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I wonder if Bezos intended the layer of Straussian reading that's available here? Perhaps it's just because it's my pet issue, but I remain surprised at how hard it is to get people to agree with me that electoral legibility is an absolutely crucial part of legitimating democracy. It's not enough to have very serious experts tell people that it's the safest and most secure election ever, it must be genuinely hard to imagine how the election could be rigged.
It's easy to make an almost impossible to rig voting system, we have the technology: in person printed paper ballot wrapped in individual booth in an opaque envelope and then cast in a transparent urn on presentation of official identification (or a secure number of local witnesses) and counted simultaneously and locally by volunteers of all political sides in a ceremony open to the public and cameras on the same day all the votes are cast that is declared a public holiday.
The fact people actively resist setting up something that's at least as secure as Athens' pottery shards tells me they're more interested in the result than the security of elections.
Who knows what Athens would have done if they didn’t have CCTV?
More seriously, this is a problem with scaling. The peak voting-eligible population of ancient Athens was probably under 60,000. That’s around half the eligible voters in modern Athens, GA. You need a solution that still works at 2,500x the size.
So we do implement most of those features. Physical, printed ballots. Adversarial counting. Cameras. Even the states which hate requiring ID use some form of proof.
The big ones we’re missing are transparent boxes/individual envelopes and a full voting holiday. Sure, I’m in favor of both. I’m even fine with photo ID requirements. But they aren’t free, and I’d argue that they wouldn’t actually reduce the amount of bitching that goes on after an election. Trump and people like him will seize on the counting, the certification, any possible vector for sowing doubt. They have already baked into their worldview a far-reaching conspiracy against him, personally. That’s license to doubt even the most secure process.
You don't though. There's no requirement for 150 million people to share a single polling place. In fact there's no requirement for any given polling place to handle more than ancient (or modern) Athens. In larger cities like NYC break election up by burrough/neighborhood. Brooklyn votes, the Bronx votes, Manhattan votes, and trusted representatives from each report thier tally to Gracie Mansion who reports the city's tally to the State, and so on up the chain.
This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia and as such I'm inclined to both agree with @IGI-111 and take thier suggestion further. Election integrity is niether impossible nor even particularly impractical, election integrity is actively opposed by certain vested interests, the DNC among them.
The relevant scaling parameter is the number of races, not the number of voters. I have participated in hand-counts in the UK with 1, 2 and 3 races being counted simultaneously, and the difficulty of counting an election scales slightly more than linearly with the number of races. 3 races can't be done to British standards overnight. More than 20 races (if you add federal, state and local offices plus initiatives) in an American election is common. If you hand counted it to British standards it would be December before you knew who had been elected dogcatcher.
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But as soon as you compress the ballots into a count--as soon as you move away from the pottery in an urn--you're leaving an opening. Motivated reasoners can and will jump on that just like they jumped on everything else.
We are already doing most of these millenia-proven strategies.
Yes, which is why maintaining a strict chain of responsibility/custody is so crucial. So long as said chain is maintained, any discrepancies should be readily identifiable along with those at least proximally responsible.
As i said, This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia. If you want to argue that the US is too poor, too stupid, and too fractured, to impliment the sort of basic checks one might expect to see in France or the Sudan, that's fine, but make that argument explicitly so that we may offer a proper rebuttal.
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Anyone with a passing familiarity with voting in any other part of the world will tell you that the US system is a joke when it comes to security and integrity, precisely because you don't follow these strategies.
My thoughts exactly.
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Big Pottery is in the tank for ostracons. Who do you think manufactures all those perfectly broken, dulled ceramic pieces? You can see their shills in the thread right now.
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I think one thing not talked about enough is keeping a good chain of custody. It absolutely boggles my mind that there’s no talk about simply using the same supply chain logistical tracking that FedEx and Amazon and UPS use to track a package from the seller to the buyer through multiple warehouses often in various states. And it seems like it would eliminate fraud at the counting sites — if a ballot gets counted, but isn’t recorded as cast at a polling place or retrieved from a drop box, it’s going to be obvious. And you could likely figure out where these ballots are coming from. Scanning the unique barcode on each ballot as it’s fed into the machine would make it obvious if someone is counting the same ballot more than once.
And while it does a lot to prevent fraud, having a ballot logistical system tracking ballots would make forensic investigations possible, and would enable recounts as needed. All the raw data is there and can be looked at. Add in the need to badge in and out of the areas where ballots are held or counted provides the possibility of finding out who might be messing with the ballots.
I mean, it is something we consider. That’s how PA was able to find its registration-dumpers, how audits like the Cyber Ninjas worked, etc.
I’m sure there are holes, since states and counties have a lot of leeway, but keeping a paper trail and sealing containers are pretty universal. The federal best practices can be found here.
I get the impression that partisanship has led skeptics to think it’s the Wild West out there. In practice, there’s already a bunch of boring procedure that raises the cost of fraud.
