Is Early Voting A Good Idea or Not?

[jacqueg]

Originally Posted by shooting4life

Lots of excuses. A 12 hour plus period to vote plus absente voting is more than enough.


Making it easy to vote is not the goal. Having an informed electorate is, which means having people who care enough to learn about the issues and candidates actually doing the voting. I would prefer a basic efficiency test to vote, something simple like "name all the branches of government" "name two of the 9 members of the supreme court" and "how many US senators are there" This plus removing all indication of party from the ballot would do us good.

Courts have ruled that candidates have a free-speech right to identify their party affiliation.

Here in Washington, we have an election system that de-emphasizes the role of parties. But candidates are given the option to have their party preference printed on the ballot, and they overwhelmingly do so.

Originally Posted by Wambatown81

Voting shouldn't be hard, but it should require a little effort in getting off your butt. A slight bit of sacrifice standing in a line shows you care. And if you don't hardly care then why should your opinion of our government matter at all? I support a window of a couple days of voting because bad luck can happen (car trouble etc) but no more.

Someone might care a lot but not be able to afford to take a day off to stand in line.

Many states don't have laws requiring time off to vote. Of those that do have such laws, many do not require that it be paid. And of those that do require paid time off, many limit it to a couple hours, which is not enough if you're unfortunate enough to live in a minority neighborhood that doesn't get anywhere close to enough voting machines.

Restricting voting times is little more than a thinly veiled way to implement a poll tax and suppress the vote from people who cannot afford to not get paid for a day.