Since the US voting system is so broken... what does everybody else use?

Politics & Elections
21

Every time this comes up I think of the reputation of the “Cook County Machine”.

Two paragraphs:

"In 1983, Mayor Harold Washington created the city’s first Freedom of Information law, allowing journalists and others to obtain and analyze records. Independent reformers also filed complaints in federal courts and judges ruled they should be able to observe precincts on election days, Crawford said.

The “new set of eyes” from those two changes made a “huge difference” because officials couldn’t hide as much, Crawford said. A Tribune expose into fraudulent registrations,which won a Pulitzer Prize, also forced reform in the city."

22

Does “elderly” work with modifiers?

23

In other countries, like Australia, Canada, Norway, and Taiwan as mentioned, are your elections controlled centrally or do your states/provinces/counties have any influence on voting rules, processes, and tools?

In the US we have an uneven and inconsistent landscape in this space.

24

In Canada, the federal Elections Commission runs all federal elections, and each province has a provincial election commissions which runs the elections in each province.

The elections commissions are non-partisan. The Chief Electoral Officer is appointed by the House of Commons (federally) or the Legislative Assembly (provincially), for a fixed term. No elected official has any authority with respect to elections.

25

I first realised that huge difference between Canada and the US during the 2000 election, when I learnt from the US media that the Secretary of State of Florida, the public official who would make the final call on certifying who won the electoral votes for Florida, was also the co-chair of the Bush election campaign in Florida. That just doesn’t happen in Canada. The election referees aren’t also playing the game.

26

ISTM that’s where the US election system is actually broken. We have one party clinging to power at the federal level by their fingernails using elected legislatures where they happen to have a majority to contour local election laws such that votes not going the right way can be blunted. All under the false guise of “election integrity”.

27

The whole ‘dead’ people voting is such a foolish red herring in my opinion. Dead people vote in every election, in every country…because people are always dying, duh!

If you get in an accident and die on the way home from voting, then yes, technically, a dead person has now had their vote counted. Since there’s no easy way to track down that person’s vote and cancel it, it’s left to stand. It’s the same everywhere.

Frightening close to 99.9% of ‘dead people voting’ is covered by this. The idea that someone voted for their dead relative, while it does very occasionally happen or come to light, is a tiny percent of the tiny percent of actually voter fraud.

But since the republicans made it a talking point, OMG dead people are voting! Ugh!

28

No the problem is that in ten years we have gone from racial voter suppression being something NO ONE could talk about to it being an absolute, unalloyed good thing for something close to or over half the white population of the United States.

29

I hadn’t really considered the simplicity of the trust issue before. But now I think about it, it’s persuasive.

Seems to me we have had the ability to count votes very accurately for a long time, but choose not to. I’ve discussed this example before - I’ve used bank ATMs for decades now. I’ve never once been given the wrong amount of cash, nor has my bank ever made an error (that I know of) in basic accounting of how much money I have. That’s kind of amazing, considering the machines have to deal with a physical entity (the cash bills) and be able to provide receipts.

I can’t for the life of me figure out, if we can do that, why can’t we have a basic, reliable means of voting that is standardized?

Answer: we choose not to. In the U.S. there is no standardization, and I suspect attempts to make it so would be shouted down (states’ rights). And having a system as ubiquitous, reliable and usable as ATMs would also have detractors (people who don’t want voting to be easy).

As with many of our problems in the U.S., we have only ourselves to blame.

30

This is already a thing. Well, not “getting a neighbor’s permission,” but having another registered voter in your precinct vouch for you is a way to comply with Voter ID laws. At least in Iowa.

I’ve been a poll worker twice over the past four years, so I know how that works. No scandal, no uproar … just one more legal way to comply with election law.

31

I’ll add re: Canada that voter ID is required, but it’s just not a big deal here. As Northern Piper said about registering, it’s pretty easy to establish your identity, including being vouched for by another citizen if you have no ID. I’m usually in and out of the polls in 15 minutes, including waiting in line and ID check.

