SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Daily Northwestern reports
The Illinois Senate voted 38-18 on [November 16] to override Gov. Bruce Rauner's veto of an automatic voter registration bill.
The bill [...] would automatically register voters who are seeking a new or updated license, or who are seeking other services from state departments such as Human Services or Healthcare and Family Services.
[...]The only two things a citizen should need to vote is being 18 years old and a citizen.
[...]The bill received bipartisan support when it passed through the House by a vote of 86-30 and the Senate with a vote of 42-16.
[...]To fully override Rauner's veto, the Illinois House will also have to vote to override, but it will not back in session until Nov. 29.
More information on Automatic Voter Registration can be found here.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Monday November 21 2016, @02:56AM
No, you missed something. We don't "volunteer", in Minnesota we're paid. $13.30/hr in my city (registration specialists and the head judges for each precinct get a little more; pay isn't uniform in the state and we're probably toward the high end, some places might be as low as minimum wage, but rural areas are more likely to pay mileage too). There is a place on the timesheet to check if you don't want the money, but I've never seen anyone check it. We have training classes (also paid). We swear an oath. Ok, nobody makes a living at it, not with one and a half day's work a year, but we are paid. I do understand that some states are too cheap to pay workers, which sounds crazy to me. Then you're more at risk of staffing with people who have other reasons to work for free, like an ax to grind or they're getting "reimbursed" by a candidate or party (the 95 year olds aren't so much the problem, it's too grueling for them anyhow.. unless you're one 'o them young whippersnappers who thinks everybody with grey hair is 95).
I'd agree that voter registration should probably be a paid job, especially if, as here, you can vote two minutes after registering. At the polling place I work, that's me. About 10% of our voters register on election day, though a lot of those are people who skipped voting in the last couple of elections, or moved (even to a different apartment in the same building), and need to re-register. About 2% of those trying to register were not registered because they didn't qualify.
The judges do tend to skew toward retired people, since those are the ones who don't have day jobs (or be taking care of children), at least until we can make election day a national holiday.
Volunteer fire departments might be a good analogy. Or church rummage sales. Staffing for events that happen rarely, where a full-time paid staff doesn't make sense.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @01:23PM
Huh, thats pretty cool. Interesting way to run an election. I imagine operations are quite different when its a trained job vs all volunteer.
Likely a part of the reason we only have volunteers is we have the expensive (for their time, decades ago) optical scan readers. When its plugged in do the lights turn on, now does it eat ballots, if not call support, now you're fully trained on the mechanical aspects of the job. They spend a lot more time memorizing streets so they can instantly tell you your district and find you in the registration binder, and of course ballot handling processes are probably very formal and complicated. Do you all have fancy electronic voting machines? I would imagine every $ spent on fancy machines is a $ not spent on election workers. The extreme of that would be people voting at home over the internet.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:49AM
We've got both. The machines (there is one per voting place), stuff your ballot in and it reads and counts it. If it notices a screwup (e.g. an overvote, where you checked too many boxes) it tells you and offers to give the ballot back so you can get another and do it right. (If you decline, it voids that particular election, but counts the rest, some voters don't want to deal with redoing it.) It's got some kind of (proprietary, boo) computer and optical scanner, and can figure out which side is up. For a precinct where there were about 1500 voters in the recent election, there were about 15 workers, all paid. Most of the jobs aren't rocket science, and don't take much training (everybody gets a 2 hour class and a handbook to study). Registration specialist gets an extra hour of class, and I think the head judges get extra. Being supervisor types, they have some work before the election as well. They try to return workers to the same precinct in successive elections (I've been doing that one for the last 6) so there's a core of workers with experience who know each other.
For streets, we've got binders that index all the streets in the precinct, and tell what range of house numbers. To vote, people who say they're already registered need to know their name (signin judge looks it up) and address (ditto). If they get those both right and are in the book, then they sign in (attesting that they're of age, live at the address, not incompetent, etc.) and get a ballot.
I don't know what it all costs, the numbers seem buried in various budgets. In 2012 they reported the election cost about $7500 per polling place (about 1800 registered voters), covering rent, machines, staffing, materials, etc. So, a little over $4 per registered voter, maybe $6 per vote (turnout varies year to year, and primary to general).
Like I said, in other towns or rural areas the details may be different, and the pay scale definitely varies. But state law requires paying at least the minimum wage.