In the last couple weeks prior to the election, I didn’t miss many opportuntities to encourage people to go to our website and check their voter registration status on line as well as look at their specimen ballot.  I saw pretty early in the voting process in our office that some voters were taking quite a while to cast ballots because of its length and complexity.

Well, we were somewhat successful, but nothing like I hoped.  On Monday, November 3rd and Election Day, November 4th we had over  8,000 visistors who checked their voter registration status on our website.  That works out to over 10% of the people who voted on November 4th.

On the other hand, the next step of viewing your ballot to better prepare for the election was taken by only 659 voters during the entire 40 day window when they were available.  I’ve broken down the list by total number of voters in a precinct viewing their ballot (first was City of Champaign 38 with 20) and highest percentage of registered voters viewing their ballot (Raymond with 1.9%)

Looking at your ballot prior to going to vote is a critical step in becoming an informed voter.  Many people were surprised at the issues that were presented to them on election day.  Even those who knew that an issue was going to be on the ballot were often surprised by the complex language of the question.

We’ve already decided that in future elections we’ll make the view your ballot feature a one step instead of two step procedure.  We’ll continue to track this data because it gives us a sense of how we are doing in our role of facilitating voter education.

I’ll have more research later on this, but I’ve been reading numerous stories about lines at the polling places.  What never seems to come up is just how long people believe it is appropriate to have to wait.  Of course, we’d all love to zip into our polling place (or any place of business) and not have to wait.  In reality, we understand that we’ll have to wait at least a little while for many things.  But just how long is too long?

Here are some articles about lines.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4068/are_long_lines_the_new_poll_tax/

http://electionlawblog.org/archives/cat_fixing_election_administration.html