I believe many people would agree with me that this country is in serious need of a voting reform. The current system has people lining up to vote like a bunch of barbarians, and forces people to vote on a Tuesday due to some strange tradition formed by some strange people from when the country was practically brand new.
Even though there are alternatives like absentee voting or early voting, some places are having some extreme issues using these options. In the state of Florida, people are having to wait in line for six hours just to cast an early vote because Governor Rick Scott, who has received the title of lowest approval rating in the nation, has refused to extend early voting hours. Since there’s less of a window in which to vote, everybody has to show up at once, creating record-long line at polls. Some voters were even turned away when the ballot-counters closed the doors on them. Although they re-opened the doors after the potential voters began chanting, “We want to vote!” it’s still ludicrous that polls would even close the doors with voters standing right there. They might as well have just told them to their face, “Your vote doesn’t matter.”
True the Vote, an organization dedicated to eliminating voter fraud and inconsistencies have recorded these statistics: The states of Florida, Texas, Michigan, California and Illinois all have an alarming number of deceased people still on the rolls, with a total of 1.8 million deceased voters still on the voting rolls across the nation. This is not to say that this could be easily over looked, taken advantage of and then turn the tide of an election unnoticed, but it’s evidence that there needs to be a serious clean-up.
It’s widely accepted that voter fraud by individuals, like one person casting their ballot twice, isn’t as much of an issue as much as voter fraud by organizations. A perfect example of this is in 2008 when the organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a community based organization focused on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care and other various social issues, gave illegal compensation to voter registration workers for exceeding their quotas. The fiasco ended with 400,000 fake voter registrations in total before ACORN was convicted of breaking Nevada law, the state in which this all occurred.
Another issue we have is both sides of the coin arguing about who’s the culprit and who’s the victim. On one side, Democrats are saying Republicans are trying to prevent the lower class (who are generally Democrat) from voting by using stricter voter registration laws and disguising it as “protecting the vote from fraud,” whereas Republicans are saying the Democrats aren’t passing their voter registration laws because they need voter fraud in order to elect their candidates to office. There are some of these issues, like Democrats getting prisoners to vote or bus loads of unregistered immigrants, and Republicans attempting to pass voter registration laws that would make it a challenge for the average man to vote, but this isn’t evidence of either side being in the right. It is further evidence that voting reform is necessary.
It’s already a problem enough trying to get people to get in line to vote in the first place, but when things like this happen, it makes people feel like you might as well just forget it and just elect a big giraffe to the oval office. Here is a suggestion: elections should be treated as the national census. After all, it’s just as important. Perhaps have the polls come to everyone’s door instead, and they check their ID, and then they hand them a ballot and they vote. Or, one could always say, “I don’t vote,” and that’s that. But, this way we’d advance from the age old tradition of voting on a Tuesday. Or, we could try online polling, like Estonia, where they have successfully adopted voting on a computer from home without threatening democracy as we know it. Either way, this would get more people to vote. More people voting would mean a more honest count of the vote, and a more stable and happy nation.
