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Last week, this comment spurred a few subthreads about electronic and/or digital and/or online voting (depending on what one wants from it). I felt like the dominant view was that it was a terrible idea, hopelessly insecure, and perhaps even a bridge too far for one being able to think that an election is legitimate.
Today, I saw this article, saying that Kamala Harris' name was left off of some Montana ballots, causing them to shut things down until they could fix the problem. As I started reading, I casually wondered, "Shut what down? Just the ballot-printing process? Why is the headline saying 'voting system'?" Then I read the article and learned for the first time that Montana has an "electronic absentee voter system" that allows, for example, "Max Himsl, a Montana voter living in the UK," (who reported the issue) to "fill out his ballot online".
Whelp, I guess it's arrived. Is it a stupid, terrible idea? Is it hopelessly insecure? Has it delegitimized Montana's election? It is something that nobody's doing, nobody would do, nobody would be stupid enough to do, and it's a good thing that it's happening now?
Having not personally looked into the technicals of the system at all yet (obviously, having only just heard about it five minutes ago) and having said that I thought that a lot depended on technical specifics, I have little idea about how to feel other than that it seems obviously impossible for online voting to seriously maintain secrecy in voting, which I do care about. Of course, almost any system that allows for absentee voting seriously struggles on this point (as was pointed out by one of those international pro-democracy organizations that I quoted long ago), though I think that most people are somewhat willing to give up a little bit of this if it's a small number of absentee votes.
Double envelope system: Go to a special polling station (such as in embassy, in a hospital, at nursing homes, in your military base). Put your ballot in an envelope, this is always done to maintain secrecy anyway. Put that envelope in a second envelope, which will be sent to your registered place of residence along with your name (and national ID number if such exists) - there it will be opened and mixed with the rest of the ballots to maintain secrecy. Your name is marked as having voted, to prevent double voting.
Similar to this, but amended to accommodate the US's non-centralized process.
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I still don't understand how "a Montana voter living in the UK" isn't a scandalous notion in the first place. Why do UK residents need to vote in Montana? You don't live there! It's not your place of residence! I can see exceptions for American military and other foreign service roles, but if you're just an American that voluntarily elected to live in London, I find it baffling that anyone thinks you should be voting for the mayor of Missoula.
Where would you draw the line then?
If he lives in Missoula for 3.5 years and then takes a 6 month contracting gig in London, should his vote be dependent on the timing of that 6 months (e.g. he gets to vote unless it overlaps an election)?
Outside of situations where people in the military or foreign service are obligated to be elsewhere, I'm basically just against absentee balloting altogether. If someone isn't home on election day, oh well, they don't vote. My preferred policy is for everyone to just go to the polls on election day... or don't.
I am aware that's unpopular though. I do think this specific example is illustrative of how far we've gone in the opposite direction, being so insistent on universalizing suffrage and getting ballots out to people that just shouldn't be voting at all that it's just downright silly.
I appreciate the candor, it also occurs to me that this is probably quite against what I assume is your political preference. I’ve no doubt that you hold this sincerely though.
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In crude base reality I live in a solidly blue state. But in spirit I feel I truly inhabit Pennsylvania or whichever state affords me greatest likely impact on the election.
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Because they're not British citizens and can not vote in British elections.
Why do they need to be allowed to vote at all?
That's how citizenship works. Presumably the Montana voter living in UK is still an American citizen, and one of the main perks of such citizenship is being able to vote in American elections.
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Because they're still paying taxes to the US? No taxation without representation etc.
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Why does anyone?
I mean the idea of democracy is that the people have input on matters that will affect their lives. Someone living in the UK is affected only in the most tangential way by political goings-on in the United States. Why, then, should such a person need to weigh in on those matters?
A British citizen living in the US is substantially affected by political goings-on in the United States. Should [if RAND < 0.5 print "he" else print "she"] be entitled to vote in US elections?
(This isn't entirely intended as a 'gotcha' question, by the way. I can see the argument that people should vote where they live currently; I reject the notion that there are certain kinds of people who don't deserve any voice anywhere.)
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US Citizens are taxed on global income by the IRS even if they don't reside in the US. This kind of fiscal obligation should earn them a vote even if they're living overseas.
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"Votes are to men with swords as banknotes are to gold."
Ah, but there it is.
The idea of democracy is that those capable of mounting armed resistance to a policy can trade their swords in for votes and simulate battles without having to lose a lot of manpower to internal conflicts.
Modern US democracy is radically different from anything envisioned by the men who built the system. In fact I'd say that the actual purpose of modern democratic systems is to keep the populace feeling enfranchised even as policy-making power is increasingly taken away from them.
The idea that the majority of adults should have a hand in governance strikes me as absurd. They are clearly unsuited for it, and the results have been and continue to be disastrous.
Should the people be able to make their voices heard? Absolutely, and even monarchies had many mechanisms by which that could happen. But this? What we have now? It doesn't make sense no matter how one looks at it.
Anyway the collapse of both ends of Lord Salisbury's quote at the top is sort of delicious. But I think it makes its point even better, now, from the correct perspective.
