[EL] “Utah Republicans are holding a first-ever online presidential primary. And it’s not going so well.”

[Sean Parnell]

I’m in the skeptic camp regarding online voting, and the article cited below I think helps to explain some of that skepticism, BUT I think this is an answer to the rhetorical question that Rick and perhaps others occasionally pose, “What possible defense is there for holding caucuses?” (that’s my paraphrase, not a direct quote). The fact that caucuses are wholly independent of state regulation (at least I’m pretty sure that’s the case) gives them the freedom to innovate and explore new ways to vote and participate in the political process. It would be a sad day, I think, if political innovation were snuffed out because some sort of one-size-fits-all solution to very real voting problems were imposed by the state, effectively eliminating these sorts of experimentations.

 

 

Sean Parnell

President, Impact Policy Management LLC

Alexandria, Virginia

571-289-1374

sean at impactpolicymanagement.com

 

 

 


 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=81143> “Utah Republicans are holding a first-ever online presidential primary. And it’s not going so well.”


Posted on  <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=81143> March 22, 2016 7:25 pm by  <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3> Rick Hasen

 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/22/utah-republicans-are-holding-a-first-ever-online-primary-and-its-not-going-so-well/?postshare=3511458699560427&tid=ss_tw> WaPo:

Unfortunately, Utah’s digital election night doesn’t seem to be going as smoothly as Utah Republicans had hoped.

While Utah Republicans headed to their caucus in person on Tuesday evening, anyone who had registered online by March 17 can log on to utah.gop to vote between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. local time and cast their vote. But the Deseret News <http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865650643/Utah-GOP-voters-encounter-troubles-voting-online.html>  reports some voters got error messages when they tried to navigate beyond the first page.

“I must have tried eight or nine times without success,” Greg Ericksen told the newspaper.

Others say they got stuck on the candidate page and couldn’t cast their ballot. And still others say they got confused by links to the candidates’ bios, thinking a click meant they were voting for a certain candidate only to find they were suddenly on a different website.

As of Tuesday night, party officials said about 10,000 of the 40,000 Utahns who applied to vote online were rejected because their IDs couldn’t be verified. In an interview  <http://www.sltrib.com/news/3694691-155/utah-gops-online-voting-experiment-has> with the Salt Lake Tribune, GOP Party Chairman Evans seemed to suggest the error was on the user end: “Primarily it was people thinking they were approved to vote online [but were not],” Evans said. “The other category were people who received their PIN and it went to their spam folder or they just deleted it.”

 <https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D81143&title=%26%238220%3BUtah%20Republicans%20are%20holding%20a%20first-ever%20online%20presidential%20primary.%20And%20it%E2%80%99s%20not%20going%20so%20well.%26%238221%3B&description=> 

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