TOWARD VOTING AS A POSITIVE PLEASURE

"ELECTRONIC technology seems to have abolished time and space. Computers calculate inventories, bank balances and rocket orbits instantaneously, thousands of miles away from their "clients." Culture is transistorized and education telemetered. Tomorrow or the day after, according to Canada's Marshall McLuhan, the most provocative scientific prophet around, people will be able to perform their jobs or shop via television from their homes (if they and their wives can stand it, that is). Despite such present or potential miracles, the business of voting in America--the most important business in a democracy--is slow, cumbersome and primitive. Says CBS President Frank Stanton, who has made voting reform a personal crusade: "If we ran our factories, conducted our communications and nurtured our health at the same rate of scientific and technical advance as we conduct our political affairs, we would still be taking weeks to make a pair of shoes, delivering the mail by Pony Express, and treating pneumonia by bloodletting."

From Paper to Electronics

One trouble is restrictive registration. Most states have lengthy residence requirements before an otherwis eligible voter can cast his ballot in a national election--Mississippi being the worst, with two years. Many states also require unreasonably early registration; in Texas, it is necessary to pay a poll tax by Feb. 1, if one wants to be able to vote in November. Almost everywhere the voter is caught in a vortex of filling in forms and signing registration books. Many of these practices stem from a time when American communities were isolated; in mobile America, the system is clearly outdated. An estimated 8,000,000 Americans were unable to vote in 1960 because of state residency requirements; they could have made a crucial difference in that election, which John Kennedy won by a scant 113,000 votes.

Even after the citizen has managed to register, voting itself is at best a bother and at worst an ordeal. Polling places are almost always overcrowded, badly organized, requiring long waits. Way back in 1634, Massachusetts switched from voice voting to paper ballots. Today, most Massachusetts precincts still use paper, and so do a majority of the nation's other 173,000 precincts, despite the fact that electronic progress has already bypassed even the familiar automatic voting machine.

A growing number of groups and individuals have become concerned with reforming all this, including a special Commission on Registration and Voting Participation, which filed a report to President Johnson. There is increasing pressure to cut residence requirements out, or at least cut them down. A pioneer in making registration easier is Idaho, which has county canvassers who go from house to house enrolling voters. Result: more than 80% of Idahoans cast ballots in presidential elections, against a scandalous national average of slightly over 60% .

Many feel that registration reform is not enough, and that the whole voting process should be overhauled with the help of electronics. Observes the chairman of Chicago's Board of Elections: "Everyone with the least bit of ingenuity is inventing something to simplify voting." In several places electronic voting systems have been tried, with remarkable results.

>Orange County, Calif., used paper ballots for its primary elections of June 1964. It took some 10,000 workers about 36 hours to complete the count, at a cost of $600,000. But by the time of the November elections, Orange County had installed something called the Coleman Vote Tally System. The voter still marks a paper ballot, but uses a special fluorescent ink. He drops the ballot into a box, which is later taken by officials to a central counting place, where its contents are fed into a computer that announces the results within moments. A control experiment was conducted with the help of a county grand jury, which was handed a quantity of ballots that took 21 hours of counting. By the electronic method, those same ballots were counted accurately in ten seconds. The electronic system enabled Orange County to cut its costs from $1.22 to 600 per voter.

> Contra Costa County, Calif., also began using the Coleman system in November 1964. Despite some bugs and errors, it reduced the number of precincts from 1,164 to 720, election personnel from 7,384 to 2,880, the election payroll from $127,797 to $73,870, and the man-hours required to tabulate the vote from 52,573 to 5,781--even while the total vote rose by more than 15% over the last previous election. >Fulton County (Atlanta), Ga., is one of several that has used a nifty little number called the IBM Votomatic. Invented by Dr. Joseph P. Harris, a retired University of California political science professor, it weighs a mere 6 Ibs. and costs $185 per unit (against $1,800 for the present automatic voting machines, which, because of their size, are also far more expensive to store). Votomatic works by electronic punch card. As with the Coleman system, the precinct ballots must eventually be taken to a centralized computer headquarters.

By Phone to the Franchise

These systems only begin to suggest the possibilities. Voting, says Richard Scammon of Washington's Governmental Affairs Institute, "ought to be as simple as making a telephone call"--and the phone might, in fact, be used for that purpose. Moreover, voters may some day cast their ballots via two-way TV without leaving their living room.

Apart from electronics, CBS's Stanton urges that Election Day be made a national legal holiday so as to "free thousands to vote at their convenience rather than attempt to squeeze it in before work or at lunchtime or on the way home" (on the other hand, cynics argue', it might free thousands to go to the races rather than to the polling booth). Stanton would have all the nation's polling places open at the same time, remain in operation for a full 24 hours, and shut down simultaneously, thereby doing away with the time lag between the East and West coasts.

Stanton also argues for making registration a responsibility of the Federal Government instead of the states, with each voter carrying a permanent registration number, much the way Americans already have Social Security, draft and credit numbers. Says he: "In the future, electronic scanners at polling places will very probably be able to identify voters, or prevent repeats and unauthorized ballots, by a split-second survey of a voter's thumb."

Such visions still evoke considerable skepticism. Democratic National Chairman John Bailey agrees that voting should be made easier, but he believes, as does his Republican opposite number, Ray Bliss, that the main problem is not mechanical but lies in the welter of state regulations. Many people oppose federal control of registration; although the U.S. Constitution is somewhat vague on the point, long tradition has left the function to the states. Some politicians fear that electronic voting will do away with patronage jobs for local election officials and generally loosen their control of the precincts. But the majority of political leaders would probably agree that some form of electronic voting is a good idea and inevitable.

There will always remain some citizens who just don't care enough to exercise their franchise. If voting is a right of U.S. citizenship, so is nonvoting. But that is no excuse for archaic procedures. After all, Trinidad and Tobago recently instituted a national registration system, installed voting machines, and drew 88% of the electorate to the polls. It seems hardly proper for the U.S. to lag behind democracy in the tropics.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.