P&L DISCUSSIONS
Mariah Ramsay
voting. But our ultimate objective is informed political participation.” (Milner, 195). Even if we make it easier for everyone to vote, some people just don’t want to. So when looking at all of the reasons we can conclude that we won’t be able to fix all of them. Finding solutions to the ones we can fix however, would improve the voting system tremendously.
People can write as many books about voting data as they want, but it means very little without a valid solution. Opinions differ on how to approach this, like with many other things that deal with politics. One solution that we can look at is online voting, or ‘e-voting’. We're living in an ever-changing world; Our society has already integrated the internet and technology into numerous things in our everyday life. It's quick, convenient, and reliable most of the time.
Electronic voting can be split into two smaller sub-categories. Those are eMV and eDV. eMV stands for electronic machine voting which is defined as any electronic device that records and/or counts votes. These are used today already. eDV stands for electronic distance voting. This takes eMV to the next level and lets people vote where they are from a device instead of going to a specified voting area. If we look at some of the reasons why people didn’t vote, they don’t say it’s because their age,
education, gender, or income. The reasons that people aren’t actually voting are dependant on those bigger reasons. Mostly it’s smaller reasons like they live too far away from a polling place. Or they are a younger person and they go to school full time and work. These issues can be categorized by location and age, but those aren’t the direct causes.
The reasons that are listed there could almost all be avoided if an electronic voting system was put into place. If we try to solve these smaller issues, voting turnout rates would be so much higher. This ties back into trying to promote it in smaller communities because more people experience these problems. Elderly, disabled, low-income, ect people are less likely to be living in New York City. Also people that lives miles away from a small town could find it frustrating to get to designated polling areas. Electronic voting, specifically eDV will help most of these issues.
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