Just let the people speak. The candidate with the most votes wins. Crazy. Revolutionary, I know. Sorry if you belong to a party that most voters can’t support. If you require a stacked deck to win, maybe it’s time for a little soul searching. This will also go a long way toward ending the only two party stalemate we have today. If a candidate could merely state what he/she believes, nevermind the label, we could forget the labels.
It will never happen, I realize.
But it would be better.
Technology / schmechnology! IMHO the deal-breaker for online voting is that there is no paper backup. It’s the same flaw as all-electronic machines for in-person voting. You have to have that resource in case of processing errors, recounts, or to disprove fraud.
This may not pertain to the question of the OP, but I would like to see the primaries change to one day, just like the main election. Usually any candidate I am interested in has dropped out by the time we vote in Oregon. Maybe 6 months before the main event. These 2 year elections are exhausting.
Media outlets voluntarily agree not to report exit polls until polls close, but any law restricting that would be unconstitutional.
Everybody’s money and transactions are tracked in the banking system at both ends, which means the interested parties never lose out and can trace everything from send to recieve. You pay $100 for X and you know $100 came out of your account, and the shop knows they received $100 AND you got X and the shop has 1 less X.
With online voting, you cannot really see where your vote went. Sure, you could read a receipt that says ‘You voted Trump’, but how do you know it got there and how does he know he got all the votes due?
I believe Kavanaugh has endorsed the perspective as you say. But I don’t think your conclusion necessarily follows because of general principles of law.
Could the legislature of some state pass a law that in 2024 there will be no voting for President; instead their governor will flip a coin, or consult the magic Discobot or pick the candidate of the same party as the governor? Sure they could. That totally passes US constitutional muster. Whether it complies with that state’s constitution or that state’s political realities is up to that state’s citizens, politicians, and courts.
In general ex post facto laws are invalid. A law saying that the 2020 voting was conducted under one set of rules, but now that it’s Nov 7th 2020 we’ve decided to do the EC process differently than we told the populace fails the ex post facto test.
Of course that requires somebody willing and able to enforce the ex post facto test.
But that’s inherent in all these things. Once you assume enforcement is random, corrupt, or nil, any discussion of “rules” is simply silly. The only remaining logically valid prediction is: “Anything can happen for any reason, fair or foul.”
As I said way up thread, the OP wants a more skullduggery-proof and fool-proof system. We can certainly make it more skullduggery-resistant and fool-resistant. But only to the degree the people involved, from citizens to politicians to Supremes are willing to make it so. We need that willingness before we can move on to the designing and the doing.
True, but the paper trail can start with the sending out of the means of voting. And paper is not indestructible anyway. The problem with electronic voting is to ensure a secret ballot you either have to take measures to ensure that right person gets the means of voting, or else you leave open a huge potential gap that can be exploited to produce fake votes. There is also the issue as to how to check that the person’s vote was what he or she intended and it does not mysteriously change or get lost en route. Is this something for a blockchain?
Just circling back to post this: PA Legislature Isn’t Going to Overrule Voters.
Also, I didn’t know this, but apparently the Court in Bush v. Gore did consider the hypothetical of whether a State could change its method of appointing electors between the election and the Electoral College meeting, and said nope.
By Kavanaugh’s “logic” a state’s constitution and courts are utterly irrelevant, and the only check on a legislature’s decision is that state’s citizens in the next election for legislators.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors,
Kavanaugh’s theory is that, because the state legislatures were vested with this power by this clause of the Constitution, any restriction in a state constitution on the legislature’s use of this power fails under the Supremacy Clause (Art. VI, Sec. 2) and state courts can’t enforce or interpret the restriction.
So Kavanagh thinks States can change the rules after the election? I disagree, but I think that the prospect of facing voters at the next election has in fact been, and will continue to be, an extremely EFFECTIVE check against any Legislature ever actually trying that move.
Wow. Color me even more blown away by the sweep of his illogic than I was before.
So presumably he believes all state courts and state constitutions are irrelevant to providing any check on state legislatures on anything mentioned in the federal constitution.
To be fair, he would admit that Congress can limit the legislatures’ power over Congressional elections because Art. I expressly provides so. It’s the sweeping language of the Art. II provision he relies upon.
Tom Scott made a very good argument for why electronic voting can’t be trusted:
Thanks for the link.
Scott mentions that physical voting has been around so long, that we have learned how to safeguard this system, but acknowledges that it has been, and can be attacked. The he brings up the issue of how we get people to trust the system, which I have agreed is a problem, but one that I think could be overcome. After that he comes up with some scenarios where he tries to illustrate how this will never work. He says that system will probably be loaded from easily compromised USB sticks (okay, don’t do it that way). Then he talks about how the votes will be counted. Maybe gather up all the voting machines and take them to a central place, and then do the count. Or instead, save the votes on a USB stick, and gather them all up, and count the votes. He rightly states why these are bad ideas, for instance, a bit of sleight of hand with the USB sticks, and good-bye trusted voting system. Finally, he comes to transmitting the votes over the internet, which he describes as “…optimistic”. Now to be sure, he doesn’t say this in an optimistic way. Clearly he thinks it’s a bad idea, and afterwards brings up the issue of trust repeatedly. But for me, the problem with this video is that Scott does not address the technical aspects of electronic voting in any great detail. The problems he raises are legitimate, but once again repeating that I am not an expert, an actual expert in encryption/electrical engineering/etc would be more convincing that we just can’t solve the issues at this time. Or, that person may well convince us that the problems can be solved.
You’re right that he does use rather absurd simplifications to make his point, but the point he is making is not one that can be overcome by some clever technology such as encryption; you say you’re not an expert in encryption, and that’s the point - how can you fully trust something that cannot be explained to you?
Without wanting to be unkind, I think you’re assuming that experts can solve a problem just because they’re experts. But if the task contains an inherent contradiction of objective (which in this case is the conflict between transparency and security/anonymity), it may not actually have a solution.
As Tom said in the video - there aren’t any specific flaws in the idea of electronic voting that are absent in paper-based voting, it’s just that attacks upon paper based voting don’t scale well.
I understand that “online voting” usually means voting from your own independent device. And, as Tom points out at the end, there’s no way to make sure no one has a device with malware on it that changes their vote.
I didn’t say it couldn’t be explained to me. That’s the point. If there is a way to do this, and people don’t trust it, explain to them (and me) how it works.
Not at all. But amazing things have been done with technology. I don’t get this idea of accepting that something can’t be done before you even try. Now, if attempts have been made, and Scott wanted to convince me, he could have raised those examples. And I have nothing against him, but who is he, anyway? I see has a linguistics degree and that’s all good and well, but all I’m saying is, he doesn’t display the weight of technical knowledge himself to convince me this can’t be done. Finally, I don’t just blindly think it can be done. I just haven’t seen that convincing argument yet that it cannot.
What we need is a convincing description of how it could be done. All that seems to be offered for this is of the standard ‘surely with encryption, and clever technical stuff’. The people who are confident that it can be done all think someone else should be able to do it. This is similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Fair enough. I am intrigued enough by the concept that I am going to research attempts that may have been made, and see where that leads me. As for the Dunning-Kruger effect, I am clearly not overestimating my knowledge, as I have said a few times I don’t really have any knowledge on this.