Early Voting

Early Voting began Monday in the county I live in.  The wife and I will take advantage of this.  We were planning on going on one of the first days we could.  Monday we did a few chores around the house and outside, sat down to rest a bit and looked at a quick news report.  The early voting locations were overwhelmed with voters.  The wait being well over one hour.  One of the reasons we were going to vote early was to avoid the crush of voters on election day.  Apparently that is not going to happen.  Our county experienced a record turnout for the first day of early voting.  This is a good thing that there are so many that are exercising this right.  There is no real way to read into it anything, this county has gone blue the last two presidential elections and there were record turnouts then also.  So I try not to read anything into it and be disappointed later when the results are tallied. So we will wait a few days and try again with the hopes that the lines will be a bit shorter.  I am not sure how my recent back issues will be effected by standing still a long time.

There are only two locations to vote early that are reasonably near us.  So we have little choice to pick one that might have less folks.  The other thing is, most all the folks working the polls appear to be volunteers.  Almost all of them are many years into their golden years.  They don't get in a hurry even if they could.  Plus the fact that the way voters are checked in is so antiquated it slows the process anyway.  There is only ONE person checking everyone in and then he passes that person off to another person who completes the check in process. Then your are handed off to another person who will guide you to a voting machine when one comes open.   

I don't understand why this process hasn't been modernized.  Why not issue a credit card type voter registration card instead of the paper copy.  It could have the 'chip' that could be read by the voting machine and record that you have voted.  It would have all the information that the check in folks look for.  This would eliminate the slow check in process.  Various security measures could be added to verify the person is legit.  No it wouldn't be perfect, but how perfect is the current method? Just get in line at a voting machine, swipe your card and vote.  You could have multiple lines for all those folks instead of one speeding up the process considerably.  This would also encourage others to vote that have less patience for the wait and won't vote for that reason alone.  The technology is there, it will have a cost but the results IMO would be worth it.

Happy Trails