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Whole countries with public counting of paper ballots have election results faster than we do. The phrase "voting system" is an absurdity. It highlights the ov

• syshum 5y ago
  The uniparty does not want secure, fast, accurate election. Election manipulation is the game... Neither side of the uniparty want to admit that though and believe "their side" is the pure and virtuous side, where as the "others" are evil vote stealers or suppressors
  • hatware 5y ago
    I like how this is fading because folks can't process reality. How anyone thinks lifelong politicians are serving us in _any_ way is beyond me.
    • sidlls 5y ago
      Tribalism has a very strong presence in the US.
      • hatware 5y ago
        I just call it the Agent Smith effect
  • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    I’m struggling to identify what is a uniparty here. I fee that the two parties in the United States have multiple separate issues and behaviors that are mutually incompatible enough to call two different political organizations. For example, when the republicans were in power, very few social programs were passed/rolled out in the 4 years they were in power for. The Democrats in comparison have passed a significant amount of legislation in just 8 months, including new social programs like the child tax credit. 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.
    • macksd 5y ago
      They may be referring to the fact that the two parties will often join forces to protect the status quo. Where you see support for things like ranked choice voting, or easier ballot access for third parties, you see less support from the established party leaders because the status quo is their best case scenario. It's all about democracy as long as you have the majority. 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.
    • mindslight 5y ago
      Individual candidates have differing policies, but their overall platform is cut from the same cloth - benefiting their corporate sponsors. The main backdrop of agreement is massive money printing to prop up ever growing market bubbles, to the detriment of individuals' finances. The main differentiation comes in how they spin the fallout from corporate welfare - the Democrats want to use some printed money for individual welfare, whereas the Republicans market fake austerity. 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.
    • syshum 5y ago
      >>I fee that the two parties in the United States have multiple separate issues 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....
• dannyw 5y ago
  Australia has a simple and trustable election system. Paper ballots, reinforced by the fact that more or less every citizen can get a job working on election day. Your duties include looking up people based on what they say their name an address is (no ID required; although many electors hand me their ID anyway) on a big electoral roll book, cross out their name, and hand them a ballot with your initials. 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.
  • smt88 5y ago
    The US systems are often similar to this, including the several steps of checks. None of that matters in the face of conspiracy theorists who live in non-reality.
    • sidlls 5y ago
      Not really. Most of the US is run on a very opaque system of electronic machines and poorly thought out processes ostensibly to make it more secure.
• jcranmer 5y ago
  > Whole countries with public counting of paper ballots have election results faster than we do. 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.
• seoaeu 5y ago
  Hand counting of ballots works well when you're only voting for a single elected office. In the US, most elections involve voting for many different offices all on the same ballot. 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
  • sidlls 5y ago
    Are you suggesting most other places, including those with counted paper ballots, don’t have multiple offices to elect at election time?
  • tzs 5y ago
    > 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/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/... https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      Unfortunately such systems assume that all of the parties in the election are working in good faith towards finding out the true result. They don't deal with the threat model of one (or both) major parties deciding to deliberately cast doubt on the outcome of an election by lying about or losing one of the secret keys needed to check the results. 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.
• ajay-b 5y ago
  I agree, the overly complex use of machines, followed by closed door counting, lends it self too much to impropriety. I think America has mostly honest elections, but after last year‘s election I am… Uneasy about the whole system. Simple is better.
  • bediger4000 5y ago
    What exactly makes you uneasy? 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?
    • tohnjitor 5y ago
      - Arguably unconstitutional changes to state voting laws less than six months before election day. - 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.
      • bediger4000 5y ago
        None of these issues are true in Colorado, or Mesa County. 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.
• Spivak 5y ago
  This system is simple but it’s neither fast nor available. The thing you have to worry about with this kind of system is ballot stuffing which leads to needing an additional requirement to verify each voter and observe them filling out and depositing the ballot. This creates a bottleneck at the polls which is why every election there are news stories about people having heat strokes or being turned away after the polls close. 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.
• sfteus 5y ago
  My only issue with a paper-only drop box is there's no redundancy. I would think with having poll watchers from multiple affiliations and multiple shifts per day to ensure you have many eyes on the box it wouldn't be a concern. But, if someone or some group managed to figure out a way to "stuff the box," you'd have no proof it happened. 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.
  • aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
    Just add some risk-limiting audits (like what Colorado has, incidentally) and this is the kind of election system I would like. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf
  • xadhominemx 5y ago
    It’s hard to stuff the box because fraud would be instantly detected when many voters submitted multiple ballots.