The phrase "voting system" is an absurdity. It highlights the overly complex, bug-riddled lunacy we have now.
A lockbox, under guard with multiple observers, collecting ballots over the voting period, followed by a public counting of the paper ballots is simple and fast. What we have now isn't.
They go to one of the booths and mark their selection, and drop it off into a zip-tied big ballot box (that is visible to the general public, and of course election staff at all times).
After the polls close, the polling official cuts the zip-ties on the ballot boxes, everyone working sorts ballots into piles and count them, along with scrutineers from political parties who can watch. An officer-in-charge records and publishes the results continuously, and everything is saved and shipped for OCR-based recounting to verify the numbers. The process is federally operated and the same processes are followed everywhere.
Results are almost always revealed on election night.
The electoral roll books are processed centrally after every election, so someone who votes twice would be quickly caught. Someone who votes under fake names and addresses would most likely cross-over with someone else, hence an investigation would still happen. (We also have compulsory voting, which is another subject for debate, but it does mean "vote under multiple names" is mitigated without the need for ID laws).
The job pays reasonably well (A$457 for the day), more or less everyone who applies gets hired (I believe there is a bias towards maximizing first-time applicants), and it's hard to think about election fraud when every citizen can be part of the election process itself, and it's hard to conceive of how fraud can happen.
None of that matters in the face of conspiracy theorists who live in non-reality.
I haven't heard of a large part of the US that doesn't have a auditable paper ballots as a backup for the electronic system.
That is far far far different that what is being talked about fro AU and Canada, where there is no electronic middle man that is trusted first...
Some (very very few) did "Risk Limiting" Audits, that audit a random sampling (some times as low as 2%) of ballots.
I am unaware of any full, hand recount not using any electronic machines audits that took place anywhere in the US outside of AZ.
The audit in progress in AZ is a partisan sham that has been challenged as unnecessary and politically motivated by local Republican researchers[2] and officials.
1. https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
2. https://tucson.com/news/local/political-notebook-tucson-repu...
I would hardly call that a Full Audit... but I will stand corrected in that one other state besides AZ is did a hand recount.
1 of 50 states, 14 of 435 Congressional Districts, and a small fraction of total races....
No narrative of fraud at the counting stage makes any sense unless you haven't read how the count is secured without sacrificing too much speed.
Unfortunately in this case, they won't accept anything that invalidates their baseless belief that the election went the other way.
If someone found voting at two places, that's dealt with afterwards.
The roll book is very, very big, and includes every registered elector in the state. It's alphabetically sorted by last name. Every election official gets their own roll book that they mark names off.
The way you are supposed to do it is ask:
1. "What is your name?"
(flip through the book and find the right page with the last name, usually just takes a few seconds)
2. "Where do you live?" / "What is your address?"
(find the entry with the right name and correct address; if you can't find it, ask them to go to the 'help desk' where a provisional ballot is provided).
3. "Have you voted before in this election?"
(they should say no, and then you initial a ballot and hand it to them).
These books are centrally checked after the election, so people who vote twice can be investigated.
Obviously, voting must remain anonymous. Could it happen?
I'm guessing this would be similar to presenting your SSN. Its troublesome. But regardless, I'd think that we could prove the voting record.
Edit: the more I think about this, I don't think PKI could work. Voter identification would always be available in some way shape or form. I'm not sure this can be solved with tech. Maybe we should just have paper ballets.
Your final conclusion is correct, though. Any system which relies on people having to trust specialist auditors to tell them whether the "correct" software has counted the votes is a system which is fatally vulnerable to FUD and conspiracy theories, even if by some miracle the hardware and software were all open source and worked perfectly.
You present....damn it I've already figured out a half dozen problems with this idea. Give the bill to your buddy and he can vote how he wants.
Do you have any ideas or recommendations to this problem? Every citizen whom is eligible to vote should be able to. Every vote should be counted correctly.
It is a hard problem to solve, and I would guess whoever solves this problem - especially for the long term - would be able to help out humanity in a way that hasn't been invoked in a long, long time.
Ughhh. The world is tough sometimes. Reminds me of Idiocracy - Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr., fuck you, I'm eating.
There are 35k polling stations for 47m voters so each station has to process only ~1,300 voters in 15 hours. Queueing is unusual in my experience. Postal votes and voting by proxy are also options.
The US has state-run elections, as provided in the Constitution (Article II, section 1).
Each state could individually opt-in to use a federally run system (or portion thereof), but the feds can’t mandate it, absent a Constitutional amendment.
