I’m not voting today, but that’s simply because I didn’t change my registration when I moved.
That’s no excuse!
Right in front of me in line was a man who was illiterate, spoke no English, and was not registered. He said he had just moved to Maryland from DC. The election officials were very understanding. They gave him a provisional ballot, had somebody read to him in Spanish, and he got to vote.
You have to realize that the whole point is to encourage people to vote and to make them feel good about it. You can’t do that if you turn voters away. A would-be voter getting turned away would be like a company picnic where your kid goes home crying because he doesn’t get his face painted. The folks in charge will do anything to avoid having that happen.
At least where I vote.
READER COMMENTS
Vincent Clement
Nov 4 2008 at 1:35pm
My wife and I make it a point to take our children with us whenever we vote. We want to show them how important it is to take a few minutes and vote.
manuelg
Nov 4 2008 at 4:50pm
I live in Orange County, CA. Hard-core Republican county in a Democrat tax&spend&entitlements-up-the-wazoo state.
Because it is rich people worried about being disenfranchised, our voting machines are fool-proof, robust, and print a human readable receipt that you can verify through glass. Absolutely no tough screen technology – everything is done with controls befitting industrial automation instrumentation.
> A would-be voter getting turned away would be like a company picnic where your kid goes home crying because he doesn’t get his face painted.
I endorse face-painting for voters. Purple finger, my ass! _Purple_ _face_!
Zac
Nov 4 2008 at 5:44pm
So are you going to offer up some pseudoscientific justification for voting or why people “should” vote, or just take it as a given? Do you support voting in all small community elections where your vote has, conceivably, some small sliver of efficacy or only the large ones in which your vote has a p(decisiveness)=0?
Greg
Nov 4 2008 at 6:10pm
Wow, the commenters have a severe irony detection deficit today.
George
Nov 5 2008 at 2:18pm
So do they take your ballot out of the privacy envelope and look at it before putting it in the scanner? That’s what they do here in DC.
It makes me wonder if there’s a “Test” button they can press while feeding in your ballot if you connected the wrong arrow….
Comments are closed.