US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level
vox.com
vox.com
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't even trust mail-in ballots. I'm perfectly content to fill out my ballot ahead of time and hand-deliver it on election day.
I think it should also be a requirement to show a state or federal ID before you can cast your vote. I'm always floored when people try to defend voting without requiring any kind of identity verification. In Puerto Rico you're required to register ahead of time for a voter ID and you must present it in order to vote. If Puerto Rico, which is drastically poorer than all 50 states, can pull this off without it being considered a problem then I find it really hard to take seriously the claims of people saying it sets too high of a bar.
I've been thinking alot about Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) and how to do an instant runoff with paper ballots at scale, notably for something like President. I suppose it's unlikely to occur, but in the instance of a national popular vote for president that results in a runoff, it is worth the extra time to go back through and count. After all, TV entertainment aside, there is no need to have results in same-day.
And besides, it’s really not fair to assume that voting systems are simple to understand. Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
I agree there are other methods that are better by the book than the IRV method, but are exercises in statistics and graph theory.
It works that way in New South Wales. Apparently in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Malta, too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...
The problem is that the state and federal ID system is so fucked up that it disenfranchises voters. Until that system is fixed, you can't use it for voting.
This issue then becomes a partisan one because voter fraud is so rare that it doesn't seem to need any additions, so strong pushes for voter ID laws (which almost never address the issue of the ID systems) are targeting those who are less likely to have ID, which tends to be concentrated with voting for one party. If anyone actually cared about voter ID laws for non-partisan reasons, it would go hand in hand with a national ID system.
I'm in favor of requiring a photo id to vote but am well aware of the problems some have in obtaining such an id. That's the problem that needs to be corrected. It does need to be corrected first and we shouldn't just shrug our shoulders and go back to things the way they've been. Everyone should have easy access to a state endorsed identification card. It's an essential function of government and interaction with citizens. As such it should be funded by general taxation rather than a user fee.
A state issued identification card is used for so much more than just authorization for driving a vehicle. Why is it in the hands of the DMV/DDS in most if not every state? Even the non-driver identification cards issued to those who don't drive are usually still issued by DMV/DDS. It's an odd system that wouldn't be designed as it is now if we were designing from scratch but we're use to it because that's how it evolved over time.
There tension between those two positions is of little practical importance. I'm not worried that they can link my name and address, I'm worried about a sudden outbreak of majority-vs-miniority where someone I really don't like gets in to power and links, I dunno, tax records-name-address, racial-history-name-address , travel-history-bank-account-photo or somesuch. I don't think it is practically feasible to target someone off the information in a voter role.
The real issue to me is that there isn't much organisation against governments laying the groundwork, and in practice opposing an ID card doesn't mean anything. In Australia we basically have all the infrastructure for a national ID card except the formalisation of a little piece of plastic.
The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate how congressional elections are held - Article 1, Section 4 - precisely because those elections are national in practice (in terms of how their outcome translates to policy). Congress already uses the power to, for example, set the date of the elections to be the same across the country, or to enforce a uniform electoral system (single-member districts). That same power could be similarly used to enact uniform voter ID requirements, and one could argue that it is the only way to ensure that states aren't abusing the system to benefit whatever party controls them. And once you go there, it makes sense to tie those requirements to a national ID.
States can use their own IDs for state elections. But I don't see why they should get away with arbitrary restrictions (or arbitrary lack of restrictions) for elections that directly apply outside of their borders. They're not sovereign countries, and federal elections are one of the issues on which federal-level regulation is clearly both reasonable and constitutional.
Showing an ID to vote is utterly common sense.
Instead of all those voter registration campaigns that everyone spends money on ... they should be spending on 'just getting ID'. And then maybe there should be no need to even register in many cases, if you're ID w/address is good enough.
Two birds.
In the end, you have to register to vote, and in most states you do so with the same agencies that make Identifications. Requiring an ID card to get a voter ID, or having it as part of your driver's license or state id isn't a horrible idea.
There's no reason for it to be a "federally issued id".
