Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping, but it really is true. If you're serious about election security, you'll learn a lot very quickly by immersing yourself in the process and the people who do it.
For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.
Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping,...
I don't think it is gatekeeping to suggest people learn something about a subject before developing & propogating strong opinions on it. Obviously this is one of the best ways to learn some of the ins and outs.
> This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof
I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?
Once you go online (not to be confused with electronic-in-person), you cant really hide your vote. Whoever is buying your vote can instead buy your credentials to vote.
This is true of all remote voting. The all-postal ballots in Washington and Oregon are certainly subject to this, and there is a certain rate of voter coercion that goes undetected, particularly within households.
For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. Democratic legitimacy can be very nuanced and delicate. A well-publicized example of voter coercion could destroy trust in the existing system, but then the well-publicized problems of lines and poor voting hours eroded trust in the previous system too.
But the idea has never gotten very far. In general, the idea of a collectivist state that is underpinned by citizen responsibilities has been subsumed by the idea of the state as service supplier, and the citizen consumer.
I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option and if the majority votes for that then the election is a do-over and the candidates on that ballot are forbidden from running in the next election and possibly more.
> I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option
You could write in a name, or hand in an empty ballot. Mind, nothing will come of this even if it's the majority pick, but you're never actually forced to choose a candidate.
Yea, mandatory voting is more of an assurance that everyone is given an opportunity to vote without encumbrance than that they actually express an opinion. I haven't seen a mandatory voting system that requires you to vote for a candidate out of a chosen list, that seems very dangerous.
If voting is mandatory than any impediments to being able to vote (like not giving employees time off) is quite limited by the fact that such impediments are illegal, in the US voter suppression sort of skates by on BS and lots of talking heads explaining how unmotivated millennials are.
I suspect an even bigger problem is that there are powerful players who seem to have have an interest in the opposite - that is, reducing the number of potential voters who actually vote. I can't imagine them letting mandatory voting go without a real fight.
There is a whole alt-right idea of "Demographic shifting" as a tactic being used to suppress their opinion. Unfortunately Americans are really stupid and conspiracy theories have gotten a deep hold on society.
> require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.
This is only feasible if employers are legally required to allow employees time off to vote. In many countries, election days are holidays, but attempts to follow suit in the US haven't gone anywhere.
In Vermont there is a state holiday for "town hall day" it's statutory so everyone either is out of work or getting paid holiday overtime and it's meant to encourage people to participate in their local town's politics - it is awesome and everywhere in America should have it.
Nope! You could easily require states to offer a full week of voting as a minimum, this would also cut down on the tactic of making long lines at voting stations to reduce turn out.
> Nope! You could easily require states to offer a full week of voting as a minimum, this would also cut down on the tactic of making long lines at voting stations to reduce turn out.
How can you do that without an amendment? As I understand it, states are free to choose the methods for elections (which is why there is such variety in the US).
From the whitehouse.gov site:
> Federal elections are administered by state and local governments, although the specifics of how elections are conducted differ between the states. The Constitution and laws of the United States grant the states wide latitude in how they administer elections.
If your point is that you'll eventually go to jail, after many years of warnings and chances to pay, I don't have an issue with this.
There are many actions we require of citizens. You have to pay your taxes, you have to show up for jury duty, you have to sign up for the draft. Why is showing up to vote a less important civic responsibility than any of those things?
> If your point is that you'll eventually go to jail, after many years of warnings and chances to pay
This may be the case in principle, but in practice I actually don't think this is enforced here in Australia.
Last time I neglected to vote in local government elections (because I legitimately didn't know they were on), I got a letter seeking an explanation, then a $20-ish fine, then no further correspondence and no credit record strike or any further consequences. (I think that may have been because The Greens won that election and they weren't interested in chasing people over tiny fines).
And yes I get that if after multiple court summonses and defiant refusals to appear or pay, you could theoretically end up being hauled off to jail, but I don't think this has ever happened in Australia.
I can imagine a magistrate just ending up rolling their eyes and saying "oh fine, go away".
