Slashdot Mirror
How Would You Change U.S. Election Procedures?
"How about a credit card-style voter registration card that I have to swipe in order to verify that I am eligible to vote? Such a card could be used to present custom electronic ballots to voters so they do not have to physically vote in their home districts (one could be away on business and within the country's borders or even at an embassy in a foreign country and still vote without an absentee ballot). Federal standards would also put the burden of maintaining proper voting facilities on the Federal government, helping to alleviate issues that can arise with insufficient equipment in less affluent or populous districts. The idea is not to centralize the voting regulations that are currently in place in each state, but rather to centralize and unify the mechanics of casting a vote. Your thoughts?"
The system works, let it be.
Nobody wants a fiasco in their state, so the states are individually reforming the system to avoid a situation like the one in Florida in 2000.
It takes time, anything involving government does.
The last thing that we need is yet another massive Federal program with arbritrary rules and unfunded mandates.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Uniform voting regulations across the country (I know, states rights etc) and a good old paper ballot. This should be simple.
It's insane that each of thousands of states and counties have different rules, different technology, different everything.
And, as the latest irregularities show, there is simply nothing as useful as a simple and unambiguous paper trail.
Oh yeah - and better candidates.
Three Squirrels
This is not going to happen without widespread and energetic grassroots support and, in the case of Diebold and other unverifiable voting systems, possibly bloodshed. Neither seems likely when "The OC" is on TV tonight.
The USA could begin by making people vote on Saturday and Sunday. Many countries vote on these days: people tend to have more time during the weekend.
A unified voting procedure also helps: just as an example you can then use national television to illustrate the voting procedure.
Yes, of course, brilliant. Any country can count its population and be assigned an amount of electoral votes!!
Of course the countries have to may tax, and the states need to conform to our constituion.
Did I say states? Opps.
The electoral college is in place and had lasted this long for a reason. It forces candidates to go after voters across the nation/gives all states a say in the election.
The college has the same effect as the congress. Smaller states are given the same number of senators so that they are represented nationally. Larger states are given more representatives because they have more people and pay more taxes. States are given electoral votes so that smaller states have a say.
Without the electoral college, candidates would simply pander to NY, LA, Chicago, and maybe a few other markets. They can then safely ignore the rest of the nation because a small victory in the large markets overcomes even the largest losses in the rest of the nation.
The other reason for using the electoral college is that it creates a consensus. This year was a big enough victory that it doesn't really matter, but four years ago, the popular vote was too close to call(Let it go.), but the electoral college presented a clear winner(eventually). I think that after some thought, people on both sides of the issue would agree that if the election is really that close, we are better off with either candidate as president than with the presidency vacant.
This is a _terrible_ idea. If voters walk out of the voting booth with a receipt that says how they voted, you've just enabled everyone who might want to pressure, bribe, or influence voters. Domineering husbands will demand that their cowed wives vote the "right" way, and then offer proof of it when they get home. Employers will give bonuses to employees who proove they voted a certain way. Religious figures will deny services to people who voted "wrong". In areas with a poor police presence, gangs will demand to see your receipt and beat you up if you can't prove you voted the way they want.
It's a deliberate feature of our voting system that after you leave the voting booth, there is no way that anyone can gain knowledge of how you voted. This enables people to vote their concience. It makes it almost impossible to harass or reward someone based on how they voted. To change this would be a disaster.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
That's not strictly true - it means "densely-populated cities" become the "critically important" locations. A pure "popular vote" based mechanism means a proportionally sharp under-representation of non-urban areas.
Do you WANT the nation's garbage being dumped next to all the farm fields, just because the farmers are outvoted by "city folk" who just want to get rid of their garbage? Do you WANT all the water shipped to supply e.g. Los Angeles instead of growing food? There's a reason people have been proposing other, more complex replacements for the electoral college than a simple popular vote...
Not to say that I'm in favor of the current system, either - the "Electoral College" is rigged to require "major party" votes only get counted.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
You do realize, of course that the reason the 3/5th person clause was put into the Constitution was to weaken the power of the Slave holding states.
Backwards. It was to increase their power, and thereby entice them to enter a union with the more-populous northern states that otherwise might dominate federal voting. (In a similar way, the "Conneticut Compromise" gave smaller states extra power to attract their membership)
By making a slave count as 3/5th of a person, you have weakened the federal power of a slave holding state.
Livestock, such as cows, chickens, and slaves, count as zero people. Only the special exception embodied in that clause adds them to representative totals.
One cannot argue that slaves were already people anyway, because although biologically human, they were certainly not people under the eyes of the law. Otherwise typical slave-owner actions like bondage and beatings would be illegal kidnapping or felony assault.
Expanding suffrage to everybody does lead to better government than the alternative, which is what we call oligarchy. Of course, I define "better" as "more representative of and responsive to the people", not "in agreement with me specifically". I understand that's very trendy of me.
For the government to be stable, we need the vast majority of people to believe that the elections are fair and honest. When some of the people believe that the election is rigged, those same people are likely to seek an alternative way to force power away from the people who rigged the election. We see that happen in other countries, every year. It's called an assasination, or a revolution, or a civil war. Whatever you call it, it is messy and bloody, and there is only one way to avoid it. That way is to make the election process so transparent and honest that everyone can be certain that it is honest.
I have read that there are four boxes to use in defense of liberty: Soap; Ballot; Jury; Ammo. The first two have now failed. It's time for the third. If the legal process fails to correct the election process in this country, then it may be time for the fourth. I sincerely hope that the fourth box will not be necessary.
The details of the election process matter, but not nearly as much as the transparency. Paper ballots go a long way to make elections transparent. Paper ballots provide evidence that can be examined if the election is disputed. Registration requirements have been used to disenfranchise people, so registration should be eliminated. Inking the thumb of each voter provides a transparent way of being sure that no one votes multiple times. Electronic machinery can be useful, to provide handicap access or save labor, but only to the extent that it does not reduce honesty or transparency. Other mechanisms may also be useful, but each should be judged by the extent to which it improves honesty and transparency.
Rigging or attempting to rig an election should be a capital crime, even for minor conspirators and accomplices, and even for minor local elections.
70% of the people, my fellow slashdotters, are ... poorly educated, non-rational... folks, they're stupid, and they hold out fates in their hands. I know, that's anti-democratic. But when a race is based on the will of the people, by pure numbers, candidates have to worry about how people perceive them on an emotional level, not on how they stand on issues.
Though I'd generally agree that people are stupid... I think you just explained Bush's campaign technique. He won because he ignored issues, appealed to people on an emotional level, and told the stupid masses what would make them feel better.
The electoral college does not protect us from that sort of politics.
I don't know a reasonable, fair way to keep clueless knee-jerk voters out of the system. If this image has any truth to it, a simple IQ test (require an IQ of 100 or greater) would have produced a landslide victory for Kerry. But that's not fair, and not democratic. So, we'll just have to deal with all those uninformed people who haven't been paying attention to the world; the ones who made the PIPA report so interesting. Bleh.
For now, the only reasonable things I think would help are: switch to Condorcet voting, get rid of the electoral college, and add a "nobody" entry in every election.