States have been proven by experience to be willing to do both. AFAIK, all states that have implemented some form of voter ID to date collect fees for issuance of any eligible IDs. And there are numerous cases of states closing or moving DMVs and similar agencies, or mucking around with vote schedule, to deliberately suppress some voters (a recent example which is particularly glaring because the state explicitly admitted its motivation: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/).
Thus, the only way to ensure that voter ID would not be discriminatory in practice, is to have feds run the whole thing, in a way that guarantees non-discrimination - which means it has to be free, and it has to be easy to get. If you truly believe that voter ID is necessary for election security, then this is the compromise deal that you'll have to accept for us liberals to be onboard with that (keep in mind that most of us don't believe that there's any real issue to be solved by having voter ID, so any such support would be mainly symbolic in nature - and you'll have show good faith in courting it).
Wow, this is mind-blowing to me. A fair election is the basis of western democracy, a sacred institution. In my mind this pretty much equates to treason.
I don't know how these people can sleep at night.
I really think this is a giant myth. You're expecting me to believe that these minorities are living such horrid, opressed lives that they slave away every single day, and can't find a friend with a ride, or band together to make a group trip to get registered one day out of the year?
Yeah, I've heard it, registration centers are closing in minority neighborhoods; but that doesn't mean that these people don't have places to register/get an ID within an hour or two by bus.
The problem is ignorance and apathy, not voter suppression. Frankly, if someone is so uninterested/unwilling to participate in society that they can't be fucked to spend even 1 day out of the year to get a license, then they don't have any business making any decisions regarding out collective government.
Maybe you don’t even have bus fare. Maybe your car can’t make it 90 miles to the nearest DMV.
Also you’re really dismissing the fact that some people literally work all the hours the DMV is open. And when those people have their one or two days off, there’s other crap they have to get done.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have voter ID... I’m just saying you’re being disingenuous by saying it doesn’t disenfranchise any voters.
Also, I'm not saying it doesn't disenfranchise voters, but the numbers are so incredibly small that it's statistically insignificant.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
most of which are practically prohibited by law to obtain a valid ID
I understand that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but I think we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of the perfect either. The symbolic act in being able to cast your vote and at least have the feeling that you have control over various governments that have such powerful sway over your life is powerful and maybe even cathartic.
The documents you present for ID shouldn't be any more than you should present to vote... it's just a shortcut. Voter fraud is a significant issue... in many districts significantly more than the number of people who would be unable to vote because of complications.
No one, including partisan commissions established for no other purpose than validating this claim, has been able to provide evidence supporting this.
1) There is a way for all Americans (including the poor, minorities, indigenous tribes, the homeless, and people without a physical address) to obtain this ID without any prejudice, opportunity cost, or privacy implications 2) There is significant political will to rolling out 1)
Then I'm with you. If not as it currently is the case, then voter ID is a means of disenfranchising the vulnerable groups I mentioned in 1) and I'm opposed.
Update: You might argue that I'm contradicting myself in that voter ID law would be good and ensuring that the groups I mentioned were protected in 1) would be asking for perfection. My rebuttal would be that any scheme that allows for legal disenfranchisement of otherwise legal voters is not good at all.
>Also you’re really dismissing the fact that some people literally work all the hours the DMV is open. And when those people have their one or two days off, there’s other crap they have to get done.
For an entire year? You can't scrape together $20 and find a free afternoon once or twice in a decade? What percentage of the non homeless population actually lives this way and actually lives too far from a DMV?
An example: https://www.dmv.org/ny-new-york/id-cards.php
To apply for a photo ID card, you must:
* Be a citizen or a legal resident of the U.S.
* Be a resident of New York State.
* Have your original birth certificate.
* Have your Social Security card.
* Be able to provide enough documents to verify your identity.
This is not a myth, and affects magnitudes more people than there are cases of voter fraud.
