In response to DianaG, I was attempting to contrast electronic voting machines with ATMs, not with other methods of recording votes.
Sure, but that’s only your trade off between security and freedom. You could easily make it a law saying that every citizen has to pick one place as official location of residence.
There will be cries about socialism and big brother of course but it’s not as if it is impossible to do things the other way around.
We already do this. Here in Michigan(and I would imagine anywhere else with motor voter), you’re registered at whatever address is on your Drivers License. I don’t know how it works for people that don’t have licenses though. Those people I guess actually have to go somewhere to register to vote. I’ve always done it when I’m at the Sec of State office for Driver’s License things, so I’ve never really had to think about it.
In Spain you don’t specifically register to vote. You register your permanent address, the address you’ll use to file your taxes, receive government benefits and communication and, yeah, vote. If you’re a national (or a national of an EU member country), over 18 and not disenfranchised by judicial order, then as soon as you register a permanent address you’re registered to vote; homeless people who have their wits about them can use “mail drop” adresses (not specifically set up places, just a place which they know will keep their mail if any is received). About a month before any election, every City Hall publishes “Census lists” indicating every person that comes up as an eligible voter in town, listed by lastname-based alphabetical order (Firstlasname Secondlastname, Firstname) and the Census sends cards to every person in their lists, indicating where do they have to go to vote. We’re as good at bureaucratic shit as anybody, but that process seems to be simpler than the one in the USA.
If you haven’t done something like move between countries (which means a delay that’s ridiculous in this day and age), updating your registration takes ten days and, except for Census error corrections, you can update it up to one month before any election day. If your move hasn’t come through, your old registration is still valid so you can vote there (in person or by mail).
It isn’t necessarily a better system, but I’d say that not being able to get your tax returns back is a pretty hefty penalty for not being registered…
Sorry, out of time:
for people who have multiple homes, they choose one to be their “permanent address” (residencia). Everything else is a “temporary address” even if they are spending most of their physical time there (dirección). For people like me who are in one country but nationals of another EU member, and so have the right to vote in both (just not to emit two votes in the same election), you can either get each address registered with its country (what I’ve done) or get one registered with both (I’m not doing that because I’m self-employed in Spain and that requires a permanent address in Spain). When I registered in the UK, I had to indicate that I was a national of Spain and would only vote in the UK for “non-EU level” elections; they verify this with the Spanish Census.
When I was in college, if I got a letter in my Catalonia addresses during the summer, it would sit there until September. If I got a letter in my Navarra adress during school terms, I’d be told about it and asked whether it should be forwarded, tossed on the pile or read by my parents next Saturday when I called home. So even if I’d been interested in voting in Catalonia, it was more practical to be registered “back home.”
As for soldiers, they often use as their address of record that of a relative who won’t be going anywhere if they get deployed.
But it’s not related to machine - you can make electronic voting system capable of tracking every single vote and machine that print you receipt with time, your ID and candidate you voted for. Only, you know, it will be no secret ballot anymore. Bulwark against state oppression and blah blah blah.
In Canada, you can tick off a box on your income tax return (or on your citizenship forms for new citizens) to have your name and address added to or updated on the national register of electors. Failing this, you can send the info to Elections Canada, or simply register or update your registration at the poll on voting day. You are required to provide proof of residence and proof of identity to be registered at the poll, but this is pretty simple - for example a homeless person without ID would provide a certification from a local shelter that he/she receives services there for proof of residence, and proof of identity can be a sworn identification by another registered voter. If already registered, you will receive a card in the mail a few weeks before the elction to advise of the time, date, and location of the regular and advanced polls (which you do not need to vote although it saves a couple of minutes in the process). You will need proof of identity at the poll (but see above).
Unlike the US, however, Canada has both a Constitutional right to vote for (almost) every Canadian citizen aged 18 or older, and a central independant agency which runs the whole federal election process. (The head of this agency and his deputy are the only adult citizens who are legally prohibited from voting.) This both limits the barriers that can be placed on voter eligibility and pretty much removes partisan politics from any effect on the actual election process. I’ve been voting for almost 40 years and can’t remember any voting-related scandals in any federal election. Provincial/municipal voting is similar, and the agencies exchange data to keep the voter registers up to date.
Right, but lots of people don’t have Driver’s Licenses, and the uproar over the recent Voter ID Law is that many people don’t even have any kind of state issued ID at all. So many people have no address registered with the state at all whch could be used by an automatic registration process comparable to that used in other countries.
Ed
If you follow TWDuke’s quotes back, the point was that people complain louder when our money is messed with than when our vote is messed with because we can tell when our money’s messed with. Like you said, that state of affairs is necessary for a secret ballot, but it’s annoying to hear people try to equate the reliability of voting machines with ATMs. It’s not that we care more about money than our votes; it’s that we simply have to trust that our votes are counted, but we can verify our bank balances.
I do not know how a paper receipt would help. If the results seemed wrong would they expect everyone to come back with them?
What caused the awareness of the problem was the polling results. After voting polling is extremely reliable and is used world wide. The UN uses it to determine if elections around the world are legit. It works in every instance ,except now in the US. In 2004 ,I saw a mathematician who was setting up the polling. He explained what they did to make sure that the polling would be accurate. The quadrupled the people polled and chose areas that would assure them of getting it right. Yet ,we claim it was the polling that was wrong.The math man said the polling error chance was around zero. Yet it did not match again.