Not quite 7½ moths after the 2020 Presidential Election, former President Donald Trump still refuses to concede that he lost the election. With everything from box loads of ballots being fed into counting machines, to massive amounts of voter fraud, to voting machines, all being the subject of accusations as to why Mr Trump lost (as opposed to the public just being sick and tired of corruption, abuse of power, and general incompetence), in states that are predominantly Republican controlled, instead of taking measures to actually address the issues that they've just cited, thoughts have been turned to voter laws.
I don't have a problem with voter ID per se. In places like Norway, Sweden, and Germany, all voters are sent Voter ID cards before an election; and if the voters can not produce the cards upon request then they can still provide proof of who they are with through 100 point identification. That also means that Norway, Sweden, and Germany, all have reasonably up-to-date electoral rolls. In Australia where voting is compulsory, there isn't a requirement to produce any voter ID and all you have to do is state your name and address before you get your named ticked off on the roll. That being said, the number of people actually found to have committed voter fraud is so incredibly small, that the number of elections which could have been swayed is exactly zero; in more than 10,000 elections across Australia (since every seat in every lower house is actually a separate election).
With that kind of data set, the fact that news outlets are trying to dissuade trust in public institutions so that their preferred political football team wins, should be viewed with the same sort of spirit as we afford other terrorists.
Nevertheless, the lesson that voting systems should be improved to prevent mass tampering, especially from political parties themselves, is a good idea.
Here are some basic preventative measures that can be taken immediately; which cost less than zero in some cases.
1. Paper ballots.
... actually, that's all you need.
Yes. Having people write their choices on pieces of paper. This is an idea which seems so incredibly mundane that in none of the discussions which have been put forward, it has even been mentioned.
The underlying assumption that I suppose that lawmakers have is that technology is always implicitly better, right? Wrong! Paper ballots are in fact slower to count and will mean that the result will take longer to find out but when you are dealing with the appointment of people who have the authority and assigned power to run government, then efficiency and the speed of the count is entirely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that the count is correct. Correctness is dependent on the security of the election and ability to check and counter check the accuracy of the result.
Paper ballots are the most secure method of conducting an election for the simple reason that it is really really hard to mount a scalable attack on them. During an election, you can have someone from every interested party not only check the collection box before the election is conducted but that box can be manned during polling day and then subsequently checked while the counting is going on. If that is happening at every single polling station, then for a foreign actor to mount an attack, then they would need to visit more than 3000 places across millions of square kilometers.
Furthermore, if everyone is mistrustful of everyone else (which given our current age of politics where trust of institutions is close to zero), then that mistrust should be used as the mechanism to ensure that the result is correct.
The blatant problem with voting machines is that they should not be trusted. With literally every single kind of voting machine, that introduces a second layer of items that have to be checked. That also means that the person who is checking the checking has to be checked. With in person, paper ballots, not only is the record of someone's vote physically present but in the event of a recount, that same physical record is still present to be checked again.
This came into sharp focus during the 2000 Presidential Election, when the utter failure of voting machines in producing a trustworthy result became democracy manifest. In Florida, the so called hanging chads left behind after a voting machine failed to correctly punch holes into the voting card, became the material of a Supreme Court hearing. That would have never have happened had the election been conducted on paper ballots because the very first check to see whether or not the voters had made their intentions obvious, would have been the voters.
Did anything change after this? No. Even after a proven failure of voting machines to produce a reliable and trustworthy result, they were still used. That is a practical demonstration of idiocy; that is, deliberately taking action in spite of knowing that it is wrong.
In the 2020 Presidential Election, the Trump campaign which although has been living in a fantasy land, accused the machines of Dominion Voting Systems of producing fraudulent results. The accusations remain unfounded and unproven but given that level of mistrust, it should give rise to interrogating the voting system for a better answer.
That answer very simply is that all voting machines should immediately be got rid of and all elections should be conducted on paper. Anyone who tries to convince you that voting machines have any benefits, needs to be ignored.
Getting back to the issue of Voter ID itself (even though it is the wrong answer to the question), believe it or not I actually do not have a problem with the idea of voter ID being required. If it is to be implemented though, then the responsibility of making sure that people have the relevant ID rests entirely with the government.
If the government announces an election on a particular date, then there needs to be some central independent authority which conducts the elections and which issues the relevant identity documents.
Admittedly this opens the door to nefarious self-interested parties using voter ID as a way of suppressing the franchise of people who would choose something different to them; so as before there should be checking mechanisms to ensure that the franchise is properly extended and can be exercised.
The deliberately knavish thing that keeps on coming up during the debates surrounding voter ID implementation is that there is a determined refusal to set up any kind of independence of the electoral systems or the agency to run them.
The number of permanent employees of the Federal Electoral Commision in the United States is 339. It is argued that because the United States is a collection of republican (small r) states, that the power to run elections should lie with them. That's rubbish if the aim is to produce a reliable and trustworthy result. How anyone can trust a government body to run elections when it is unable to function, due to lack of a quorum, is beyond me.
If there is someone in person, who has presented themselves to vote and they have either the card with them or sufficiently enough ID for any reasonable person to determine that they are a citizen/resident then that aught to be enough. The assertion that there are millions of people who vote illegally is a bald faced lie and needs to be ignored.
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