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Attempts to Repeal Straight-Ticket Device in Indiana Get Attention — 30 Comments

  1. Leave it to the government to want to ban one of the easiest ways of voting, especially for seniors.

  2. Using a straight-ticket device doesn’t really make voting easier. It encourages voters to overlook the ballot questions and the nonpartisan offices on the ballot. So in that sense, the device makes voting more difficult for voters to realize what parts of the ballot they have failed to see.

  5. Richard Winger – some people don’t care about ballot questions and nonpartisan races. Straight ticket makes voting easier for those people who only care about partisan races, know which party they support and want to spend less time and effort to make that support known.

    It would be even easier if all voting was by party without any “hot or not” school election style voting on candidate’s looks, name recognition, charisma, lying promises, whether or not they already hold the office, or in many cases voters judging people they never even heard of based strictly on whose name sounds better to them or is listed first etc.

    Btw why do I need to connect to a vpn to comment?

  6. The AZ 666 SPAMBOT still needs to answer the IFO QUESTIONS and Richard Winger still needs to stop enabling the murderous left’s assassination politics by allowing those questions to be posted again if he keeps allowing the spambot to keep spamming its nonsense about Trump being a “tyrant.”

    Unfortunately, neither of those will happen.

    Winger’s stated reason for deleting those logical questions is that it’s “unpleasant” to mention the things actual tyrants do, including having people’s organs harvested against their will while they are alive without anaesthesia.

  7. If Trump was actually a tyrant, Winger would have long since had to remove comments about Trump being a “tyrant” or had his site shut down (and probably gone to jail and or been executed to boot).

  8. Tyrants deserve to be assassinated, and frequently do get assassinated. There have already been at least two attempts to assassinate Liberator, Peacemaker, Savior Trump. Allowing the constant bot spam about Trump being a tyrant and deleting the questions which show how ridiculous that lie is amounts to encouraging more such assassination attempts.

  13. @Michael Skaggs,

    That sounds pretextual, just like when the New Mexico SOS tried to implement straight ticket voting claiming it would save veterans from toppling over while voting. A simpler solution would be to provide a chair.

    Better solution only hold elections for one office at a time.

  14. What do you have against making voting easier for seniors, busy people, and people who just want it to be easy? For many people, voting is a marginal activity they can do without. If you waste their time by trying to force them to vote about issues and offices they don’t know or care about or choose between candidates they know nothing about, they are way less likely to vote than if you let them just vote quickly and easily about the one thing they do in fact care about. Why should voting only be for political nerds like me and y’all?

    Also: everything Ifo and Ofi say +1000!

  15. “Better solution only hold elections for one office at a time.”

    Biases the outcome towards people with a lot of time on their hands (or campaigns money/organization for juicing turnout).

    Better to have one election per year, everyone votes in person by party – standing count or voice vote, on the record.

  16. There should only be straight ticket voting. Candidates names should never even be mentioned at all. Doing away with presidential electors names on the ballot was a good first step.

  18. I support abolishing the AZ spambot and I support abolishing ballots! I support White Power and I support Trump!

  19. @HG,

    Your argument is pretext. If you actually favor Straight Ticket voting it is not because it is “easier” for the elderly such as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or “busy people” or “lazy people”.

  20. I favor making voting less complicated, making politics and government less important in our lives, and requiring less focus to knowledgeably participate, as well as demanding fewer resources to participate in and administer from all parties involved.

    Furthermore I’d like it to be as localized as possible and as transparent and hard to cheat or game as possible. Anything which makes vote counting harder makes vote fraud easier.

    Lastly I’d like to limit participation to men of sound mind and body, long term residents of the local area, married fathers, gainfully employed or independently wealthy, with substantial community ties and leadership positions, not senile, property owners, capable and willing to pay nontrivial poll taxes, heads of families with a history in the local area, veterans still active in reserves/civil defense/militia/neighborhood watch. In other words stakeholders.

  21. Joe Biden and Donald Trump aren’t the best examples. They are surrounded by people whose job can include researching all the candidates for them or they may already know a lot of them personally or know people who know them. Biden is probably a party line voter who might appreciate a straight ticket to make it faster and easier. Trump may or may not be.

  22. Straight ticket is a good incremental step to voting only by party without any candidate names.

  23. @HG,

    Straight ticket voting is more complicated, less transparent, and subject to cheating and fraud. As you might know, voting in America was originally by write-in ballot. The state should not control elections in a republic. But soon it was determined that machine-printed ballots were valid. A piece of paper that says “George Washington” is just as valid whether the voter scrawled the words, or a printing press printed the words, so long as the voter deposited the ballot paper in the ballot box. Political parties began printing the ballots. Or a newspaper might print endorsements. A newspaper might print ballots with “known” candidates. But you can trust the local fish wrapper to omit the names of candidates you might favor such as “Kamala Harris” (this is just an example, you might favor someone else).

