Our voting process is suffering from a crises of confidence these days. A significant portion of the population does not feel it can be trusted to be fair and impartial.
Whether you think our elections are 100% above board and fair or know they’re not, election integrity is a huge issue in America today. We need to fix that. Just the fact that the process is now so convoluted with so many places for possible tampering makes it suspect in some people’s minds, whether that tampering is actually happening or not.
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago managing warranty claims for a manufacturer. If you put a feature into something that has a high percentage of your customers thinking “this is broken” when it happens, even if that feature is loved by the sales team and the engineers, you’re going to create a problem. No matter what kind of incremental benefit someone gets from that feature, you need to balance that against the huge number whose perception will be that you built a bad product.
Coke once decided to mess with the formula, New Coke was born. Coke did not “stick it out” and simply order people to like New Coke, because that doesn’t work. Coke went back to “old Coke.”
We once had elections that pretty much everyone trusted. The process was somewhat simple and transparent. You went to your polling place (often your neighbor’s garage or a local school), they checked you against the rolls, you marked your ballot, you put it in the box. Somehow that box was opened after polling closed, people counted the votes, and in general enough results were in by late evening to know what was likely to happen, most of the rest of the votes were in the next morning. Sometimes there needed to be recounts and such, but it was a simple process that worked.
We no longer have that simple process. Nowadays votes can happen by mail over a large amount of time (from a month before to two weeks after election day), in-person voting starts weeks before election day. And if you do walk in to vote in person and you aren’t on their list? That’s fine, just fill out this voter registration form. A form that then has to be tracked, processed, etc – and somehow synced up with the ballot so the vote doesn’t get counted until the registration is validated.
And of course then the mail-ins need to be processed, including signature checks (necessary because the voter who signed was not in front of you…) And a period where signature issues can be “cured”, itself another process.
All of this happening in different places via different methods with different rules by jurisdiction, state, etc.
Is it any wonder that people question the process? How could you NOT question that process, especially knowing how top-notch excellent our government is at handling complicated processes flawlessly (sarcasm….)
The solution would be easy – because we’ve already done it and know what works. Vote on election day, in person, showing ID to prove who you are. With the same mail-in ballot process we used to have, that applied to people who were away (mainly military) and people who were invalid or in some other way not able to make it. That required you to apply, but my understanding is they granted it for pretty much anyone who asked. No one asked to see a doctor’s note.
Process the votes overnight. My school district has about 19,000 registered voters (I know because I ran for school board a few years ago…) Usually we see maybe 80% of registered voters cast ballots – in a “contentious” election. Many are much smaller than that. But if 80% of 19,000 vote that means we have 15,000 votes to count.
The scanner takes seconds, but let’s assume because these are temp workers, perhaps volunteers, they take some time to do the process . Call it 30 seconds for each ballot. Which is a long time. Start a stopwatch and wait 30 seconds, I dare you.
That means 7500 minutes to count them all. Let’s assume we have people working 8 hours, so they start right after the polls close and finish maybe 4-5am or so. We’d need 15 people.
That’s it. 15 people to have “99% of all votes counted” by the next morning.
Is that really an onerous burden? How ever did we manage it when ballots couldn’t be scanned and had to be read and counted by hand….!
And, as for same-day registration? The issues we have on our ballots are complex and require a bit of thought and research to really understand. If you are not thinking ahead enough to get registered in advance then it’s unlikely you’re also doing that research. Your vote will affect ME, not just you, and I don’t particularly need to be governed by politicians elected by people who just got off the couch today and decided to vote.
Yes, there are likely valid reasons to have not registered 30 days in advance. Sorry, but in those corner cases I’m afraid you’re going to just have to vote next time, when you’ll have time to really review and understand the issues.
Going back to “the way things worked before” would solve the problem. Yes, there would still be deniers who questioned part of the process, but with far, far fewer cracks for things to fall in to I guarantee far less issues would be raised. Remove the feature that is causing people to suspect the product is broken and, guess what, you get less unhappy customers.
Now… about “removing that feature”.
One important aspect of those features is “convenience”. It’s convenient to vote in your living room. It’s convenient to show up whenever you feel like it at a polling place. It’s convenient if you forget to register to do it at the polling place.
Is the primary concern in our elections convenience? I thought the primary concern was electing our government in a fair and open manner. Silly me.
There ARE issues of convenience that should be addressed. For example, if we require voter ID we should make damn sure we verify the eligibility to vote before issuing that ID, and come up with some kind of indication on the ID that the person is eligible. We also need to make damn sure that where-ever we designate going to get that ID is reasonably closely located to everyone, and doesn’t make you wait for hours before getting to the clerk.
Hear that, DMV? Our legislators should hold DMV management accountable for performance metrics, but that’s another topic….
And of course any state ID should be provided for free to anyone who qualifies for a public assistance program. That seems easy.
Another issue of convenience – polling place locations. I read somewhere that a major city in the south (Atlanta? But don’t quote me) had closed all it’s polling places in poor neighborhoods, and the new “mega” locations were often nowhere near bus lines. Would calling government “stupid” be redundant? There should be a polling place within a 5 minute walk from every major concentration of population (sorry, Montana, but you can apply for a mail-in ballot….)
Remember when you used to vote in a neighbor’s garage? I don’t know when that ended in my neighborhood, maybe mid 2000’s or something, but doesn’t that seem like a good idea? Maybe even PAY people to host polling places in their garages? What does it cost right now to have the larger “regional” facilities going? And lets throw in the cost of not processing millions of mail-in ballots…
This is not an unsolvable problem. WE know what the answer is. All we need to do is do it.
If you’re now thinking “what can I do to help”, in CA there is an initiative out right now collecting signatures to get on the 2026 ballot, the “CA Voter ID Initiative 2026” https://www.reformcalifornia.org/cavoterid/home
You can print this at home and send it in. You can print multiple copies for any registered voters in your household or in your neighborhood and send them in too!
This isn’t the entire solution wrapped up with a bow (or, “the whole enchilada” as we say in SoCal), but it’s a start. As they say, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.”
You can do it. WE can do it.
Let’s get our voting system back to making sense so we can go back to arguing over which politicians slept with who….