But the "compulsoriness" of voting here does mean that more people pay attention and take politics seriously, and politicians have to try address the needs of the entire population and not play games relating to people's willingness or ability to vote.
That said, it is not compulsory to lodge a valid vote, and drawing genitalia on the ballot paper is a socially acceptable form of voting.
Unlike the U.S., prisoners in Australia are allowed to vote, which seems like a meaningful - if symbolic - check on government tyranny.
But prisoners, like everyone else, can still lodge a blank ballot paper, or one with any kind of message on it, including a drawing of genitalia. So, no, silent protest is not criminalized.
It only leads to logical absurdity if you insist on taking it there for rhetorical purposes.
All laws ultimately come down to a level of reasonableness in their application, and this one is no different.
In practice, in Australia, it’s a moderate and balanced approach that helps to bring about what is one of the more well-functioning and harmonious democratic systems in the world. It’s no big deal.
Besides, people who hate the system enough to want to overthrow it should probably come up with a more robust course of action than merely staying home on polling day.
Australia don't have even the the most basic inalienable rights (speech for example), and you just got done arguing that a selective enforcement legal system is a good thing. Now you top it off with equating forced voting to silent protest, letting murders vote, and (cringe) suggesting something "more robust" than free speech.
Next thing you know Aus will outlaw random numbers.
Given the mischaracterisations and both personal and nationalistic slurs in this comment, we're clearly beyond being able to have a respectful discussion on this topic.
But for the sake of setting some points straight, and correcting a mistake on my part:
- Australia's basic human rights are inherited from British common law, which is argued by some (generally conservatives from what I can see) as in some ways preferable than rights encoded in a constitution or bill of rights. Reasonable people can and do debate that, but for however much this counts, the (hardly left-wing) Cato Institute rates Australia as 4th in the world on its freedom index [1]).
- I don't support selective enforcement; the article I linked showed that the law was enforced, it's just not a heavy-handed enforcement, and thus the spectre of jail is overblown.
- You're not forced to vote; you can lodge a blank form. You are just required show up (or send in a vote by post), or pay a $20 fine. Which, I agree, initially seems like a heinous impingement on freedom, until you realise it's the best protection we have of a more important freedom: that everyone has the right to vote without interference by political operators who would seek to manipulate the system to arbitrarily prevent certain people from voting.
- I was slightly mistaken about prisoners voting; prisoners on sentences greater than 3 years can't vote. So, murderers or other serious violent offenders aren't voting. But the potential for governments to manipulate elections via excessive incarceration is vastly reduced, which seems like something that should be important to people who worry about government intrusions on freedom (of which I'm one).
- I'm with you on the profound importance on free speech; I just think people who want to send a strong protest to government would be better off finding another hill to die on.
- "Moderate" and "balanced" are important concepts in political decision-making, and "reasonable"-ness is a core concept in common law.
Ultimately, systems should be judged on their outcomes.
I was previously (indeed quite recently) of the ideological persuasion that saw things like compulsory voting as an unconscionable breach of civil liberties.
I now recognise that virtues can only be measured in relation to other virtues they either impede or promote, and that in practice it turns out that, this particular infringement of civil liberties leads to a far more important benefit: a democratic system in which nobody is denied their right to vote, and a society that is widely regarded as being as free and well-functioning as any.
Which is not to say I make great criticisms of the U.S. I like the U.S., and whether I do or not it's not for me to say it should change.
I'm just pointing out that the odious spectres people invoke whenever compulsory voting is raised, turn out not to be problems in practice in Australia.
Not if you can re-establish credentials after selling them and cast a second vote that silently spoils whatever the buyer sends. Though that might count as electronic-in-person, as you'd need some unsellable credential (e.g. live video of you showing your ID and the date-time, sending a fingerprint, etc) which can take precedence over the one you sold (a username/password, an earlier-dated video/fingerprint/whatever, etc).
But then I guess the buyer just waits til the deadline, and buys the live video of you establishing credentials and casting your vote for them, so you can't fraud them... seems a lot more convoluted though.
Nope, at least, this won't work in Cook County: even if you've mailed in a ballot, you can vote provisionally, and if you have your mail-in ballot in hand, you can spoil it on-site and vote normally. You could therefore "sell" your vote and still override it to vote differently on election day.
