It's high time for online voting

Election, vote, voting tile
Election, vote, voting tile

You can buy anything online. You can read this in your newspaper online. You can get a college degree online. You can vote in poll after poll after poll online.

Unless it's a real poll -- a city, county, Tennessee or U.S. election.

Maybe someday -- someday when we want to make voting mainstream rather than something only 36.4 percent of our nation's voting-eligible population actually exercised in 2014. General election voter turnout for last year's midterms was the lowest it's been in any election cycle since World War II, according to early projections by the United States Election Project.

What about Tennessee? Of course not. And it's not as though we don't need the nudge of convenience. In fact, you can count us out as a "Volunteer State" when it comes to voting. Only 29.1 percent of us went to the polls, and we were next to last in the nation. Only Texas had a lower voter turnout with 28.5 percent.

But there is some progress toward actually helping some in our nation actually cast a vote. Or at least register to vote. Come 2016 when the country picks its next president, a record number of Americans will have the option to register online and vote early.

The Pew Charitable Trust reported Wednesday that 20 states now offer online registration and seven more are considering it or have passed legislation authorizing it. That's up from two states when President Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

No, Tennessee is not among the enlightened. But Georgia is, along South Carolina and Louisiana in the southern portion of the nation.

Maybe someday ...

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