I recently moved. This means I need to update my voter registration.
Question for the political wonks out there: Why can’t I do this online?
paradox1x.org
Karl Martino, Philadelphia, PA, USA
I recently moved. This means I need to update my voter registration.
Question for the political wonks out there: Why can’t I do this online?
Ok, I will try to explain this as best I can but I may get some terminology mixed up – and terminology to many people is more important than the point one is trying to make.
Anyways, here goes – each district is divded into precincts. And each precinct, depending upon the number of people in it, has a budget. This is why in some precincts they have a paper ballot and in others, they have a lever booth, while in others, it may be computerized. Unfortunatly, most of the precincts all over the country use either the paper or lever system. The reason they will not upgrade is because of money. Now usually, the money they do get is to pay the folks who are working the polls, and of course, maintaining the quipment. Unfortunatly, this leaves no money to actually upgrade to an automated system to register yourself in a precinct online. But this isn’t the problem really – its the massive undertaking of a project such as this would be. It would be unprecedented in its size. It would also have to be an all or nothing deal.
As it is now, your a registered in your precinct all by paper. While there are antequated databases that have information on you based on your address, it still needs to get down to your precinct, and this is usually by hand. It can take months and sometimes over a year, for a precinct to get information based on your address. It has to move from one precinct to the next. Its a very ineffcient system that is becoming more lopsided in such a fast moving societu. Folks are more apt to buy a house and move out of it in 5 years rather than buy a house and stay in it for 20+ years – and that is what the current registration system is designed for.
No company would take on such a project because it would cost them too much in resources to do such a project. In a nutshell a project like this would have to involve every precinct in the country. It would involve having to go to the census beareu to get information that is already out of date – it may even involve having people reregister to vote. 190 million voters. Then, someone would need to either enter the data or at least verify it. Think of this project in terms of what it took to build the great wall of china.
There are rumors of many diffrent agencies, contractors, and what not, that are trying to design an infrastructure. These are just rumors though.
Thanks gg. The programmer part of me thinks there is a solution to this. I wonder who is working on it?