Love this idea

Great idea Ben.  I'd go further and try to get no excuse permanent absentee balloting the norm.  Colorado passed it last year and 60% of the CO electorate voted by mail.  Great improvement.  

I agree wholeheartidly. It is unfair to use partisan political gain in certain states to sway votes. We are well aware that certain states will deny early voting when they are certain providing early voting will lead to more votes for the other party. Because of this exact blatant partisan trickery, I waited for 4.5 hours to vote on election day. I lost over half my days work in pay. I can't aford that, but I knew that I had a responsibility to vote.

A good idea.  However, I would add making election day itself a national holiday.

I think we had a lot of illegal "early voting" due to being able to register at the same time.  Not a good idea if that is the case, otherwise its fine...some rules just have to be followed.

Early voting is wonderful. As an election judge this past November, I can attest to the ease of the process when the majority of people had already voted. I'm less thrilled about mail in ballots since they are subject to coercion.

I happen to like election day: the idea of everybody in the country on the same day taking time out of their lives to exercise their democratic responsibility.  I think it's a great idea to make election day a national holiday.  What about more federal funding and guidelines as to the number of voters per voting site (to avoid ridiculous lines) and federal guidelines for adding/deleting voters, and handling provisional voters?

Excellent idea if it would ensure both accurate counts and fraud prevention.  I have seen way too much of both problems in my lifetime!

Why are we try so hard to create 2.5 million jobs when we are going to let 20 million illegal aliens in to the country to take those jobs and the rest go on welfare?  WHY?

I support early voting.

My wife and I voted early in every election this year. Alaska allows voters to request an advance written ballot as well as offering a few central places for in person voting one or two weeks early before each election. This is popular with workers who work at remote sites for weeks at a time, as well as hunters, fishers, and other travellers who may not be home on voting day. However, I have found it to lead to a more deliberate and thought out vote as it eliminates surprises at the voting booth and allows a person to research further any ballot measures, bond issues, or unknown candidates which appear on the ballot. It also reduces the polling lines on election day.

It's a silly idea,if you ask me.The pollworkers must show up at 6A.M. on normal voting days.Are you deciding that no one will go to the polling places?Ever?How would votes be counted,and when?Election Day always was a National Holiday.I had no idea that it isn't now.Registration on Election Day would clog up the lines worse than ever.How hard is it to register by mail?Let's not mess with the electoral college.Large states would win every time!The Founders were not stupid at all.Voting is a priviledge,not a pain!

I favor changing Election Day to the first Saturday in November. The number of polling places should be adjusted to reflect the numbers of registered voters in each voting precinct to minimize waiting time.  Early voting should be limited to those with logical pradtical absentee need, such as our military overseas and seniors who may have physical limitations. 

I voted early in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to choosing candidates, we were asked to vote on a dozen or so initiatives, many of which were complicated and required research. To be responsible voters, we needed time to discuss the issues before voting and extra time just to fill out the ballot. On election day, I think that over half the votes were already mailed in and counted, which meant that the tally was done more quickly and accurately than it probably would have been had the election officials been flooded on election day. I strongly support the concept of offering early voting including mail.

We are supposed to have only mail-in voting next year, but they have been saying that for a few election cycles.  Sounds like a way to allow more thoughtful selections, but we will miss the yearly face to face interaction with our precinct folks.

Early voting on DESIGNATED NATIONAL ELECTION HOLIDAY.

This is what I sent for an idea, What do you think? We must Get our Military Might out of the war business and into something positive, useful, and humanitarian.  Such as the Rescue Relief business… Imagine The United States of America’s impact on all of the other countries of this ONE WORLD that we all call home…  If instead of using Deadly Force to win Every Citizen of the World’s fear. We earn their  respect,  and admiration.  We earn it by rushing all of our Vast Might to Rescue, Recovery, Restoration; Wherever, and Whenever Natural Disaster appears in Our ONE WORLD.  Want to end terrorism?  I believe this is the most natural sincere way to do it… Our Politicians will only respond when large enough numbers of us demand in writing that changes be made if they (the Politician) want to stay in that rocking chair which we allow them to sit in by our votes, or our apathy…  It doesn’t matter which or what party is in power, Politicians are alike the World over…  I can only envision one reason why they spend many, many, times more money to get elected to a position that pays so little; except that the  reported salary must be only a portion of the remuneration that comes with that rocking chair which we allow them to occupy for life …    Go Figure.

