The upside inherent in fifty parallel and bespoke experiments in government is worth the extra complexity and cost. Ideas are tried out, and can bubble outward and upward if they work. Bad ideas directly impact only ~2% of the country.
Furthermore, having state and local control over elections has a direct impact on legitimacy. I don't have to believe that someone in Washington DC is doing things right. Instead, I can interact directly with our state's secretary of state and our local county elections office.
Decentralization with heterogeneous procedures makes election compromise a much greater logistical challenge for any nefarious actor. It is probably a lot easier to spend money on lobbying.
Edit: Finally -- if you want your local/state elections infrastructure to have more resources, your voice and your vote are your tools.
The number of true "toss up" states is unfortunately fairly small.
If only populations were so evenly distributed. 1/2 of Americans live east of the Mississippi, on 1/3 of the Continental US, and about 1/2 of the rest live on the West Coast. The mideastern states have very few residents.
If you mean the Midwest then I regret to inform you that Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan are all in the top 10 most populous states.
They're in the middle of the continent, and east of my state, so they are mideast to me. Not to be confused with Arabia, east Mediterranean, and Persian gulf.
Don't agree. Just look at the history of Alec to see how local and regional governments are easily captured by self-serving actors. These are nice sentiments but the underlying assumptions are painfully naive.
Many states experiment with election law as well. California with top two primaries. It’s yet to be seen how that will play out, but we likely wouldn’t try on a national stage.
How do you figure? It could easily be 100%.
The actual implementation of how these standards are met should be left to the states. Updating the standards to eliminate exploits and loopholes would minimize gaming of the system.
Ideally I also feel that somehow the entire nation should be incented to increase voting %. Just not sure how to do that though without creating unforeseen consequences.
I get called a conspiracy nut for talking about this. Neither Republicans or Democrats really give even the slightest of care towards election integrity. What have the Republicans or Democrats done to actively try to fix anything? Republicans prefer to not talk about it at all, Democrats love to talk about how they're for election integrity but do nothing about it. Democrats even conveniently purged voters in Brooklyn just in time for Bernie vs Hillary primary and were sued for it [1].
Almost none of the ruling class cares. Only maybe 3 or 4 senators, congress, actually care. If you let the people actually vote and participate in Democracy, those people might stop being part of the ruling class and money may actually start trickling down.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-city-boa...
"Our concerns are exacerbated by the fact that there are very few companies who manufacture and operate voting machines, and they tend to be controlled by executives who donate largely, if not exclusively, to the Republican Party and Republican candidates."
"Diebold’s Express Poll 5000 machines were even easier to crack, thanks to having an easily accessible memory card, which you could swap out while voting, containing supervisor passwords in plain text."
"The "security" of these WINvote machines is so bad. Running WinXP, autorun enabled and hard-coded WEP wifi password."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050203193203/https://www.house... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_O%27Dell [3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/defcon_election_vot...
So in your opinion, the solution to Republicans subverting democracy isn't well considered democratic action, but rather bloodshed? That seems rather anti-democratic.
>Proposing technical solutions assumes all players wish for fair elections. This is not the case.
So you can't think of any technical solutions that assume bad intentions on behalf of most of the involved actors? What about the protocol your browser used to send your comment to the servers that run this forum?
I do see it warning that it's a possible outcome.
As for technical solutions - paper ballots make this a solved problem, albeit a labour-intensive one. (How much effort is democracy worth?)
The idea that vote counting contracts should ever have been be handed to contractors *who fund specific political parties and have been indicted for bribery and other criminal acts" is almost surreal in its aggressive disdain for verifiable electoral fairness.
https://columbusfreepress.com/article/diebold-indicted-its-s...
https://www.accesswire.com/471912/Voting-Technology-Companie...
I honestly think that the election system in the United States is simply too decentralized. Counties, even larger ones like mine, struggle to afford to hire a staff or retain contractors that have any kind of serious security expertise - or even expertise in reliable services. The federal elections commission was created to address some of these problems by providing centralized resources to states and counties, but it hasn't gone nearly far enough in my opinion. I have a had time imagining a way to make a serious improvement here without moving just about the entire platform for voting systems under the federal government.