LA Times Today: Patt Says - Votemobile
Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.
How does your mail get to you? By a big white mail truck.
How do tacos get to you? Truck.
In some places, even the department store, in miniature, comes to you … by truck, actually a very roomy RV.
There’s the bloodmobile. There’s the bookmobile -- the original, started with a horse and carriage version taking literature to the American people nearly 120 years ago.
So why not a fleet of vote-mobiles?
There’s so much angst right now about getting to the polls or not getting to the polls … who can make it and who can’t and why. In Virginia, as people lined up to cast early ballots, Trump supporters showed up to disrupt it.
Now, Los Angeles County already has a small number of vote-mobiles. It sends them to hospital parking lots to accommodate frantically busy nurses and doctors and technicians. It mobilizes them for the homeless, and for people with disabilities. But why stop there?
For decades, candidates have campaigned using four wheels to take their messages to voters. Why not make the voting itself a mobile undertaking?
Especially with LA County having consolidated in-person voting into fewer and bigger “vote centers” that may not be just down the street or around the corner, like the little neighborhood voting precinct places they replacing.
As for security, it may be even easier to make voting mobiles safer from cyber-hacking than some of the vote collecting methods being used now.
You wouldn’t need vote-mobiles out on the road for every day of the weeks of early voting. I’m thinking it’s just for the last few days and election day itself … for people who hear the vote mobiles playing a signature theme song like “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” and see them stopped in the neighborhood and think, oh my God, I forgot to vote – and run out to cast a ballot in the vote mobile the way kids run out to answer the siren call of the ice cream truck
We’re always trying to be creative and innovative, and encouraging people to vote.
But don’t confine our thinking to the latest technological whiz-bang.
Sometimes simpler is better. So is taking important things to the people.
Like ballots. And tacos.
How do tacos get to you? Truck.
In some places, even the department store, in miniature, comes to you … by truck, actually a very roomy RV.
There’s the bloodmobile. There’s the bookmobile -- the original, started with a horse and carriage version taking literature to the American people nearly 120 years ago.
So why not a fleet of vote-mobiles?
There’s so much angst right now about getting to the polls or not getting to the polls … who can make it and who can’t and why. In Virginia, as people lined up to cast early ballots, Trump supporters showed up to disrupt it.
Now, Los Angeles County already has a small number of vote-mobiles. It sends them to hospital parking lots to accommodate frantically busy nurses and doctors and technicians. It mobilizes them for the homeless, and for people with disabilities. But why stop there?
For decades, candidates have campaigned using four wheels to take their messages to voters. Why not make the voting itself a mobile undertaking?
Especially with LA County having consolidated in-person voting into fewer and bigger “vote centers” that may not be just down the street or around the corner, like the little neighborhood voting precinct places they replacing.
As for security, it may be even easier to make voting mobiles safer from cyber-hacking than some of the vote collecting methods being used now.
You wouldn’t need vote-mobiles out on the road for every day of the weeks of early voting. I’m thinking it’s just for the last few days and election day itself … for people who hear the vote mobiles playing a signature theme song like “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” and see them stopped in the neighborhood and think, oh my God, I forgot to vote – and run out to cast a ballot in the vote mobile the way kids run out to answer the siren call of the ice cream truck
We’re always trying to be creative and innovative, and encouraging people to vote.
But don’t confine our thinking to the latest technological whiz-bang.
Sometimes simpler is better. So is taking important things to the people.
Like ballots. And tacos.
