Using Crowdsourcing To Design More Accessible Elections

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission is sponsoring an online, open innovation challenge to search for creative answers to the question: 'How might we design an accessible election experience for everyone?' The goal is to develop ideas for how to make elections more accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities."

Re:Easy is easy

[spire3661]

Its not as much nonsense as you make it out to be. Look at the statistics for low income families and their ability to get proper identification.

Re:Ballot stuffing is very rare.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ballot stuffing (or even voting two or more times) is very rare.
So rare as to be a non-issue. Despite claims to the contrary."

Except, of course, when it isn't. LBJ would have never held office, had it not been for ballot box stuffing. And he's not the only one.

There's a persistent pattern, in a number of states, of early returns providing a clear advantage to one party, and that advantage holding until all but a very few precincts return, and then those precincts not returning for hours after the other polls have closed, and then returning just enough to swing the election. And oddly enough, these precincts vote 90%+ for one party, and due to persistent efforts to keep the voter registry dirty, have more registered voters than they do people.

There are a lot of people who believe the Prosser would have lost, in Wisconsin, had the Secretary of State not "accidentally" held out a strong GOP county from the initial totals. That had she not, the voter manufacturing effort would have kept running until he had lost.

The Soros-backed efforts to stack the states SOS offices with radical leftists doesn't help convince people that there isn't fraud going on.

Still, I have an easy answer - stop counting votes, until after all of the polls have been closed. There's absolutely no need to be publishing any returns while there are polls still open.

Re:Ballot stuffing is very rare.

[cold fjord]

Ballot stuffing (or even voting two or more times) is very rare.
So rare as to be a non-issue. Despite claims to the contrary.

Sorry, but you are quite simply wrong about that.

. . . two Troy city officials, the city clerk and a councilman, along with two Democratic political operatives, have pled guilty to forging absentee-ballot signatures and casting fraudulent ballots in the 2009 Working Families Party primary. The WFP is the political party associated with ACORN.

One of the citizens whose votes were stolen was stunned at what happened. She said that she was “sure this goes on a lot in politics, but it’s very rare that they do get caught.” This voter was right on the money with that observation — fraud is so easy to commit in our election system that it is rare that fraudsters get caught and even rarer that they get prosecuted.

. . . one of the Democratic operatives who pled guilty, Anthony DeFiglio, told New York State police investigators “that faking absentee ballots was a commonplace and accepted practice in political circles, all intended to swing an election.” And whose votes do they steal? DeFiglio was very plain about that: “The people who are targeted live in low-income housing, and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions.”

That is exactly what former Alabama congressman Artur Davis said recently when he admitted that he was wrong to oppose voter-ID requirements. Davis says the “most aggressive” voter suppression “is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt” of Alabama, which is an area of very poor black communities. These are the very areas where the NAACP claims voter fraud does not happen. The NAACP opposes all reasonable measures to safeguard the voting process for its own constituents, even going to the extent of defending vote stealers, as the NAACP did in Greene County, Ala., in the mid-1990s. Small wonder one of its local officials was recently sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud in Tunica County, Mississippi. - Yes, Virginia, There Really Is Voter Fraud [nationalreview.com]

And more . . .

In contrast, a subsequent media analysis showed that at least 2000 votes were cast illegally in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Since the margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes, the fraudulent votes were sufficient to affect the outcome of the election.

That’s not an isolated example. Evidence adduced at various commission hearings suggests numerous instances of actual voter fraud. The cases involve organizations and individuals who register ineligible voters, dead people, and fictional characters. In an infamous Ohio case during the 2004 presidential election campaign, a canvasser paid with crack cocaine registered Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins, and scores of other equally noteworthy characters.

Again, these aren’t isolated cases. A major 2001 voter registration drive in St. Louis’s black community produced 3,800 new voter cards. When some of the names appeared suspicious, elections officials investigated all of the cards and determined that every single one was fraudulent. Dogs, the dead, and people who simply didn’t want to register were among the new registrants.

