>But it takes so long to aggregate the votes if done with paper ballots.
This one was alway wierd to me. Other countries always manage to count the votes in one night, and while the USA is very big, you'd think there would be that many more people counting the ballots available to make up for it. I guess it doesn't scale that easily.
Maybe the (low) number of voting locations is a problem?
Around here, it's recommended to have a polling location for every 800~1000 voter and a booth per ~300 voters.
When the polling location closes, staff (volunteers) start counting very publicly: anyone can watch and the procedure is legally specified such that overseers can trivially keep track and count of everything, the results are certified, displayed at the polling location and (if necessary e.g. for non-local elections) sent up to the next administrative division.
Unless there are improprieties, it doesn't take very long to count a thousand votes.
As a UK citizen, some of the voting practices I see in the US seem really mind-boggling:
- Not enough polling stations
- Long lines as the norm in many places
- Polling stations closing early -- I've seen 8pm
- Exit polls released before voting closes
I guess these are generally due to the US being a large country spanning several time zones, with low population density. But they seem fixable, especially if you care enough about the integrity of the vote to commit enough staff and money to the process.
Given the ridiculous amount of money that gets ploughed into campaigning in the US, it seems bizarre that you can't spare a fraction of that to improve the process. But it seems like what little money is available is captured by hucksters selling electronic voting machines.
(Not that the UK system is perfect! Our voting system is pretty bad. Both countries could really use PR.)
Yeah, the targeted voter suppression is terrifying (and apparently legal! But hopefully that can be remedied in the courts. The recent progress on gerrymandering seems promising.)
Anecdote: the small city I used to live in once scheduled polls on the same weekend night as three popular local sports events. Can any system work with arbitrarily rotten politicians?
Arguably, this is just another form of "legal" voter suppression.
An employer cannot legally fire a person for taking time off to vote, or to attend jury duty. That doesn't mean they don't, it just means they can't do so legally.
But if you are someone who depends on that job (such that you can't just go out and find another), losing that job because you voted is something you're going to weigh, and regardless of how you vote (though typically - at least historically, notwithstanding our last election - those on the lower-end of the economic scale vote for Democrats), you are more likely to want to keep your job to pay for rent and food, than to vote.
Furthermore, even if your principles matter more to you than your job, if you do get fired, you aren't likely to then go thru the process of taking your former employer to court for firing you (because that would mean more time and expense away from finding another job).
Heck - the employer may not even need to break any laws, just make implicit threats as to what will happen should an employee take time off without consent of the employer, while neglecting to tell the employee about their voting rights (and nobody reads those employee rights posters in the breakroom either). Even though such threats aren't arguably legal either, nobody is going to fight against them because again - that means loss of job and money to pay rent.
I feel like weekend voting would help for those who work "regular 9-5 jobs" but those who are young, and say still in college/university and working weekends, would now have a more difficult time voting. The weekend type jobs usually won't let you have time off to vote, they schedule you that time because they're busy, so it might be much more difficult for those people.
At least the weekday election day somewhat levels the playing field, at least as I see it.
I'd go beyond that even. The US loves pageantry and celebrating freedom. But what event could be more appropriate for a celebration of freedom than voting day itself?
You could have small festivals at every voting booth to encourage people to come out to vote, and you could even move the ballot boxes as part of a big parade so there's absolutely no doubt in the process.
Texas has early voting for about two weeks prior to poll day, which makes voting convenient. That said, the recent attempts at voter suppression and gerrymandering abuse are saddening.
It works very well. We also have a basically-no-questions-asked early voting for a couple of weeks. Nominally it's intended for if you're preoccupied (overseas, working, etc.) on voting day but in practice people use it to dodge the lines.
That said, we also have so many voting booths (I have never not been able to walk to my closest - usually only about 1km away) that the worst line I've ever waited in was probably 10 minutes.
Too few voting places, and voting days are not holidays (or on sundays) like in other countries. There are very obvious steps that could be taken to solve both counting time and voter turnout as well as suppression.
> There are very obvious steps that could be taken to solve both counting time and voter turnout as well as suppression.
But when the party in power counts on that low turnout due to suppression in order to remain in power, do you really think they will do anything about it during their time in power?
Vote count could also be optimised with machines. Each party can bring it's own OCR machine to count the votes. If there is a disagreement, fallback on humans.
The issue is with having a single machine that we have to trust end-to-end.
Even in this case you still have vulnerabilities in the two party's machines. Just because they have different interests doesn't mean that they'll apply strength to their machine's defenses, or even have the ability to stop the attacks on their machines assuming they were 100% committed to following correct procedure.
Do Diebold machines still cost 3k a pop[1]? You can get 3 high-end scanners at that price. And generally more than one Diebold would be deployed per location right?
Let's say the scanner costs $500 and there are 9999 locations. That's 50M of investment per party that can be re-used. It's a lot of money but it's an order of magnitude less than their campaign cost[2]
Why would it be mandatory? It's a way to let parties assure themselves that the votes were counted by a trustworthy method. If they're already satisfied that that's true, then nobody can conceivably benefit by having them bring their own machines.
Why wouldn't I be? They are just performing another count.
If one party brought machines to a poll place and managed to make trouble it is likely that the other party will show up too. Eventually it would just be part of the political landscape and the results would be better vetting all around.
This one was alway wierd to me. Other countries always manage to count the votes in one night, and while the USA is very big, you'd think there would be that many more people counting the ballots available to make up for it. I guess it doesn't scale that easily.