I think one adult, one vote is a Schelling point we should not break away from without any need.
It is true that most US citizens would not be effective in a civil war. But even among the people who would be able to fight, most are not willing to fight a war over the issues of US politics. Dobbs or Obamacare or Immigration might infuriate people, but not to the point where they would be willing to murder their neighbors or die in some trench over it.
If we give the special forces rifleman the franchise even though it it unlikely that he would decide to support a side in a civil war, should we not also give the arts student the franchise given that it is unlikely, but possible that she would become an excellent drone pilot?
Ruthlessness is helpful in winning military conflicts, so you should award extra votes for the psychopaths who would be willing to nuke NYC over Dobbs.
The price to pay for having voting power proportional to military might is that you have civil wars sometimes, whenever both sides feel that they are stronger than the other one. Expect elites to form their own loyal armies in preparation. We know the end result of that, it is called feudalism. Of course, while medieval societies could survive the odd civil war over some election dispute or succession, industrialized warfare is much worse.
The present system is a much more civilized alternative. Violent gangs and jihadists don't get an over-sized share of the votes. Instead of spending billions in nuclear weapons programs and stealth bombers, elites can just spend their money on TV ads to influence the outcome of the election. Given how bad nuclear war would be, even the psychopaths are better of that way.
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I agree with you, but just to make the case: could the person living in the UK be drafted into the US military in a war?
Checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System it looks like all US male citizens from 18 - 26 are required to register for selective service, as well as resident non-citizens including: immigrants (illegal or otherwise), refugees and asylum seekers. Non-citizens exempt from registration are international students on visas, visitors (lived in the US less than a year) and diplomats. Though if an international student visa lapses they are required to register.
Perhaps I have read too much Heinlein, but that non-citizens clause feels utterly bizarre. An alien might be forced to commit treason against his country if he is drafted by the US. As an intuition pump, consider an American civilian working in Moscow. If Putin decided to send him to fight Ukraine, I am very sure that the US government would consider that some kinds of rights violation.
I vaguely recall a scene from a civil war movie where an immigrant on a pier in NY was first given a certificate of citizenship and then a draft order, which is IMHO the proper way to do it.
I assume non-citizens would hypothetically serve non-combat roles, if there was a need for draft probably would need a lot of ditch diggers.
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I believe you’re thinking of Gangs of New York.
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Semi related...
They were sending Covid checks to U.S. citizens who live in other countries and haven't paid taxes or lived in the U.S. in decades. Source: I know one.
Those US citizens living abroad must file US tax returns though and may have to pay US taxes on their UK income (if it's high).
The US and Eritrea are the only countries that tax their citizens overseas so it's only right the US should pay them covid checks too.
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I'm not the Montana guy, but democracy is funny like that.
Not only do I, as a dual citizen, vote in an election in a country I've never lived in. In fact, I even vote for a member of parliament that specifically represents my interests living in the US.
It would be like having a Congressman for every American who lives in Europe, and another Congressman for every American who lives in Asia, etc.
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One way to avoid this would be to have voting booths in place where people are likely to vote -- embassies, military bases, hospitals, nursing homes. Just say that a mail-in envelope has to have a stamp certifying booth usage. Of course, state officials would have to rely on the testimony of federal institutions like embassies and military branches, but these are surely more trustworthy than relying on their citizens being truthful when they certify that they have not shown their ballot to another person.
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Information on this system is scarce. Seems they’re practicing security by obscurity, I hope they’re doing quite a bit more.
Montana is in no danger of going for Kamala, at least at the moment, so I’m not super concerned about this one instance, but I also had no idea this existed. Do other states allow for this? ChatGPT says Alaska, Arizona, and West Virginia also have such systems.
If these aren’t being red teamed and having their source code audited by actual security engineers they’re almost certainly insecure. Government developer salaries are pitiful and attract low tier developers.
The Senate race there is one of the most highly contested this cycle.
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In order to have a functioning democracy, you need to be able to convince the losing party that they lost a fair game. Therefore, any problems or irregularities with the elections delegitimize the elections to some extent. It doesn't even matter all that much if it's deliberate tampering or honest mistakes, or if nothing at all happened and it just kind of looks like something might've. The loser has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt. Really nothing should even look like it's going wrong.
You need more than that to have a functioning democracy. In order to avoid incentivising defection from democracy, you also need to have fair post-game reward distribution. It's not enough for the vote itself to be fair. The actual exercise of power after the vote must be fair. If one side wins elections and then gets to enact policy, while the other side wins elections but then doesn't get to change policy, then this is hardly any better than the election being rigged in the first place. But this also has to balance against not harming the losers too much. There's no reason for the one sheep to accept two wolves voting to eat it, and it would be wrong to describe their subsequent attempt at self-defence as an attack on democracy.
Both parties in the US seem to hold both these grievances with existing elections, though they both responded to it in different ways. Republicans by claiming the voting process is flawed, and Democrats by claiming foreign interference made it flawed.
What exactly makes democrats think they got an unfair deal? Russia collusion was basically a fear reaction, not an escalation to feeling screwed by the democratic process.
