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The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous
- whynotminot 6y agoI've lost so much respect for Greenwald over the last few months. Him joining the circus of self-interested assholes sowing unnecessary doubt in our democracy is just one more nail.
- jdlyga 6y agoI think we're forgetting the real reason: Republicans are aggressively fighting in courts to make counting votes harder, and to stop counting votes after a certain time. If both parties worked towards the common good instead of taking a "by any means necessary" approach, we'd have such a better country.
- kaycebasques 6y agoThe article is skimpy on evidence that other countries have perfected an efficient, trustworthy voting process. I guess the main argument is that countries that can get all the votes in by a specific deadline are more trustworthy?
- tyingq 6y agoI'm not particularly bothered that it might take another day or two for all the votes to be counted. I'd much rather have the devil I know than a bunch of automation and technology that might have bigger issues. Since it's not nationally controlled, and each US state (and county) can do what it wants, a big push to use tech is almost sure to backfire. And backfire in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
- craftinator 6y agoI'm not bothered either. I think one reason this comes across as an "issue" is that a majority of the public believes that "election day", the event, or holiday, or whatever you want to call it, is the day on which a new president is elected. This narrative is pushed by tradition, news media, and the politicians themselves (if it's in their interest). I think we need to separate this narrative in two separate days; one day is Voting Day, the day on which everyone who wants to participate in voting must have their ballot mailed or submitted, and Election Day, which should be a month later, after all votes are counted, where the official results are published, and we accept a new president. This is good for the American people, in that it's reliable and clearly defined, good for the media, because now they can have a month long headline where they hem and haw and speculate about who will win, and good for the politicians, in that there's time for a smooth transition.
- littleweep 6y agoI think part of the expectation that results be instant is just that things have gotten faster: I can stream any movie I want instantly -- why do I need to wait to see who won the vote? It's complicated and complicated things take time.
- tyingq 6y agoWell, and that it is often is same-day, when the results play out enough to make an electoral prediction with high accuracy. That was the case for many years.
- salicideblock 6y agoI really don't think this is about a tradeoff between time and reliability. Other developed countries have, for decades, reliably given results within hours of polls closing, without "automation or obscure technology". Time to results is a factor in the credibility of the results, just as auditability and transparency. International election observers regularly raise concerns about protracted and drawn out election counts in less developed parts of the world. I wonder how they would report on US elections.
- vonmoltke 6y ago> Other developed countries have, for decades, reliably given results within hours of polls closing, without "automation or obscure technology". How do these other countries handle mail-in ballots? In most (maybe all) US states, a ballot postmarked on election day is valid as long as it is received by some specific point (usually Friday) after election day. Thus, in the US there are an undetermined number of valid votes that have not even been received by election officials yet.
- cameronh90 6y agoThose rules just sound like a bad idea that should be changed. In the UK at least, it needs to be with your local authority by 10PM on polling day. If you fail to send it in time, you can just bring it down manually instead. (aside: I am generally opposed to postal voting. Postal vote seems even more prone to abuse than remote electronic voting.)
- disgu 6y agoGermany: Every person over the age of 18 is automatically registered to vote. The right to vote cannot be lost. Every registered voter gets a letter some time before the election and if you want to vote by mail you have to send the letter back for free and they'll send everything over. The ballots have to be received by the end of the day of election. There's a lot of time so you won't miss that date. The letter you get to remind you of voting also contains information about where you have to be to vote in person. There's very little last minute changes in Germany. The election is not decided in the last couple of weeks before the election, people have made up their minds at that point. I think the crucial part is that there's absolutely no effort involved. You basically show up at the polling place on the Sunday of the election and you're good to go. If you're too lazy for that you can to everything by mail. If you decide to vote by mail and then forget to send it via the post you can just drop it off at the polling station as well.
- tmaly 6y agoEven if tech has bigger issues, I would still like to see the certified election board results from each district posted to the blockchain. It would be a nice parallel way for the general public to get the actually results.
