November 30, 2020

Horse 2785 - America Could Fix Its Elections By Bothering Just A Little Bit

Partly because I follow both sides of politics across several nations and partly because everything on the internet eventually gets distilled into the most extreme version of itself, my social media feed across Twitter and Facebook has been one in which conspiracy theorists are spinning the engines of malarkey and wingnuttery almost like a perpetual motion machine. 

Let's assume for a minute that the current conspiracy wingnuts are actually correct and that there has been a massive systemic failure of security in this last presidential election. I find it completely incredible that the Presidential Election was fraudulent but that the concurrent elections for Representatives, Senators, Governors, and local government positions weren't but then again, that's because I think that if you are going to design a conspiracy theory then it had at least be somewhat internally consistent. Even so, if we make that assumption, then the only logical action is to do what they did in the Western Australian Senate election a couple of years ago and run the whole thing all over again.

I find it utterly stupid and abysmal of characters that supposedly the 'greatest democracy in the world' can't run elections properly.

The more rational explanation is that the side who lost, just really belligerent and of such poor character that they can not accept the results without having major dummy spit. It is as though two year old children were put in charge of the kitchen, smashed up some glassware and started banging on the pots and pans, and are now chucking a tantrum because mummy has had to come in and clean up the mess.

America, grow up.

I personally think that the United States is badly constituted and this has been comprehensively proven by the fact that that same constitution is one of the root causes as to why the country had a civil war in 1861 and why it has been copied by exactly nobody. The framers made it deliberately difficult to amend and chang because of highly self-interested reasons and 231 years later, it still echoes with that same deliberate set of difficulties.

Nevertheless, there are some key aspects to how elections are conducted which can be changed without any amendment to the constitution whatsoever and if I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else then I would set about making those changes by executive order almost immediately.

1. Get rid of Voting Machines and conduct elections on paper.

It seems utterly absurd to me that anyone would allow elections to be conducted on a machine. Not only are there the costs of maintaining said machines but the integrity of the result will always be in doubt. Someone can accuse the other side of rigging the machines, or of being open to man in the middle attacks, or of direct denial of service attacks or a heap of other things that can go wrong.

The only way of ensuring complete integrity of the vote is by every vote being written on paper and also being treated with suspicion. Paper ballots should be counted by hand and in the presence of a representative from the relevant political parties. Where possible, the vote tallies should be signed off by representatives from the various interested parties as well. As a paper ballot is also the most reliable instrument upon which to do a recount.

2. Saturday Voting.

Voting on a Tuesday may have been sensible in 1789 when the Constitution was written but it isn't sensible now. Actually, in 1789 it wasn't sensible either. Typically, an election would be held over several weeks; with some physical polling booths moving from town to town. The idea that you could ever hold an election on one day, has more or less always been nonsense and the suggestion that pre-polling is somehow undemocratic is an outright lie.

Voting on a Saturday means that the most number of people don't have to amend their day, just to go to the polls. Most people are already not at work on a Saturday. Also, this ensures that school halls and other civic institutions which normally are open during the week and that have sufficient space to be able to be operated as a polling place, don't have to close because they already would be anyway.

3. An Independent Electoral Commission

Apart from the Secretary heads of a department, almost everyone else within a government department has a life span which is longer than the elected member. Politicians may come and go but the underlying civil service is eternal. As such, although they have the job of implementing the sometimes stupid whims of their temporary masters, they have the more important and co-objectively self-interested job of maintaining the continued operation of the actual machinery of governance.

Staggeringly, the United States doesn't really have a proper Electoral Commission and instead chooses to let the states run their own elections. Not only is the entire process excessively politicised but it combines that with being hideously inefficient; and both of those factors are perfectly acceptable to the political parties already in power, who don't actually have to compete in the marketplace of ideas. 

3a. Provide enough polling places.

As we're now holding elections on a Saturday, every school hall and most major civic institutions which have halls (such as the Town Hall or the Courthouse) will be closed. Those spaces are now instantly available to be able to put votig booths into. As we're now holding elections on paper, those voting booths can be made out of cardboard and erected in about two hours for an entire room of 60. If they already come pre-folded so that all the polling officers have to do is pop them out and fold some flaps down, then it should be a pretty simple job.

3b. Provide Voter ID

If voter fraud is the big boogeyman which you are worried about despite all of the evidence, then as the date of an election is known, then there should be a process to provide people with the necessary ID which you are demanding from them. I can guarantee that the vast majority of people in the United States will have a photo ID card as their Driver's License; so this should already be acceptable but where people for whatever reason, be they old and no longer driving, or too young to drive, or perhaps they are homeless etc. then the ability for these people to be able to obtain something to prove their identity which you are demanding from them, should be made readily available and obtainable in the several months before an election.

...

I am of course fully aware that originalists will argue that because the states have a 'republican form of government' that the original authority to be able to conduct elections lies with the states but invariably, those same people are the same people who are currently the children chucking a tantrum because of their imagination of voting fraud.

If you think that the system is systemically broken but do not want to actually fix the system, then I don't care what your complaint actually is because it's internally nonsense. I don't think that it makes sense to complain about a thing being broken (which it clearly is) and then refuse to fix it, just so you can go on complaining about the problem.

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