I would immediately get Congress to pass the Uniform Election Standards Act of 2021, which would:
Ensure all citizens can file a mail-in/absentee ballot, no excuses or witnesses required
Any ballot can be returned early by mail, in person, or at officially designated collection boxes
Any ballot returned by mail will be accepted and counted if postmarked by Election Day and received by Election Day + 5.
Local authorities may process and prepare for counting any ballot immediately upon receipt, but not count until Election Day
I’m just not sure that Congress has the authority to enforce this. Perhaps they could just add financial incentives to the states to adopt it.
Vote counting has to happen in public for very good reasons. You can’t keep the process secret. There are observers from both parties present, and there’s nothing to stop the observers from reporting the counts they witnessed. Trying to limit the flow of official information would not solve the problem of media speculation, it would just make it less accurate.
The idea that there are no benefits to hearing the results early is laughable. Why have we all been glued to our televisions and refreshing the nytimes needle for the last few days? We could just all ignore it and tune in on Jan 20 to see who gets sworn in, right?
Knowing what will happen in the future has obvious benefits and that’s why we as a species expend so much effort on it.
I don’t know if we should put too much stock in exit polls this year, considering the huge amount of mail-in and early votes (which are more like to lean Democratic).
Given that the OP is asking about making voting and vote counting work more efficient and quick, and not about increasing voting access or making the outcome more representative of the will of the electorate, I’d say that everything right now is working just fine.
There is no reason to expect that results will be known on Election Day, particularly in a tight race. That is a baseless expectation that Trump has been trying to create. What I’m seeing right now is local election officials taking their responsibility seriously and making every effort to count every vote cast in accordance with state requirements.
We’ve been glued to our screens out of terror, not because we’re actually gaining useful information. And the reason we “as a species” spend to much time vomiting out incomplete and inaccurate information is because political theater drives viewership and clicks.
Yes, we need to take steps to ensure that votes are counted accurately and shenanigans are prevented, but the notion that the news media trickling out a continuous stream of incomplete results to keep us glued to the screen is a good thing is risible.
Bruce Schneier - the preeminent computer security expert - has written repeatedly that it is not possible to have secure online voting while protecting the right of private ballots. He emphasizes your second point that in addition the public must trust the results.
I have to agree that media posting early results is political theater, but only in the sense that they take it upon themselves to “call” a state lne way or the other. In my eyes, that only serves to feed the American hunger for everything to be a sporting event. “My guy is winning,” and all that. Hell, they even use sports phrases, like “home stretch” and “halftime” to reinforce the connection.
It’s appealing to the lowest common denominator. That’s what our society is great at. “Idiocracy” is not a comedy, any more; it’s a documentary.
I’m not arguing that it’s “good” on net, just that it’s not without benefit. Even if that benefit is just alleviation of fear.
The media shows people what they want to see. You can think that it’s bad for us to want to know this, but we still want it. All the good natured plans to save us from our base impulses will be dashed on the rocks of reality.
Would it be a better world if we all just watched a ballgame and hung out with our friends and checked in on the election in a few weeks? Of course! But you can’t get there from here (with our brains wired as they are).
Imagine that the news really did what you want, and not report anything until sometime next week. Would we all be going about our lives and ignoring the election? Or would we instead be flooding message boards and facebook groups and speculating about what the results would be, but without the steady hand of editorial control and authoritative sources? I think it’d be the latter, and then we’d be even worse off.
Taking the second point first, as I alluded to earlier, older people probably have more of an inherent distrust of online voting and technology in general, but younger people take it as a matter of course in life, so perhaps the problem can be overcome.
Also as I said earlier, I am not expert, so thanks for that link.
I don’t understand why this is so. Also, this is just one person’s opinion. I certainly don’t discount it outright, but as of now I remain unconvinced that we couldn’t have secure, trusted online voting.
This. The WA/OR/CO method taken nationwide. No drama. Results around 8:00 p.m. on election night, unless real close and we have to wait for the final mail to arrive.
Steven_Maven - To add to the above: I suppose it comes down to, for example, I vote and in so doing have to identify myself online, and that means that someone who receives my vote would also know my name, and goodbye secret ballot. But couldn’t this be overcome in some way, similar to how TOR does it? Again, I’m no expert, but this is interesting to me.
Our speculations would be calmer since we wouldn’t be whipped to a frenzy and we’d have more time to think about other things since we aren’t checking 538 every five minutes.
I mean, which of the following two scenarios is better: Your boss says, “There will be a meeting at three” and there’s a meeting at three, or your boss says “We’re going to have a meeting sometime today - could be anywhere from 8am to 6am. Keep checking back at the site constantly to see if I’m there” - and then you have the meeting at three. Clearly not having to keep watching for every little change is better.
If you keep a person’s info attached to their voting record, then everybody who gets their hands on the data knows how you voted.
If you don’t keep a person’s info attached to their voting record then ballot box stuffing becomes a simple matter of pushing a button. And if you don’t catch them in the act of doing it then it’s completely undetectable and untraceable (unless, again, there’s enough information to track the ballot back to the person who created it).
Myself, I want the ballot box stuffers to need to at least have access to a ream of paper and a xerox machine. Plus it will tend to keep the ballot box stuffers more local - I want the perpetrators of foreign election interference to have to at least get off their couches and put some pants on.
You know you don’t need to check 538 every five minutes. You get to choose to do that or not.
In the absence of 538, I expect that people who are checking it every 5 minutes would be checking some other less reliable source. When the boss tells people there’s a meeting at 3pm, people don’t go “well, I guess I’ll find out at 3pm” and go back to work. They start speculating and the rumor mill fires up and by 2:30 a bunch of them are worried they’re getting fired, even though the meeting is really about new rules for using the shared microwave.
Limiting information about something people care deeply about doesn’t make them less interested in finding that information, it makes them seize on imagined or bad information.
But right now we have the boss leaning in and saying, “You’re probably getting fired.” And then ten minutes later “Just kidding, probably not.” And then “Okay, you know how I said you’re not getting fired? Kidding again!”
I’m not sure why you think 538 is the boss in your analogy. Aren’t the voters the boss?
538 is the employee who’s been around a lot and has a pretty good guess about what the meeting is and is reading all the minutes of the board of directors meetings. He’s the one saying “Hey, I don’t know if anyone’s getting fired, but only 10% of the past meetings were about firing people, so we’re probably not.”
If you take that guy away, you think cooler heads will prevail?
Like, I agree if we could just get an actual vote count immediately (which is analogous to the boss just telling us what the meeting is about), everyone would be happier. But that option isn’t on the table.
Agreed. You may not have seen my follow-up post where I realized this. But as I also said, couldn’t some scheme similar to what TOR does, to encrypt the “voting trail” be used (again, I’m no expert)? It just seems to me that there a a lot of smart minds out there that should be able to come up with a trustworthy, hi-tech way to have online voting.
I was thinking again about the trustworthy-ness of online voting again, and the objections against it. But can’t any voting system be hacked? In this presidential election season, I’m reminded of the future president at the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson famously stole his first Senate seat. And obviously, ballot-box stuffing and the like have been around ever since there were ballot boxes. But this hasn’t stopped us from creating systems that everyone trusts. So again, I think that problem could be overcome.
ETA: Seems it’s already happening.
I know, I know, of course they’re gonna say that. Anyway, perhaps food for thought, if anyone is interested.
All I can say is that as a software engineer, and a person who keeps hearing every few months about how a major company got their data hacked, I’ll vote in your online system if there’s no other choice, but with the awareness that my data will be stolen and the result of the election will be fraudulent.
Anyway, perhaps food for thought, if anyone is interested.