Renewing or replacing an existing ID requires none of those other documents, generally. (I haven't even seen my SSID card in three decades)
Where I'm from everybody is required by law to have one from the age of 14 and gets it for free for the first time. You just can't have anything done without id and tax identification code, so voting is just another place to show it. It's not even about technologies - my is handwritten with photo being glued on it.
The ID law has been shown to be slanted to disfavor the working poor who vote for one party over another. It's not done as a legitimate concern over fraud; its a political maneuver to favor one party over the other and disenfranchise the poor. That's the argument
Sure, it isn't easy, but they get ID because they need it for damn near everything. For example, you mentioned "work hours". If they are legally working, they have ID. If they get any sort of welfare, they have ID. If they smoke or drink, they have ID.
“Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income.”
From http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...
It is assumed that the people claiming to be Americans without ID are in fact Americans without ID. It's kind of hard to verify this without ID, eh? The given percentages are in the ballpark for estimates of illegal aliens, meaning that these might be people who aren't supposed to have an American ID and in fact aren't supposed to vote.
For half a century social security cards had "not for identification" written on them because they are really bad for ID. Didn't stop everyone from using them as ID because there was no other option. The Social Security administration was the only government agency actually tasked with tracking citizens for their entire lives so they did that. Poorly.
If you want to understand why requiring any state ID is voter disenfranchisement in the US just consider what it takes to get a state ID as a fresh adult. Two recognized proofs of ID. Basically birth certificate, student ID, social security card, or other state ID. If you don't get a student ID, didn't go to high school, or your ID from there simply expired it can't count. So its basically requiring birth certificate and social security card.
Now thats where you might not recognize how weird the US is. Nobody is required to have those. Hospitals do the paperwork to get them issued when you are born there but for every child not born under the supervision of a doctor (way too many to this day in the US) your parents do need to actually apply for those. Of course that only matters if you are filing taxes to begin with. Which is disproportionately whites. A ridiculous number of people exist outside the tax system because... the government doesn't know who its citizens are. It doesn't keep track of anyone in a central way. If you IRS never started getting pay stubs from your employers they might not even know you exist.
This is in addition to having the means to get to a DMV, pay the fee to get an ID card (I think it was $25 when I got one to fly to Texas when I was 17?) and be able to go there during some obscenely limited hours of operation (some of the worst offenders I've seen are only open 10-2 on three weekdays). Then you also need a permanent address to get it shipped to.
For way too many people they are missing something in that chain, and if you find yourself without two qualified forms of ID getting a birth certificate or social security card where you never had one before can take months at least.
What might sound really bizarre to you is that there is nothing to really "catch" kids that fell through the system. School enrollment is completely decoupled from all the previously mentioned systems of tracking people - you don't need any major documents to enroll your kid in a public school, often not even proof of legitimate residency in the country. Schools want those but the laws are state specific and often simply "try to figure out who they are or just drop them in class somewhere I guess". So you can easily graduate high school with no government institution knowing you exist whatsoever, go to get a job, and find out your employer won't hire you without this backlog of paperwork nobody made sure you had.
This whole mess, as others say, disproportionately affects minorities and the poor. They are less likely to have parents who can afford hospitalization for the birth so they don't get the paperwork done for them. They don't pay taxes or work under the table and thus don't itemize their children or apply to get their documents to get tax rebates. They get them enrolled in school without having any documentation of their own. They go their entire childhood using health clinics and whatever their mom thinks is best to get through because they don't have health insurance and never show up in that system. Nobody in their family can afford a car so getting into the drivers registry isn't even on the radar for any of them.
There are millions of legitimate born US citizens to American parents without a paper trail because they live in poverty. Its the 1 in 4 food insecure kids growing up today. Their towns and cities are practically blighted with mistreatment by every institution that has any influence on their success. I live in central PA and see this all the time - neighborhoods can be 10 miles apart where on one side they don't have regularly working electricity and water while on the other end you have mcmansions and three newly built shopping centers composed of Whole Foods and Old Navy. One of those groups is going to have their learners permit at 16 and be preregistered to vote without even knowing it, the other would have to spend years of time fighting to form the paper trail to register to vote.
