Improving Local Elections

I’d like to start out this post by reminding readers that the views expressed herein are my own, and not that of my employer – demoxi.

We’ve all heard about the voting “scandals” in the past. Places like Florida and Ohio still scare some of us. We’ve heard the calls for e-voting, and we’ve seen the current problems with it. Some of you may not be familiar with the recent phone jamming scams and what not – but all of these are problems with our current electoral system and all of this stuff is better written somewhere else on the web. I encourage you to go find and read it (after finishing this post of course!)

What we don’t often talk about though, is local elections. To be quite honest, I never cared much about the workings of local elections until recently. That reason, is that my Aunt was running for office.

I’m going to get it out of the way right now and simply say that she lost, and lost fairly. I say that now because I don’t want people to think I’m implying a scandal or something in what follows.

What I saw in the election though, was tons of room for scandal and corruption if anybody wanted to do so.

The first thing I noticed on election day was the sudden disappearance of election signs. I don’t mean that people removed them from their lawn though, many were simply uprooted and laid flat on the lawns where they once were. Most of these weren’t my aunt’s signs, but the fact that somebody was going around doing it is very unsettling.

The 2nd thing I noticed is that the person in charge of issuing absentee ballots had his name on the ballot! In his defense it was in his current job description to manage absentee ballots, but I still think somebody else should have done this. Imagine how easy it is to sway an older person into voting for you if she has no idea who either candidate is but you’re the one who handed her the ballot.

The last thing that totally shocked me is that multiple people whose names were on the ballot were also involved in counting the votes! Can you imagine a presidential election in which Bush put himself in charge of counting votes? There would be public outrage – but from what I hear it appears to be the norm in city elections.

Again, I’m not saying there was any fraud going on in the vote counting – but there was certainly room for it if somebody wanted to play dirty. I’m sure in some cities across Michigan who used these same procedures that there actually was corruption.

This is a major problem for America. I stated yesterday that your city officials vote really matters since city officials end up turning into state officials and then on to Washington. The same is true for voting procedures.

If we want to clean up and regulate the voting system, we need to start at the bottom and work our way up – nip the corruption in the bud.

November 7th, 2007