Still more thoughts about reducing polling delays in November |
| Published: August 25, 2008, 11:52 pm |
| Tags: people who count, vote suppression |
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It’s not only voting activists who’ve noticed the potential bottleneck at the polls this year. The New York Times‘ editorial board writer Adam Cohen wrote today that in Ohio “tens of thousands of votes were suppressed by something so mundane that no one thought to focus on it: long lines.” Cohen points out that most of the decisions about polling stations and voting equipment are made by local officials, not state or national leaders. The result is that efforts to coordinate numbers of machines and ballots may sometimes be hamstrung by disjointed planning or even various kinds of bias. (College towns may do their best to minimize votes from the college population, for example.) Cohen, who was in Ohio for the 2004 election, says he watched tens of thousands of people give up on voting when faced with hours-long lines to reach the voting booth. Therefore he’s cheered to learn that Ohio's secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner (mentioned [ Full article ] |
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