24 Hour Polling Stations

Imagine this: Located throughout the country are electronic polling stations open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Want to know what the current issues are requiring a vote today? Tune into your local news station and catch the listing of current issues. You then have 48 hours to make it to a polling station to cast your vote.

Essentially, everyone in the U.S. would be able to vote on everything. It would be up to that person to determine if they felt strongly enough about the issue to get off their 'duff' and go vote.

Would such an idea work? In my opinion, probably not, for two main reasons: 1) Corruption would be rampant, it would be very easy to buy votes 2) Many people would not fully educate themselves on the issue up for a vote, thus casting an 'opinion' rather than a 'decision'.

Anyone think such an idea could conceivable work?

It's a novel idea. I actually think it could work to some degree but not completely.

The less power a government has, the more direct democracy can be allowed. The more entangled a nation becomes in complex issues, the more necessary it becomes to maintain a consistent policy guided by "experts".

I think it would be a very bad idea to direct democracy into action for every little thing- such a system would take us on a peace keeping mission on friday and pull us back out on monday. In some ways all of our policy would come to mirror Clinton's "focus group foreign policy".

Now on the other hand, some issues the American people SHOULD have some direct say in- a veto at the very least.

For example, remember the government shutdown when Clinton and the congress faced off over the budget? I think a situation like that would definately warrant some direct democracy, because we were playing with fire over politics there. I think it would have been nice to allow for a veto-override by popular vote there. If Clinton had the votes in congress to stave off an override, but 2/3s of the American people said "just sign the budget" thats an option we perhaps should have had.


The logistics are impossible though. You've got to verify your results- you couldn't do it in a timely and cost-effective manner unless it was electronic, and that could be tampered with. Even if not tampered with you've got samping errors. A guy with two jobs and a kid isn't going to vote, but you can bet your butt that the country club vote will come in once it's too dark for golf.

It's a nice idea though. I remember it from "With Honors". That was a great movie in a lot of ways.

I had no idea this concept was reflected in a movie.

I'll have to try and rent it this weekend.

I never thought about sampling erorrs. That in and of itself would probably make such an idea impossible to pull off.

Before you invest the 2 bucks, let me warn you it's a peripheral concept in "With Honors", it just happens to be the subject of a grad student's thesis.

Still a great movie though. Nice blend of intellect, trying to make you cry, and humor. Matter of fact, the movie turned me on to Walt Whitman (and poetry in general).

But yeah, back to the point, sampling errors would be an enhanced problem (though they already are given certain demographic tendencies in regards to voting).