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I will evade this whole discussion by provuding a little bit of the outside view of Slovak resident. And my opinion is that US election conduct seems to me amazingly unsafe and to the core untrustworthy. As a reference, I served in election committee in Slovakia and it is against the law for spouses to go into the voting booth together with possibility of one spouse coercing the other to vote as they want. We do require ID with photo for voters to vote in a specific place they are assigned based on their address and the paper ballot is handed to you against your signature. If you want to physically vote elsewhere in the country because of travel, you have to ask for specific one-time voting ID that enables you to be manually added to some other voting list. You may also ask to vote via mail but you have to register 52 days before voting and ask for the ballot to be mailed to you, this is specifically for people who vote from abroad. And to be fair I am against that as well although only around 2% of votes were delivered by mail.
All votes are paper based, they are counted by actual people in voting committee on the spot and ballots are safely transported from thousands of voting places by police. Recently my friend and I had a thought exercise of how to commit voter fraud and we could not find a theoretical way of doing it properly. The voting system is highly decentralized, vote counting is watched by regular people who can take a photo of paper document of voting count for each election place and then cross-check it with official website of central voting committee. In fact many parties have representatives in election committees who send them those voting counts so politicians have some idea about election results even before official ones are announced. Elections are highly trusted and with good reason, vote results are known within hours of closing polling places - in the past we had a party that did not get to parliament by just couple of hundreds of votes and nobody disputed that result. Say what one may about my country but elections are airtight.
The comparison with US electoral system - especially for presidential elections where each state does shit their own way is laughable. You have mass sending of ballots and mail-in voting percentage in 30%+ range. You have ballot harvesting, you have strange centralized ballot counting with computers. You have no voting IDs in many places, you have gerrymandering, you have situations where precise election results are not known for days or weeks. And of course elections are often very competitive where literally thousands of votes can decide the next president as far back as 2000 Florida vote recount kerfuffle - I cannot blame anybody who thinks that those elections were stolen one way or another. From where I stand, the US elections to me look closer to this scene from Gangs of New York compared to elections I know in my country. And amazingly instead of trying to make US elections more trustworthy it seems that the they are continuously getting less and less legitimate, while shouting how pointing that out is antidemocratic. And I understand that there are reasons for why things are the way they are with all the aforementioned nitpicks. But the end result is still shitty and untrustworthy election system that is at least prone to election fraud conspiratory thinking if not actual outright fraud.
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