Standing in line

Many decades ago, when I was an undergrad at UCLA, the campus switched to a computerized class registration system. This was in the era of mainframe computers and punch cards.

At the time, late 1960s, UCLA was a campus of roughly 30,000 students. I don’t know how many of us were standing in line, holding our registration cards, but it seemed like most of the student population. Fortunately it was a sunny day, and we were young, so spending hours in line waiting to register was not such a bad way to spend time. Shoot the breeze, flirt with the girls, soak up the sun.

Fast forward to the 2008 election. In many states voters are standing in line for three, four, five, six, even eight hours to vote. And those were the early voters. What will tomorrow be like? You’ve probably seen the images on television. Your fellow citizens standing in line are not, in general, young students with nothing else to do. They are parents, workers, the elderly—many of them probably taking unpaid time off from their jobs.

It makes me furious. How can we preach the benefits of democracy to other countries if we can’t practice it ourselves? Self-delusion and hypocrisy are not attractive attributes. We don’t torture people—except when we do. We have the greatest democracy in the world—except many voters find it difficult or impossible to vote and not everyone who votes is sure that his or her vote will be counted.

I am sure that there are lots of ways to solve the voting problem. Here’s one off the cuff pre-breakfast idea:

Figure out a way to reward (tax credits, financial assistance, something) every city which enables voters to cast their votes in one hour or less. Maybe $2.00 per voter. So in a city with 300,000 voters, this would be a huge incentive. And please, don’t tell me how expensive this would be. Seven hundred billion to bail out banks—we can come up with a few bucks for fair and efficient voting.

Or if you’re in a punitive mood, the opposite. In places where voters are forced to stand in line for hours, start the meter ticking and fine the responsible parties at the state and local level. Said officials might come up with creative solutions to this problem if they were being fined $1,000 per hour for every hour above one that voters had to wait in line.

Really, we can do better. No more excuses. Fish or cut bait,