The USA is really a republic of states in many regards and the states have [or at least started with and in theory still have] a lot more power than in many other countries where the central government is stronger.
With the 16th the federal government was able to extort/bribe the states with money...
With the 17th the states lost their voice in Congress...
The 2 combined has really hurt the idea of State Sovereignty. Personally I would like to see that power restored back to the States
This is why all spending bills have to start in the House, because the House is the peoples voice in congress, and if they want to spend the peoples money it has to start with the peoples voice, not the States.
The US was to be a republic with only a single part of the new federal government democratically elected, there was / is a reason for that. Separation of Powers and distributed power being the key concepts.
By changing congress to have both the house and the senate become democratically elected the State Governments lost their voice in the federal government.
Just because the president is elected indirectly through electors, and Senators were elected through States, doesn't mean they were any less "democratically elected" than Representatives. You could equally say that the House of Representatives is undemocratic because democracy would require all laws to be approved by referendum.
Also, in case anyone still thinks that representative democracy is antithetical to the goal of a republic, and goes against the wishes of the Founding Fathers, they should consider Hamilton's words: "But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable."
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-01...
I do say that, I know its probably a shock but I am not a fan of democracy. I believe democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what is for dinner. I do not support the generally popular idea that democracy is the best form of governance.
>>anyone still thinks that representative democracy is antithetical to the goal of a republic
It can go against the goals of the republic, democracy itself needs to be balanced against other powers. The US was setup to be a careful balance of interests, over the years we have upset that balance and today the democratic elements of our republic are antithetical to the goals of the republic as founded, which was to promote and preserve the Lockean philosophy of individual rights.
The democratic elements in our current system have replaced this idea of Individual rights, with the idea of collective rights... Has replaced the philosophy of negative rights, with positive rights. Has replaced individualism, with collectivism
Individualist like myself see this has a problem.
>>goes against the wishes of the Founding Fathers, they should consider Hamilton's words:
Personally I am not a big fan of Hamilton, and he hardly spoke for all the "Founding Fathers". Many people seem to have this idea that the "Founding Fathers" all sat in a room agreeing with each other. Far far from the case. They largely disagreed with each other, and many hated each other. Personally I am more of a Jefferson, and Franklin supporter than a Hamilton supporter. Hamilton had the desire to create a much stronger and more centralized federal government than many of the other Founders were comfortable with, He had to make many concessions that reduced the power of the federal government. Most famously he was opposed to the Bill of Rights even being included as he saw it as unnecessary...
No to me Jefferson was better founder... and if I was alive then I likely would have been a part of the Anti-Federalists...
What system would you support instead of democracy, and how would you convince the 2 wolves to support that system when they could just ignore it and eat what they want? At least under democracy, the lamb might get 4 years to emigrate, or persuade the wolves to become vegetarian.
Democracy may not be perfect, but the fact that human society has invented a system that is more peaceful and liberating than either civil war or dictatorship is something like a miracle, so I don't expect there to be something fundamentally different and better that humans could implement.
I do think that not all democracies are equal, though, and it's worth considering the possible options regarding voting systems, gerrymandering, mandatory voting, recall elections, the size of legislatures, campaign finance rules, and so on.
> The democratic elements in our current system have replaced this idea of Individual rights, with the idea of collective rights... Has replaced the philosophy of negative rights, with positive rights. Has replaced individualism, with collectivism
I think your disdain for current political and societal trends has been directed at the idea of democracy, but it is merely a scapegoat. If anything, democracy has made people feel more empowered and more individualistic, whereas allowing the states to elect the Senators on behalf of the people is a more "collectivist" approach. Also, I'm not sure how you can blame democracy for the philosophy of positive rights, except to say that most people in the US support the idea of schools and food being provided for poor children.
There is maybe an argument for requiring super-majorities for changing very consequential aspects of a country, such as the minimal set of powers granted to the federal government, or the minimal set of restrictions that the federal government can place on the individual states, but even that is a form of democracy, and if anything it is more collectivist to require a super-majority than a simple majority.
I don't want to put words in your mouth or misrepresent you, so forgive me if this is an unfair characterization, but if what you're actually saying is "I prefer how things were, and I wish that the system made it as hard as possible to introduce all these new changes that other people seem to want", then I would say that this is not a principled position on the system itself, it is a self-serving preference for whatever system would give you the outcome you wanted. Such a preference would fail the "original position" / "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, and therefore should be rejected.
