Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

greenwald.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#61

Post by ASalazarMX »

tgb wrote: post #12

I just worked the polls in Pennsylvania - the new voting machines are pretty great. You get a paper ballot, you insert it, you use a touchscreen to make choices, the machine prints the ballot with your choices on it, shows it to you behind plexiglass, you check over it for correctness. If it's all good, you hit done and the ballot is pulled in to a hopper. If not, you can redo. You get a machine count instantly at th…

Even third world countries like Mexico are able to give reliable preliminary statistics the same night, and definitive statistics in a couple of days.

I'd call it a disgrace that the self-proclaimed bastion of democracy could legally delay results for most of this month. It can be poor organization or regulation, but even if it's done for a good reason, it erodes the credibility of your elections.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#62

Post by happytoexplain »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #35
davidw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of his writing is FUD lately.

Concern and worry about left-leaning "journalists" censoring a newstory (a newstory that, had it happened to the other political party, would have been all over the news in an instant and would be covered for weeks on end) is FUD? Yup, keep downvoting me retards because I want a free and objective press. You've destroyed this website, hope you're happy.

I downvoted you because your writing is irrationally emotional and one-sided - not because I disagree with a less hostile version of your point.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#63

Post by marcosdumay »

dingaling wrote: post #58
marcosdumay wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fraud rates are extremely low. How do you know that?

It's a reasonable question. You can determine to some extent whether postal votes have been tampered with after they have been cast. Or whether more results were returned than were issued. But you can never realistically know what happened at the time of casting. Coercion is invisible with postal voting.

Can you determine if some votes have been destroyed?

(I really don't know how that system works.)

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#64

Post by tyingq »

Arnt wrote: post #60
tyingq wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Other developed countries have..." I suspect they have a way to mandate how local governments handle the voting. The US does not. That's the barrier.

Germany handles it fine, ie. each of the sixteen states handles it fine. There's nothing magic about holding election, that prevents Florida from doing it trustworthily and would permit the USA do achieve the same feat. A great many states do it, some federal. It requires coordination and reliability, in much the same way as delivering the mail, supplying everyone with fresh milk, handling vaccines, etc.

I think you're missing the point that US states have rights that can't be infringed upon. They are all allowed to make their own types of ballots, allow (or not allow) mail-in voting, decide how many workers to employ for the process, etc. The US government is, by law, not allowed to mess with any of that. Check out how different, for example, Maine's process was this year. They didn't have one winner. They split out electoral votes to two different candidates.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#65

Post by Arnt »

tyingq wrote: post #64
Arnt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany handles it fine, ie. each of the sixteen states handles it fine. There's nothing magic about holding election, that prevents Florida from doing it trustworthily and would permit the USA do achieve the same feat. A great many states do it, some federal. It requires coordination and reliability, in much the same way as delivering the mail, supplying everyone with fresh milk, handling vaccines, etc.

I think you're missing the point that US states have rights that can't be infringed upon. They are all allowed to make their own types of ballots, allow (or not allow) mail-in voting, decide how many workers to employ for the process, etc. The US government is, by law, not allowed to mess with any of that. Check out how different, for example, Maine's process was this year. They didn't have one winner. They split out…

No, I'm not missing that. I mentioned Germany because the sixteen German states have rights too, sufficiently so that it matters for politics in general.

Some German states even partly devolve elections further. There was a minor scandal regarding that last year, when one city chose to deploy some software that broke (and as a result, some votes weren't tallied until many hours later than expected, perhaps >24h). That's the kind of scandal federally devolved elections can have, the kind the Americans should aspire to having.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#66

Post by slowmovintarget »

salicideblock wrote: post #18
tyingq wrote: post #2

I'm not particularly bothered that it might take another day or two for all the votes to be counted. I'd much rather have the devil I know than a bunch of automation and technology that might have bigger issues. Since it's not nationally controlled, and each US state (and county) can do what it wants, a big push to use tech is almost sure to backfire. And backfire in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

