This presidential election saw some of the same long lines in early voting that plagued some parts of the country the last presidential elections. Reports from Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma and other states said that people where waiting up to 8-12 HOURS to vote EARLY. To me, and many others as I have been reading, that smacks of a type of poll tax.
Even though the poll tax was formally done away with in the 24th amendment to the constitution, a wait of that long is a type of poll tax. You have to consider the cost to you to wait for that long in lost wages or even if you have a job that would allow you to miss that much time at work. Then consider if you are in college (classes), elderly or disable (physical stamina) or have small children to take care of. The lost wages and time are enough to deter you from voting if the wait is that long, even though you are not paying cash at the door to vote you are paying via those things.
Also are the lines just a bureaucratic snafu or another way to disenfranchise certain groups of voters? I saw a very interesting graph of news reports of long lines vs. the state population of African-Americans based on the Election Day news articles referring to long lines at polling places.
Long lines are a deterrent themselves because for every person in line who waits the 5, 6, 8 hours it takes to cast their ballot there are how many that cannot for the above mentioned reasons or simply are discouraged from doing so.
To help fix this problem a Florida Congressman Alcee L. Hastings, authored the Critical Election Infrastructure Act of 2008 that would spend $1 billion dollars over the next four year to eliminating long lines by supplying more workers and voting machines. Also he authored the Voter Outreach and Turnout Expansion (VOTE) Act, which would make Election Day a national holiday and allow for no excuse early voting as well as same day voter registration nationwide. I believe this would go a long way in helping to increase voter turnout over all and decreasing the wait time in lines.
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Ohio 2006
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