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I think this is precisely why something like this would be good to do. There are many people in power who agree with you and honestly, in good faith, believe that it won't actually appease Trump and his followers; if they went with it anyway, it would provide a truly costly signal to the electorate that they take election security seriously. So seriously, that they consider this kind of non-free step worth it even if it means submitting to demands from what they consider to be an irrational/cynical actor, thus increasing in the odds of someone irrational/cynical winning an election, in addition to both a reduction in their own status within their own peer groups and a reduction in the status of said peer group among various peer groups.
Okay, so what do we get for it?
That’s like demanding a car ban because you enjoy biking. Directional agreement is not a blank check.
As @07mk says, what you get is more secure elections. You want secure elections don't you?
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We'd get more secure elections and, likely more importantly, the perception of more secure elections as judged by the electorate. And personally, "we," the people who agreed to take this costly action, would gain actual knowledge that wasn't there before, that we actually do care about fair elections and are not merely convincing ourselves that we care about fair elections.
I really don't understand the push against election security. In all other areas of government regarding probity and integrity, there is an understanding that the appearance of integrity is just as important as the integrity itself. It's such low hanging fruit to institute controls that are commonly found throughout the rest of the free world.
I don’t think there’s so much low-hanging fruit.
We already do physical ballots. Chain of custody. Adversarial counts. Auditable trails. What specific things do you think are missing?
I’d argue that most of the reasonable additions wouldn’t actually add integrity or the appearance of integrity. Not when one party has made skepticism a brand. Require ID, they blame the count. Confirm the recount, now it’s the voting machines. You could have OP’s transparent urn and someone would still go on Fox to say George Soros was behind it.
Foreign students are voting in Michigan. Bonus, the vote will count!
The only reason we know about it is because the guy asked for the ballot back. Simply don't snitch on yourself and you're home free.
This should be impossible. It is both trivially possible and unrecoverable.
Seems like low-hanging fruit to me.
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Use pottery shards. Which are immensely more secure than mail in ballots or voting machines.
As others point out. Almost every European country implements something close to this standard or better. Some have done so for longer than the US has existed.
This isn't costly. Most of the cost comes from printing the ballots, which you already do. And issuing the IDs, which you already do for driver licenses. The rest can be handled for free by volunteers.
The idea that this doesn't scale is nonsense. France can get same day results for 50 million votes with this system. That's twice the voting population of California. And we do it on five continents, multiple times a year, last time was with only three weeks notice.
And the idea that this doesn't quell questioning of the process I just don't see. That last one was one of our most contentious elections yet, the country is divided to the degree that nobody can get a majority and the smallest of margins would be extremely consequential for everyone, and yet nobody even thought to question the process because all it takes to convince yourself your vote is properly counted is lose a holiday afternoon to count it yourself.
All you need to achieve this is a small percentage of volunteers, logistics for printing the ballots and some empty space to put the ceremony. The rest is literally just coordination and political will.
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This requirement is a joke:
Given the prevalence of "paperless" billing, we've (or at least, my state has) decided that simply printing out a copy of your online bill suffices. They don't actually keep the copy for future validation so it is completely trivial to forge. To add insult to injury, this is considered a better form of ID than the temporary driver's license we are issued before the real one gets sent which isn't considered an acceptable form of ID for registration.
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Athens voted by casting tokens in different urns, IIRC- functionally not riggable below a certain scale. Sparta, on the other hand, voted by acclamation- the side which the magistrate thought had more people clamoring for it at a given time(judged by volume) won. This system is pathetically easy to rig and I just thought noting this while we’re on the subject would be an interesting aside.
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Their reality. When Donald J. Trump held a rally at a place where many Democratic events were held in the past, media intersped footage from Trump's rally, with the American Bund event from the 1940s. We do not live in a world where Trump's alleged persecution complex isn't affirmed daily.
Americans are eager to use the term "Europoors", justifying it by pointing out that even UK as one of the richest European countries would if it were a US state below Mississippi in GDP per capita. Yet even much poorer countries like Slovakia implement security measures which would give the average democrat a heart attack.
It is thus shown it isn't a question of money, the US has it in spades, but of political will.
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Stupid and uncharitable. There are undeniable trade-offs to many of these ways of making voting systems 'more secure'. Not saying you can't think they're worth it, but 'my opponents have contempt for democracy' is not in fact the only conclusion you can draw. As it happens I am pro-paper ballots and human counters but this doesn't seem to have any recognisable political valence - in fact hand-count states are mostly Democratic.
"Uncharitable" i will grant, but it is far from "stupid", remember if something is stupid but it works it Isn’t stupid.
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For what it's worth I'm not pointing at Democrats in particular. I think Americans have been tampering with their process with little care for how trustworthy it looks in many stupid ways for a long time.
It just happens that it's Republicans complaining about it today. I was saying this back when Democrats were the ones complaining too.
When I press people on the tradeoffs, and I've done so for years, they always end up folding to a canard for participation and how they think making voting easier or harder will affect turnout in their favor. This is clearly incivic and you're reaping the distrust you've sown today.
If Americans love their republic as much as they all claim they should manage to put aside gaming the process once in a century to setup something decent enough to beat the shards of Yugoslavia. You're the most powerful country in the world and you still have massive voter fraud scandals. It's ridiculous.
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