And its a legitimate fight. My parents lost my social security card at some point in my early childhood and it took 2 years and 3 visits to the DMV to get a replacement. Good thing that happened when I was 12 and not 18 or I would have missed upwards of two elections like that. And I was on the lucky side of the ID disparity - born in a hospital, records of doctors all the way through, proper paper trail in the public school system, and it still takes several hours of your life to get through the beuracracy to have a drivers license or state ID by the time you are eligible to vote. Way too many people don't have the paperwork or the time to try to use it as a barrier to voting.
In the US, one of the founding principles, different from all (almost all?) others at the time, was the people create the government to govern for them. Government was not suppose to be a system where the government (ie. the monarchy) rules and owns the people. I don't think it is such a bad idea that people are resistant to a national ID. "Show me your papers" and all that comes with it is something to avoid if possible.
My major issue with the thought process that gets you to "having a national is a violation of my freedom" is that you only want to be invisible if the government is an actively hostile entity to you that you want to avoid. It is also the principal justification to the right to bear arms - you arm the citizens against a tyrannical government.
The problem is that in both cases - if you have a government that you want to hide from anonymously or a government you need to arm yourself against - you have a government you need to overthrow. You don't just exist in this state of armament or anonymity without taking action to depose the king and reclaim your liberty.
In both cases there are real, persistent, continuous costs of not having a centralized record of citizenry with secure id (because social security cards are not even close to secure) as there with keeping recreational firearms ownership so permissive. The former means people fall through the cracks and need to exert tremendous effort to prove they exist while the later costs life and limb all the time.
If US history has taught me anything (in regards to the history of most nations) its that when trying to preserve liberty its a fine line between disdainful paranoia and reasonable ambivalence. And American culture definitely falls towards the extreme on that spectrum in a, in my opinion, really unhealthy way. It just breeds controversy and arguments about ideology without anyone actually doing anything to improve the world they live in for either outcome... which is a generally common thread in US politics, to be fair.
Its hard to get your first ID specifically because of the desire to limit immigration fraud.
My parents lost my social security card at some point in my early childhood and it took 2 years and 3 visits to the DMV to get a replacement
It wasn't a problem for voting because the poll workers knew most of the nursing home residents socially. This was a small town and some of the poll workers even attended primary school over half a century ago with the nursing home residents. As our communities become looser and looser knit, this kind of informal identification system loses its integrity. Our identification card issuing system hasn't kept up with this change in society. Fix that problem and the rest fixes itself.
I have never been able to file my taxes electronically because I cannot pass their electronic verification process.
They have to verify birth date, which they think is something else other than my actual birth date.
I have spent hours and hours being shuffled around between different governmental offices, explaining my case, and it got to a point where you have to give up. Have you ever seen the movie Brazil? You might know what I'm talking about.
Imagine having to be reduced to calling around your city, trying to find the nearest fax machine because some governmental office will only take faxes so that you can continue your quest towards the distant sanity...
Now imagine doing that when you work an hourly service job instead of a salaried engineering job.
So at least in those states, it isn't an issue. You have every day off from work.
In some states, you'd have committed a crime already
1) you don't need any drivers license to be employed in anything but driving
2) all states recognize other states' licenses ("full faith and credit") until a grace period after you take up actual residency or employment.
2) Sure, you can drive there. You can work there even. You can't combine them: working while having an out-of-state license is a crime.
So the remaining opposition is more symbolical than anything - accepting a national ID would be acquiescing to this state of affairs, while rejecting it allows to maintain the pretense that all the massive data-gathering operations (from IRS and Social Security, to DHS and NSA) are somehow fundamentally different.
In practice, this just means extreme inefficiency whenever you have to deal with the government. I would dare say that citizens actually suffer a lot more from it than the government does (the government can always hire more bureaucrats to maintain and synchronize more databases).
