EAllusion wrote:The hell? Another way of wording this is that younger people are forced to wait longer to vote. That shouldn’t be legal.
I'll bet the assumption is that it's harder for older people to stand in line for a long time. How is that different than giving handicapped people better parking spots and making the non-handicapped walk farther?
Those lines are insane. I've never seen electronic voting machines used. I've always been given an "ink blot" ballot. While I'm all for new technology, I wonder how they compare for getting people in and out. It's obviously a lot cheaper to set up more ink-blot booths if needed, so scalability is probably a factor as well.
EAllusion wrote:The hell? Another way of wording this is that younger people are forced to wait longer to vote. That shouldn’t be legal.
I'll bet the assumption is that it's harder for older people to stand in line for a long time. How is that different than giving handicapped people better parking spots and making the non-handicapped walk farther?
I'm sure that's the logic, but it unfairly advantages a broad voter demographic. It places a substantially larger burden others to vote. Waiting potentially hours longer in line to vote is much more significant than walking a few hundred feet more. For what it is worth, I assist disabled individuals with voting - I did so today - and they receive no preferential treatment in queues. A medical condition requiring such treatment is a basis to vote absentee.
You have to and ought to have to accommodate a person's disability, but you shouldn't make it such that a demographic has a vastly different level of burden in voting. And to do that with a large demographic with a heavy partisan lean, such as the elderly, effectively games the election. Wait times for voting matter in outcomes.
If I'm in town I always go to the polling station. If there is a secular sacrament in a democracy, it's the act of voting. After all of the thinking, watching and talking, it's just you and a ballot. You get to have your say. It's the piece of empowerment to which we are all entitled in a democracy.
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