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Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day. I honestly think we all need to reset expectations th

Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day. I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy. I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues. As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain). The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.
- quadrifoliate 4y ago
  It is a feature of US elections that they are far more decentralized than any other country. To your point, the people conducting the elections in Oregon and Nebraska do so as employees of their respective state governments and not as Federal representatives. I suggest that you and other commentators in this thread read the Elections Clause [1] and historical background on it. You can't just address flaws in a system that has been running for 200+ years with a flippant "stop complaining". It would require Congress to pass a bipartisan voting law, and recent efforts to that effect have failed because of lack of bipartisan support [2]. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-4/clause-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... [2] https://www.vox.com/22736509/freedom-to-vote-act https://www.vox.com/22736509/freedom-to-vote-act
sidlls 4y ago
Other developed nations have no problem providing same-day (or near) tallies of all votes. The fact that it can take weeks to get a complete tally is a symptom of huge dysfunction.
specialist 4y ago
> reset expectations Voters want accurate results. The recurring tantrums over speed come from media and candidates.

systemvoltage 4y ago

Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain). The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.

quadrifoliate 4y ago
It is a feature of US elections that they are far more decentralized than any other country. To your point, the people conducting the elections in Oregon and Nebraska do so as employees of their respective state governments and not as Federal representatives. I suggest that you and other commentators in this thread read the Elections Clause [1] and historical background on it. You can't just address flaws in a system that has been running for 200+ years with a flippant "stop complaining". It would require Congress to pass a bipartisan voting law, and recent efforts to that effect have failed because of lack of bipartisan support [2]. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-4/clause-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... [2] https://www.vox.com/22736509/freedom-to-vote-act https://www.vox.com/22736509/freedom-to-vote-act

sidlls 4y ago

Other developed nations have no problem providing same-day (or near) tallies of all votes. The fact that it can take weeks to get a complete tally is a symptom of huge dysfunction.

specialist 4y ago

> reset expectations Voters want accurate results. The recurring tantrums over speed come from media and candidates.