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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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You guys need to organize your elections better. The reason people will believe Trump when he yells 'fraud', is because election fraud looks to be plausible.

There's usually no voter ID. The electoral rolls can easily be screwed around with (by both parties in different ways, even). Voting machines seem opaque even when they're not, and break down during voting, necessitating workarounds that don't inspire confidence. Mail-in votes are common and there's barely even a pretense of a chain of custody. And then there are outright shenanigans, such as kicking out the poll watchers.

I've said it before, you need to be able to convince the loser that he lost a fair game.

Consider how it works in the Netherlands:

  1. Everyone who is legally in the country is registered with his municipality. The same registry is also used for taxes, so you bet the government makes sure it's kept in order.
  2. When there is an election, everyone who is eligible to vote is mailed a voter card, which looks like this. It is personal to you and has your name on it. You should receive it at least two weeks before the election. If you don't get it for some reason you still have two weeks to get it sorted.
  3. When you go to vote, you bring the voter card and your ID (such as a driver's license, government ID card, or passport). They take your voter card and put it in a sealed box. Then they give you a ballot (all voting is on paper). This prevents anyone from voting more than once, and also prevents ballot box stuffing: there need to be at least as many voter cards as ballots at the end.
    • Polling stations are generally in schools, churches, or other public buildings. There is approximately one per 1000-1500 voters depending on the election. A wait time of an hour is considered a scandal.
    • By law your employer has to give you time to vote. Normally this doesn't matter, as the polls are open from 7AM to 9PM, well beyond normal working hours.
    • If you really can't make it, you can appoint a proxy by writing their name on the back of the voter card, signing it, and giving it to your proxy. One person can only cast two proxy votes, to prevent ballot harvesting.
  4. Each polling station counts its own votes, by hand. Each polling station submits an official report containing their votes, which is nowadays also published online. Anyone is allowed to attend the count, and anyone is allowed to speak up, and the comments will be written in the report. (You can get yourself kicked out if you really try, but that's also written in the report.) They add up all the results by computer, but if you really don't trust it, you can download the reports and check the work.

Media outlets will download the reports and make fancy visualisations such as this one from the last election. I encourage you to click that link, you can see every single vote that was cast. Each dot on the map is a polling station, and if you click them you can see how many votes were cast for each party.

We do sometimes still have sore losers who yell fraud, but we don't have anyone taking them seriously, not even their own supporters.

At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated: how many issues are you voting on? My American ballot is a complex superposition of half a dozen different geographic boundaries in terms of which races I vote in: US representatives, state legislature (two different boundaries), municipal city races, county races, school district races, state court boundaries. By the time I'm done with it, my sheet of candidates to vote for probably has 30 or more names on it most years. In comparison I often see other countries with just "which party are you voting for?" and wonder if that's a better system. Hand-counting all the different races couldn't be done night-of easily. Also, the complexity of the ballot means that my specific combination of races I vote in plausibly identifies a pretty small set of street addresses, so anonymity is a real concern.

On the other hand, my county (counties run elections, here -- and yes, I get to vote for elections commissioner) does a pretty good job: it's a computer-printed-and-counted, but human readable paper ballot, and I can vote at any of the dozens of sites in the county. And there are plenty of options for early voting.

Looking at your itemized list sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I can't help but think of which constituencies, and how, each would be challenged. You can't assume everyone has an address! Nor that they check their mail.

At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated

The complexity of the ballot is yet another weakness of the US electoral system. Having so many questions on a single ballot means that an attacker can deanonymize it and use this information to commit fraud. Complex ballots like that should be split into separate ballots, both because it makes counting faster and because it makes certain kinds of fraud impossible.

We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them. They try to avoid it, scheduling them apart from each other, but when they are combined you just get e.g. three separate voter cards, three separate ballots, etc. This is a bitch to count which is why they rather not do it.

Eligibility may vary: someone from another EU country can vote in the EU parliament elections, can vote in a municipal or district committee election if they have lived there for at least 5 years, and can't vote in any other elections. There may be multiple elections going on at once, and you can only vote in one of them, so you just get only the one voting card and your neighbour may get all of them.

We don't get to vote for judges or school boards, sadly, so maybe it does not scale to the level of democracy in the US. On the other hand you could of course just spread them out and just have a couple of elections every year. We run our elections mostly using volunteers already, so it doesn't need to be that expensive (and democracy is worth something, right?).

counties run elections, here

The municipalities run the elections here, but there are set standards for doing so. They have to print the voter cards and the ballots and set up the polling booths (the picture of the voter card I linked has the coat of arms of the municipality of Sliedrecht on it, for example), but they have to follow the same process everywhere.

You can't assume everyone has an address!

Ah, but you can. If you really are homeless, you are supposed to register at a shelter in the municipality where you last lived before you became homeless. Then you'll get your mail there. I guess if you're truly vagrant you'll have trouble, but that surely can't be too different anywhere else.

(Edit: though this actually can be a bit of a problem. People may live in (ahem) informally rented housing, so they can't register. Especially students and other young people. This is technically illegal, but tolerated. They leave their registration at their parents' house. They can vote, but would have to travel back "home" to do so (or ask one of their parents to be their proxy). They also can't vote for local elections in the place where they actually live, since on paper they don't live there.)

Nor that they check their mail.

That's on them.

We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them.

If only it were that simple

(pdf warning) https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wakegov.com.if-us-west-1/s3fs-public/documents/2024-09/November%205th%20General_SampleBallots_Guide_0.pdf

See the 181(!) ballot styles for Wake County NC (home of the state capital, Raleigh, and one of the state's 100 counties) starting on page 11. Your ballot depends on exactly which districts you live in for various things, which usually don't line up. These ballots this year are actually on the small side IME; it's usually 3-4 pages rather than 2.

I've never seen a ballot that has anything more local than city elections, so I can't imagine how it would be a privacy issue unless you've got a city of like ten people. I doubt that intersecting the city and senate district or whatever will result in a small set of people.

City, county, legislative district, port commissioners, hospital districts, judges, statewide office, federal.

The city is wholly contained in the county, so that adds no information. Same likely goes for judges and many statewide offices. Never seen elections for hospital districts.

Cities can spill over into multiple counties and judicial districts can be quite small. A ballot for Townsville city council district 123 but also justice of the peace for place XYZ and school board members for ABCISD and a county road maintenance bond for a county that only 10% of the city crosses into can be a very, very small intersection of people. But otherwise I do agree with you, the actual ballot is secret which is largely good enough and really it wouldn't take much effort otherwise to guess which way a given voter voted based on precinct counts, demographics, and party registration/donation.

I happen to live in the corners of a school district, city council district, city limits, and state and federal legislative districts. The exact set I vote for would narrow it down to maybe a square mile. I guess I can't speak to whether this is a median experience in the US.

Wait, there's no reason that your entire ballot needs to be published, right? Publishing the vote tallies for each race separately is sufficient. If there's no association between the choices you make in each race I hardly see the privacy concerns.

I don't think it needs to be, but OP's scenario with hand counts of everything that anyone can watch presumably means others can see it. Maybe if you literally diced them up into sets for each race, or something. But maintaining a secret ballot and open accountability simultaneously isn't always an easy task.

Ballots are already multiple pages, you could easily split it into enough pages so that no page could identify anyone.

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