Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Our Problematic Voting Process

As Election Day gets closer, I am reminded of the problems I see in our American election process. I've always had a problem with how we run elections in the U.S. First, why is Election Day on a Tuesday? Why not a Saturday when much more people will be off of work? It seems to make sense that we should have a whole day free to choose our elected representatives, instead of having people jam packed on lines before or after their work. I was a Poll worker for many years and worked on local and national elections and I can tell you that waiting on long lines to vote is nothing to look forward to. This, combined with Republican restrictions on early voting, makes for untold thousands of voters not having the time to exercise their constitutional rights because they also happen to work.

Second, the Electoral College has always bugged me. I believe an election should be decided by, and only decided by, the popular vote. Instead we have a system in which a handful of swing states decide every election. Going only by the popular votes would eliminate that. We should also have a national primary day, called Primary Day, held on a weekend, instead of the week by week media celebration of indulgence that is done today.

This year voter ID laws are the controversy. Since it has been shown that there is no large serious credible threat of voter fraud according to many sources, and that cases of voter fraud amount to a voter fraud rate of 0.00004% in some states, the voter ID laws that have been passed by some states recently is of coarse to curb Democratic voters, so the republicans can win the election.

There are other changes to consider for our voting process that are worth considering, such as being able to choose a second choice candidate during primaries if your first choice doesn't make it. The problems with our current election and voting processes that I've outlined above are what I believe we should change in order to make the United States of America, a better democracy. Unfortunately, the powers that be, makes for such changes long and arduous, and close to impossible.

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