The loosing party claim that the election was stolen every 4 years.
There was no outright fraud. There has been a massive amount of time, money, investigation, and litigation that all points in the same direction.
So why do so many people believe there was election fraud in 2020?
There are too many people with financial incentives to make people outraged now:
- Social media platforms,
- new media companies,
- hybrid entertainment-journalism companies,
- fake media companies,
- wealthy idiots dipping into politics (Patrick Byrne, Mike Liddell, Ginny Thomas, etc),
- campaigns raising huge money on "stop the steal" claims (Donny Trump, Kari Lake)
- a cottage industry of charlatan lawyers litigating "Stop The Steal" without any evidence (Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Lin Wood)
Also worth pointing out that Trump re-engaged many voters who were disillusioned by politics before him (and thus, completely ignorant about policies). He turned political rallies into WWE wrasslin' shows -- I with I could unread all of the articles which mentioned "heel" and "kayfabe". Sadly the target audience of WWE isn't exactly media literate and probably can't tell the differences between fact, opinion, hyperbole, and completely fabricated gossip.
2000 → Florida
2004 → Whatever the "don't taze me bro" guy claimed
2008 → All sorts of crazy Tea Party shit
2012 → ??? (Nobody actually liked Romney)
2016 → Russia
2020 → Whatever Trump claimed
- Providing money for campaign
- Using data from Cambridge analítica with target voters. - Hacking democrats trying to get advantage / dark secrets.
This broke several privacy issues and campaign finance laws but as far as I remember not the voting machines themselves.
That said. Voting with paper makes everybody more confident of the result.
Hillary had to blame something and it certainly wasn't going to be herself or her party. Maybe the reason was:
- Russia
- Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots
- sexism
- too much bad press about things like her emails
- Wikileaks
- Bernie was too mean
- Comey
etc.
Oh, and her base, not understanding error bars, went on a statistician witch hunt.
>too much bad press about things like her emails.
>Comey
Wikileaks and Comey reopening the email inquiry did obvious damage to her campaign, I don't know why you would imply that's not a legitimate complaint on her part. You could say she didn't do damage control well enough, sure, but there's a reason the only thing anyone remembers about her campaign comes from conspiracy theories about her emails and the DNC hack, and nothing to do with her actual platform.
>Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots
What? She said that about a subset of Trump voters who would never vote for Obama. And time has proven her correct.
I have been a vote counter in France, any citizen can keep an eye on his ballot in the transparent box until it’s counted.
Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly, is exactly what Putin would have done.
It's notable that people thinking an election is unfair, and an election being unfair, have the exact same social outcome. And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever is absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.
There is no reasonable doubt. To the extent that any doubt remains, it is only in the mind of people who wouldn’t be swayed by facts.
As someone who have spent the Trump years learning about epistemology (how we come to believe the things we do), I have realized that motivated reasoning will always blind humans to the truth. The truth is that elections require some amount of trust. It’s not possible to allow every voter the ability to see and verify each of the 162million ballots and no election would work if that was a requirement.
The BTC ledger is pretty good, but it is fallible —- mostly because a human has to control the keys and the UI apps that make using the wallet for transactions are far less secure than the core BTC protocol. Good luck teaching a 90 year old person who hates computers how to vote using their BTC wallet.
Also, the security of BTC isn’t infallible. Once someone finds a weakness in the system, they will quietly abuse it as a 0-day for a while before anyone notices it. Elections should be robust against any single point of failure, and they are. The BTC wallet is until it isn’t.
I still think _ergonomics_ of making sure every eligible voter can use the system is far more important that making it {immutable, distributed, transparent}.
Also, the immutability property is a double edged sword as someone losing control of their wallet secret key would lead to a leak of everyone they voted for. Or worse yet, if voter ID is tied to wallet ID instead of government-issued ID, one organization could go around stealing private keys in order to steal those ballets.
Optionally, add an ID on each ballot and people can not only look at all 162 million ballots, but even verify that their ballot properly scanned, published, and counted. The only argument against this is that ballot verifiability is a bad thing, because it might enable e.g. vote buying or whatever. Yet somehow people were perfectly fine with there being more than 26,000,000 votes made by mail in 2020 in which such threats are dramatically greater.
The nice thing about this solution is also that there's no 'classified' data. The complete transparency of it all would make any sort of stuffing or vote manipulation effectively impossible, which means there's no need for ultra-sophisticated systems. Plain old 1990s tech of digital scanners and scantron would work just fine. Ballot observers would need to do little more than count the number of people coming into a station and ensure that matches the total number of ballots eventually published by that station.
What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?