I really don't think this is about a tradeoff between time and reliability. Other developed countries have, for decades, reliably given results within hours of polls closing, without "automation or obscure technology". Time to results is a factor in the credibility of the results, just as auditability and transparency. International election observers regularly raise concerns about protracted and drawn out election c…

Yeah, the "Hey I found these 30,000 votes in the trunk of my car... oops" stuff is really embarrassing.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

tyingq wrote: post #37
salicideblock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think this is about a tradeoff between time and reliability. Other developed countries have, for decades, reliably given results within hours of polls closing, without "automation or obscure technology". Time to results is a factor in the credibility of the results, just as auditability and transparency. International election observers regularly raise concerns about protracted and drawn out election c…

"Other developed countries have..." I suspect they have a way to mandate how local governments handle the voting. The US does not. That's the barrier.

> I suspect they have a way to mandate how local governments handle the voting. The US does not.

Yes, it does.

It does for federal legislative elections because while the Constitution gives power to run those elections to the State in the first instance, it also gives Congress the power to jump in and regulate anything it wants about "the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, [...] except as to the places of choosing Senators".

And, while it doesn't have truly mandatory federal direction for Presidential elections (for which voting by the people isn't even Constitutionally required), it does in practice for them the same way much of what is done in Presidential elections is already fixed: safe harbor laws defining what states must do to protect their electoral votes from being subject to challenge when counted by Congress.

The US chooses not to exercise the tools it has to mandate how local government handles the voting, and where it does exercise those tools doesn't do it well, and that's the problem, not the absence of the tools.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

tyingq wrote: post #64
Arnt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany handles it fine, ie. each of the sixteen states handles it fine. There's nothing magic about holding election, that prevents Florida from doing it trustworthily and would permit the USA do achieve the same feat. A great many states do it, some federal. It requires coordination and reliability, in much the same way as delivering the mail, supplying everyone with fresh milk, handling vaccines, etc.

I think you're missing the point that US states have rights that can't be infringed upon. They are all allowed to make their own types of ballots, allow (or not allow) mail-in voting, decide how many workers to employ for the process, etc. The US government is, by law, not allowed to mess with any of that. Check out how different, for example, Maine's process was this year. They didn't have one winner. They split out…

> I think you're missing the point that US states have rights that can't be infringed upon.

Those "rights" (there's a problem with applying that term to states and not people, but its a side issue here) do not include the "right" to run federal elections without oversight by Congress, which has both direct and explicit regulatory power for federal legislative elections under the Constitution, and the Constitutional role of assessing whether electoral votes are properly given when counting them, and has, in fact, has acted based on the latter power to direct states as to what they must do in federal Presidential elections to shield their votes from potential challenge.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

happytoexplain wrote: post #6

It's childish and destructively hostile to paint a prediction of the outcome of an election giving high odds to the result that turns out wrong as some kind of catastrophic failure or humiliation. It boggles my mind how many apparently otherwise smart people commit this obvious fallacy out loud.

> It's childish and destructively hostile

That's kind of Greenwald's schtick, particularly recently.

Re: The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

#70

Post by tgb »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #61
tgb wrote: post #12

I just worked the polls in Pennsylvania - the new voting machines are pretty great. You get a paper ballot, you insert it, you use a touchscreen to make choices, the machine prints the ballot with your choices on it, shows it to you behind plexiglass, you check over it for correctness. If it's all good, you hit done and the ballot is pulled in to a hopper. If not, you can redo. You get a machine count instantly at th…

Even third world countries like Mexico are able to give reliable preliminary statistics the same night, and definitive statistics in a couple of days. I'd call it a disgrace that the self-proclaimed bastion of democracy could legally delay results for most of this month. It can be poor organization or regulation, but even if it's done for a good reason, it erodes the credibility of your elections.

There's nothing more degrading to the credibility of the elections than the people running around pretending that suddenly counting votes quickly (rather than accurately) is the important thing.
Post reply on HN