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ars

Actually it's quite the opposite: People get so worked up about these things because they don't tolerate it.

If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

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If OP comes from a democracy, I highly doubt they do things like:

- Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1]

- "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2]

- Another article on "True the Vote" [3]

- Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4]

- You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines. [5]

- Again, you don't see stuff like this on election day outside of the US: [6]

- Thankfully, there are honorable republicans who also call this out, like Conor Friedersdorf: [7]

- And this, it's just... Baffling to people in the rest of the world. [8]

Again, this is unheard of where I live, not because people don't care but because we're not (completely) bamboozled!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOT1bRYdK8

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-ball...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-tr...

[4] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/21/voting-wron...

[5] http://news.yahoo.com/voting-already-mess-florida-041641182....

[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/no-one-i...

[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/shame-on...

[8] http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/doral-florida-early-vo...

So very much this. Voting systems and elections in the US are heavily gamed, mostly legally but always unethically. The reason why the US does not have smooth voting is because the incentive for elected officials isn't in getting people voting, but enabling voting for those with interests aligned with their own. When it comes to actual voters, some of them see nothing wrong with policies that are highly discriminatory, and that includes how elections and voting is conducted.

The "gamed" bit is the essence of the problem. The USA has a winner-take-all two party system and not a parliamentary setup. This simultaneously makes the victory margins razor thin (because the two parties naturally align at about 50% support) and the stakes of the outcome very high.

Where in most of Europe people can just go vote their favorite party and let the legislators figure out the details later, everything in the US is determined on one day.

So the incentives to game the system are immense, which is exactly why you see this kind of "Voter ID" laws to target unwanted demographics, and elaborate GoTV efforts with buses shuttling people around town, etc...

But even in the US, it doesn't have to be that way. Several states (mine among them) have moved to a 100% mail-in ballot system and eliminated in-person polling places.

> Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly

Why would that discourage anyone? In slovenia, you are required by law to carry an ID when you turn 18/get voting rights. So there's really no excuse for anyone to not have an id (or driver's licence).

An example: In Texas, a student ID is not good enough to count as a voter ID -- but an NRA member card is. I kid you not. The Simpsons could not have come up with something more absurd.

Minorities in the US are way less likely to carry photo ID. I could go on and on. In short, the situation is different than in Slovenia.

Also, there's a loaded history, too. Blacks were disenfranchised post-Civil War through a whole host of measures, of which IDs was just one of them. Requiring IDs or literacy for voters brings back thoughts of Jim Crow laws. These issues are steeped in history that Slovenia just doesn't have.

It's the same here. Well, similar, you're not legally required to carry it with you; most people do so anyway for convenience. But some countries don't have a national id, including but not limited to the US.

The UK briefly introduced and then scrapped a national ID system, bowing to public pressure. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006 -- a key phrase being "Many of the concerns focused on the databases underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves."

It's not something you can easily compare across borders and it's extremely loaded with all sorts of issues in the US, as far as I understand.

In a lot of countries, ID is not mandatory, and government-endorsed photo IDs are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. As such, people with a high income will be more likely to have them.

That applies doubly so for a passport or driving license -- people with more money are more likely to have a car or travel overseas, so more likely to have those types of ID.

If you live in a place that requires you to carry identification papers at all times, I can understand your shock.

The US does not have national ID, and doesn't even require you to show identification to the police when asked.

Though it does require an ID to buy alcohol.

So I guess we're talking about people under 21 who (a) don't drive, (b) have never needed an ID for any other purpose, and (c) can vote but for whatever reason, are too poor/disadvantaged/etc. to get an ID.

And those people get a provisional ballot anyway.

I guess I don't see the problem with requiring ID; we require for far less important things already.

Don't forget people over 21 who don't drink, e.g. muslims. I can well imagine that poor muslims who don't own a car constitute a significant constituency, and with a significant Democratic preference; it seems plausible that keeping them from voting would lead to a noticeable shift in the overall result.

> You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines.

Well, that's not strictly true. I recall waiting about half an hour on the election day for one of the elections I voted in in Ontario.

Several hours' wait during early voting seems a little bush league though.

> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

Or that they don't happen...

what is this fantastic place?

Denmark? I've never heard of these sort of things happening around here.

> Or that they don't happen...

Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up.

If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.

Other countries rely less on machines where this sort of thing is even possible. The fact that human-built systems are likely to contain errors is an argument for making these system as simple as possible. The fact that we use touchscreen voting machines in the U.S., with all the hidden errors (honest or malicious) they can introduce into the canvass, is insane.

Yes! People are surprised when I hear that I, as a software developer, am utterly opposed to touch-screen voting and internet voting.

California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise.

I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.

Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?

What system, in your opinion, would minimize error?

> Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?

What on earth? I marked the candidate I wanted to vote for with an X in a circle on a paper ballot. Marking circles for more than one candidate is a spoiled ballot you can replace instead of depositing if you wish. This isn't rocket science.

Normal(paper) vote with one reviewer per political party.

Computer-based systems that print out a machine-readable paper ballot that can be hand-counted as well. You vote (perhaps with a touch screen, perhaps not) by making your selections, printing out your ballot, examining it, and inserting it into the tabulator once printed.

There's still plenty of margin for error (for instance, the printer could run misprint or run out of ink, the tabulator could be buggy), and corruption ("here, let me file that for you...") but I think it maximizes the benefits of touchscreen voting for disabled voters while minimizing the downsides.

We don't have voting machines exactly for that reason (Germany). There have been cases with voter fraud, but they got solved with recounts.

Oh, they get reported on (Netherlands). Usually there are four, five polling places in the country where there are problems with voting boxes or ballots. Yes, we have problems, but a) there doesn't seem to be intentional interference, and b) the scale is a few orders of magnitude smaller than in the US.

Must not be a programmer if you actually believe bugs don't exist.

Are there problems ("bugs")? Sure. Are there problems similar in magnitude to the 'shenanigans' in the United States of America being discussed by morsch? Quite possibly not.

There's also the possibility that other countries have more robust voting systems so there is less to complain about. Do you think voters wait in line for five hours in Germany, or get turned away from booths in Scotland? Voter turn out is slightly larger in both countries compared to the US, so apathy probably won't explain fewer complaints. It's more likely that the lack of a US national standard system permits more screw-ups and maybe occasional outright abuse.

*(Scotland 64%, Germany 68%, US 55%)

If they didn't tolerate it, they wouldn't have voting machines in the first place.

In many other countries these things are banned because people care.

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