    But voters were free to edit ***their*** ballot. Cross out a name and write-in your choice. Party-printed ballots could be used to defraud. Print a picture of an eagle in or rooster in red or blue, and maybe the name of the presidential candidate, and then insert some imposters for other offices.

    When Texas first adopted the Australian ballot (government-printed ballots), each party nominated their candidates. One ballot was printed for each party. For each office, the party nominee would be printed along with a blank space to write-in another candidate for the office. A voter would take the ballots to a voting booth, select one and edit it to their liking, and discard the others. If they did not like the congressional candidate of the party, cross it out and write-in another name.

    The next election a single ballot was printed with party nominees in columns. A voter could go down a column and cross off the name of each candidate they wanted to vote for (this was simpler than crossing off the names of all candidates you did not want). Or instead of marking horizontal lines, you could mark a vertical line down the entire column, leaving gaps if they wanted to skip a candidate (subject to interpretation as to where the line terminated).

    See the 1952 Texas election where Allan Shivers ran as governor on both Republican and Democratic tickets. A voter could vote for native-son Dwight Eisenhower and continue down the “Republican” column, or vote for the tyrant Harry S. Truman who was stealing Texas Oil and continue down the “Democratic” column.

    After Texas added voting boxes next to each name, they also added a straight-ticket box at the top of party column. The boxes were numbered, so a voters might be encouraged to vote “1 and Done” or “2 and Through”. Voters could override the party choice for individual candidates.

    But Republican leaders knew that the Democratic election officials would go down the ballot and mark candidates for the offices a voter had skipped. It’s hard to be convincing if you draw a circle around a name and write “I really WANT Smith instead of Hoover”, but trivial to X Smith if neither was marked.

    Other voters might mark an “emphasis vote” to indicate they really liked a particular candidate. They might even believe it counted double.

    When electronic voting machines were introduced, they were programmed to force a voter to scroll through the entire ballot. You could select a straight ticket, but then the machine would indicate which candidate you prospectively had voted for. If re-selected a candidate the vote would be erased (standard GUI practice for check boxes). Machines were programmed to prevent over votes and discourage undervotes. If “your” party did not have a candidate for a particular office, you would be informed that you had not voted. You could go back to the race and be given an opportunity to vote for an unopposed Democratic.

    All and all straight-ticket voting is actually complex and confusing and subject to fraud and cheating.

  24. No, it’s far easier to count a single straight ticket vote than a bunch of votes in individual races. It would be simpler still if there was only straight ticket voting and no candidate voting. That eliminates any of the complexity you mentioned. It’s even better if it’s voice vote, on the record, publicly broadcast and video archived. Anyone can then check in real time or any point thereafter if all votes were correctly recorded and counted.

  25. @HG,

    You are advocating for some other system than the Straight Ticket system used in Indiana (and formerly in Texas). I don’t know what State you reside in or have resided in. Your concern for ease of voting by the elderly is pretextual.

  26. Yes, I’m advocating for an even better system, but the availability of a straight ticket is still better than not having it available, for many reasons, including that one. What state or country I reside in is besides the point since I’m discussing things that are applicable to any of them.

    The states I’ve spent the most time in over the course of my life are Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, in that order, if that somehow matters. 99% of the time I’m within 50 miles of the other two from whichever one of the three I happen to be in. I’ve voted in all three at different times. I’m currently a Georgia voter, and the residences where I have been a Florida and Alabama voter are within an hour drive.

    Is there something about that which is relevant here? Praytell.

  27. @HG,

    You appeared to be unfamiliar with how straight ticket voting actually works. Alabama has straight ticket voting, but you might not have been overly active when you lived there, or they might not have used voting machines. Did you know any of the Carters (Jimmy, Billy, etc.)?

  28. I’ve met Jimmy Carter, but always voted against him every time he ran for anything. Lester Maddox was a good friend of my father’s and my political mentor. I always voted for him when he ran for anything, including a write in for president. A lot of people I knew voted for Carter in 1976, but not in 1980. They told me I’d been correct about him all along.

    I also worked on the George Wallace presidentiao campaigns including before I could even vote. I didn’t find out he had been LARPing the political positions he held during his political peak in 1962-72 until afterwards.

  29. @HG,

    It has been suggested that straight ticket voting contributed to Tommy Tuberville’s defeat of Doug Jones in the 2020 Senate election. Tuberville defeated Jones 60% to 40%, but Jones actually ran well ahead of Biden in the state (there were Trump-Jones voters).

    Straight ticket would not have been relevant in the 2017 special election in which Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore, and there would have been other issues there.

  30. Thanks for pointing out yet another reason why straight ticket devices are better than not having them.

    My dad met Lester Maddox when father was a student at Georgia Tech after coming home from the war. Father used to be a regular at Mr. Maddox’s restaurants, Lester’s grill and the Pickrick, in those year’s. The pickrick opened in 1947.

    Later they were political allies. We’d visit the Maddoxes when we were up in Atlanta and they would visit us on trips to the southwestern corner of Georgia where we lived.

    I’m familiar with voting straight ticket. It’s easier and less complicated than voting in a bunch of different races.

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