Scott Says

Point:  Replace voting now

 by Scott Green

The best way to rid this country of vote fraud, ballot stuffing and voter error is also the simplest.

Eliminate voting.

Presidential elections are too important to be trusted to local election officials, state election committees and the hole-punching, scantron-filling aptitude of average American voters. Disputed presidential tallies are an American tradition dating back to 1800, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received equal votes in the electoral college and Congress had to handle the fallout. In 1876, Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost the election after three states sent two sets of electors to Washington, and a partisan panel awarded the presidency to Rutherford Hayes. In 2000, Florida got messy and our electoral system turned to bedlam.

The fix is to switch from polling places and ballots, paper or electronic, and conduct phone polls in each state of the type normally conducted by Gallup or Zogby. Not every eligible voter would be called - only whatever random sampling is necessary to produce results accurate to within, say, a 2 or 3 percent margin of error. Just as citizens have the choice to not vote, there would be an option to abstain from the poll.

There would be a separate poll in each state, so the electoral college could be kept.

A slight mistake in results would not be detrimental to our government or the electorate. We have had 54 elections to choose a president, and in two of them, 1876 and 2000, there’s a good chance the rightful winner was denied the Oval Office. That’s nearly 4 percent of the time. The margin of error of a phone poll would create a higher likelihood the right person wins.

Voting is a cherished institution in this country, but we never got it right. Stuffed ballot boxes are a tradition, and crooked polls have long cooked the numbers. With a phone poll, the Democrats and Republicans can listen in on each call to ensure everything is on the up-and-up. Whoever orchestrates the polls can take measures to ensure respondents remain anonymous. If you get “the call,” your rights would be secure.

Elements that have made phone polls inaccurate would be remedied, too. Usually when Gallup or Zogby gets a prediction wrong, it’s because individuals of a certain viewpoint are predisposed to tell the pollster to mind her own business. The result is an over-reporting of support for the opposition. Those citizens, when their response has actual repercussions, would open up with the name of their candidate of choice.

Such a switch would also have psychological effects on the populace that would improve the quality of election discourse. Say you’d only need to call 600 voters to accurately determine the wishes of Illinois. Citizens would become more invested in learning about platforms and policies because their opinion, if they got called, would actually matter. At the same time, the candidates would fight cleaner, because there would no longer be a need to scare people to the polls with attack ads and “get out” the vote. The vote would instead “come in.”

Like most issues, there is more to phone poll voting than what I’ve presented here. But it’s a workable option, one that would lead to more accurate results and smarter voters. Going to the polls is old hat. It’s time to bring the polls to us.

Counterpoint:  Save democracy and resist the change

 by Dan Streib

At first blush, national polling seems like a great idea. With our all-too-human ballot counters, our current system of electing presidents has always been at great risk for miscounts. The fact is, in our country’s current electoral process, potential acts of fraud and incompetence can go largely unchecked.

In allowing anonymous telephone responses to be monitored by anyone willing to check, national polling goes a long way to remedy these problems. But the question proponents of this idea seem unwilling to ask is this: are new and unexpected problems created by this measure?

The answer is an unequivocal yes.

With voting, only those who wish to vote actually vote. With polling, respondents do indeed have an option to pass, but some may feel compelled to answer. It would be like forcibly placing somebody into a voting booth and saying “vote!” Reactions of different people to the pressure of the “which president” phone call would have to be somehow tested in a study. This, however, is difficult to do without first implementing the system.

Despite numerous complaints by voters about voting not really making a difference, one has to imagine a similarly frustrated citizen confronted with the possibility of not even getting to directly influence the selection of our president! The thought train would go something like this: “If I might not get called, then why on earth would I waste my time watching the news. What are the chances of them calling me, anyway?”

Thus, we have more uninformed poll respondents. Combine that problem with the first, and we’ll still have a better sampling of the entire country’s wishes. Problem is, the entire country’s opinion would no longer matter much, anyway - the nation would be more apathetic and uninformed than it is now.

And honestly, if polling succeeded without the aforementioned problems of inaccurate samples and increasing voter apathy - meaning that random samplings better measured the entire country’s wishes - the best it could do would be to closely mimic the effect of an undesirable compulsory vote.

In a compulsory vote, those who don’t care about voting have to vote in the elections anyway. This hurts the spirit of the vote.

Think about it this way: when you were younger and were forced to clean up your room, did you ever do a good job?

Honestly, even with a possible punishment awaiting a job poorly done, most kids did only the minimum to meet their parents’ standards. Yet if a kid personally likes having a clean room or is rewarded by having friends over, the young one will accomplish the task of giving his room that sparkling shine with gusto and bravado!

That’s the benefit of freedom. We complain about voter apathy, but at least we let those who wish to contribute to the electoral process have a method of input unimpeded by those who could care less.

So do Americans truly want to enact a system that, at its best, resembles compulsory voting? No, we don’t. And do we want to risk the other drawbacks of inaccurate samples and increasing voter apathy? Definitely not.

But on second thought, this measure does indeed deserve to be put on the ballot. With all those who don’t like to vote voting against it, we’ll have the highest voter turnout in years.