Stopping identity theft would reduce the cost of banking, including all kinds of credit, bringing consumer interest rates closer to non-consumer ones. Stopping identity theft would quickly cause the arrest of most fugitives, both immigration-related and otherwise. Stopping identity theft would reduce medical errors; today your treatment can be affected by an identity thief. (the doctors think you have drug-seeking behavior, a genetic condition, a disease, or issues with violence toward hospital staff... and this changes how they treat you)
If you try to move to a federal ID, you de facto need to replace a bunch of state run offices with federal offices. This would not be an easy transition at all. It would be easier to create federal regulations and require states to alter their state ID to comply by X date, but states tend to resist that kind of interference from the federal government.
The US is a little bit like a country of countries. It would be a little bit like requiring an EU ID and European countries objecting.
The complaint is the fairness of the burden to obtain acceptable ID, for voting. In Alabama, over a dozen driver's license office closures mean people in overwhelmingly black counties had a vastly high burden to obtain ID than people living in predominately white counties. There are all kinds of examples and variations on this theme. It's hardly any different than poll taxes, and literacy tests. They're just as blatantly racist as how photo ID rules are employed.
Using your logic of Puerto Rico, since the vast majority of the U.S. went without photo ID's for voting for over 200 years with no statistically meaningful voter fraud problems, we don't need such laws today either. Meanwhile a recent case in Texas, a non-citizen with stolen photo ID had been illegally voting in elections, which means photo ID's do not assure there's no fraud.
Anyway, people have a right to vote. It is not a privilege. And therefore the state cannot apply unreasonable burdens on people, which only serve to disenfranchise them from their right to vote.
Actually, in US, it is a privilege. Look up the Constitution - the original one doesn't define any right to vote at all (which was a necessary component of the 3/5th Compromise); all it says is that the states must have a "republican form of government". And all subsequent amendments specify what can't be used as a basis to deny the right to vote. Aside from the ones that did so explicitly, there's also the catch-all Equal Protection Clause - but even that does not amount to a full-on acknowledgement that voting is a basic right of any American citizen.
This is why the states can e.g. deny the right to vote to felons - some doing so for the rest of their lives, and without any ability to reinstate it. And why all challenges to voter suppression have to be coached in anti-discrimination language (i.e. that they deny the right to vote to some protected minority specifically, as opposed to a generic right to vote).
It's a very unfortunate state of affairs, and we desperately need a constitutional amendment that instates the right to vote as one of the fundamental rights of a citizen.
The only bit in the 14th that explicitly addresses voting doesn't establish a right to vote. It says that if the states deny the right to vote to some male citizens above a certain age, then their representation in Congress is proportionally reduced. Note that this mechanism implies that the states can, nevertheless, opt into such an arrangement. So, if anything, it establishes that there's no right to vote.
If you're referring to the Equal Protection Clause. It does not explicitly establish a right to vote, either. It has some effects on voting rights - in particular, it was used to restrict poll taxes in state elections (since the 24th only applied to federal elections). However, the relevant court decisions explained that it was not because it infringed on some inherent right to vote that all citizens possess, but rather because it was unduly discriminatory (on the basis of "the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee").
> and fifteenth amendments
That one says you can't deny the right to vote based on race. Similarly, 19th amendment does the same wrt gender, and 26th does the same wrt age for those 18+.
However, none of these establish a right to vote, per se. For example, if a state denies the right to vote on the grounds that are not related to race, they are not in violation of the 15th.
> and the voting rights act of 1965
That one is more of an implementation of the above, although it goes further wrt placing the burden of proof on the states in many cases.
But, in any case, it's just a law, and as such it cannot establish a fundamental right (since Congress can overturn it at any time).
> those have all been significantly weakened by the judiciary
Given that Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections was one of the massive expansions of the right to vote, I don't think that's a reasonable assertion. Courts have given, and courts have taken away. If Constitution were explicit on this subject, we wouldn't have this back-and-forth.
> allow permanent disenfranchisement of convicted felons, which seems explicitly against the text of the fifteenth amendment.
Convicted felons are not a race. Yes, there is a racial disparity when it comes to such laws in practice; but the amendment doesn't prohibit any restrictions that result in a racial disparity - only those that are specifically using race as a basis.
