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Making Sense Of U.S. Voting Rules
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Tuesday, November 6 is election day. Since nearly half of eligible voters in the U.S. do not vote, the question remains: Who and how many people will actually vote on Tuesday?
The Academy-award winning filmmaker, Errol Morris (who lives in Cambridge), produced a short op-doc for The New York Times that posed that and other questions to a group of young Americans.
The reasons behind voter apathy are many. And they lead to all kinds of questions about our voting system:
- How do we encourage more people to vote?
- Would mandatory voting increase voter turnout?
- What are the rules behind absentee ballots?
- Why do we vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November?
- Why is there early voting in Illinois, Florida and other states, but not in Massachusetts?
We’ll take a look at the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of voting rules in the 21st century.
Guests:
- Jamie Chandler, political scientist at Hunter College
- Alex Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
More:
This segment aired on October 31, 2012.