The standard Dem "elections are rigged" rant is that all three federal elections (President, House and Senate) produce Republican control even if Democrats are slightly ahead in the popular vote. The electoral college is a fossil that makes no more sense than the continued presence of hereditary peers in the British House of Lords, and lots of Democrats (wrongly) feel the same way about the Senate. The Republican advantage in the House is the result of deliberate gerrymandering, including recursive gerrymandering where purple states elect Republican-dominated House delegations on maps gerrymandered by Republican-dominated state legislatures that are themselves elected on self-gerrymandered maps.
The gerrymander in Wisconsin is so severe that if it happened in a third world country then the State Department would call it a flawed democracy.
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I think the supreme court getting in the way of policies that democrats want to implement would serve as an example. Either way, I didn't say these had to be justified grievances.
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This is why I've found the Democratic response to Trump's/Republican claims of 2020 election fraud so frustrating. As someone who believes that there's no good reason to believe that any meaningful election fraud took place in 2020, if I were in charge of the Democratic party, I would have responded to such accusations by investigating with so much fervor that even the most die-hard Trumpist would think we should be scaling it back. If fraud were not found, then this would embarrass and discredit Trump and his ilk, and if it were found, then it will help us to run more valid elections in the future, as well as possibly correct errors in the 2020 election. This seems like a win-win. Mocking the fraud accusations seems like a pure power move - "I won, therefore I get my way instead of yours," instead of "I won, therefore my belief that the contest was fair has no credibility, and thus I'll defer to your judgment for the sake of keeping our democratic republic credibly such."
If dozens of Trump-appointed judges finding no fraud, why would some commission appointed by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer convince anybody?
The reason why more than half of Trump voters believe there was fraud is because Trump to this very day continues to say so.
Note than in the 2022 midterms, many candidates in a lot of different races all claimed there might be fraud in the lead-up, but all of them, including very MAGA types like Mastriano in Pennsylvania all conceded and gave very typical except Kari Lake in Arizona, who is now losing a Senate race by 5 to 10 points.
There were no big changes in the laws in most of these states between 2020 & 2022, but nowhere the same amount of people think that for example, there was fraud in Catherine Cortez Mastro's 0.8% win in Nevada, despite at the time, Nevada being a completely Democratic-controlled state.
Who knows why? I'm more interested in the "if" than the "why," and there's only one way to answer that question. I'd love to have found out by first having Pelosi and Schumer or anyone else at the top of the party first establishing themselves as so rabidly pro-finding-of-fraud that even Trumpists want to dial it down a bit and then establishing some commission (or more effectively, having someone vetted by Trump himself establish the commission).
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I mean because there would be a complete investigation for one thing. What made the conspiracy theory take off more than it ever would have is the fact that nobody officially ever looked at the evidence. The Message was always “nothing to see here, and if you’re asking questions about it, you’re falling for disinformation.” That message cannot inspire people to believe that the election was fair. There’s no discussion of the evidence, no day in court, no witnesses cross examined, nothing that would give the impression that there’s anyone official who cares about the claim.
There were plenty of days in court - there was just zero actual evidence to get past the first hoop despite being in front of in many cases, Republican or Trump-appointed judges.
There isn't zero actual evidence, there isnt evidence that doesn't have other possible explanations. Which is, unfortunately, how the system will always be by design. You can even catch a bunch of people on camera dropping load after load of ballots into boxes and they say, "well could be legit." You find statistical anomalies, well thats only circumstantial. You have people mishandling boxes in a polling place? Meh. You have proof the governor made illegal "emergency rules" again meh.
To catch fraud the fraudsters have to be incredibly stupid, like following a post truck and stealing mail in the middle of the day.
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First of all, if the Democrats investigated and found nothing, the Republicans would (not without reason) sneer that "The Democrats investigated the Democrats and found the Democrats did nothing wrong". Second.... perhaps they do have good reason to believe that meaningful fraud took place.
If a Republican investigated and found nothing, then the MAGA Republicans would say "An establishment RINO investigated the establishment Democrats and found the Democrats did nothing wrong...", because from the MAGA perspective any Republican who doesn't pretend to believe that the 2020 election was stolen is a RINO.
Donald Trump could personally say that the 2020 election was not stolen and his supporters would not believe him - we know this because he did and the MAGA alt-media machine kicked up enough of a fuss that he had to walk it back.
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Well, just because I'm a Democrat doesn't mean I can't appoint a Republican to run the investigation. Heck, even give Trump himself the right to hand-pick the one top investigator in charge. Ideally, the investigation should be bipartisan, but it's hard to be credibly so, just make it partisan against my favor.
And if top Democrats do have good reason to believe that meaningful fraud took place, then as a Democratic voter, I would want this to be revealed and publicized, so as to excise the Democratic party of fraudsters and their enablers, which would increase the credibility of the Democratic party's dedication to keeping our democratic republic democratic. Unlike a Democrat calling out a Republican, a Democrat calling out a Democrat for fraud (that helped Democrats) is a costly signal to the electorate that Democrats really do care about democracy. Let democracy be done, though the Democratic party fall.
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