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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   19147 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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How long did it take to count races in the 1990s?

It just seems like pure insanity to me that we use these machines to do our elections.

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems, and now new and exciting problems have come in their wake.

Like the Poles in the comment below, Ireland does paper ballots and manual counting (we even had a mini-scandal when the government of the day, back in the 90s, wanted to introduce electronic voting and bought some machines, but there were so many legal challenges that the machines sat in a warehouse and were never used).

The counts are the best part of the election 😀

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems

Really? Were the hanging chads worse than the 400 voting-machine voters who cast negative 16,000 votes? That was even in the Florida 2000 Presidential election too!

It actually looks to me like Maricopa is trying to get things right: voting machines for accessibility, but instead of storing results on a chip they print a human-readable paper card ballot. The ballot can be immediately scanned for a quick count and to double-check for problems, but then it ends up in a lockbox for recounts or disputes... and if the tabulator isn't working, it just goes in a different container for hand-counting. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of(NSFW audio), but they're independent enough that you could just spoil any half-printed ballots and send someone to another voting machine. Scanners are usually more reliable than printers, but having redundant tabulators too would have been a good idea in hindsight.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of

I didn't know it would be that clip when I clicked on the link, but I was hoping it would be that clip.

Here is an example of how it works in Poland, a country with a population size close to California.

There was a second round of presidential election on July 12th, 2020. The poll station closed at 9 pm. Next day, on 13th, the national election committee, announced the results.

https://pkw.gov.pl/uploaded_files/1594724319_obwieszczenie-pkw-20200713-1915.pdf

There were 20 million votes to count, almost all cast in person (out of 30 million eligible voters). No machines were used to cast votes, all of them were done on paper. No machines were used to tabulate them, all tabulation is done manually. Nevertheless, the official results are announced less than 24 hours after the polls close, and unofficial results (ie, enough stations reported results to give 99%+ confidence in election outcomes) are available around midnight the same day.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

How many unique questions are on Polish ballots? IIRC British ballots have only one question typically, but my American one had about 60 odd questions from various overlapping jurisdictions. There are almost certainly more unique suites of ballot questions than voting locations in my county.

But the wide variation in election quality speaks to differing standards and equipment across states and even between adjacent counties.

The one I gave as an example was particularly easy, as there was only one question with two possible choices.

However, for a better analogy, in the national “local” election (555 seats to provincial assemblies, 6,244 seats to county councils, 32,173 seats to commune councils, and 3,162 local government heads, close to 40 000 elected seats in total) in 2018, the official results of Sunday election (and the elections are always on Sunday in Poland, by the way) were announced on Wednesday afternoon.

I don't think you understand the nature of the problem. In general european elections will ask each citizen a handful of questions (for example two votes: one for the senate and one for the parliament). The US has far more elected positions than the average european country and also likes to aggregate local and general elections all in one (probably because general elections happen so frequently). So a normal US ballot will ask the citizen to vote for national elections but also positions in the state and county administration and include things like: seats on the supreme and appeals courts, sheriffs, various public attorneys, one or more referenda questions, seats on the school board, things nobody knows what they are, like comptrollers, etc.

Random example of a ballot

Of course they could just use two ballots, put the one or two national questions on one and everything else in the other and then use two ballot boxes, and then just count the national votes first. I guess it never occured to them.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

Where are you?

Don't people get paid?

In 2018 according to my gf's recollection she was paid 90 dollars to run a poll station for 12 hours as a volunteer. You're basically reliant on civic minded people to bother with it at that point I think.

civic minded people

And exceptionally politically "involved" people.

Oh, that's too bad.

I remember being paid like $300 for working as a vote counter (lowest at the totem pole) in Sweden during the 2009 EU parliament elections, so that was pretty attractive for me as one days work as a student.

That's wild. NJ is normally $200 for the lowest level volunteers for the day. The two times I did it during Covid, they paid extra, for $400 and $325.

Hahaha… oh wait you’re serious.

They either don’t get paid, or paid only a nominal amount, like jury duty.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

IME, 70-90 years olds in cognitive decline are typically challenged by computer-like machines. Why do we think that they are worse at manual counting than at everything involving the custody and machine tabulation of votes?

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