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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: tejek who wrote (129218)11/30/2000 1:18:20 PM
From: stribe30  Read Replies (1) of 1570108
 
Ted: I know this is kicking you when you're down.. but did I mention that most Canadians knew the results of their election an hour and a half after the polling booths closed? :)

My sincere suggestions to make sure this situation doesnt repeat itself.

1) Establish a federal non-partisan body to oversee elections (ie we have Elections Canada up here.. run by the Chief Electoral Officer) and establish a national and uniform standard for voting... ie One ballot that is the same in all 50 states... It also arbitrates any potential disputes candidates might have over ballots, recounts etc. This would avoid the charges of conflict of interest that Florida officials face.

2) Remove the machines out of the equation. In Canada, hand counting is all that takes place.. On the ballot itself, you have the names of the Candidates to the left, as well as what party they represent (if any) and a big circle on the right, where you mark an X in with pencil. Very simple to do, for new voters and elderly ones as well. (Obviously once those results are sent into the regional electoral officer and they get posted.. the networks will then take those individual polling stations counts and feed them into their computers for them to number-crunch.)

3) Pass a law or at least get the networks to voluntarily agree to not use exit polling to base their projections/estimates/predictions on. Exit polling is not used in Canada by the major networks. They solely depend on the raw data coming in from the polls in each riding (er.. precinct for you guys) and calculate probabilities on remaining population in the rest of the riding, the history of the voting in the riding for 1 party in the other, etc etc.. I see American network execs claim they cant figure out why people voted for who without exit polling.. thats funny.. because the Canadian networks seem to be able to do it. (perhaps the Cdn guys use it for that purpose but not to predict elections with)

4) Have staggered poll open and close times nationally so that they all end at the same time. In most cases.. you will not have as close an election as this one.. and its important I think that the Western USA not feel like their vote doesnt count because the networks have declared a winner from Eastern results. An option to this or even an addition to this (Canada had a combination of both) would be to impose regional news blackouts on the election results until that region closes their polls.. So.. for example.. if the East time zone has a uniform time of polls closing at 8 pm.. and the central time zone area all has their polls close at 8 pm central -9pm east - the people in the central time zone will not know the results coming in from the East's counting until their polls close.. Do this nationally across time zones.

I believe some or all of these implemented will prevent this stalemate from happenning again.
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