> No to me Jefferson was better founder
Then let me also provide some other quotes, expressing his views on democracy and individualism. "It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail."[0] "Every man cannot have his way in all things. If his opinion prevails at some times, he should acquiesce on seeing that of others preponderate at other times. Without this mutual disposition we are disjointed individuals, but not a society."[1] I don't know how representative those quotes are of his over all philosophy, and I think the Joker may have said something similar to the second one, but hopefully it confirms the idea that the modern trends you are reacting to have very deep roots.
In the case of Mesa County, CO, the breech of security was by a conspiracy theorist. There is no voter-level election fraud, so the USA doesn't need strict ID requirements. Colorado is particularly transparent about how they do risk-limiting audits of all elections, so fearing about electronic counting machines mis-counting is misplaced.
What exactly, are you uneasy about?
- Authorized election observers banned from their designated polling places on election day.
- Cessation of ballot counting on election day.
- Waiting until observers leave to count large numbers of ballots that were hidden under a table all day.
- Hundreds of thousands of ballots with no chain of custody records.
- Double standards about who is allowed to challenge vote certifications. Democrats challenged Trump's election and both of Bush 43's elections as is permitted in the Constitution. When Republicans did the same in 2021 they were threatened with impeachment and removed from committees.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other reasons to be uneasy.
For other states, all these issues were addressed in more than one lawsuit each, and all such lawsuits were rejected.
The suits didn't get filed in one state, and appear before one judge. Multiple states, multiple judges. A lot of the suits were appealed, and failed on appeal, too. To be uneasy about this is to believe in a far reaching, many hundreds of participant conspiracy.
Further, the states in which these concerns were raised are all swing states. This seems suspicious in and of itself. Why not raise concerns about procedures in Colorado? It's a vote by mail state, and even in Colorado Springs districts, there was a big swing to Biden from 2020 results. Seems like you'd take on the easy places to prove a conspiracy, and you'd raise legit concerns. But no, swing states are the only places, it looks like trying to game the refs, to borrow a sports metaphor.
What are you referring to here?
I'm not sure about the other examples, but it is true that the House of Representatives voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. That may have been for reasons other than simply believing the spurious claims of election fraud, though.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/04/marjorie-tay...
Are you talking about January 6th, or what?
John Kerry conceded quickly in 2004, partly to avoid the weirdness that followed the 2000 election.
Gore as Vice President presided over the congressional vote to certify the EC vote. Which he lost. Nothing like Jan 6 2021 happened and the vote was substantially closer and fishier. I think the double standard lies elsewhere.
How many of those countries have as many races on a typical presidential-year ballot as the US does?
The US is also generally pretty fast to count its ballots; note that the election result is usually known within hours of polls closing, despite the insane number of races on the ballots. What happened in 2020 is there was an unusually high number of mail-in ballots, and this was combined with several states intentionally slowing down the counting process.
It’s also not available because making people show up to a few set of fixed locations at specific polling hours will exclude people who don’t have access to transportation which is why during the Obama election the big thing was the Obama campaign providing busses to voters.
If you’re willing to give up some anonymity (only that you voted not what/you voted for) then mail in ballots, public drop-boxes, and walk-in deposits are much faster and more available. If you can mail in then great! Done. If you want to go to the polls then you fill out your ballot ahead of time, verify yourself with the poll worker and then drop it in the box. Done. 30 seconds a person rather than 10 minutes a person.
I think the culture in the US surrounding voting is the real issue. The discussion is always around security and integrity and making sure only the right people vote which are the kind of problems people who read too many Tom Clancy books care about. Meanwhile we only get at most ~50% turnout every year and people have to fight to actually cast their ballots. And we pretend that our election results actually mean something when half the country doesn’t vote and the sample that does is so skewed because the factors that keep people from voting aren’t random.
Really, we should just be switching to using scantron style ballots everywhere. They're paper ballots which can be efficiently counted by a machine, and are super easy to manually recount later
Better yet, switch to Scantron style ballots with some clever mathematics in how the ballots are made, and some clever chemistry in how they are marked, and you can then make it so that all the ballots can be published afterwards, any voter can verify that their vote was counted toward the correct candidate, anyone can verify that the totals for each candidate match the vote, a voter cannot prove to a coercer that they voted the way the coercer wanted, and any voter can do a check before voting to try to catch shenanigans with being given tampered with ballots, all without requiring any changes to the Scantron counting machines so that there is very little addition cost for all of these protections--and for voters that don't care about verifying that their vote was correctly counted it works just like plain Scantron voting--fill in the bubbles next to the candidates you want to vote for.
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...