- eli 6y agoThere actually WAS a big push/requirement for states to adopt new tech after the 2000 election. https://www.eac.gov/about_the_eac/help_america_vote_act.aspx https://www.eac.gov/about_the_eac/help_america_vote_act.aspx Certainly not perfect but I think we can all be glad there aren't any "hanging chad" punchcards or un-auditable lever machines to worry about this election.
- Certhas 6y agoJust to give you a feel of what is actually possible in a well run election: Germany (80 Million people) has a fully manual (all paper ballots, no voting machines or automatic tallying) and fully witnessed official result on election night. This count is then checked and certified as final a few days later (discrepancies are rare and small). People don't have to wait in line to vote. And voting happens on Sunday, which is a mandatory day off for the vast majority of people.
- uranusjr 6y agoDitto. Elections in the US are run so inefficiently, it’s not the tech, but the people running them. I doubt tech would make a difference unless they also drastically change the people running those high tech machines.
- Balgair 6y agoI mean, there were a fair few news articles out there describing attempts to explicitly make voting harder and to throw out already cast votes.
- davidw 6y agoOregon has a great voting system. Works very well - supposedly the easiest in the country. Everything is by mail. Fraud rates are extremely low.
- mwest217 6y agoOregon, Washington, Colorado, and Utah all have 100% mail voting. I’ve lived in Colorado and Washington, and had a very easy time voting in both.
- marcosdumay 6y ago> Fraud rates are extremely low. How do you know that?
- dingaling 6y agoIt's a reasonable question. You can determine to some extent whether postal votes have been tampered with after they have been cast. Or whether more results were returned than were issued. But you can never realistically know what happened at the time of casting. Coercion is invisible with postal voting.
- marcosdumay 6y agoCan you determine if some votes have been destroyed? (I really don't know how that system works.)
- sriram_sun 6y agoThe US is really 1500+ independent elections.
- happytoexplain 6y agoIt's childish and destructively hostile to paint a prediction of the outcome of an election giving high odds to the result that turns out wrong as some kind of catastrophic failure or humiliation. It boggles my mind how many apparently otherwise smart people commit this obvious fallacy out loud.
- mitchdoogle 6y agoIts even more childish to do this before final results are even known. Let's wait until votes have been completely counted and then discuss the matter.
- leftyted 6y agoI agree the language is a bit childish but it is quite remarkable how -- for two elections in a row now -- we've seen these models get so much so wrong. Almost everyone was predicting a landslide for Biden and it's dead heat right now. It seems that there's something wrong with the polls themselves, how the models interpret the polls, or both. There's lots of talk about "stealing the election" coming from both sides. Lopsided predictions from polls and models can increase the perception that the election was "stolen" if the vote defies the predictions.
- happytoexplain 6y agoI agree that in the Trump case the models/polls are missing something, and we should try to figure out what it is, but I just don't think that's a bizarre thing for models/polls, and, more important, I think it's crazy how it's portrayed as some kind of ignorance of the elites in their political bubble, or some moral fault of arrogance.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> It's childish and destructively hostile That's kind of Greenwald's schtick, particularly recently.
- milquetoastaf 6y agoI normally like Glenn's writing but this is just FUD. Historically it has always taken days to count up all the votes due to the heterogeneity of the ballot systems used by the State's. Not to mention the actual electors in the College don't even vote until December - and aren't always faithful to the popular vote. People are acting like this is the end of the world or some horrible crisis that we don't know the outcome instantly. Patience goes a long way.
- davidw 6y agoA lot of his writing is FUD lately.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoConcern and worry about left-leaning "journalists" censoring a newstory (a newstory that, had it happened to the other political party, would have been all over the news in an instant and would be covered for weeks on end) is FUD? Yup, keep downvoting me retards because I want a free and objective press. You've destroyed this website, hope you're happy.
