And as a fellow software engineer, I will say I completely understand. But also, I would think it a challenge worth considering, given the benefits. Could take years, or who knows how long, though.
I will go back to my first post then. The data will get out because vote counting is a public process. If the state officials don’t release it, then the poll workers will, it’ll just be less accurate.
I was under the impression that poll workers tend to hold themselves to stricter standards of propriety and secrecy, but I could be wrong about that.
You might be right in general, but right now there are few incentives for them to release info because the local precinct releases the totals as soon as they’re verified. If they were holding them for a few days, the info would leak out for sure.
It’s easy to be professional and discrete when you don’t have any secrets to keep.
You and I think exactly alike on this.
One of the strengths of our system that makes it resistant to hacking fuckery is how diverse each county is in their approach. Yes, have some federal standards as you have suggested – and I heartily endorse each and every one – but leave the actual handling of elections to individual counties. It makes it really hard for anyone to mess with enough votes across the country to change the outcome of an election.
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And as a hard core liberal, I also would never trust online voting. Online tracking, sure. But I’m quite fond of paper ballots for actual voting. The one I filled out – not the receipt that gets spit out by some electronic voting machine.
Since Constitutional scholar debate whether or not the compact is Constitutional in the first place, and that is a totally biased worthless cite, I choose to disbelieve. Read your original cite. And again, what is to stop them? If they withdraw and say “ha ha” we have to depend upon a heavily GOP court. This is a crappy idea. All it will do is cause chaos if it ever gets into place.
When the vote is 100,000 in favor of candidate A, and there are 10,000 votes left to count, it’s over. That is called “math”.
“Behind closed doors”- what a interesting phrase. So you want the doors to be open, so that members of the public- like a armed militia- can just wander in? That is a really bad idea.
Party scrutineers are already present , have been for ages. The have watchers from the Dems the GOP and independents.
You do you.
Which is it?Any ballot returned by mail will be accepted and counted if postmarked by Election Day and received by Election Day + 5. or “Results around 8:00 p.m. on election night…”?
As I said, “Results around 8:00 p.m. on election night, unless real close and we have to wait for the final mail to arrive.”
I’m not sure what problems the OP is trying to solve. It appears that the election is functioning very smoothly; there are no credible reports of any significant vote fraud. Trump is filing a bunch of bullshit lawsuits, but thus far the courts appear to be shooting them all down, as they should. And we’ll probably get results within two or three days of the election. Where exactly is the nonsense here?
It usually takes about two weeks for States to announce their final vote counts, because they carefully check their work multiple times. Some people seem to think two DAYS is an unreasonable amount of time to wait, people aren’t going to wait two weeks. And it’s completely unnecessary, because unless the election is extraordinarily close, it’s obvious who won long before the official results are certified. Election officials really want to get everything right and will take weeks to determine whether Biden won their state by 450,000 or 450,100 votes. There’s no reason for the rest of us to care.
I would agree that once the sum of remaining uncounted votes is incapable of causing an upset (as in, there literally aren’t enough left to flip it), perhaps with a small margin of error, then at that point it is certainly proper to make an announcement regarding the winner.
Why in the world would a State want to not report its vote totals, Interstate Compact or not?
Yes, that is exactly how it works. Election results are certified by state officials once every vote has been counted. Since we don’t want to wait weeks for them to do that, we look at the unofficial first-pass vote counts, which almost always vary from the eventual final results by only a tiny fraction of a percentage point. The media “calling” the election has no legal force.
I think you guys are in agreement here, you’re just parsing phrases slightly differently. The only way to prevent the current count from being publicly known before the count is finalized (which seems to be the thing that the some posters here want to have happen), you’d have to have the vote count happen in secret. ie, behind closed doors, without proper observers.
The alternative to that is not wide open doors that let anyone come in and disrupt the process, it’s our current process, where the count happens with plenty of oversight and also some doors that are, yes, literally closed (but not what was meant by “behind closed doors”), to provide sufficient physical security that the counters can do so without disruption.
I think the response to people freaking out about this should be: the current system actually works very well, and if it makes you nervous to see close votes as they are counted, don’t watch the news every second! All the nonsense that’s going on as the vote is counted can be ignored because it’s not going to amount to anything.
This isn’t an argument against the Interstate Compact.
States have the right to choose how they will allocate their Electoral votes. Currently, all choose to hold an election and give their EC votes to the winner, but they don’t HAVE to. State Legislatures could just decide for themselves, and in early American history most of them did.
The Constitution isn’t clear, though, on whether State governments can put one method of awarding EC votes into place and then change it retroactively if that method doesn’t produce their desired results. No State has ever tried to do this, so no court has ever had to rule on the question. This could be the year; a few States that Biden is (apparently) carrying have Republican governments, and if any political party would ever have the nerve to try such a blatantly undemocratic power grab, this would be the one.
But none of this has anything to do with the Interstate Compact. If States could decide not to abide by the Compact once the election is over, then they could decide not to abide by the election results, either.
Why would poll workers hold themselves to standards of secrecy? The information they’re gathering isn’t supposed to be secret.
Well, I suspect that pretty much any sweeping change proposed in this thread would be implemented as an official policy/legal change, if implemented at all. If this happened the poll workers would presumably find themselves operating under different rules.