Voting Rights Act, as amended in 1982, is the law that prohibits restrictions on the basis of their results, rather than their intent. But even with VRA, a mere disproportionality is not sufficient to declare a restriction unlawful. And, of course, it's still just a law, and therefore cannot provide any fundamental guarantees like the Constitution does.
So, in practice, there's no universal constitutional right to vote for citizens in the United States on the federal level. There's a patchwork of protections, but even when taken in combination, it does not amount to such a right.
Which explicitly labels it a right, as well as restricting the conditions under which that right may be restricted. PPP
So, it is explicitly a right.
And it has repeatedly been found to be a fundamental right (and thus subject to strict scrutiny.)
And they would have to give a valid name of a registered voter who had not showed up yet, or the pollworkers would realize that the same person was trying to vote twice.
Or you could only impersonate voters who voted by mail (thereby voting twice in the same name).
Sure, you can come up with examples where a very small number of votes determined an election outcome. But for the vast majority of important contests -- and especially for state and federal level -- it does not seem feasible to round up enough thousands of people to cast enough fraudulent ballots to affect the election outcome.
To vote you simply have to bring that letter with you, and then you usually don't need to show any ID. The election officers can still ask you for it if there is any doubt about your identity. Just before you enter your ballot your name is checked against the voter registry and crossed out from it.
Of course that still leaves a bit of fraud potential, but not really on any scale that would affect the election. You'd still need to forge the letter and know the personal details of a voter that won't vote themselves.
I’d be interested to know why though. Is it a problem in the US? In the UK at least, no ID is required and there is virtually no voter fraud. Is it really the case that the cost (disenfranchising groups with lower rates of access to photographic ID) is worth it to solve an issue that might not even exist?
And if you think about it, it’s pretty clear that in-person voter fraud is already difficult and risky enough in the US that it’s really not a scalable election manipulation strategy.
Based on first-hand experience, Al Gore disagrees.
An Australian polling booth has a copy of the electoral roll, with names and addresses (homeless people can enroll with name only). This roll is marked when you vote, and then the roll is analysed afterwards. Attempting to stuff the ballot box by impersonating someone will show up as duplicate marks on the roll. You won't get far with impersonating random people as voting is compulsory in most elections so duplicates will quickly happen. You could vote twice if guaranteed in advance that someone wasn't going to vote, but at best you will get only a small number of extra votes that way.
The aim with an election isn't necessarily to outright prevent cheating, but to prevent undetected cheating. Hence why ID isn't so crucial (at least in Australia).
I honestly think that the election system in the United States is simply too decentralized. Counties, even larger ones like mine, struggle to afford to hire a staff or retain contractors that have any kind of serious security expertise - or even expertise in reliable services. The federal elections commission was created to address some of these problems by providing centralized resources to states and counties, but it hasn't gone nearly far enough in my opinion. I have a had time imagining a way to make a serious improvement here without moving just about the entire platform for voting systems under the federal government.
The upside inherent in fifty parallel and bespoke experiments in government is worth the extra complexity and cost. Ideas are tried out, and can bubble outward and upward if they work. Bad ideas directly impact only ~2% of the country.
Furthermore, having state and local control over elections has a direct impact on legitimacy. I don't have to believe that someone in Washington DC is doing things right. Instead, I can interact directly with our state's secretary of state and our local county elections office.
Decentralization with heterogeneous procedures makes election compromise a much greater logistical challenge for any nefarious actor. It is probably a lot easier to spend money on lobbying.
Edit: Finally -- if you want your local/state elections infrastructure to have more resources, your voice and your vote are your tools.
The number of true "toss up" states is unfortunately fairly small.
If only populations were so evenly distributed. 1/2 of Americans live east of the Mississippi, on 1/3 of the Continental US, and about 1/2 of the rest live on the West Coast. The mideastern states have very few residents.
If you mean the Midwest then I regret to inform you that Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan are all in the top 10 most populous states.
