[EL] Line Standers --not just heroic but Hiatoric

[Jack Cushman]

The laptop system would have made a huge difference in Massachusetts. Two
of the polling places I saw this time around (in Boston and Somerville) had
lines out the door, one elderly person looking up names in a paper book,
and a bunch of empty voting booths. The lines were about half an hour long
in one location and an hour+ in another -- not long by swing-state
standards, but longer than they should be. Two people checking names
simultaneously would have basically cut the time in half.

Then if the same system could have said "oops, your polling place is down
the street, here's a map" or "you moved in the last six months, you need to
vote at this other place" or "you need to fill out an inactive voter form"
it would have moved things even faster.

The question I have, though, is how does that kind of system gracefully
degrade if there's a power problem or internet problem or crashing problem
or software bugs or the system gets hacked or whatever? As a tangential
example, halfway through counting the absentee ballots at my location on
Tuesday after polls closed, the scanner jammed and the warden had to start
pulling crumpled ballots out of the back and stacking them on top. (Then a
bunch fell off the front and spilled all over the floor. Good times.) It
was reassuring to know that (if the races had been close) all of the
ballots were physical objects that wouldn't be lost by a mechanical glitch.
Is there a way to have that reassurance with the laptop checkin system? Or
are checkins less important data?

--

On the question of early voting, fraud and late information, this has to
have been discussed here before, but is it feasible to let a single voter
send multiple ballots, with later votes wiping out earlier votes? If, say,
I was intimidated or tricked or bribed into voting by mail for Candidate A,
I could then turn around and mail another ballot cancelling out the first.
Vote buyers would have no way of knowing whether they were getting value
for money, and voters could always change their minds based on late
information. The last ballot to arrive would win, and an in-person vote
would trump any mail-in votes. (I suppose a savvy vote buyer would wait to
send mail-in ballots until the last minute, so a savvy reneging voter would
have to vote in person to cancel that out.)

Anyway, does the ability to cancel out earlier votes address the concerns
with early voting?

Best,
Jack


On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Mark Schmitt <schmitt.mark at gmail.com> wrote:

> I voted early in DC, and the system you're suggesting is exactly how it
> worked at the early voting site  -- no alphabetical lines, and everything
> on a laptop, with electronic signature. I wonder why they didn't do the
> same on election day?
>
> One reason may be that the early-voting poll workers are more experienced,
> and the larger number of election-day workers includes a lot of people who
> can't necessarily handle the laptop. Or maybe they're phasing it in.
>
> Mark Schmitt
> Senior Fellow, The Roosevelt Institute<http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/>
> 202/246-2350
> gchat or Skype: schmitt.mark
> twitter: mschmitt9
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Jack Santucci <jms346 at georgetown.edu>wrote:
>
>> Here's an idea I've heard very little about (and plan to write more on
>> later).
>>
>> I ran a precinct in DC. We had four check-in lines at which each clerk
>> had a paper pollbook. Each pollbook contained one fourth of the precinct's
>> voter registry. When a voter checks in, he or she signs the pollbook.
>>
>> Sometimes the line for one chunk of the alphabet is longer than the
>> line(s) for (an)other chunk(s). This drove voters mad. I repeatedly had to
>> fend off waiters' insistence on my restructuring the lines, breaking up the
>> pollbooks into different segments of the alphabet, etc. Of course, all of
>> that would have been ridiculous because (1) it would have risked confusing
>> my swamped check-in clerks, (2) would have risked having unbound pages of
>> pollbooks flying around the precinct, and (3) would have ignored the fact
>> that, every time a voter walks into the precinct, there is an effectively
>> equal probability that he or she will enter any of the four lines.
>>
>> This third point is most important. At 9 AM, people are irate about the
>> length of the L-R line. An hour later, complaints focus on the A-D line. An
>> hour later, it's the E-K line that's got everyone all angry.
>>
>> The obvious solution: replace paper pollbooks with laptops on an
>> in-precinct intranet. Each laptop contains the entire precinct voter file.
>> No more alphabet-break-specific lines. When a voter checks in and e-signs
>> on one laptop, the fact that he or she has voted is updated on all of the
>> laptops. Super efficient.
>>
>> I seriously wonder whether Ezra Klein (or many others with strong
>> opinions on how to improve election administration) has ever actually
>> administered an election.
>>
>> Jack Santucci
>> Washington, DC
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Thomas J. Cares <Tom at tomcares.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I have doubts that any of the five ideas in the WaPo article Rick link<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/11/08/five-ways-to-cut-long-election-lines/>ed
>>> to would *dramatically* improve wait times.
>>>
>>> I wonder if we could do something bigger, like just mail everyone a
>>> vote-by-mail ballot, and have the federal government fully subsidize return
>>> postage for all VBM ballots. Voters could discard the ballots and vote at
>>> the polls as if they'd never received them, or mail them, or return them to
>>> any polling place in their county.
>>>
>>> With this, I'd bet less (maybe a great deal less) than one-third of
>>> ballots would actually be filled out at polling places, and that the
>>> overwhelming majority would either mail their ballot or simply drop it off
>>> at a polling place on election day (with the convenience of being able to
>>> go to one near their job, or favorite grocery store, and not necessarily
>>> the one in their home precinct - and not having to wait!).
>>>
>>> I suspect the argument against this would be the potential for fraud
>>> (I'm not sure that's meritorious though; diligent implementation could
>>> probably prevent fraud).
>>>
>>> There's a good argument for better early voting policies, but a
>>> disadvantage to early voting is that something may happen in the last days
>>> of the campaigns that could cause an (objective) voter to change their mind
>>> on at least one thing on their ballot (I'm a permanent vote by mail voter,
>>> but whenever I'm certain I'm going to be in LA County on election day, I
>>> hold my ballot until the election to allow for that contingency). It would
>>> certainly seem helpful if all voters had the automatic option to fill out
>>> their ballot at home and quickly drop it off on election day.
>>>
>>>
>>> Thomas Cares
>>>
>>> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Roy Schotland <
>>> schotlan at law.georgetown.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We haven’t sung enough about the Line Standers, who stand among the
>>>> all-time proof of how much people –as grass-roots as can be-- care about
>>>> the Right to Vote.  ****
>>>>
>>>> ** **
>>>>
>>>> Roy A. Schotland****
>>>>
>>>> Professor Emeritus****
>>>>
>>>> Georgetown Law Center****
>>>>
>>>> ****
>>>>
>>>> ** **
>>>>
>>>>
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