I really don’t understand the American obsession with voting machines, I believe there is always a manual count anyway and American election counting is extremely slow anyway.
American elections usually have a whole ton of races on them. I've usually got about ten elected officials to weigh in on, and then five issues to give a yes or no to (down since I moved out of California). That would make manual counting all the races a major pain. AFAIK, ballots are machine counted, a sample is taken and hand counted, and as long as the sample is consistent with the machine count, and the machine count isn't too close, that's that. Unless a candidate wants to pay for a hand count of their race. But each state has its own rules, and races are generally handled at the county level, so there's room for a lot of variation.
The slow parts of the counting is usually validating the ballots before opening them, which may not be legally allowed before election day and recently, many states allowing for ballots to arrive by mail after election day if they have a timely postmark (details about ballots that arrive by mail without a postmark vary, of course). Sometimes there's issues with transportation of ballots or polling places have to stay open for a long time for voters in line, and generally counting in a state won't begin until all polls are closed, which can be a coordination issue. Otherwise, counts are usually available night of, which is good enough for me? The certification process is slow, because it takes a lot of manual work (as discussed above).
It’s actually irritating. Most ballot measures shouldn’t be ballot measures. Pretty much anything that’s a constitutional amendment shouldn’t even be on the ballot, and the more elected officials there are, the less pressure there is on the more abjectly political parts of government to do a good job (legislatures, Governors/Mayors). We’re up to electing State Supreme Court justices now, and well, you can’t be held accountable for your judicial picks if you’re not the mook that put them in office, now can you?
As much as I enjoy having a month or so to fill out my ballot at my leisure, I’m beginning to see a downside to that combined with voting machines, namely in that it allows the ballot to basically grow endlessly over time. The point of elected officials is these are the mooks hired to do the job of making laws, appointing their cabinet members, filling vacancies in the Courts and, prosecutors offices and law enforcement, and running the business of government in a politically accountable fashion so that we don’t have to.
Do you believe those should be on different ballots or do you just oppose the concept of referendum in general?
California allows for initiated constitutional amendments to pass with only a simply majority, and those amendments can appear on the ballot after gathering a relatively small number of signatures. The signature requirement weeds out a majority of initiatives, whether amendment or statute, but the quality of the remainder makes me wish it were more stringent.
I dislike that California's process for citizen initiatives is quite so open as it is. For example, 2022's Prop 29 was a third run of a measure that also failed to pass on each of the preceding two ballots, with 59%+ of voters opposed each time. The topic is sufficiently narrow, and would benefit from expert input, that I don't feel it belongs on a ballot at all.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_29,_Dialysis_...
I question, as well, the inability of the state legislature to amend or repeal anything initiated by citizens without sending it back out onto the ballot.
I would support one more additional referendum though: a ratification for a new California Constitution that wipes the slate clean on the old one.
That struck me as weird too. Why would so many of Hutchinson's votes be second-rank, with no first-ranked candidate? Hutchinson was the incumbent; one might divine from tealeaf reading that these voters knew about Hutchinson, and based on his record, did't care to rank him first. But they didn't like any other candidate well-enough to give him first rank.
I think perhaps naive voters treat the ranks they award like gold stars on a student's workbook; more a mark of approval than a vote in election. But who's to say?
It's easy to play into that bias, you even see it among the technically minded who work with computers all day, and exploit it for financial gain. It's a grift that keeps on grifting.
Nice! Filed - I'm sure I can use that one someday.