Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby (<2km away from registered address). Including a monk who gets his own polling booth because he lives so far from everyone and everything else. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth...
As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him.
There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).
Yep. Physical voting places are great, but they're also an easy target for voter suppression. There should be a requirement that there be a nearby polling location, we should also have multiple days to vote there and employers should be required to give every one of their employees at least one of those days off.
Georgia made sure African Americans had crowded long line voting locations with no access to water. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were doing that. The South is still pretty racist.
I observed this in New England while living in a city with evenly distributed population. The polling locations were more abundant in the wealthier side of the city. This may not have been straight racism; there was no way for me to determine why this was the case. Looking at a map of median income and polling locations made it pretty obvious to me at least that polling location choice was biased.
It could be as simple as "wealthy areas get more county services." There are practical considerations when choosing polling places, like the availability of parking and enough space to accommodate a line, check-in tables, voting booths, and ideally separate entrance and exit doors. Public schools and county rec centers are go-to locations because the county (who administers the election) already owns them and they have the space needed. Churches are great too, but they require having an agreement with a private organization.
By New England I guess you just mean Boston and the Boston area right? I'm unaware of any other huge concentrations of African Americans in that region. Boston is well known for its racism, I actually had a friend from Boston when I was living in Vicksburg MS and they got along there much better than me.
> It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
No un-answered serious questions. Serious questions are asked, regularly, as well as un-serious ones by cookers. But, the serious questions, the audit, the sense "did we do ok" is continuously asked.
We have an independent electoral commission. I'm not saying its incapable of being reproachable, nothing is "beyond reproach" but I have yet to hear a serious, non-cooker accusation any political party has tried to stuff the electoral commission.
What we don't have, (and I think should have) is capped party donations. I'm tired of the money aspect of who gets the most billboards.
We also have silly bad behaviour emerging: People doing their billboards in the same style and colours as the electoral commission. Often in foreign language support roles, using words like (not a quote) YOU MUST VOTE FOR PARTY A LIKE THIS which I think is really trolling the voter badly.
>Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
The flip side is even more true. If someone is claiming they care about election integrity and isn't willing to pair that with funding of an equivalent ID system that is both free and easy for voters to acquire, they don't actually care about election integrity.
I’d like to respectfully challenge you on this. There is no chance anyone can ever create an effortless-to-get ID. Even if it was like the census where they sent someone to your house repeatedly to try to find you, take your picture and print an ID on the spot, it wouldn’t be effortless because you might not know where your passport or birth certificate are.
Some people probably are so badly organized and/or ignorant that they can’t manage making and keeping one single DMV appointment even once every 15 years so that they could get an ID (I think we can all agree that an “expired” ID would do fine, as long as the picture isn’t so out of date it can’t be verified).
Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious. It’s ok that some things in life are reserved for people that have invested a tiny amount of effort once in their lives. There’s also not a free and effortless way to feed or bathe yourself.
By the way, a state ID costs $15 in Mississippi and $9 for “eligible people” in California.
The main problem with obtaining ID is that is takes time, and it's not evenly distributed. In the US its not folklore that people of color are less likely to have ID, it's a statistical fact.
This can be fixed, but you will notice the people who champion voter ID never bother trying. Naturally, the only reasonable conclusion is they like it that way. They're not stupid, after all.
>Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious
I hate calling something a slippery slope, but I don't know how else to describe an argument that is fundamentally "Sure, it will disenfranchise people, but who cares about those people anyway?" Once you accept that people's rights can be taken away simply because protecting those rights is an inconvenience, then none of us actually have any protected rights.
Exactly, a freedom you have to pay to access isn't a freedom. "If people can't get it together to pay a modest $9 fee for the 'don't get imprisoned forever' tax, who cares if they get throw into the forced labor camps?"
Beyond this point: voting isn't just a freedom, it's a duty in a civilized democracy. We don't enforce it like Australia does, but anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it, isn't fully on board with government by the people.
Voting itself takes effort (even to vote stupidly, where you just vote a straight ticket blindly and pick all the judges and ballot props at random). Voting in a way that's good for society (meaning you read about the candidates and ballot props and actually think through their true implications) takes WAY more effort. Why is it so important that we enable people who can't be arsed to make more than a trivial effort at all to vote?
There are already a bunch of arbitrary de facto restrictions:
- If you can't read, you won't be able to use your ballot.
- If you don't have transportation or any time off to vote, you can't vote in person. (Also the main objection given to requirements to get an ID card).
- If you don't know where you'll be living consistently, mail-in voting is problematic.
We accept that there will be people whose lives are so chaotic and messed up that voting probably won't be easy for them. So why is the requirement of identity proof, which is not more difficult to overcome than the above existing barriers, such a trigger to some?
> anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it...
My response is, anyone who cares so little about casting a vote that they wouldn't set aside time once in a decade to get an ID for the purpose of voting isn't fully on board with participating in government by the people -- and I'm totally fine with that.
I also don't see the point in the Australian idea, especially since paying $20-50 is trivial for anyone who's not homeless, and uncollectible (moot point) if you are actually destitute. You're still getting basically the same set of people in the voting booth anyway -- only the ones who give a shit about voting.
> By the way, a state ID costs […] $9 for “eligible people” in California.
A state ID is not required to register to vote in CA[1]. (The requirement is CA ID number or last-four-of-SSN or a third complicated way, but I'm assuming ID or SSN is attainable for nigh everyone eligible.)
It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.