Voting Access – “Our Journey Is Not Complete”

Voting access. In his second Inaugural Address, President Obama said “Our Journey is not complete” until long lines to vote are history.

On election night in November President Obama referenced the disgusting status quo of long lines on election day.
“We have to fix that”, the President said.
Today, in his second inaugural address, the President again told the country that he finds our current state of voter access in the United States to be unacceptable. He included exercising our voting rights as part of a list of important issues that still face our country.
“Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”
Many of the problems the President spoke of are not easily solved. When it comes to improving voter access, the things that block progress are in some ways easy to defeat. In other ways it will be more difficult.
Technologically, the answer to ending 12 hour lines to vote is easy: Provide citizens with the option to cast their vote online. Online voting can provide our elections with better security, auditability, transparency, and verifiability than our current antiquated paper based election administration does. It can do all this at lower cost. Online elections in the private sector and for political elections in other countries prove this every day.
Without an entrenched resistance to automating much of our election process, solving the problems of waiting in line for hours and low voter turnout is easily done.
Unfortunately, with such resistance firmly in place, with an elections administration industry and culture that firmly rejects the modernization of our voting as threatening to their status quo, completing the journey toward easy voting access in the United States will not be easy. It will require a rejection of fear-based rationale and a rejection of the position that our nation, in the second decade of the 21st century, should accept 12 hour lines- accept dysfunction – as the norm.
When it comes to voter access we must complete the journey, we must Cyber the Vote.