> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.
Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.
But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.
And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One.
So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives.
Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
That said, be careful what you wish for. We seem to be getting a lot of big buildings approved without the necessary additional parking. Also, downtown is basically all restaurants or random business offices. There are very few shops and boutique that cause people to walk around and create a vibrant downtown scene like MV, PA, Burlingame or San Carlos. The city also doesn't seem to have much in the way of budget beautification or schools so it still looks quite rundown and property prices are depressed comparatively, even in the nice parts of RWC due to the school ratings.
It's such a convoluted system; it seems so, uh, undemocratic(?).
Reforming it I believe would require a Constitutional Amendment, which is virtually impossible to accomplish in the current political climate.
That said, the electoral college is largely a formality. Much more important than the fairly remote chance an elector might vote against the will of his state is the fact that most states have winner-take-all systems, wherein you get all of the state's electors by winning a majority. Even that has only proved problematic thrice: once in 2000, once in 1888, and once in 1876. And I think there are reasonable arguments in its defense: you force candidates to have some geographical distribution of support, for example. If it was based on solely on the popular vote, you could win the election with massive majorities in a few populous states and no support elsewhere.
It's also balanced out, I think, by the fact the Presidency is, relatively speaking, not all that powerful of an office in America anyway - his most important power is "figurehead/scapegoat in a bully pulpit." Other than that he gets a veto over legislation (which Congress can override), command of the military (which is funded by Congress), and gets to appoint some top level executive offices and the judiciary - subject to Senate approval. Hypothetically Congress can also remove him from office via impeachment.
So command of the most powerful military complex in the World. Who in your opinion is powerful then? ;o)
For example, all commissioned officers are approved by the Senate, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the President from using the military to enforce domestic policy. Congress also has the sole authority of appropriating money to the military and they can attach whatever strings they want.
There is probably not single individual more powerful than the President, but Congress as a whole is by far the most powerful branch of government. The Presidency doesn't even compare. That said, I think what we've seen over the past several years, and will continue to see, is that dysfunctional Congresses increase the power of the Presidency.
(The electoral college is an anachronism, though).
Which tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
Just for the record, I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US and have therefore obviously never voted there. I can only talk about how we do it here in Germany.
You can ensure that no dead or non-citizens vote by having a well-kept population registry cross-referenced with other databases. If many public officials work with the data chances of fraud in the registry is extremely low. In any case, you would have the same kind of problem with any electronic system.
We tick off any voter from the list in the moment they throw their ballot into the box. After the station closed, the first thing we do is to count the ballots and cross-reference that with the number of ticks. We also count the voter cards (which gets mailed to every voter) and have a tally sheet of people voting without that card (by showing their ID). I'm not exactly sure how I would "lose" some votes. These numbers are phoned to the election office and written down in the record and signed by everyone working there. After the election is over I verify that the votes we counted correspond to the published number for that station.
Any questionable or invalid ballot needs be inspected by anyone working at the polling station and everyone needs to agree on how to proceed with that ballot. Those ballots are marked and the decision is recorded for every single one individually. We then package them up into a special sealed envelope. These questionable votes are verified by other people on a random basis and always if the election is a close call or any signs of fraud come up.
You could probably vote for someone else around here if you can get access to their voter's card as we usually don't check ID. We can see gender and birth date of the voter so they should roughly match. You also can't do that more than once or twice in the station or we start to remember your face. Additionally, you should hope that they haven't already voted themselves and haven't registered for absentee voting. It would be a logistical nightmare to effectively change the outcome of the election by that way and the risk is high.
The biggest risk I see is absentee voting. For example, there is evidence of people "helping" elderly to fill out "their" vote. But again, if you allow people to electronically vote from their home the same kind of fraud is possible.
Or this: https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM
(I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
No one has ever shown it's a problem, people have only claimed or insinuated that it's a problem from a place of "truthiness"; i.e. they claim to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" that in-person voter fraud is a problem.
That is essentially the system we currently have for electoral fraud.
I.e., if p(evidence|presence) ~= 0, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Of course, it is pretty strange how so many people are strongly against the collection of evidence.
For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.