Go ahead submit this to Obama, it'll probably end up in the trash because it makes too much sense.Russ Wilson 

Early voting is an excellent idea so long as voters have an opportunity to be fully informed before they vote. In California,the ballot pamphlets are sent out a month before the election, and voting by mail, as well as at the elections office, is possible shortly thereafter.  

I am for anything that encourages voter participation
I live in a rural precinct that gone to mail-only ballots. Before that, some voters here had to drive as much as fifty miles round trip, mostly on dirt roads, to reach the polling place, and when the weather was nasty it could heavily impact the voter turnout.
Now I no longer have to worry about whether it is even physically possible to get to the polls on election day.
I feel this ease of voting should be extended to all qualified voters regardless of whether the polling place is next door or many miles away.
And yes, election day should be a national holiday.
.

Oregon's system of universal vote by mail in all elections is great!  Anything which expands the number of voters able to participate and minimizes the opportunities for partisan skullduggery makes democracy more vibrant.

We need to get rid of those Diabold electronic voting machines that have been show to be so easy to program with virus type code to permute ballots and comit election fraud to safegaurd free elecions in this country. They are a total sham and its incredulous to me that a company which specializes in secure electronic banking transactions could come up with such a problematic and insecure implementation. It screams election fraud.

Election Day should be a national holiday and early voting is a great way to not only get out the vote, but to make stealing an election extremely difficult.

I think national voter registration is the answer to the fraudulent "voter fraud" cries of the Republican Party.  Couple a fair national registration system that does not disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, and the otherwise downtrodden, with early voting, and a national voting holiday and you would see "the people" voting in much greater numbers.

I am an ex-pat living in Australia......early voting is a good idea...however, here in Australia voting is not an option...each person is required to vote. There are those that might say mandating would step on civil liberties...but we have now seen what happens when political apathy takes hold. And we have seen what happens when people "get" that their vote does matter. Having said the above, both my sister and brother have lost their jobs....so lets set aside the "smaller" stuff for the moment and support/focus on all we can do to assist Pres. Obama in getting the economy functioning again. This has got to be the number priority and if recovery takes place people will be more apt to realize that WE THE PEOPLE ARE THE GOVERNMENT and vote.

 Protect the wall of seperation between church and state. If Christian displays are allowed so should other displays, whether they be atheist or other religions, non religions.
One cannot be tolerated over any other.
             Pansey

This is an excellent was to engage new voters.  Make voting as convenient as we can so that more people vote regularly.  More people voting early means more people are likely to pay attention to the issues and feel as if they have a voice-- that's democracy.

I'm from OREGON, we've all been voting by mail for years!!!!  It's simple, easy, relaxed, safe and answers all the problems sighted above!   ALL OF THEM, in one easy stroke.  Get on it!

I too voted early each year in Tucson and thought it a great way to get the votes out early and without waiting in line and to get my vote counted and avoid the long lines. Also the newspapers in Tucson published a copy of the ballot ahead of time so you could figure out who, and what you would be voting for. 

Watching the MN Senate recounts tells me all methods have their weaknesses - lost ballots, fer cryin' out loud!

My idea is to make all elections instant runoff.  You get to vote for your 1st, 2nd, etc. choice.  Lowest total vote candidate drops off the candidate list and those who voted for them get to have their second choice count.  This continues until someone has 50% +1 votes.

Advantages:
1. No recount would be necessary
2. It would be hard(er) for a Diebold machine to swing an election
3. You could vote for your 3rd party candidate to make a statement without fear that you'd be helping the real opposition get elected (examples - voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 or earlier for Ross Perot.

