1) Open all polls and 00:01 election day EST. Close all polls at midnight EST.
2) Ban all election reporting and advertising/campaigning while polls are open (under the no campaigning near a polling place laws, the only way to ensure this with modern technology is a complete ban.) No pre or post vote opinion polling of voters.
3) No release of election vote counts until noon the day after the election, at which time all results would be released.
4) ALL vote counts released and published in the media, down to individuals not campaigning who received a single vote.
5) Mandated voting similar to Australia...if you're eligible to vote, you must vote.
This eliminates the 'me too' effect and negates the advantages of winning Eastern states and thus affecting voting in Western states as well as the 'looks like he's going to win, I'll vote for/against him and the 'silent majority.'
A new report on the U.S. election system shows that while voting machine technologies have improved, these gains could be cancelled out by errors through mail and internet voting. MIT News reports.
So, the Florida situation of 2000 probably won’t happen again, since outdated voting systems – such as punch cards and lever machines – were replaced with more reliable optical-scan or electronic voting machines.
But, there’s an increase in early voting through the mail, which is turning out to be a relatively low-accuracy method of voting, according to a new report released by MIT and Caltech.
- Although a small set of counties still hand-count paper ballots these days, roughly 60 percent of counties use optical-scan machines, and 40 percent use other forms of electronic equipment.
- As a result, the overall residual vote rate (the difference between the number of ballots cast and counted) dropped from 2 percent in 2000 to 1 percent in 2006 and 2008.
- However, absentee voting is more prone than in-person voting to residual vote rates – a real problem since the percentage of Americans voting by mail or at early election centers has doubled from 14 percent in 2000 to 28 percent in 2008.
- In all, 36 states now conduct some kind of early voting.
“We’ve settled for convenience at the cost of accuracy and making sure that every vote counts,” says study coauthor Charles Stewart III at MIT.
And then there’s the issue of identification and claims of voter fraud.
The report suggests that the computerized statewide voter-registration databases required by federal law should be used in polling places, and coordinated with driver’s license photos or other identification databases. Rather than forcing all voters to first acquire ID cards, poll workers could quickly confirm voters’ identities through the use of connected databases in the polling place.
The report was released by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project this week.
[Via MIT News]
Image by rynosoft via Flickr
