Editorial: This election puts life into democracy

   When poll workers arrived at the Community Center in Woodlot Park on Tuesday, there already were 40 or so voters lined up and waiting to cast their ballots.
   At the Kingston First Aid Squad, there were lines out the door and polling sites were reporting wait times of up to an hour for some voting districts.
   Similar stories were being reported around the state, as turnout for this year’s presidential election was expected to approach record numbers.
   According to New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Wells, 631,512 new voters were added to the state’s voter rolls — a 13.2 percent increase in the number of registered voters since the beginning of the year. And turnout, she says, was expected to reach 80 percent statewide. That’s a lot of voters, which is why many — especially those voting either before or after work — have been forced to stand in line far longer than they have in the past.
   And yet, the wait times are nothing compared to those reported in other states, like Florida, Georgia and Arizona where backups of more than eight hours were reported during early voting over the weekend.
   The backups, delays and various difficulties — badly designed ballots, questions about the security of electronic votes, registration issues, purges of voter rolls and alleged intimidation — scream out for modernization and transparency.
   FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for voting reforms, issued a report last week that questioned the efficiency and openness of the voting procedures in use in 10 so-called “swing states,” finding that the lack of “uniform standards for the conduct of elections” diminishes the credibility of the electoral process.
   The group found that the number of polling booths allocated from voting district to voting district in the swing states varied and was not tied to “a specific scientific formula.” Rather, election officials tended to base their decisions on “experience, past voter turnout, current voter registration, and precinct population,” but did not have a consistent rationale for “how they use such numbers to determine an effective allocation.”
   The result is long lines at many polling places, especially in urban areas.
   FairVote recommends policies that allow for “public input at every stage of the election process — from ballot design to poll booth allocation plans,” which it says “would lead to far greater credibility in the electoral process and could prevent serious oversights that impact voters.” There also needs to be a full analysis following the election that includes “quantitative measures tracking ease of voting (i.e. average time waiting in line, average time to cast a ballot, etc.)” that could lead to changes making it easier for people to register and vote and for them to be sure that their votes count.
   Voting is the American birthright, the best way we have to ensure that we have a say in how this nation is governed.
   ”Democracy,” Bill Moyers said Friday on “Bill Moyers’ Journal” on PBS, “this is still the most radical idea ever let loose in the world — that masses of people, so feared and loathed by monarchs of old, so distrusted by monied and political elites, should be charged with self-government, and get on with it, imperfectly, crudely, but with the idea of creating a prosperous society that leaves no one out. … It’s been at the heart of the American experience, the hope that sustains one generation to the next. Every election is an effort to retrieve that radical idea and breathe new life into it.”