Steve Kornacki at NBC just had a wonderful tweet thread about the Florida ballot.
After the 2000 debacle in Florida, there was bipartisan agreement to set up an election council to study ballot science and assist communities in creating ballots. They’re still very much in existence, and review and offer suggestions to fix ballot design errors across the country.
One of their main pieces of design advice: do NOT put a ballot choice item below a large block of text. People will skip over it. They practically beg communities to not do that.
BUT…their advice isn’t legally binding. They offered it to Broward. Broward ignored it.
I don’t blame anyone for forgetting to vote for Senator if it’s not clearly labeled. Easy enough to lose track with all the dozens of other crap on there. Judges, propositions, various other minor positions, etc. I blame any fuckwits that approve a nonsensical ballot though. It should NOT be that difficult to design an easy to use ballot.
Again, Washington State leads the nation in common sense. There are no voting stations. They mail you the ballot weeks before the election. You can take an evening to fill it out, or two, or three, or four, or how long you want. No hurry, no pressure, go over it with a fine-tooth comb. And this year they added a postage-paid return envelope. Dump it off in the mail box, or you just drop it off in the dozens of ballot boxes they set up around each community.
Yup, that’s what I do. I re-review each candidate and ballot proposal, read the pros and cons from both sides, and then mark my choice. Then on to the next candidate/proposal.
It definitely makes me a more deliberate voter than before, when I’d stand at a polling booth and have no idea about so-and-so candidate or ballot proposal.
Also remember that lots of people (way too many, sadly) just vote party line down the whole thing. They don’t know who or what they’re voting for, really, and don’t care all that much, so long as it’s the right “team”. For such people, they’re just filling in the D or R circle for every item they see. So if they don’t see it, they don’t vote for it and have no idea that they missed something.
It isn’t as easy as all that, though states like Washington, Oregon, and California are showing the way.
With that said, there’s an obvious initial infrastructure cost to switching it all over to go primarily by mail. And in many states, the physical ballot is constrained by a tangle of laws – in many cases constitutional – for what must be listed on a ballot, in the way of instructions, explanations of ballot measures, candidate affiliations, etc.
In principal I’m for going vote by mail to let as many people vote as easily as they can. Are there any systems in place to prevent someone form swiping your ballot, such as you have to write your identifier on it or something? It’s probably a pretty low risk, but seems like there should be some protection. is vote by mail susceptible to any other kind of fraud?
You see what I’m saying here. I am flabbergasted and upset that each and every one of the women being talked about as front-runners are the specific women who have already alienated me. I am as frustrated by this terrible coincidence as you are, believe me! Believe, women!
What I want is not impossible! I want someone who is not tainted by polarizing choices in the past, but who also has experience, who is knowledgeable but doesn’t sound like she is lecturing, someone vibrant but not green, someone dignified but not dowdy, passionate but not a yeller, precise but not mechanical, someone lacking in off-putting ambition but capable of asking for what she wants, not accompanied but not alone, in a day but not in a month or a year, when the moon is neither waxing nor waning, carrying a sieve full of water and a hen’s tooth. Easy!
Kind of - the option to vote absentee was opt-in beginning in 1991, then counties were given the option to go all vote-by-mail in 2005, it was just in 2011 that they did away with all other options. I’ve lived here since 2002, I never voted in a booth.
vote-by-mail had already been implemented to a lesser degree in Oregon:
1981 The Oregon Legislative Assembly approves vote-by-mail for local elections, at the discretion of the county; at least one polling place in the county had to remain open on election day.[2]
1987 Vote-by-mail becomes permanent, with the majority of Oregon’s counties making use of it.
1989 A House bill to extend vote-by-mail to include the 1990 primary elections was defeated in a 33–27, non-party-line vote.[2]
1992 Governor’s Task Force on Local Government Services identifies statewide vote-by-mail as one of the most significant opportunities to save money on conducting elections.[3]
1995 Oregon becomes the first state to conduct a federal primary election totally by mail.
1998 Oregonians confirm their overwhelming support for vote-by-mail by passing Measure 60.
2000 Oregon becomes the first state in the nation to conduct a presidential election entirely by mail. About 80% of registered voters participated.
The original point someone made is true though. It took years to get he pretty good system we have now. It’s not something you do overnight although you can certainly prep and be ready for when it passes.
The idea that ta ballot can be so complex that you can find out where the Senate race is seems so… strange to me. I think I would recognize it just by the name, but since I’ve been an active voter, I’ve always been able to take hours to go over my ballot and voter’s pamphlet, and the internet and anything else i want to look up on the fly.