The problem isn’t only that canvassers are being paid to produce manifestly fraudulent voter registrations; it’s also that voter rolls throughout the country are being padded with hundreds of thousands of false and fraudulent names. For example, testimony by John Sample before the Senate Rules Committee showed that Alaska had 503,000 people on its voter rolls but only 437,000 people of votin

Re:Easy is easy

[Stone Rhino]

Individual voter fraud is extremely rare. The sort of fraud that would be prevented by photo ID is almost nonexistent. [brennancenter.org] On the other hand, the requirement to obtain a photo ID excludes a nontrivial percentage of the population, and creates an additional burden that falls disproportionately on poor and/or nonwhite voters [businessweek.com]. Voters who usually vote democratic, making this a partisan issue.

Much more likely than fraud by individuals is a systematic effort to exclude voters unlikely to vote for your party, and the usage of methods to purge legitimate voters from the rolls [brennancenter.org], add additional hurdles (the modern poll test), or gerrymander districts so voting doesn't work at all.

It's not a "special interest" to want democracy to work for everyone, not just the well off.

Voter-ID

[FatLittleMonkey]

special interests

You need to drill down into the history behind the issue. Conservatives are easier to motivate to vote, and almost only vote Republican. Groups that are easy to discourage (young, black, poor) tend to overwhelmingly vote Democrat. High turn-out elections favour Democrats, low turn-out elections favour Republicans.

Hence the Republican powers-that-be tend to (quite rightly) see voter registration drives, "Rock The Vote", "Vote or Die", as a pro-Democrat mechanism. So they push back by making voting more difficult. Hell, I saw a conservative editorial recently describing voter-registration drives and anything that encourages voting as "anti-democratic".

Hence the push for voter-ID systems. And it polls well with non-Republicans, as an anti-fraud measure, making it easy to hide their real intent. (Along with less publicised anti Voter Registration Drive measures, like making it effectively illegal to hand out voter registration forms, etc.)

Here in Australia, we have mandatory voting (well, mandatory turning-up-and-getting-your-name-crossed-off, you can still leave your ballot blank). There's a $50 fine for non-voting, although it's apparently easy to get out of. And we have over 95% turnout at Federal and State elections. The left-wing party supports mandatory voting, the right-wing party opposes it. For exactly the same reasons, and with each using exactly the same poll-friendly lies to defend their positions.

This is all part of the long and nasty history of efforts to keep the "wrong" group from voting.

Re:Easy is easy

[SETIGuy]

Yes, but without proper documentation we won't know if they are legal eligible to vote.

Yet somehow we survived as a country without such requirements in the past.

But unfortunately, elections in this country are decided by who doesn't vote. And conservatives (i.e. Republicans) have recognized they they are the one who win when people don't vote. So they make it difficult for people who vote for Democrats to vote. That would be the poor, primarily. The primary attributes that poor people have in common are frequent address changes. So the "voter ID" laws are designed to disenfranchise anyone who has changed their address within a year of the election. You do that by putting the registration deadlines as early as possible. You have to show an ID to register, and if your address has changed by the election, you won't be able to vote. Especially because the Republicans are printing flyers threatening arrest if you show up with invalid ID.

Similarly, they disenfranchise students by making a gun registration form acceptable ID, but a student ID is not.

And, if course, that guy living in a doorway on main street isn't going to have valid ID even though he is as elligible to vote as the Mayor is. Maybe moreso, because if the mayor is a Republican, he's probably a felon.

Re:Easy is easy

[SETIGuy]

Anonymous cowards tend to be morons and I'd put you in that category. The problem is often not the lack of photo ID, but the lack of a photo ID that is a character for character match for birth records. What happens when you move. The people who move the most are the people who can't afford $13 every time them move. How long does it take the voter registration change to be enacted? How does someone who is living on the streets (but still entitled to vote) prove their eligibility?

How many people truly can't afford one of the above?

It doesn't matter. If the answer is one or more, it is unconstitutional. Ever elligible is entitled to vote. Any law that prevents someone who has a right to vote from voting is illegal. Vote early/vote often is a strawman argument from the right that doesn't actually occur. Whereas Republican Secretaries of State (Blackwell, Harris) preventing eligible voters from voting is well documented and thousands of times the votes of any alleged voter fraud.