- milquetoastaf 6y agoWhat's the story? That Hunter Biden smoked crack and got a footjob? The NYT, WaPo, and Wall Street Journal all reported on the supposed connections in the emails tying Joe into this and all came up with little to no evidence of any wrongdoing, fraud, or conspiracy. Glenn's (former) editor points this out to him and then Glenn cites the Daily Caller, which is hardly a reputable source.
- singemonkey 6y agoYour comment here actually did make me happy, so thanks for that!
- happytoexplain 6y agoI downvoted you because your writing is irrationally emotional and one-sided - not because I disagree with a less hostile version of your point.
- tgb 6y agoI just worked the polls in Pennsylvania - the new voting machines are pretty great. You get a paper ballot, you insert it, you use a touchscreen to make choices, the machine prints the ballot with your choices on it, shows it to you behind plexiglass, you check over it for correctness. If it's all good, you hit done and the ballot is pulled in to a hopper. If not, you can redo. You get a machine count instantly at the end of the night, and a paper ballot trail for recounts that are voter-checked. Apparently other locations had some problems with paper jams from the ballots, but at least my operation had 3 machines and could have easily handled our voters with just 2 active without resorting to hand-filled ballots. The only real difficulty is the absentee ballots which were obviously a new effort (at this scale) lacking infrastructure. And they were prevented from processing any ahead of time. I think calling this "dangerous" or a "disgrace" is, in fact, blatantly disgraceful and dangerous.
- ashtonkem 6y agoCA had a similar system where it spat out the paper and you had to reinsert it into machine after checking. I thought the machine really provided the best of both worlds; fast and easy controls with user verifiable correctness and audit trails.
- dllthomas 6y agoThat's not as secure (or at least not as obviously secure) as when we mark the paper ourselves. People make mistakes, and people miss errors. This creates room for the software to introduce rare (but, in some races, common enough to matter) errors in a particular direction and rely on them 1) often being missed, and 2) accounted to user error when noticed.
- la6471 6y agoVery well said. Thank you. Let’s appreciate what we have.
- ASalazarMX 6y agoEven third world countries like Mexico are able to give reliable preliminary statistics the same night, and definitive statistics in a couple of days. I'd call it a disgrace that the self-proclaimed bastion of democracy could legally delay results for most of this month. It can be poor organization or regulation, but even if it's done for a good reason, it erodes the credibility of your elections.
- biggieshellz 6y agoThis is simply disinformation. The "inability to count votes" in many of the swing states this year was due to their Republican legislatures refusing to pass legislation allowing for the absentee ballots to be counted as they arrived, leading to a backlog after the election that they thought would make it easier to challenge these votes in court or to raise doubt about the outcome of the election. As we do every year, we will count all the votes, and each county and state will do their final canvass and report the results by the legally mandated deadline.
- klyrs 6y agoTo have consistent federal elections would require an erosion of state sovereignty. Is this something that would receive bipartisan support after this week?
- exabrial 6y agoI don't think so and any responsible steward of history would also disagree. The point is to spread power out, rather than concentrate it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- notRobot 6y agoDon't forget that 300,000 votes are currently unaccounted for: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/03/postal-service-blows-deadline-check-missing-mail-ballots/6149643002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/0...
- thetanil 6y agothere are 100 things which are disgraceful about the american electoral process. Whether or not the votes are counted in one day or three is probably the least important of all of them.
- dudul 6y agoI'm actually much more bothered by the fact that people can start voting 1 month before the actual election day, or that votes can be counted and communicated before the election day. Before moving to the US, I voted a few times in a different country where the rules were simple: one election day and absolutely no polls/estimations/etc communicated in the media during the last 48 hours before the election day.
- sukilot 6y ago> start voting 1 month before the actual election day, Letting people vote is the foundation of democracy. > votes can be counted and communicated Where does this happen? > absolutely no polls/estimations/etc communicated in the media during the last 48 hours before the election day. For what benefit?
- dudul 6y agoFor the benefit of letting people think about their choice without being bombarded with numbers, political ads, etc.
