two thoughts

[fox]

1. Here is a commercial for Centrum vitamins that declares, "There's complete - and then there's most complete." Fail. 'Complete' is an absolute - either a thing is complete or it isn't - but usually I don't fuss about such things. Only lately this commercial has been driving me bats.

2. Help me out, legal types: would it create more problems than it solved to just have the damn polls open for twenty-four hours?

Comments

[twistedchick]

Centrum commercials have been driving me nuts for years. Their formula does not provide 100 percent of the miminum daily requirement of *anything* -- and the MDR is the level below which there's a danger of encountering vitamin deficiency illnesses. Not enough of anything, not enough of everything.

[thefourthvine]

I am not a legal type, but I can tell you one huge problem it would create in my state to have the polls open for 24 hours: poll workers. We already have a huge poll worker shortage, to the degree that government employees are heavily, heavily pressured to "volunteer" to work the polls. BB is a library manager, and every election she gets the same message: two of your people MUST volunteer for poll work! And of course none of them does, and here is why:

Polls in our state are open 12 (ish) hours, and you cannot do poll work in shifts. The same team has to work the entire time, so that discrepancies, etc. can be limited and more easily traced and so on. (I think having such tired poll workers creates problems, but, yeah, I can see the tracing thing.) They have to work even longer than that, actually, because of counting and cleanup and so on. The people who work for BB are college students who have classes, or parents who have to pick their kids up from daycare, or folks who cannot handle such a long work day. And even the few people who are none of the above don't want to do it, because that is a fucking long day trapped with people who you don't know and random voters.

Having the polls open 24 hours a day would mean dealing with creating shifts. Which might be a good thing (except apparently this is something they cannot do) if they divided the day into 6 hour shifts, but they wouldn't, and even if they did, they'd have to find FOUR TIMES as many poll workers. My state couldn't do that without a lot more money. We do not have this money.

[fox]

Yeah, it would absolutely require shifts of poll workers - which I don't think would be a disaster, really, though I take the point about tracing discrepancies and so on; I say overlapping shifts should ameliorate that, because as you note having the same people on for a whole day of voting doesn't exactly mean there are no issues ever. My thinking was that 24 solid hours of voting time would solve a lot of the problems we hear time after time about a polling place not opening on time or the machines not being working on time and last-minute court battles about whether or not to keep the polls open longer (as we just had in DC yesterday, though the guy agitating for extended voting hours appears to have won even without them) - a half-hour of technical difficulties or nobody-gave-me-the-keys would, I'd think, make a lot less of an impact on a 24-hour period than a 12-hour one. (Plus it would enfranchise night-shift workers.) I don't know the solution to the shortage of poll workers, though. :-/

[sneezer222]

In our state the solution to poll worker shortages is to make elections mail in ballot. I hate it.

[fox]

Yeah, I don't think that's so good. I mean - I think no-questions-asked absentee voting is a good idea (that is, I haven't been convinced that it's not), but requiring everyone to mail in doesn't please me. I can see where there are people who like being able to vote early and get it done with, but aside from all the other risks involved (security? what?), it does lead to the kind of thing that happened to people last time around who had already cast their primary ballots before John Edwards got out of the race. Boo.

[dorothy1901]

Only lately this commercial has been driving me bats.

For me, it's the cable channel that advertises itself as having "less commercials." Did the word "fewer" disappear from the English language when my back was turned?

[fox]

Anh, I'm okay with that. They do have less commercials, by quantity - they also probably have fewer commercials by number, but the distinction is fine as far as I'm concerned.