I think that early voting is absolutely necessary for fairer elections. It gets more people to the polls, it gives people the time to vote, it saves money on expensive voting equipment needing to be duplicated on a same day voting situation. It gives far more Americans, across the board but especially those of us who cannot always get to the polls in a one day voting process access. Some of us cannot stand in long lines, need public transportation or other important needs that one day voting makes harder to satisfy or so difficult we cannot get out to vote. YES to a better election process.

We don't need a holiday, we need to act.

Not a bad idea but not great either.  Certainly now worth a national effort.  First is smacks of the same unproven assertion that the right claimed to bolster voter Id.  This is not really a great problem worthy of a national effort.  A NATIONAL voter registration is much more important.  As would be REAL campaign finance reform, and on and on. Do not waste energy solving this foux problem when REAL problems exist.
It must be the pet project of someone of staff.

I live in Oregon. We get information about all the candidates early, by mail, & then our ballot, which we can  mail in right away, or drop in boxes about town set up for that purpose (early voting), or we can wait until election day to drop the ballot in one of the boxes. I like this system immensely because I fill out the ballot at home -- no distractions, no pressure.

Election Day should be on a Sunday when a larger percentage of the population is off work. Or, there should be a National Holiday akin to Thanksgiving when almost all businesses are closed. Or, there should be national early voting. Or, everyone ought to be able to vote by mail (as in Oregon where there are no polls). Or, people should be able to vote by email. Surely if we can send astronauts to a space station where they can live for 6 months at a time, we ought to be able to come up with a safe, secure way to vote over the internet.  In any event, the present system is outdated, outmoded and discriminatory and should be scrapped in favor of all or some of the above.

I sure wish Pennsylvania had early voting! 

Since we first began early voting in Texas I've seen the system as a whole improve.  I served as election judge under both systems.
Election day was vastly improved as a result, and the election results for the entire state were complete before 11:00 P.M.  There were fewer mistakes as a result of early voting.

The first thing to do is to get rid of HAVA (Help America Vote Act).
It made voting more difficult and  less secure because it required us to vote on hackable voting machines.The only ones it helped were the voting machines companies.It made them rich and us poorer. We have wasted billions of dollars on the machines and none of them is totally safe.The machines have done more to jepordize our democracy than the terrorists have.

Early voting, paper ballots, hand-counting, doing away with provisional ballots, trained observers on duty at all phases of voting, making election day a national holdiay, will all go a long way to making voting safe and convenient to all.

Anything that makes it easier for people to exercise their right to vote is a great idea.  That's what democracy is all about.  Only cheaters make moves to suppress the vote.

Anything that opens access to more people and takes away from the long lines and long waits that can deter the elderly and busy people will be a good thing.

Election Day should be a no-work day. Better yet, why not an Election weekend?

A community aspect would be lost.  With in-person voting, activists are able to speak face-to-face with voters, hand out info, answer questions, build neighborhood info bases, sign up volunteers, chat with friends and neighbors.  We also pollwatch and remain alert for voters who should not be there.  When citizens push, we also get recountable paper (optical scan) ballots.  I see the arguments for spread-out populations, and I  agree about making voting day a national holiday, but early voting seems to me undesirable unless as a public, visible event.

I agree with early voting for the nation.  I have voted early by mail in every election in recent years.  Much as I used to enjoy going to the polls, as a senior citizen with health problems, it's too difficult now.  I'm sure early voting and mail voting would help many other seniors.  To help those still working I think national election day should be a national holiday.  Before I retired, I'd get 2 hrs off to vote, but lines were long, and I lived in state where polls closed rather early.  In addition, I think Presidential Inauguration Day should be a national holiday.  C'mon employers, these days are only once every 4 years!  We need employer cooperation in encouraging every eligible American to vote and to see the inauguration of a new president. 

No Secret Funds!  Make the State Department account for all of its expenditures.  Also, specify what are "United States Interests".

