The Independent View: Making Voting Easier and More Meaningful

I found this interesting article by Tom Allon, the President of City & State, NY and the Liberal Party-backed candidate for New York City Mayor in 2012.

He writes about being one of the 9 percent of eligible Democratic voters who recently went to his local polling place in September to cast his vote in the gubernatorial primary. He arrives at 8:59 p.m., just one minute before the deadline and they close the door.

Right next to him was a neighbor. "I had to come and vote only to show Albany that I care about what's going on up there," he said, trying to explain his fierce urgency to make it in time.

In Manhattan, where he lives, the turnout in early November will likely be light, because the four statewide races will likely be won easily by the Democratic candidate and there are no contested assembly or senate races in his district.

It's too bad, because he finds the political process incredibly interesting and exciting to follow and monitor a well-run and contested political race.

New York Statewide races or Federal campaigns, legislative or congressional, are rarely competitive and our system is worse off as a result. We don't get the benefit of heated debates, media coverage of the hot issues and a general buzz in the air that voting for your elected leader really matters in your life and for the future of your city or district.

There are a number of reasons for this anti-competitive trend.

He states, "Foremost is that New York State as a whole is becoming heavily Blue and Republicans running statewide have little chance to win given the changing demographics. Then, there is the increasing power of incumbency; in New York State, you are more likely to leave office in handcuffs than by being beaten at the ballot box these days. And then, of course, there is the corrosive influence of large campaign donations and SuperPacs that try to influence the outcomes of elections."

But why is voting, which our ancestors fought a very bloody revolution over almost two and a half centuries ago, such a cumbersome task and why do so few eligible voters take advantage of this right? In some developing countries, where democracy has just taken hold, voting rates can top 60-70 percent of the eligible population; in New York, one of the largest states in the oldest democracy in the world, we are not likely to see elections where more than one in five, or 20 percent, of eligible voters head to their local polling place on Election Day.

He feels the problem is because we use eighteenth century technology in a twenty-first century world. Why in an age where you can text your cousin half the way around the world instantaneously or when you can order almost anything you want delivered within four hours, must we suffer with voting booths that look like they were invented before Theodore Roosevelt was born?

The cynic in me thinks that progress is slow in electoral technology because the status quo benefits the current political class; depressed turnout helps incumbents and for some reason we are more risk averse when it comes to wiring election booths than we are in wiring banks. If I can pay bills online or wire large sums of money securely, then surely my vote can be safely and securely delivered from my smartphone or office computer.

Can you imagine how much turnout will spike if we can vote for our leaders from our office desks or from our smartphones?

And perhaps more importantly, wouldn't the playing field for running for office be leveled considerably if each candidate has the same technological outlet to convey their ideas and background and vision to voters? If we said to candidates, here is a database of all the email addresses of all registered voters in your district/city/state: now go and tell them in texts and videos why they should vote for you. That would essentially eliminate the need for big money and campaign donations that sometimes masquerade as deposits in the favor bank.

But, alas, these lofty ideas are perhaps too futuristic and idealistic to be feasible in the near future. But we can dream, can't we?

He misses the fact that New York is a closed primary state and over 2 million registered voters can not take part in the primary selection process.

I recently attended a discussion on “Why New Yorker’s Don’t Vote?”

The discussion began with the panel's standard reasons registered voter do not vote;

1. Long lines at the polls.
2. Lack of information about candidates or issues.
3. Lack of choice.
4. The feeling their vote does not count.
5. Unreadable ballots.
6. Absentee ballots can be challenged by candidates or their lawyers but the voter has no standing in court.

No one spoke about the over 2.8 million registered New York voters who can not vote in the states primary.

The panels suggestions included:

1. Electronic registration.
2. Early voting.
3. Same-day registration.
4. Vote by mail.
5. Better Ballot design.
6. Propositional Voting.
7. Instant Run-off Voting.
8. Register 16 year olds, so they are automatically ready to vote when they get to the legal age.

As a Technologist and a Political Activist, it started my research project to answer this question. During reading my copy of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), I started to research the development of an integrated system to answer the question, Why Don’t Voter’s Vote? and will call it Voter Relations Management.