Would You Vote for Your Next President on Facebook? [POLL]

Can digitizing voter registration get more people signed up to vote before Election Day? A pair of New York lawmakers think so, and they introduced a plan on Friday to do just that.

The Voter Empowerment Act of New York would digitize the entire registration process in an effort to reduce errors caused by handwriting and typographical blunders that can leave otherwise eligible citizens off the voter rolls.

“As election season approaches, government bureaucracy continues to impede too many people from voting,” said New York State Senator Michael Gianaris in a statement. “Our proposal would remove these obstacles and maximize voter turnout while saving the state and its counties hundreds of thousands of dollars per election, thus preventing disenfranchisement and enabling better record keeping.”

The bill would also enable 16- and 17year-olds to pre-register to vote and allow government agencies to ask New Yorkers to update their voter registration each time they have an interaction with such an office.
Currently, voters in New York have to register on paper forms which are prone to several problems: People can fill the forms out incorrectly without knowing there’s a problem, they can mail them to the wrong address, the forms can be damaged and made illegible in the mail, and so on. Moving to digital ballots could help to address those issues.

Online voter registration could also have other benefits, too. Citizens could register to vote or change their address much closer to Election Day than is possible with paper registration forms, according to the lawmaker’s release.

The proposed law is modeled on the Voter Empowerment Act introduces in the U.S. House of Representatives, and similar efforts have been carried out in several other states, including Arizona, Delaware and Georgia. However, as the press release notes, the New York plan “would be the most comprehensive state plan implemented to modernize the voter registration system.”

The bill would only allow New Yorkers to register to vote online, it won’t let them actually cast a ballot on the Internet.

However, this raises a question: if it becomes possible to vote for a president on a platform such as Facebook, would you?

Answer our poll and then share your thoughts about online voting in the comments below:

Would You Vote for the Next President on Facebook?































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