Of course it would work. A real world "attack" is more like a regressively patriarchal household where everyone "votes" at the dinner table. Yes, an 18 year old around that table could later make their way to a ballot station, but they'll run into their neighbors along the way, and if their swamp-creature of a father finds out, it won't go well for them.
I should be more precise. The voting system we have in Cook County accounts for the possibility that someone observed your vote, and that you might later want to rescind that vote. It does so imperfectly, as you note.
I will say that the system we have goes to some annoying lengths to try to maintain this particular kind of integrity. For instance, if you have vision problems and want your husband to help you read the ballot, we need triplicate signatures confirming that the assistance wasn't coercive. We had to stop people from helping family members, as if they were doing something wrong, which felt weird.
I've monitored elections in Ireland and the Netherlands which both have an interesting problem. They each use Proportional Representation and ranked voting. Voters filling in their ballots mark each candidate with a number indicating their preference.
There are routinely 10+ candidates in each constituency. That makes it easy to encode a highly-likely to be unique voter signature in the lower order numbers, which would make it possible to sell your vote.
To combat this, when the votes are unfurled from the ballot boxes in public, tallymen (independent checkers of the vote) are expected to record only the first preferences, and if you start marking any more, you can expect a conversation with the returning officer. They are keeping an eye out.
If you are a scrutinizer of potentially invalid ballots, which I've done a few times, you're also not allowed to bring or take any notes.
To do that with in person voting you have to physically move around enough people with enough fake IDs to actually swing the election. The difficulty of doing that silently without anyone saying anything is a protection in and of itself. On top of that you have to get that many people on the voter rolls to start with.
that's entirely a question of scale - I can imagine that it'll be trivial to scale 'online' voting fraud if you have credential access, whereas doing it in person naturally limits the total number of times you can do it.
Committing identity fraud in person, in locations likely to have an elevated police presence, is extremely risky and getting caught carries severe consequences.
More fun Cook County details: not only is there not an elevated police presence at our polling places, but the election judges are charged with making sure the local police are not hanging around within like a quarter city block, since the local police don't have any authority with respect to voting. We got to chase a cop away at our place.
(The Cook County Sheriffs police our vote, but there aren't that many of them, so if they're going to show up, it's because a judge called them out.)
Every poll site has a poll book of eligible voters (for that location). Voters present their ID, sign next to their name, are issued a ballot. In order for mass fraudulent voting, impersonators would have to choose IDs (of persons) they were very confident were not going to vote.
It absolutely is undermined by any sort of voting outside a polling station. If we’re being intellectually honest, all election systems present trade-offs. Polling stations have nice security benefits, but remote voting increase accessibility. That’s basically what you come to appreciate if you immerse yourself in these systems (and build a healthy skepticism for anyone who proposes seemingly simple solutions).
Tabulating ballots as they are received eliminates the secret ballot. Ballots should be sorted into precincts beforehand.
Many larger jurisdictions use high speed image scanners for their postal ballots and adjudicate voter intent electronically (no paper record).
Election integrity types consider postal balloting and touchscreens roughly equivalent.
The gold standard is poll sites where the ballots are tabulated onsite immediately after the polls close. Anything else compromises public voting, private counting, or both, in some way. Though sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile, eg enfranchising voters.
The best mechanism for that is old fashioned investigative work, e.g. in the North Carolina 9th district election.
The worry is that, if everything works this way, some of the indicators used to discover this sort of thing are diluted. E.g. the first indicators in the NC 9th case were that one county in this district had a lot more absentee ballots than elsewhere, and the absentee ballots favored one candidate by an implausible margin. If all ballots are absentee, the former measure becomes useless and the latter becomes a much weaker signal.
In some jurisdictions, it's possible to vote in person after voting absentee (the absentee ballot is then destroyed without being counted).
Any system will have trade-offs, though—since ballot access (getting time off from work, childcare, transportation) appears to be a much more pervasive problem than coercion, it seems like the sacrifice would be worth it.
For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.