They're in the middle of the continent, and east of my state, so they are mideast to me. Not to be confused with Arabia, east Mediterranean, and Persian gulf.
Don't agree. Just look at the history of Alec to see how local and regional governments are easily captured by self-serving actors. These are nice sentiments but the underlying assumptions are painfully naive.
Many states experiment with election law as well. California with top two primaries. It’s yet to be seen how that will play out, but we likely wouldn’t try on a national stage.
How do you figure? It could easily be 100%.
The actual implementation of how these standards are met should be left to the states. Updating the standards to eliminate exploits and loopholes would minimize gaming of the system.
Ideally I also feel that somehow the entire nation should be incented to increase voting %. Just not sure how to do that though without creating unforeseen consequences.
Even if there isn't a major breach to the point where hostile actors (foreign or domestic) "steal" an election, the confidence in e-voting will inevitably be cast into doubt by the losing side at some point. Guaranteed.
How do you audit or recount an anonymous electronic vote? How do you know if a vote cast is recorded as such? How do you know votes aren't wiped at some point?
There are two basic options that work perfectly well:
- Fill in a paper ballot with pen or pencil marking in spaces for the candidates you vote for. Have a machine verify your ballot.
- Vote on a touch screen. Once done print out your ballot and put it in a box.
In either case you use some kind of paper that isn't impossible to counterfeit (that's basically an impossibility) but it should be hard enough such that it's nontrivial.
That's it. That's all you need to do.
Sure local actors can "lose" ballots, ball stuf and so forth but this all has to be done on a pretty local level. You get rid of any potential vectors like a Russian or Chinese state agency changing the result from the other side of the planet because someone forgot to update OpenSSL on one Linux server or someone clicked on a phishing link on an innocuous looking email.
Apparently we didn't learn our lessons from unreliable voting methods in 2000 (pregnant chad, anyone?) so I'm not super-hopeful.
Now that roles have reversed, so have their claims.
Coming to the point, isn't US using paperballots? All the papers in my nation say US holds elections via paperballots and not EVMs.
And why the heck do EVMs exist? Who verifies if they are fine or not? We know very well abouhow elections are rigged in third world dictatorships.
There needs to be a standard.
Not everywhere, no: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
It's different on a per state/municipality basis. Some are paper, some are EVM. We're trending towards EVM despite warnings from computer security researchers.
Why do electronic machines exist? The charitable interpretation is that they were chosen in the aftermath of the disastrous 2000 election because they remove ambiguity and error. The less charitable interpretation is that they’re used because they’re easier to screw with.
Who verifies them? Mostly the companies who make them.
I've voted in person consistently, and never seen anything else. Different jurisdictions in the US make different choices.
Unfortunately, I think politicians know that most people don't have the time or resources to fact check and claims don't need to be supported by much evidence to be believed.
Like a lot of other things, I feel like Democrats like to keep these issues around as a rallying cause, instead of fixing them.
Edit: I'll just address some of the comments here. This is not "partisan sniping", and I write this as a former Obama volunteer and a lifelong Democrat.
Second: the federal government can do something. Here's an idea: give a $100M grant to 5 major universities to develop an open-source (hardware and software) alternative to the current system, and make a FIPS standard out of it. Then, certify vendors who implement that standard. The states can then buy systems from those vendors.
Can we just kind of give it a rest for a little while? It really is a bad time right now.
Election season makes the politically-minded think they can endlessly spill toxic discourse across all social and news mediums.
Sure it's not good. But it is just an enhancement of a greater wrong. I find most people don't want to deal with that issue at all and would prefer to believe the current system, as it is supposed to work, is the best way to do things.
It's a good system for those who are currently able to exploit it for their own gain. But that's always true everywhere.
I wish every piece of civilian software funded by gov is open sourced. And why shouldn't they be?
Validating source code does nothing. Even setting aside the fact that firmware and hardware level exploits could be running in any given voting machine, what guarantee do we have that the code in the repository is the code actually running on the machine at the app layer? Or, if you're REALLY security minded like myself, what guarantee do we have that the compiler and build environment didn't slip something in? (I guess that borders more on "paranoid" than "security minded", but you get the idea.)
