Ohio Voting Statistics

[yesthattom]

It takes 5 minutes per person to vote. Therefore, 12 people can vote per voting machine per hour. The voting booths are open about 14 hours in Ohio. That’s 168 people if the machines run non-stop. Considering the bursty nature of when people arrive, 100 people per machine per day is reasonable.

Black neighborhoods with 1000 registered voters and a likely turn-out of 800 people often found themselves with 2 machines, even when they had 5 machines for the primary. That’s nearly 60% that doesn’t have the opportunity to vote. (464 out of 800).

We can not claim to stand for Democracy in other parts of the world as long as states are allowed to disenfranchise voters like this.

Comments

[emmett-the-sane.livejournal.com]

Do you (either of you) have statistical rather than anecdotal evidence of the mean voting time?

Personally, I take more like 10 minutes. So I'm probably skewing any statistic. :)

I'd also imagine that in lower class neighborhoods (with different reading levels and such), the time might be different.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Here are some numbers that provide a statistical look into the way it can work, but the situation is still anecdotal in that it covers my experience only.

New Jersey EDs are (or were, at the time I weas heavily involved) supposed to have up to 1000 registered voters, and will occasionally have more before a local redistriciting is done. Districts with fewer than 700 voters were assigned one machine; districts with 700-1000 were assigned two. (That's for General Elections. For Primaries and other elections, they all got one machine.)

Among my functions as municiapl Democratic Chair and/or Campaign Manager (depending on the year) was to go around to all the polls in my town (9 sites covering 13 districts; it's more now) and check in with the challengers, seeing if there were any problems (and sometimes collecting lists of people who had already voted, so we wouldn't bother them and take unnecessary time trying to get them to the polls later in the day). Our districts were typically in the 600-1000 voter range.

In non-Presidential years and in non-General Elections, most of the time there was no waiting and nobody had to wait more than a couple of minutes. In the morning rush in Presidential years, the waits would typically be 0-7 minutes. In the evening rush, waits of up to 15 minutes were not unusual, and with especially slow turnout (or especially bunched voter times) the wait would occasionally get up to 40 minutes.

As a politically involved kid, I had heard of an election in town where the wait got over an hour at one poll because something went wrong. I never experienced that once I was old enough to vote myself.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

When I wrote "and with especially slow turnout" I meant "and with especially slow poll-workers".

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

And none of this has anything to do with Ohio. Don't fucking say I don't know what I'm talking about when you've never voted in Ohio, or heard the stories from people in Ohio.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have both statistical and anecdotal evidence. The statistics are in the 102-page report published by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff. The anecdotal evidence is in the stories told by the Ohioans I met in D.C. this week.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I easily spend 5 minutes or more in the booth, when I don't vote absentee. I take my time to make sure everything is aligned the way I want, read over all the referenda more than once, and am careful to make sure my little hole-punch was clean for each race and referendum. It might be faster on an electronic voting terminal, but not hugely so.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, are people who rush in, vote the party line (especially in places where there's one big lever for that), and live in states without referenda.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

You don't know what you are talking about.

There are OVER 100 decisions to be made on the Ohio ballet on Nov 2. You try doing that in 5 minutes!

(by the way, the 5 minute statistic is from the Ohio law. Everyone has a 5 minute max time in the booth).

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I think New Jersey and New York also allow 5 minutes. That doesn't mean more than a tiny handful actually take that long.

What counts as a "decision" here, and how many people are making all of them? If there are 100 lever-equivalent that could be pulled/marked/touched/whatever, that wouldn't be much different from a lot of NJ elections I've worked in. But in those cases, any one individual could only vote for a max of 30 or so.

The (unfortunate) thing is, most people don't vote on a myriad of puplic questions or for 24 judges, or whatever, unless they're voting stratight party line, which doesn't take much time.

[cos]

That depends a lot on where they're voting and what offices and questions there are to vote on, and on what kinds of voting equipment they're using.

In Broward County, FL, where I was a the election protection call center on election day, we got numerous calls from people who had to take a lot of time going through the process on computer voting machines that were very buggy. In many cases, people had to redo their whole ballot several times because they summary screens showed different votes than what they had selected.

In California, two of my friends filled out their absentee ballots while I was visiting them. It took at least ten minutes, because there were so many ballot questions to read.

Ohio used a variety of voting tech, in different counties, and I don't know what their ballots were like (how many candidates and questions). 5 minutes may be high, but perhaps the average was 3 minutes, or 2 - which is still long enough to support the basic point. Perhaps in the elections you've experienced, 30 minutes is the norm, but do you know the details about Ohio?

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

No, I don't know the Ohio details. And I am not claiming there was no problem in Ohio. I am claiming that to take the maximum allowed time and then to assume that everyone will take that time is something that we should all know better than to do.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

In Massachusetts, by law, "You have the right to remain in the voting booth for five minutes if there are other voters waiting and for 10 minutes if there are no other voters waiting." I've never actually seen someone take as long as five minutes in my town, though; I know I don't. Of course, we vote with pencil and paper -- if I were in a punch-card state again, I might spend that time reviewing all the little hanging chads :}

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

The Ohio voting machines had the new, very high-tech, very confusing user interfaces. For seniors these were very confusing.

People keep asking if I have any data. Yes, I just spent a day walking Ohio residents to various Senator's offices so they can tell their stories.

We also showed this video, which really helps people understand.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I saod it in a thread in my journal, but I think I should say it here, too. I think the work you are doing to hold Blackwell accountable is wonderful. Whatever I may think about scattershot approaches to political arguments, the argument needs to be made and you're one of the ones making it. Our democracy in in danger, and we can protect it only by making this kind of abuse harder in the future than it is now.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm in the process of going through a backlog of 200 emails I've gotten recently and I really appreciate this one. Thank you again.

paper ballots can save time

[cos]

There's a much better solution to all this than buying loads of extra complicated voting machines: Upgrade to paper ballots and optical scan. Set up the polling places such that people go into voting booths with paper ballots, fill them out, then go to a machine to feed the ballot in. That way, you're only limited by the amount of space you have for booths. People can take longer with their pieces of paper, and they still only need to occupy the machine (which is expensive) for a few seconds. You get 4 machines, assume 1 will fail and you still have 3, and that's more than enough for well a few thousand voters, as long as you have space for, say, 15 voting booths.