few even mention their desire for an online voting system.
Question, have we really gotten THIS lazy?
I understand people are busy these days but since when was voting such a hardship that we needed to relegate it to as mundane a task as checking our email.
Voting is not a right, it is a civic duty. Making it as accessible as possible without opening the doors for fraud is an attainable goal but I just do not agree with the move towards non-transparent technologies. Absentee voting should require a valid reason one could not access a polling station such as infirmity or travel… not, I’m too lazy to put down the xbox controller.
I received a mailer yesterday asking me to sign up to vote by mail and THAT struck me as not only completely insane, but probably THE most fraud prone way of voting in the world. My mail arrives while I’m eating lunch almost 10 miles from my home at work. It then sits in my mailbox for 6 hours or more until I get home at night. I don’t know what was put in my mailbox, and I don’t know if something was removed. How am I or the election board to know that the ballot they received back is MY vote?
The system IS broken I will agree, but to me finding a better, more streamlined method of booth polling to eliminate or drastically reduce poll lines should be the goal, not eliminating the societal interaction and checks by allowing people to vote from the safety and privacy of ones home. When you enter a polling station, they have people on hand to ensure votes are not influenced.
Call me old fashioned but I do not like where we are headed as far as voting is concerned.
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Comments
My wife had her voter registration card stolen from our mailbox when we moved last so i think it’s less of a targeted thing more than an opportunistic thing to snatch mail.
To me personally, voting isn’t supposed to be convenient. Convenience breeds lazy behavior and allowing people the luxury of ticking a checkbox on their PC while they’re getting dressed (along with the insane lack of a transparent system in any of the propsed methods) just takes the soul out of the process for me.
I am perfectly fine waking the children up early and walking down to the church down the street to involve myself in the voting process. It feels like I have actually accomplished something. I have nothing against more people voting, I just feel we’re headed in the wrong direction.
Also, if voter fraud was a non-issue the Nevada offices of ACORN wouldn’t have been raided on suspicion of multiple voter registrations under false or duplicate names.
You seem REALLY concerned with this vote fraud thing. And while I would deny that it’s probably happened before and probably will again, I doubt it’s much of a problem.
Secondly, removing your ballot from your mailbox would require knowing the day it came, or repeatedly breaking into your mailbox in hopes of catching it. I think it might be less effort to fake an ID. (Assuming, of course, that someone actually had the desire to vote for you.)
And finally, I’m not sure what’s not to like about absentee ballots. Or voting online. Anything that gets more people to participate in their government is bound to make that government more representative of–and responsive to–its people.