Just because Florida is unwilling to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
To be fair, I believe that is not the case across the state, just certain areas (i.e. county level).
Florida's electoral incompetence and corruption (probably) handed the 2000 presidential election to Bush. Because of that, we wound up with the Iraq war, and a mind-boggling amount of American blood and treasure (not to mention Iraqi lives) wasted on lies. Florida's inability to conduct free and fair elections has tangible consequences on me as a Minnesotan. So yes, I want to impose some standards and values on their elections, because their elections lead to MY president.
I'm not suggesting a federal takeover of elections. I am, however, pointing out that some states, like Florida, are running elections so badly that it harms other states.
Edit: thanks for all these clarifications!
Thus, if they audit they can be sure the ballot was cast by a legitimate voter.
If you don't tie ballots to voters, you go full Florida where they just keep "finding" boxes of prefilled ballots.
You MUST tie a ballot to a voter if you want your elections to have any integrity at all. There is no other way to prevent double voting, voting out of precinct, etc.
Broward county, 2016 election. They found a box of filled out ballots at the airport return in a rental car trunk... never a word about it again. Same county, defying a judges orders, the police stopped anyone from entering/auditing the count under direction of then admin Brenda Snipes.
Guess who oversaw Bush / Gore recount? Brenda Snipes.
What is the definition of insanity again?
A lock generally needs to be stronger than the motivation of a would be thief. In this case we are talking about controlling the disposition of trillions of dollars so there probably isn't a lock in the world that is good enough.
Based on prior stories many of the machines aren't merely not good enough they are quite laughable and indeed often so old that no parts can be sourced anywhere because they haven't been made in decades.
There's no way to do that without tying the voter to the vote somehow. Why not hash the voter ID + a secret of your choosing and store that with the vote? Then, even if counting by hand, you can verify your vote was indeed cast for X candidate.
I would rather be able to verify that my vote was cast to the desired candidate than to have a strictly anonymous (but unverifiable) voting system.
EDIT: Mail in voting is skimmed with little to no risk. Oops, lost 1% of that zip code...
Assume a million votes are cast in an election. To move the needle 1%, you need 10,000 votes. And let's assume a single fake voter can realistically cast ten votes in different precincts, considering vote time and travel time (they can't just keep coming to the same precinct, for fear of recognition).
So you need 10,000 fake registrations, that must match real addresses, and you need 1000 people working all day at fake voting. One voter out of every thousand would be working for this conspiracy.
Now, you need to do this in complete secrecy. Nobody can talk. Nobody can gather evidence. They can't go to the police, or the media. Even one leak is enough to not only ruin the scheme, but create a nationally known scandal. And if it can be connected in any way to a particular political party, that party's name would be dragged through the mud across the country.
It's insanity. No one could safely pull it off.
You know what can be pulled off, though? Voter suppression. Make it much more difficult for certain categories of voters to actually vote. Such as poor people who might not have ID (or might hesitate to use it). Then, convince a large swath of the public - people like you - that this is about security, not suppression. That form of election manipulation is now seen as patriotism, not corruption.
I can see that happening maybe a few times, but it seems ineffective on a large scale.
If they already voted? "Oops, I forgot."
If they haven't voted and come in later, so what? You're long gone.
This may sound laborious and slow but it should be enough to block repeat voting, IMHO.
Voter ID is entirely orthogonal to this issue. Tying ballots to a voter is not desirable, since it opens the door for voter intimidation.
Edit to respond to the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" comment: anonymous voting means you don't know how someone voted, but whether or not they voted is still public record. The number of ballots counted still needs to match up with the number of votes cast.
> Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds.
Hand counted paper ballots are the only way to be sure, and elections are important enough to be worth it.
Nope. Ballots need to be anonymous. Otherwise you can be coerced into voting a particular way.
With anonymous ballots, you can just "Find a box of ballots" and have no way to authenticate that they came from actual voters vs fraudsters.
We regularly get precincts reporting more votes than are even possible given their total number of eligible voters.
Fraud in anonymous voting states is rampant here.
Any precinct reporting more votes than possible given the numbers of eligible voters is recounted. If the recounts can't manage to arrive at results that make any sense at all the entire precinct is ignored. Where's the problem?
It was across both parties in multiple states wherein the "found" votes were heavily favoring one party or the other (a few were well outside 3 standard deviations from the current votes, even in areas that were normally not heavily favoring one side).
It continues to be implausible and easily prevented without de-anonymizing the vote or resorting to strong voter ID.
And those IDs usually require proof of residency and/or a copy of a US birth certificate, which can be problematic to acquire or prove in their own ways for the more vulnerable to disenfranchisement (such as the homeless) in our society.
If an election method cannot be audited, it cannot be trusted.
Note I said nothing about whether recountability is a good thing. It's clearly a good thing. Hence we should stick with hand counted paper ballots since machine counting introduces trivial ways to game the vote.
Finally, the punishments need to be strong, swift, and decisive if something does come up as being wrong. You can't just be "oh well, mistakes were made with the hundreds of thousands of mis-counted votes/purged voters. What can you do?!"