Elections are hard for a reason — the requirements are complex. Everyone wants 160million+ votes to be collected, counted, and results published by 9p on election day. Everyone wants the registry to work perfectly and wants the convenience of not having to travel far to a polling place. In practice, these create a huge number of hurdles that election officials must navigate, plan for contingencies (eg. the hurricane immediately before the election in Florida 2022).
Maybe my best advice to you is the snide “don’t reinvent the wheel in Hacker News comments, but rather get involved as a polling place volunteer next year, then see all of the edge cases in action”. Then don’t propose your MVP v2 to me, propose it to your county election board. Only you will be ignored because elections in the US have 250 years of learning from the previous errors, but you seem quite content to ignore all of those hard-earned lessons.
But back to the issue, nothing you offered is a meaningful hurdle or a new problem introduced by "my" rather obvious solution. The issues would generally be handled using the exact same workarounds, because they're also issues in the current system. For instance if somebody is blind, enfeebled, or otherwise unable to vote without assistance, then assistance can be rendered in a fashion similar to the current status quo. They can bring a family member to assist, and if that's not possible then aid can be rendered with an assistant from each 'side' helping simultaneously. And so on.
This is precisely why I said "What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?" You get a system that improves the status quo exponentially, and introduces no new downsides. Basically America is obviously becoming far more divided. Our politicians and "political figures" in general are, if not simply becoming even more unethical, then having their lies and deceptions exposed in a far more realtime and active fashion. This is understandably sending trust to some value approaching zero. You simply cannot have systems where trust in a large component in its operation, and expect people to simply have faith in the results.
- Needing to request a ballot, and including a security question/answer. The security answer will be cross referenced when returned to avoid somebody filling out a mail-in ballot that was not their own.
- One must already be enrolled to vote (which implies ID verification) when requesting a ballot, and the ballot request also requires knowledge of the address used to register to vote, though the ballot itself can be sent to another address for e.g. expats or whatever.
- When filling out the ballot, you are also required to have a witness sign it, affirming that it was you who filled it out. And that witness must be on the electoral roll.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's vastly better than what we have. And targeting some reasonable fears like impersonation, harvesting, and so on. And I think that effort to target these fears is, in reality, just as important as whether or not it even does, or if those fears are even justified. Because, again it's all about perception. Anything they can be done to help increase the perception of transparency and security in elections, without meaningfully encumbering the process, should be done.
[1] - https://www.aec.gov.au/about_aec/Publications/easy-read/file...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/04/trumps-as...
Except to compare other developed countries to the USA, you have to remember that most other sane countries run elections from the nation level, whereas the US runs them primarily at the county level. We have 3300+ different jurisdictions all testing slightly different methods and policies with mostly the same aim. And states get to pass statutes to decide things like mail-in, dropboxes, identity requirements, etc. so counties can't homogenize their policies unless states do. Lots of small counties run their elections exactly as you described.
But we also have more requirements than other countries.[1] We support voting for out-of-country citizens and active-duty military. These are treated like mail-ins and have been for decades.
Some states support same day registration (including for people who move counties/states in the weeks before election day).
We support provisional ballots (there are lots of edge cases including recent name changes, citizens being removed from registry without the approval of the voter, ballot misprints, the paper was destroyed, the ballot print does not conform to the scanner, mail-in ballot was never delivered, etc). All of these types are reviewed by the county election officials with signature verification before they are counted as valid ballots.
"Having some basic form of identification is a prerequisite to being an at all involved member of society." So complain to legislators. In California, the right to vote supersedes the ability to get a valid government-issued ID or "being an at all member of society".[1] It's also worth pointing out that the right to vote is a constitutional right, whereas the ability to obtain a government-issued ID is both cumbersome and very expensive for some people. Think along the lines of people whose documents were all destroyed in a fire, people who are homeless, and people who are released from prison but whom have not paid the massive fines associated with prison in many states. It's not my fault that you value the right to vote differently than legislators.
Also, voting is not a constitutional right. There were some constitutional amendments added later (in other words, not in the Bill of Rights) that prevented states from restricting voters based on things like race or sex, but states have relatively few limitations on who they allow or prevent from voting. This is why states can do things like prevent convicted felons from voting.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-supp...
Quit spreading lies. US law allows all vote tallying to be inspected by a limited number of observers, including at least one from each candidate/party on the ballot.
Elections in the US are run by each of the 3300+ counties, many of which use pure paper ballots and tallying, still. The more populated counties have a much larger logistics challenge, so they tend to be the ones that use tallying machines. But they don’t trust those machines anymore than you do - so they also do audits using random sampling to verify that the tallying machines exactly match hand-tallying results.