Elections: Improving the Voting System

I read an article by the New York Times that explains many of the major flaws in our voting system today.

Recently there have been fights in Pennsylvania about voter identification requirements and if the point of them is to stop fraud or simply to keep the minority and the poor from being able to vote. In New York, a new design of the ballots that has been thought of as very confusing and hard to understand has now been passed to be used in this years election. In Florida, 140,000 voters were registered in four other states as well as Florida. 60,000 of them were also registered in North and South Carolina. Possible changes that could help are impartial election administration, better voter list maintenance, uniform photo ID requirements and paper trails for electronic voting machines. Voting registration rules used to exclude immigrant or blacks from voting. The registration rules can make the difference between a victory and a defeat when the election is close. Because of technical mistakes on the forms or the envelopes there were 400,000 ballots rejected in the 2008 and 2012 general elections combined.

Vocabulary: Bipartisan: of or involving the agreement or cooperation of two political parties that usually oppose each other's policies.

While reading this article I realized that there are many simple solutions to these problem that will make the election more accurate. I believe that every citizen of the United States should have the right to vote. Minority and the poor should still be able to register to vote. The forms for the ballot should be clear, easy to read, and easy to understand. Everyone should be able to access information that explains the ballot so that no one will be confused and have questions when they are filling out the ballot. That obviously wouldn't solve all of the problems but 400,000 people is too big of a number that could and should be reduced.  

"Voter ID Issue Is One of Many for U.S. Voting Systems - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/us/voting-systems-plagues-go-far-beyond-identification.html>.