It shouldn't be this hard to vote and to trust a certified outcome. Regulators require businesses to run with specified parameters, why do elections get off the hook?
On the other hand, if you use electronic machines without paper backup, it's basically impossible.
From what I have read this is not desirable for the fact that people will more easily be able to sell their vote because they can prove to their "buyer" how they voted. I think from a big-picture perspective this isn't a big deal. The reason is it would be extremely easy to create sting operations on both ends of this transaction: (a) create a sting to find and prosecute people willing to sell their vote, and (b) create a sting to find and prosecute people attempting to buy votes.
I'd prefer to move to a voting system where I can account for my vote after I've voted and put in place enforcement via these types of sting operations to prevent the inevitability of people attempting to buy / sell votes more frequently.
Just use paper ballots. This isn't that hard.
1) precinct has record of every eligible voter 2) voter can (via encrypted means) retrieve their vote so it's still "private", but the voter can view it after they've voted.
So as long as (a) the precinct confirms only eligible voter records are counted and (b) each voter can confirm their vote counted how they intended then I can't see how fabrication comes into play.
Granted this assumes the systems in place to onboard new voters is solid, but even if it's not breaches should in theory expose the weaknesses and make it possible for us to iterate toward an even more perfect system. By not exposing the core data it's kind of like "security through obscurity".
Ideals are hard to live up to ... for many.
Why mess around with new technology when there are proven solutions that work? The problem with American voting systems isn’t a failure to embrace new technology, it’s a failure to spend a little more money to do things right, combined with people who don’t want a system that accurately gathers people’s votes.
Overall there isn’t a reason to have voting machines, and if you do, they should really just print a piece of paper with your vote so that you can make sure it’s what you picked.
You’ll sometimes hear finance and efficiency as a reason, but unless American licensing for government software/hardware is significantly different from every where else, it’ll always be cheaper to manually count the votes than to buy voting software/hardware.
I mean, we digitised part of the process like I said, but we did it to make citizens wait less not because it was cheaper. It’s actually really expensive compared to doing manual voter registration, but we pay the money because no one likes queues.
Blockchain isn’t really a suitable option. It could be, but in the real world it would never be truly decentralised because no government is ever going to trust that, and if it isn’t, it’s just as easy to change and manipulate as any other database structure. And you still wouldn’t know if the voting machine actually did what you told it to do.
You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them.
I know we live in a time where we want to digitise everything, but the paper vote is probably the safest and most efficient way to run voting in a democracy.
The states that implement vote-by-mail in US (which, coincidentally, uses paper ballots), ensure that the person casting the vote is the person to whom the ballot was mailed by requiring a signature. To implement secret voting, the ballot is enclosed in two envelopes, and only the outer envelope has any personally identifiable information, including said signature. The signature is checked against the one in the voter registration database, and if there's a mismatch, the election department will contact the voter to ensure that the ballot was, in fact, theirs. Once the check is done, the outer envelope is discarded, and the still-sealed ballots are transferred to the people who will actually count them.
This doesn't preclude forcing someone to vote in a certain way, or paying them to vote in a certain way. But that is just as feasible with voting booths with modern tech - you simply demand that the victim records filling the ballot with their smartphone or a similar device. Some countries are banning camera phones from voting booths for this reason, but enforcement is usually impractical.
We set these up at libraries and other muniplacity buildings that already offer citizen things (English is my third language sorry).
We also have voting busses that go to low voting neighbourshoods and we obviously setup voting in nursing homes, hospitals and such.
But the process is always you, alone in the booth, with a piece of paper. Unless you have a physical handicap, then two officials will help you vote.
Taking a photo of your ballot is illegal, but as you say, it’s impossibil to enforce. You do have options though, we use pencils in the booth and you can always ask for a replacement ballot until your vote is cast. So you could technically take a photo and still vote another way.