Even if all the parties behave correctly, it's still not clear that such a system is really solving the underlying problem. If someone claims there were thousands of fake votes sent in by dead people, are you really going to reassure the public by saying "Don't worry, we've re-calculated the modulo-n equations using the cryptographic key's bitstream acting as a stream cipher"? That's just asking for the backfire effect to kick in.
Importantly, though, there are as many strings printed on the ballot as there are candidates, so there is nothing stopping the coercee from noting down the string that corresponds to the vote they were told to cast, without actually casting it that way.
I'm not sure how this still gives rise to the claimed properties of the system, but the inventors did at least take the coercion problem seriously, from what I remember.
It's not unusual to have votes for some combination of Member of Parliament, Regional Parliament, City Council, Local Mayor and Police Commissioner all on the same day. Members of the European Parliament too, until recently.
It really doesn't take that long. Polls close at 10pm and first results can come out around midnight. Depending on how close the result is, the winner is often known around 6am the next day and the new Prime Minister can be in office by the afternoon.
I really like the system we have in DFW now. We have a global voter roll so you can vote in any location in your county. You submit your vote on a machine, which keeps a local machine-level tally and prints out a paper ballot. You verify the contents of the paper ballot, then drop it into a vote counting box, which scans, tallies, and displays your vote for you to confirm. If at any time anything looks wrong, you notify a poll worker to resolve it. At the end of each day, they verify the counts on the machines and ballot box match, then the ballot counter/box is locked along with the memory cards of each individual machine, so you have day-by-day results.
When the election ends, the ballot boxes are delivered to a central county counting system where they are put into another large-scale counting machine to verify that the counts there match the local counter/box. If at any point there's too many discrepancies, they'll do hand counts of the paper ballots. They can also unlock the voting machine memory cards if necessary. All of this process is done under the supervision of poll watchers.
In theory, you get near instantaneous results as each voting location can simply total the ballot box results and report them. You also have 4 separate systems (voting machine, local counter/ballot box, central counter, paper backups) that would need to be compromised to successfully tamper with the results.
I'm sure it wouldn't make a conspiracy theorist satisfied, but to me, it's a system that balances speed and convenience with the simplicity and security(?) of a paper ballot, without unnecessarily obfuscating the process behind electronic-only voting.
Similarly, the removal and reinstatement of protection for Dreamers also seems to be one of those issues the parties broadly are incompatible about.
If you would like to educate me, I would welcome it! Maybe my understanding of a party is wrong, or my understanding of policies are wrong. I’m not really into politics so I don’t know much.
While in actual votes the parties may differ, in principle I often fail to see any clear difference in philosophy. Someone running against the incumbent will slam them for abuse of executive orders and support for the Patriot Act. Then they'll get in office and sign a renewal of the Patriot Act and issue more executive orders than their predecessor. In that way I see them as a uniparty on many issues.
In other ways Republicans are just anti-Democrats and Democrats are just anti-Republicans. They seem to use the same arguments on different issues depending on what happens to suit them or what politician they're defending. I've seen Republicans slam Biden for his failure in Afghanistan and failing to get Afghan nationals that helped the US military evacuated. But watch them do a 180 as soon as any of those Afghans arrive here. Which party believes you have absolute autonomy over your own medical decisions and that doctors need to treat you according to your own wishes? Well it depends on the treatment we're discussing. It doesn't depend on any consistent principle.
Call it a uniparty or not - I just don't trust either to be sincere about any democratic principles anymore.
Having said that, individual candidates do differ and the Republican party is going down a dark path dressed up as libertarianism that almost made me reflexively downvote "uniparty" above.
I suspect that is largely because the issues you care about happen to align with one single party. You primary seem to focus on what government can provide in way of social programs. Do you believe that is the sole role of government or even a proper role of government? To provide things for people?
If so it is not surprising you believe there is differences between the parties, because on the issue of social program there does seem to be (even though that is only surface level) a difference, democrats love to give out lots of free money to people they believe will continue to vote for them.
I am sure my opinions on those programs you will disagree with.
The problem here is that I do not believe those programs are put into place to help anyone, they are just another form of control. The uniparty wants control, they get that via fear, money, and division.
The apparent divide on "social programs" is an example of how the uniparty convinces people they are separate, when in reality they are both authoritarian driven by the desire to control people, not help them.
Edit:
BTW, Follow the money for your democrats... Look at the actual spending bills, look at where the Trillions of Dollars is going. Hint it is not the poor... sure a Few billion is for the headlines, but most of it is plain old corporate welfare just like Republicans do....
The broad strokes are the same, the details are different