Early-voting and the sacrosanct "Election Day".

[SoCalDem]

If we can (and many DO) vote early, and vote by absentee ballot for any reason, why do states religiously hold onto the "1st Tuesday of November" date?

I am sure that because it's been the designated date since we started up, is the main reason, but it's ridiculous in this day and age to continually shift the "first voting day/time" ever backwards, and still cling to that "first Tuesday" stuff.

People are voting NOW..

Supposedly, a main reason for why we needed the "vapor-voting machines" in the first place was because it was just too darned hard to get everyone's vote cast/collected/counted on that one day in November..

With very little fanfare, we seem to have already taken care of that issue by "early voting and absentee-for-any-reason" voting.

We are a 24-7 society now, and there's no reason to hold onto that one date. If we MUST, then why not make it a school holiday, and used the schools as polling places (no more churches, garages, fire stations needed)

And if that one day is to be used, at least make it a 24 hour period. People out here leave for work at 4AM (lots of them) and some are still stuck in traffic at 6PM.

Pushing VVM voting as a solution to handicapped voters' issues seems to be the sole reason left.

My question is this...

Why not have a few VVMs available for handicapped only...and have them used for a two-three week period up to and including election day.

An adequate supply of simple paper (card-stock for easy storage) ballots every few years should not be that hard to print up. Sharpie pens on strings should do the trick for filling in those pesky boxes.

Keep voting LOCATIONS plentiful and available to all neighborhoods.

People fret over the mechanics of elections unnecessarily. This is not a Moon-Shot.. 4th & 5th graders all over America have figured out how to run classroom elections. Every social club/organization in America has figured out how to run elections.

Surely the most powerful country in the world (are we still?) could figure out how to run an election.

There are so many common-sense ideas that would make it do-able, and yet our elected leaders always seem to grab for the brass ring of the highest difficulty and the most complications.

Everyone knows what K.I.S.S. means ( no face make-up required, here folks)

One of the reasons I always hear given, for the NEED of VVMs ids that LOCAL/STATE issues make the ballots too long and cumbersome...and that's why they need to "electronic-ify" the ballots.

HOGWASH !

Simple solution?

SEPARATE THE BALLOTS..

Ballots that determine NATIONAL OFFICES could be/should be a simple 5 x 7 card with names of congressional candidates, senatorial candidates & presidential candidates...and THAT'S ALL!

The ballot initiatives, city council, dog catcher, governor, statehouse candidates, could be on a separate , 950 page tome, for all I care.

There are people who only vote to cast a ballot for the "big 3" anyway, so why should they have to have their votes placed in jeopardy because of an unwieldy ballot construction, and "glitchy" electronics?

If local officials want to tear their hair out for days over the accuracy of the count for city comptroller of Apex, nebraska, that's not my worry.

However, I DO worry about Nebraska's accuracy if that congressperson they sent to DC casts the deciding vote on legislation that affects ME and MY family, so they better get THAT part of their election figured out correctly.

The days of "close enough is good enough" are long GONE.

We MUST have ways to preserve and recount , if necessary, and people MUST be confident that the person with the most votes gets to assume their elected office.

My personal choice would be to completely separate state-local elections from national elections ..Nationally significant elections to be in even-years, and state/local in odd years. The states could use diamond-studded Diebold machines with platinum styluses (Stylii?) to mark their choices, for all I care...but in the races that are nationally significant, we MUST have simplicity, transparency and standardization of ballots.

How come the same government that has NO problem in instituting STANDARDIZATION OF TESTING for schools that receive (apparently) only a 7% subsidization, cannot see its way clear to insist on standardization of ballots for the very thing that makes us a democracy/republic...whatever?

Surely there are many people available in every community who can count to 20. There are phones available to report individual precinct totals...there are people available to canvass voters for exit polling. Every 2 or 4 years we could hire plenty of people and still have it cheaper than what was spent for all the VVMs that offer NO confidence of accuracy.

It's complicated because they WANT it to be complicated.