Saturday, September 09, 2006

They Might Just Be On To Something...

A letter to the editor in today's NYT:

“In Search of Accurate Vote Totals” noted that voting accuracy remains a problem nationwide. Oregon has the solution.

Voting problems include voter intimidation, going to the wrong place to vote, failure of voting machines, lost ballots, no reliable paper trail with electronic voting, employees not being able to get away from work to vote, and so on. In Oregon, we have shown that all this is unnecessary.

In 1998 voters passed a measure directing all elections to be conducted by mail. We vote at our leisure in the privacy of our homes. This affords the voter the time to study the often complex measures on the ballot, and to vote over a period of hours or days, if desired.

Oregon has a high rate of voter participation and almost zero fraud. Our vote-by-mail procedure has been successful, and should be emulated by other states.

John S. Dearing
Corvallis, Ore., Sept. 5, 2006

Sounds good to me (I'd prefer to vote that way anyway), but we'd have to watch out for Republicans grabbing control of the post offices and mail pickup.

1 comment:

Interrobang said...

I kind of like the system we use up here in my part of Soviet Canuckistan. Various members of my family, who range in political orientation, have actually worked on elections for years -- you work for Elections Canada and you earn actual, real money doing it, usually between $9 and $15/hr. Mostly my family members have been poll clerks, but some of them have been returning officers (the people in charge of the vote counts) as well. It's a couple of really long days (usually 12hr shifts) and about a week or two of paid training. I know a lot of retirees, homemakers, and self-employed people who pick up some extra cash doing it.

We also tend to vote with paper ballots, although I'm given to understand there are voting machines in some areas. I've never seen any, though, despite having voted now in four or five municipalities.

Similarly, it's really interesting to see a group of poll monitors (one from each party) when there are seven parties on the ballot. :)