Recently in the media there have been a lot of comments and theories proposed about how to best vote in the upcoming election. With the coronavirus still trending upwards, Americans, rightfully so, are nervous about going to vote in person at the polls. Politics aside, this can be a very difficult debate to have. Even when we leave politics out of the discussion, there are still civil liberties and guarantees that are afforded to us in the constitution. So, while we don’t want to restrict anyone’s right to vote, we need to propose solutions that will keep American safe, while also ensuring everyone’s rights remain intact.
Mail-In Ballots
One of the popular solutions that our politicians are proposing, is mail in ballots. This seems like a good solution as it allows people to stay at home and vote by mail. The problem is, some Americans still like to vote in person, and they don’t necessarily trust the mail and process. Not because of anything that is being done vindictively, but there have been several instances where ballots have not been counted either because they were sent in late, the signatures didn’t match the one on record, or the bubbles were not filled out properly. In the 2020 primary election, over 500,000 million ballots were ruled invalid because of reasons such as these.
What if there was another way that individuals could vote at the ballot box but not have to worry about social distancing? What if there was a way that traffic could be paced through the day at your precinct, so you knew when peak times were occurring for voting with an intelligent way of time-spacing which is dynamically adjusted from one city to another city depending on the area’s current pandemic situation?
In this blog, we are going to present to options on how to TYMEYT can be an effective tool for voting in person at the polls. While we understand every aspect of this may not coincide with every jurisdiction, we want you to look at this in a theoretical perspective that can be more developed as the conversation advances.
Slotted Voting Times
Admittedly, this scenario would need more development, as we said in the beginning, we do not want to advocate for restricting anyone’s rights when it comes to voting. With this option, users would be able to register for a slot to vote during a voting day. So let’s say a precinct has ’N’ voters that did not declare “mail-in”, and the polling station was open for 12 hours you could have ‘n’ number of voters per hour at that station, which would help maintain social distance.
TYMEYT has the ability to allow users (voters in this case) to book slots based on the polling stations opening schedule. Imagine a scenario where your nearest voting center manager has a mobile device with preconfigured polling slots created with total capacity at that center at anytime. Then based on existing data, TYMEYT parses the data into equal time slots to manage the traffic flow while giving available time slots to users who are looking to vote. With all these measures, you could go and vote, in full confidence knowing that the station is not over-crowded, and you could properly maintain social distancing.
This is a scenario where you obviously could not force everyone to go through an application to register for a spot, they would have to be allowed latitude to vote outside of that spot, but like anything else the more people that adhere to their timeslot, the more socially distanced a polling station would be. Basically, users would be given an option of when they can go and vote, and once that time slot is filled, new individuals who are signing up can fill in other open slots.
TYMEYT maintains all of this data so that there is NO GUESSWORK when to go to avoid the rush. Along with this, this mobile app will generate a Booking ID for each slot booking (by individuals) which will be promptly communicated to the polling manager, when one citizen reaches the polling station.This Booking IDcan help uniquely identify them, verify, allow to vote, then mark the transaction as complete.
After the transaction, the individual will be promptly notified back again with some minor feedback about the experience –and even some reward points!
Please note that TYMEYT is mainly built for resolving the current pandemic and lockdown problem for small to medium businesses. It’s not built to solve US polling problems, but being an American IT startup we love to extend our service, completely free-of-cost, to the entire nation which we believe can be used in a meaningful way to help with voting during this pandemic.
Setup is a breeze and takes less than 10 minutes per user and less than 60 minutes per organization (or polling manager in this use case).
Certainly, there are other applications that monitor traffic, but those systems do not possess adynamic algorithm to manage in-flow counts with data specific to the pandemic in any given city.
Our algorithm is engineered to ensure accurate data being given to both the business owner and the user. Also, one of the benefits of this is that the users as well as the polling stations could use data from Pandefuse & Tymeyt which later can give users real time information from local, state, and federal authorities regarding guidelines for the pandemic.[Some developments are still in progress].
Starting A Conversation; Creating A Community
At TYMEYT, we want to start a conversation. We want to build a community of individuals who can influence social structures to best assist members of the community during this pandemic. We also want to build applications that are real-time and of real help to the users. Our hope is that professionals across all industries come together on this project to help not only their communities, but the community is across America. If you have any questions on TYMEYT or PANDEFUSE, please feel free to view the links below. And as always if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to our support team.