I think early voting is an essential reform and needs to be a central piece of voting/electoral legislation before the next election season in 2010.  Early voting should be a national law which could be met by three weeks of voting in person or absentee ballots without reason being required.

The vastly increased early voting in 2008 increased the amount of time that people in those states with early voting had to vote, eliminated the chaotic mania when all the voting takes place in one day, and a Tuesday which people have to work as well.  This made it possible to correct problems that arose by enabling people to return another day having resolved the problem, less frantic enviornment enabled the problems to be more easily solved on the spot, and also gave lawyers a chance to understand what problems were emerging before the final voting day so they could deal with them.  Early voting is an important component to guaranteeing the integrity of our voting system.

Before we focus on voting methods, let's clean up the scandalous process of gerrymandering electoral districts by the political party currently in power at the time of electoral district mapping. This in and of itself will produce a much better representative vote of the electorate.
Using contemporary computer technology it is both possible and simple to divide up all electoral districts to give better representation and to eliminate partisan efforts to cripple the opposing party.

E.G.
Assumptions:
1 The US population is 350 million.
2 We wish to have no more than 400 elected Congressional Representatives.

Ergo:

We need 400 electoral districts, each containing approximately (350*10^6/400)= 875, 000 voters.

Process:

Use a computer mapping program to divide the US map into 400 electoral districts each containing 875, 000 voters, AND to define the boundaries of the 400 districts such that the sum total perimeter of all electoral districts is minimised. 

Note that perimeter minimisation is an essential part of the process, since it will tend to produce compact electoral districts, rather than some of the convoluted monstrosities that have resulted from partisan gerrymandering. The purpose of gerrymandering has not changed since the 18th century, provide a built in bias in favour of the sitting tenant of the representative district. We need to clean up this mess and we cannot trust politicians to behave honestly when their own interests are at issue.
 One common set of  mapping software, with its configuration under the control of a national elections board should be used to define electoral districts for national, state and local elections. Ideally the mapping software would be open source, enabling independent verification of software integrity by anyone of appropriate technical ability. It is essential that the inner working of the software NOT be protected by patent, copyright, or trade secret mechanisms; such legal devices could, and would, be used to introduce the same biases that we are trying to eliminate and to protect them from discovery

 

Initiate early voting all over the country. It worked so well in Albuquerque that as a poll watcher on election day my job was almost too easy. Make it a national requirement.

Early voting, including absentee voting (such as we have in NM);
a National Holiday would certainly help those who cannot afford
to take time off for voting on "voting day".  I took my ballot right
to the County Clerk's Office, but many could not do that; therefore would have to trust the U. S. Postal Service to deliver it (we are being conditioned to trust fewer and fewer sources of service or communication).  GET RID OF THE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES:  there must be a paper-trail!!!!
Robert G. Taylor, Santa Fe, NM

There should be a National Holiday for voting; early voting is allowed. all citizens must vote under penalty of a fine; even if one votes for none of the above.

1.  I agree with the post by isis cat above (and the AZ LWV): we should institute instant runoff.  2.  All voting should be by mail as in Oregon.  It saves a fortune in renting voting places, hiring and training poll workers, purchasing voting equipment, making people miss work and have to travel to vote (frequently to a different polling precinct each election), etc. and more people participate.  

Early voting is available in Tenn. It's an excellent idea for getting a large turnout. On Election day there's only one place to vote, in early voting there are about 10 different places I can vote. This stops long lines. The Dems will stay in power a long time, if they clean up the atrocious problems with our elections.

Use paper ballots with optical scans to eliminate computer hacking and breakdown, mandate early voting nationwide, combat the horrible disenfranchisement and voter intimidation. Fine communities with excessively  long voting lines. Enact stiff crimes for stealing votes and dirty tricks against voters.

please.  i don't want to live in the "homeland". i was so happy living in the United States. can we not send that  terrible expression away along with the would-be dictator who gave it to us?