- 18af219e 6y agoThis reads to me as: `Foreigners ability to count votes is an international hero and needs to be honored!` I'm not going after this individual, but this kind of journalism needs to be considered. ( Flagged or not? You tell me? )
- sukilot 6y agoFlagged for trolling. US is holding 50 independent elections during a pandemic. Refusing to let a central authority count all the votes is a feature, not a bug.
- kspacewalk2 6y agoThe biggest issue is this ridiculous heterogeneity. Canada is no less of a federal country with devolved decision-making powers, perhaps even more so. And yet we have one system of casting and tallying votes, presided over by one federal electoral commission, which reports to the parliament and not to the government. It was set up in 1920 and worked out very well for us, delivering 100 years of bullshit-free elections. Sometimes countries adopt different laws and you cannot unequivocally say one is better than the other. But sometimes, like here, one way is clearly, unequivocally superior. This is too important to leave to amateur hour and should be done right, Canada's way.
- sukilot 6y agoCanada doesn't have anything like a President. The Prime Minister is chosen the way the US chooses the Speaker of the House. That's far far more important than the details of the administration of voting.
- kspacewalk2 6y agoThat's not really important in any way. What's important is the uniformity in the way votes are cast and tallied, and having a single independent federal agency to govern the process.
- madhadron 6y agoThis is an incredibly poor analysis. If you allow mail in votes that are accepted as long as they are postmarked by election day, you can't certify the counts on election day unless a majority of registered voters' ballots have arrived by election day. It's as simple as that. The contention is mostly in a small number of states where the Republican party has engineered electoral corruption in order to retain control, combined with the winner-take-all nature of electoral votes in most states. Most states conduct elections with few problems and little drama. If the president were elected by popular vote at the national level there would be far less contention because the margin in any given local election would be much less meaningful.
- eli 6y agoIt's unreasonable to demand the results of an election when some states have not yet even received all the legally cast mail-in ballots. Further, Republican legislatures in three states forced through new rules this election to block the counting of mail-in ballots until after election day making it impossible to have instant results. And it's bizarre to indict our vote counting system based on the fact that it's hard for the media to guess the winner from incomplete data. Nobody wins any electoral college votes until the Secretary of State certifies the results. It takes a while because they make sure all the votes are counted first. This is a feature not a bug. There are some real issues in election administration in the US, but this ain't it. If it were up to me, I'd ban the release of uncertified election results, at least for a few days. The problem he identifies is one of expectations.
- mitchdoogle 6y agoA member of the news media should know better than to complain about the vote tallies flipping overnight. We've known for weeks that it was likely for several states to flip like this because these states were not allowed to count the mail-in ballots as they came in. In the states where it was allowed to count votes early, the vote tally was released last night, in similar speed to his example of Brazil. What's really dangerous is that the same people who said that mail-in votes couldn't be counted early in states like PA are now saying they shouldn't be counted after election day. It's disenfranchisement, plain and simple.
- eli 6y agoSadly, I think he does know better.
- jgwil2 6y agoIs he complaining about the vote counting or the prediction modeling? This piece vacillates between the two without really being clear that these are two completely separate things.
- bgorman 6y agoIt is really sad that any post that provides any criticism of any system that might be helping Biden in any way at all is flagged on hacker news these days. Hacker news is the new reddit.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoYup. ~8 years ago, this place used to be much more levelheaded and objective when it came to politics. Nowadays, anything critical of the Democratic party is instantly flagged, as will be every future Greenwald post, whom HN used to revere. And the moderators don't give a fuck either because they're also in the main HN demographic of SV white liberal trash. HN is now the same as every other online community: trash.
- singemonkey 6y ago> HN is now the same as every other online community: trash. A trash community where you're posting over 10 times a day... Seriously, if you hate this community so much, why not find somewhere else where you don't get so angry?
- zo1 6y agoWhy is this flagged, exactly? Doesn't seem too-bad in terms of how the conversation around it is being had. Also, this article is a prime spot for us to have a discussion about potential improvements and tech solutions or oversight regarding the election and voting. Overall, I'd say a good topic to discuss here.