The other thing is that Canadian ballots are simple. One issue at a time, usually. You go in, mark the box, and go home. When I voted in California, ballots were very long and very complicated, always with propositions and offices whose candidates I’d never heard of and whose function I didn’t always understand. Quite a lot of American positions are elected that aren’t in other countries.

32

And that, in California at least, elections are run at the county level. If that’s true for the US as a whole (I’m not sure), that’s 3000 different systems that have to coordinate for a national election. I know that voting abroad from my county in California is incredibly easy, with ballots automatically sent out by email, but it is very burdensome for my mother whose last US residence was Illinois: she has a complicated procedure to follow each time.

33

How do you register to vote, then, that doesn’t involve filing something with the government or going to a government office?

And it’s not asking a neighbour’s permission to vote; it’s a way of proving identity. If another elector on the rolls is prepared to swear under oath that they know you and that you live in the riding, that’s good enough for Elections Canada.

34

This is an important difference. From watching US news coverage, I gather that even within one county, there can be different issues on the ballot, depending where you live, so there isn’t even uniformity of the ballot within one county? That makes it even more complex, both to coordinate voting and the counting. Within one riding in Canada, there is only one ballot.

35

I think it’s been implied already, but just to highlight - in Canada and Australia, the federal and provincial/state elections are not held on the same day. Each has their own electoral cycle, and they can be held in different years. Again, that makes the ballots and counting much easier.

And municipal elections are also not connected to federal or provincial elections, so again, the municipal ballots are shorter and easier to count.

36

Brian Kemp, come on down!

37

I may well be out of date but a quick Google tells me it is still a pretty standard medical term though debate over the age it begins rages on. Over 80 or 85 generally.

38

I’m sure he did not let his personal sympathy for one of the candidates influence his administration of the election.

39

Most Republicans oppose motor voter registration and registering high school seniors, both places where residency is either known or the procedures in place to establish. “Security” is the last fucking thing on their minds.

40

In the UK, we too have elections administered by professional civil servants according to rules set out in law and guidance from a non-partisan Electoral Commission. Their independence is jealously preserved, and political interference in the process would raise a storm. At the moment there is potentially an issue about Johnson’s government apparently planning to write into law a provision that the EC should come under some sort of ministerial direction, and that there should be a requirement for voter ID, but as things stand:

Registration is a regular annual process (the local authority’s subventions from central government in part depend on the number of voters registered) - it used to be the case that householders were legally required to register all the eligible people in the household, but I don’t know if that still applies since they went to individual registration. The register is available to inspect: the underlying assumption is that local political parties would discover any fraudulent registrations as they canvass, or from general local knowledge, but that rarely happens. On the other hand, it’s a lot of work to fiddle an election, except possibly in local government elections, which is what most such allegations relate to.

Access to polling stations is easy. A central feature here is that the polling district you’re registered in rarely changes, likewise the polling station allocated to it. Each polling district is small enough for the polling station to be in easy distance (I’ve never been further than a few minutes’ walk from mine), and they’re open from early morning till 10pm. Postal votes are easily organised.

Also, electoral boundaries are set by a non-partisan Boundaries Commission. Legislation sets the overall criteria (how many to be elected, what size a constituency should be), but the Commission staff of geographers and the like use the polling districts as basic “building blocks” to try to match the overall criteria to some sense of natural communities.

Also, we don’t have many separate elections on the same day, and if we do, there are separate ballot papers and ballot boxes for each.

Voting is by old-fashioned pencil and paper, which leaves a clear audit trail if a court orders a re-examination because there’s a credible allegation of significant fraud (very rare, and the only case I know was in a very local election). The sealed ballot boxes are taken to a central point, such as a large hall or sports centre for counting. Each is numbered, for another audit trail.

When I was an observer for a candidate, first, the number of papers in each box was counted to confirm it was the same as the number issued. Then the papers from the checked boxes were moved to another table and mixed together, then they were sorted into separate piles for each candidate (each candidate can have a set number of observers, and this is the key part of their job, to make sure their votes don’t go on the wrong pile - but they’re not allowed to speak to the sorters, just to point over their shoulder). Then the piles for each candidate were moved on to the people who counted them into bundles of 100, and the bundles were lined up in trays, with a marker for each 1000. Simple and transparent.