Arizona voters may be able to cast their ballots in 2014 at any polling place anywhere in the county. Secretary of State Ken Bennett said Tuesday he wants lawmakers and county officials to consider “voting centers” that are capable of not just accepting but processing all ballots, regardless of the home voting precinct of the voter. He said changing patterns in how Arizonans decide to vote makes the current system not only overly cumbersome but unnecessarily slow. What it also could have been, he said, was embarrassing.
“If the close race in Arizona this year had been the presidential race, and the electoral college was tied 265 to 265 and the whole country and world were waiting for Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, what do you think the scrutiny would have been?” he said.
Bennett said the problem is the method and the timing of how people vote.
“Statewide, for example, I think we had about 450,000 early ballots dropped off at the polls on election day or the day or two before,” he said. That last-minute process, he said, creates problems that do not exist if people simply show up at their own polls, get a ballot and vote it there.
“Right now if you drop your ballot off at anyplace, it goes into a box, which gets transferred to a bigger box, which gets transferred to downtown,” Bennett explained.
He said sorting, verifying and counting all those early ballots took about a week.
Full Article: Bennett makes push for ‘voting centers’.