Honest Voting

Following up on yesterday’s post on avoiding debacles at your local polling place this November — it’s not just a wise move to have extra paper ballots on hand, it’s recommended by Science.  Dr. William Edelstein, who’s associated with the Maryland group Save Our Votes, reached this conclusion via mathematics and queuing theory (the study of what happens when you stand in line).

You can probably excuse the heightened tone of this page; it reads as a bit crackpotty but the basic idea is probably accurate: even with the best planning, the best will in the world, sheer numbers can overwhelm a polling station. Even what would seem like short voting times — 5 minutes, 6 minutes — can result in huge backups.

Setting up extra stations for people to vote with paper ballots could siphon off some of the extra traffic, says Edelstein, and the time to plan for that and print the paper ballots is now. …Actually, the time to plan for that was months back, considering the cost of a print run. One of the reasons voting officials favor electronic voting is the method’s lower short-term cost. Nobody’s going to like a last-minute trip to the government printing office. But paper ballots cost far less than electronic voting machines that you have to send to the scrap heap.