531–540 of 659 posts
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But what is the other explanation then?
Hanlon's Razor would suggest a bug in the hardware or software as the more likely explanation. Unfortunately, when politics are involved, people default to assuming malice far more than they perhaps should.
It's simply because of the stakes. The cost of ignoring a positive is much greater than the cost of freaking out over a false positive.
NBC News confirming they've removed this particular machine because of this: http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...
Which is proper. The report that the volunteer said "everything will be okay" is the worst part of this. Systems need to recognize and isolate damage, not assume it will never occur.
The US uses a federal agency to collect income taxes, so why won't it do the obvious thing and create one to run federal elections?
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I was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret ? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).
The short answer is you can buy votes then. If you can prove to me who you voted for, I'll give you $5 or whatever.
For example, voting machines could drop duplicate receipts into a bucket that voters are free to rummage around in.
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Clearly, allowing easier access to voting is evil. No, definitely we should make it harder for those least able to afford it....working class people... to take time off from work and stand in line to vote. /sarcasm
Polls are generally open 12 hours, plus there's early voting and absentee voting. "Working class" people have no less opportunity to vote than anyone else. Stop with the class-warfare nonsense.
I don’t get US voting. Why don’t you do it on a Sunday, like much of Europe? 12 hours, fine, but on a day when most people have to work. When you add in commute times and all that there has to be little time for many people to vote and you basically have to plan your day around it. If voting is on a Sunday you might even spontaneously decide to take a lazy Sunday stroll to the voting booth. (But then again, you have to register beforehand in many states, which also seems pretty crazy to me.)
Add the long lines (Seriously, what‘s even going on with that? Germany has a much higher voter turnout than the US – 74% vs 49% during the last federal election – and I have never seen any lines. The most I ever had to wait were two or three minutes, and I also haven’t ever seen media reports about long lines.
It seems to me that trying to make voting easier is very much the right thing to do in the US while making it harder is not.
However, I do not believe in any grand or small conspiracy theories and I don’t think there is any kind of large scale manipulation going on. It just all seems dysfunctional, not manipulated. When comparing it to German elections, why does it seem that politicians have so much control over it? They don’t seem to be shy to make politics with how voting is implemented – which is a total taboo in Germany†, no politician would ever dare to give off the impression that they are trying to change how the election is run in order to favor their party. Much of the organization is handed off to independent experts who take most of the decisions.
It’s not that hard. There are many Europeans countries where voting is just not a big deal and where there are never big issues like in the US. You are the oldest democracy in the World, shouldn’t you have figured out that stuff by now?
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† There is one recent exception to this. The federal voting law was declared unconstitutional two times in a row from the constitutional court during the last years.
The way federal elections work is that it’s basically proportional representation – i.e. people vote for parties, any party with more than five percent gets the percentage of seats they won – but there are also direct candidates in every district, insuring that everyone has her or his candidate they can write to. Those direct candidates are elected using first past the post, but they are at least supposed to be inconsequential to the percentage of seats a party gets. If there aren’t enough direct candidates to fill the seats a party got, those seats are filled from a per-state party list of candidates.
However, what happens when a party has more direct candidates than they have seats? Before the constitutional court struck that down those “overhang mandates” were just added without changing anything else, basically skewing with the percentages. A party which got 50 seats might suddenly get 60 seats without other parties (without overhang mandates) also getting more seats.
In the last election this has favored conservatives, but taking this to the constitutional court was successful. The court gave the parliament time to change the law. What was unique and unprecedented, however (and a rare case of German politicians making politics with how voting works) was that the current conservative government decided unilaterally on a solution – instead of by working together, as had been tradition. However, that solution was also struck down (with constitutional judges showing pretty open dismay that the parliament was seemingly unable to solve this problem in the long time allotet and worried about the fact that an election is coming up in 2013) – leading the conservative government to this time around try and find a consensus solution. So it all was back to the tradition of not just changing election laws unilaterally without at least talking to the biggest opposition party and trying to find a solution both can agree on.
What will happen now is that parties without overhang mandates will get more seats to balance those overhang mandates of other parties, thus not skewing the percentages. I’m personally still not a fan of this solution – the parliament is already to big and now it will grow further – but it should be constitutional.
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Please put info in your profile. I strongly agree with everything you said, and am thus interested in learning more. I had no idea the Scottish election was so ridiculously bad. Is there anyone campaigning against this in the UK I can donate money to, or lend my support to? Paper ballet (and the process you outlined behind it) is important to prove beyond all reasonable doubt to the losers and their voters that the e…
There was an independent inquiry - the results can be read here: http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electora... On reading it I see that I have misrepresented the figures from memory: 2.88% of regional/list ballots were invalid 4.075% of constituency ballots were invalid 1.83% of local government ballots were invalid These were against a historical spoilt paper rate of about 0.66% (I have edited the…
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What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble? I'm not trying to play Loki's Wager -- there really have been incredibly close elections where you have puzzle out just what the voter intended and it's just not clear. Nor can you make the boundary be "well if it's not clear throw it away," because you can't tell when it doesn't become clear. Thi…
>What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble? Count it before the voter leaves, reject any ambiguous ballots with feedback about what's wrong and have the voter fix it before they leave. Repeat until it's accepted.
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Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.
Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area. If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.
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Read the link in tokenadult's post about Minnesota. Paper is hardly easy to count when you get to the dolts who don't know how to mark a ballot. What does it mean when the guy marks a vote for every question but also writes "LIZARD PEOPLE" in every write-in ballot spot? Lots of people really don't like the fact that the senator is chosen based on how 3 people sit down and decide what that means, or whether this chad…
There's no ambiguity about a spoiled ballot. It's a legitimate protest with a clear outcome - the vote is not counted. A simple system of slips of paper marked by hand and counted by hand works better than anything involving chads, touch screens or electronic counting. Paper ballots are really the best solution we have at present and I'd argue the involvement of as many people as possible in counting and supervision…
Very rarely is there disagreement about what is a valid vote - but they can be very ambiguous. The paper is only approved if there is a high level of unambiguity about it - any doubt it goes out.
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>What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble? Count it before the voter leaves, reject any ambiguous ballots with feedback about what's wrong and have the voter fix it before they leave. Repeat until it's accepted.
Just to be absolutely clear, you are advocating for people to have their votes approved prior to them being allowed to be cast?
This is the way it worked when I lived in Indiana. We had paper/optical ballots that were scanned immediately after we turned them in. We watched them get scanned, and could verify that the counter on the scanner incremented (not vote tallies, just a +1 for total ballots cast).