There hasn’t been much media coverage on this so far (here and here) so in case you missed it, on Wednesday night just before the House recessed, it overwhelmingly passed online voter registration and early voting, 142 to 10. These important reforms will make voting more convenient, shorten long lines on Election Day, and increase participation in our elections. At a time when many other states are rolling back on voting rights, it is great to see action to protect and expand voting rights here in Massachusetts.
The bill now moves to the Senate where we can keep the pressure on to add even more reforms to the House bill (like post-election audits and teen pre-registration that passed the House overwhelmingly last year as well as Election Day registration which passed the Senate some years ago). The Election Modernization Coalition (Common Cause, MassVOTE, Progressive Massachusetts, ACLU, LWV, MIRA Coalition, MASSPIRG, and others) continues to advocate for these reforms and remains hopeful that a truly comprehensive bill will ultimately be signed into law.
If passed by the Senate and signed by the Governor, Massachusetts would join 19 other states in passing online voter registration (many in the past year). States like Georgia and Arizona have found it to be more secure and cost effective, cutting voter registration processing costs significantly as well as boosting registration numbers. Early voting is currently available in 32 states.
In our town all voting is held at the Middle School gym. In the past for presidential elections town has gone so far as to close schools for the day due to traffic. There are certainly costs involved in running the polls for that day. If say you can vote for two weeks prior to the election (I don’t know how long a period granted, but just throwing out that figure) can’t imagine that our town would be able to do the full blown polling location for that length of time without significant extra costs (nevermind the fact that you would effectively shut down the gym for the school for a two week period). Would you envision a way scaled back polling location for the non-election day voting?
I believe it is handled much like absentee voting in that you might have a central location for what is normally a dozen polling places, and you would vote and the vote would be put aside for each polling location. So it might not be the entire gym, they might be able to do it with a vacant classroom or a vacant storefront, or something similar at your city hall or nearby.
or curriculum days take place on those scheduled election days. So there’s not a loss of learning.
Early voting would likely take place a the town or city clerk’s office or by something like an absentee ballot.
begins 11 business days before Election Day and requires cities/towns to maintain one centrally located polling location (usually city/town hall) during the city/town’s regular business hours. So, yes, as mike_cote says below it is similar to in-person absentee voting.
Per their own discretion, municipalities can increase the hours and the number of polling locations. This gives cities like Boston that have a greater need and demand for early voting to maintain more locations and to remain open during evenings and weekends, and doesn’t overly burden small towns like Peru that won’t necessarily have a need for more locations and hours.
The exact details could change as the bill progresses through the Senate and conference committee. For example, one could envision a tiered system that requires cities with say more than 90,000 people to maintain X number of polling locations and remain open on at least one weekend and two weekday nights.
First, with online voting, how can they be sure that it is me voting, and not someone voting in my name, especially with elderly voters whose passwords and IDs may be known to caregivers? Second, with early voting, issues can arise late in campaigns that can cause significant changes in potential votes. Votes cast early lock in results that a voter might not want when later information comes out. Campaigns and voters should be aware of that. Don’t misunderstand me. I am an early adopter of new technology and broader access to increase voting participation. I just want to be sure that it is secure and offers the best result.
Not online voting.
.
Are there places in MA that has been a problem? I don’t think I’ve ever been behind more than a handful of people waiting to vote. Even that’s rare; usually I walk into a poll as if I own the place even on elections that are supposedly high turnout.
in presidential years. Here’s some footage from 2012. It may not be Ohio long, but two hours is more than a lot of people can easily take out of their day.
…but like I say I’ve never experienced anything remotely close. Are there places this is more likely to happen and reasons to be cited? Your link just went to a sign-in page for the Globe rather than an article.
to see the link. But, Christopher, as you well know, your anecdotal experience doesn’t really say much about what is going on around the state. There are a lot of polling places that you have never seen.
Which is why I asked, and I also wonder why such a discrepency.
My guess is it’s pretty straightforward: there’s no requirement of equality among polling places when it comes to ratio of polling stations to registered voters, and some make it a lot easier than others.
Aren’t precincts supposed to be roughly equal in demographic size throughout the state? Even in facilities that host multiple precincts it seems the lines should be separate if that is not already the case.
…plus turnout varies from precinct to precinct. In the November 5 Boston Mayoral Election, the turnout per precinct ranged from a low of 6.8% to a high of 73.8%.
The precinct with 6.8% is Ward 1, Precinct 15. That’s Long Island, out in the harbor. It’s the location of a homeless shelter. A grand total of 10 ballots were cast there.
Ward 4, Precinct 10 in the Fenway, clocked in at 9.2%, with 77 votes. There were 840 eligible voters in the precinct.
Boston had 2-3 hour lines at several locations in 2012. Locations in Cambridge and Somerville had hour long lines. Similar issues in Lawrence, Worcester, and Springfield.
Beyond the issue of the lines, restricting voting to 12 hours on a work day isn’t ideal for many voters and you are not legally allowed to vote absentee unless you are disabled, restricted for religious reasons or not in your city/town during polling hours on Election Day (as I’m sure you know this law is regularly broken). The early voting period makes voting more convenient for those voters that have a difficult time making it to the polls on Election Day.
I’ve thought for a while we should have no excuse absentee voting. I figured it was urban, though so far my experience in Lowell has not included lines. Are those locations underfunded or understaffed? It seems even without early voting opportunities the lines issue should be an easy fix.
We use the same polling locations (one per precinct) regardless of the expected number of voters. Town Meeting or special election? POTUS? Same locations. Same rooms, same number of polling kiosks. It’s the total that the Town owns. Turnout for POTUS could be, literally, ten times a special election for the recently vacated dogcatcher position. My town simply doesn’t have ten times the resources — we don’t have ten times the kiosks, ten times the poll workers, and, importantly, we don’t have polling locations that have ten times the space.
That means lines. Not so much at 10am or 3pm, but certainly at 7am and 5:30pm. For 2012 POTUS, 30-90 minute waits during peak times.
Early voting will help reduce this pressure. It won’t eliminate it, but it will help. It also makes it easier for campaigns to “bank” their voter list, but it makes it harder for town-level candidates because fewer voters walk past them to enter the polls.
The House bill is missing the capability for post-election audits, which passed the House last year. This function is critically important as it adds credibility to our voting process. With a post-election audit, a random sample of about 2% of the precincts are chosen after each election. The ballots in those precincts are then hand-counted, and the results are compared with the results obtained from the electronic machine counting. The audit is intended to show that the voting machines are counting votes correctly. Let’s hope the Senate adds post-election audits.
Nobody wants to be audited, so I can understand why some town clerks are objecting. But, the audit process will ensure that our elections are fair. There are currently 27 states with a process for auditing elections.