No way. None of that. All the people responsible in such a situation should be investigated, and if found guilty punished. Otherwise, there will be no fear of trying to steal the elections, especially if the upside is big.
Without a massive outreach program intended to reach all voters and supply them with convenient, free of charge voter IDs, and a system that can continuously and quickly resolve errors, such a "strong voter ID" would be unconstitutional (for good reason).
It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. You can't even begin to analyze the problem so its laughable for you to assert such things.
If it's happening at any significant rate, without perfect knowledge of which eligible voters won't vote (or have someone else try to steal their vote, which is just as bad for the prospective vote thief), it leaves quite tangible evidence in the form of people presenting themselves to vote under names that have already voted.
The absence of this occurring fairly strongly indicates that vote stealing by impersonation isn't a thing that happens at any meaningful rate.
If there was more than what vote theft operation in the same area, you'd still expect them to have collisions.
> 2 out of 3 people don't vote.
Wrong. A majority of the voting-eligible population votes in Presidential elections.
> If you have ever volunteered at a precinct you would know that it's literally just an excel sheet of names
A printed paper sheet, sure. Whether Excel is used in making it or not is immaterial (I assume it's generated straight from the voter database, which I hope isn't Excel.)
> and you're supposed to check someone off.
California state law requires the actual voter to sign in on the list; I would think that this is normal.
> It's very easy to check the wrong line
If it was a just a check off, maybe it would be easy.
> It's very easy to check the wrong line and your failsafe is easily explained away as a mistake instead of raising any sort of alarm.
Even if it was just a check box, you'd also need to have extremely lax procedures that all the poll workers and any observers were all in on for this basic integrity check to be routinely ignored.
Given the political factions interested in selling the idea of rampant voter fraud, you'd expect them to raise a ruckus if there were actual instances of this going on routinely.
You'd also have to either randomly mark off some non-voter (potentially creating a new instance of the problem) each time this happened or turn in a tally sheet where the count of marked voters didn't match the ballot count. The former would magnify the visibility of the casual disregard of integrity, the latter would definitely raise an alarm in counts.
Also, here in Russia, voters put a signature in the voters registry when receiving a ballot.
It's especially ironic.
How often do any of these things actually happen? It’s all public record. The data is there for analysis. And yet nobody can point to more than a handful of examples.
The common reply to this is that you need these documents anyway to work, to drive etc. This is true but ignores all the peripheral people you don't see. People whose roles in their family are support or who themselves are in need of support because of illness. Not all of them drive or work and they are citizens too.
It seems to me that the easier solution is to make public records free. Let the taxes you already pay serve to pay the salary of the peon at the printer. Then the people clamoring for us to check ID's to keep the "illegals" from voting can be happy and those people can be enfranchised.
You don't need to show ID to vote at a polling place in Australia. And you don't need ID to enrol to vote.
I can't comment on the countries in the picture you've linked. I'll guess that most or all of them make it both easy and required to have a national ID card. That is not the case in the United States.
Consider a working class non-driver who has never travelled overseas. What is their ID?
Would you propose a new state or federal ID card? Great. How likely is it that the state or federal government will produce a system for issuing these that is easy to access, widely available, free, quick to issue IDs, etc? How likely do you think it is that politicians will attempt to modify the system for issuing these IDs so that their opponents' voters will find it more challenging to receive them?
If your answer is "likely" and "unlikely" respectively, you are naive to the history of voter disenfranchisement and vote-system-gaming in the United States. Much of it is based on race.
ID is required in some places like Northern Ireland. Iirc, the UK poll card isn't 'typically' or ID required in England, Whales, Scottland)
But as of 2018 that's changing when some districts required ID for the first time. Although last I heard, laws suits on that were still going on.
Your list is also without sources and presenting an oversimplification of laws to the point of being presented in bad faith, with intentional misrepresentation of the original data. Your list is a lie of checkmarks, intended for propaganda and not to inform the reader.
Tell me more about Canada, this implies you may be mistaken. https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...
> Option 3: If you don't have ID
lays it out pretty clearly:
> You can still vote if you declare your identity and address in writing and have someone who knows you and who is assigned to your polling station vouch for you.
No ID needed, anywhere in Canada, ever, to vote. Period.
And I made no assumptions whatsoever in my post. It is your graphic that is full of false assumptions.
Canada very effectively requires ID to vote, sorry that offends you.
> That person needs ID to be assigned to their polling station to vouch for you.
That is absolutely not true. The site says,
> The voucher must be able to prove their identity and address. A person can vouch for only one person (except in long-term care institutions).
Nothing about ID. Just "prove their identity and address", which does not require ID.
> Canada very effectively requires ID to vote, sorry that offends you.
This is false. I am not offended by facts, or by your lies.
Canada does not require ID to vote. You are spreading lies by continuing to state that it does.
Have you ever lived there? Do you know anything about Canada from experience? You are lying and citing false information to claim falsehoods that are extremely dangerous.
Canada does not require ID to vote. Period.
You get the speed of automation with a paper trail in case you have to go back and audit.
EDIT for those replying that you feel voting should be anonymous. With anonymous voting, how do you stop the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" ala Broward County Florida every election? If you can't tie a ballot back to a voter, how do you know the ballot is legitimate?