This is the day when voters raised on a reverence for democracy realize the utter disregard their leaders hold for that concept. The moment state and local officials around the country get elected, they stop caring about making it easy for their constituents to vote. Some do so deliberately, for partisan reasons, while others just don’t pay attention or decide they have bigger priorities.Why can’t the New York City Board of Elections hire workers who understand the system that employs them? Why can’t officials in Cleveland and south Florida keep their voting machines working? Why is the election board in Pinellas County, Fl., sending out robo-calls saying people can vote until 7 p.m. Wednesday?The reason for this is clear: making democracy efficient takes second place in the United States to the cherished notion of letting local officials run the election system. In this “hyper-decentralized system,” in the words of Richard Hasen, a voting expert at the University of California, Irvine, the process of voting is left in the hands of “volunteers or poorly paid workers, many of whom lack adequate training or formal expertise.”Their supervisors are partisans, often making decisions about spending money on new machines or expanding the system on the basis of how it will affect their party. (Making it difficult to vote, particularly in urban areas, has become a national priority of the Republican party.) “The United States is almost alone among mature democracies in allowing the foxes to guard the henhouse,” Mr. Hasen writes in his new book, “The Voting Wars.”
this is really shameful 4 years inbetween each time and the country that prides itself on the right to vote can be no further from the truth. is all about who holds the reins.
Here are just a few examples from this morning of the cost of these misguided priorities:
Precincts throughout New York City, including many unaffected by last week’s storm, had lines of voters stretching for blocks. In many cases, this was because scanners had broken down or there were simply not enough poll workers to accommodate the perfectly predictable big crowds. As Mayor Bloomberg (a frequent critic of the board) put it, “I kept hearing, ‘What’s this, a third-world country?’ ”
A poll worker on the Upper East Side couldn’t find Mr. Bloomberg’s name in the voter rolls, so she gave the book to him to let him find his own name. Mayor or not, that violates the rules.
Voters were being turned away in Pennsylvania for not having a photo ID card, even though that requirement isn’t in effect for this election.
this is the embarrassment of the country who would shape others in it's image
