And for those people we have early voting and postal voting too.
I never quite understand why voting is such a controversial topic in the US. In many countries (I'm sure Australia is not alone in this) it is a boring thing that just works. You might not always like the outcome, but the process itself rarely becomes the topic of discussion.
I think one thing that helps in Australia is that federal elections are completely controlled and run by the federal government. For federal elections, we don't have each state doing its own thing. Local government has no role to play in elections either. (Even local government elections are actually run by the state governments.)
Addendum: I must point out when I say "controlled and run by the federal government", they are run by an independent and non-partisan federal agency, politicians don't have direct control over them. Likewise, each state has an independent and non-partisan agency to run state and local elections
It creates a system where on political party is pretty much guaranteed to win certain districts and they’re aren’t a ton of competitive races. Part of the problem is an electorate that would “vote for a bag of rocks” if it belonged to the right party.
A segment which comprises, by simple math, a full 15% of retail, customer service, and hospitality workers, who in turn make up a very large portion of the working poor, one of the least-well-represented interest groups in the US.
Which is why that early and postal voting is so important.
Questions around the math aside, in Australia for federal elections the polling booths are open from 08:00 through to 18:00 - and the process to hop in and vote is typically fast, at least compared to what we see on the news for USA elections.
In either case, it means the number of people who can't get to a polling booth during those 10 hours on the Saturday is relatively tiny. And, as you and parent noted, early / postal voting is a convenient, non-contentious, trusted option.
The process is typically fast in the US as well, but the edge cases are what get into the news. The USA also has a population 13x larger, so we should expect any given issue to occur about 13x as often in the USA as in AUS.
Nitpick: "13x as much", not "13x as often".
But democracy's approval rating has been dropping for a while, so that's probably not the death blow it would have been. Democracy doesn't seem to be sacred anymore.
The number of people saying it's essential (rating a 10/10 on importance) to live in a democracy seems to have peaked for people born in the 50s in Europe and has been dropping for birth cohorts since the 30s. [Figure 1 in the source]
Source: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...
Additionally, about 15-20% of people in the US (depending on age) seem to think democracy is a bad way to run a country [Figure 2 in previous source]
Even this pew article, which is relatively rosy on democracy, finds that ~40% of the US would be fine with leaving policy making to experts. The question specifically mentions excluding elected officials. [4th chart in next source]. We could probably debate on the merits of technocracy, but it's a very different thing than democracy.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/10/16/democracy-wide...
Compare to "requiring ID will eliminate fraud": No. It eliminates some types of fraud, some of the time. It doesn't fix someone hacking a system and changing votes. It doesn't prevent someone creating fake IDs to vote. It also disenfranchises people who are unable or unwilling to get government ID in time to present it at the polls.
For, your eight dead relatives happen to be the average number of votes by the dead in a whole election[1], since votes by the dead have never actually been recorded in significant numbers, and certainly not in recent accusations [2][3][4]. Hell of a coincidence that it's all your dead relatives.
You are not, in fact, responding in good faith.
[1]https://ballotpedia.org/Votes_cast_in_the_names_of_deceased_... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120 [3]https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-donald-trump-georgi... [4]https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/thin-allegations-of-dead-p...
They know that a lack of voter ID, mass mail-in balloting, ballot harvesting, lack of chain of custody of ballots, lack of ability to observe the counting of ballots, etc. are all terrible security practices. They practically guarantee fraud in elections.
If you told the average HN reader to secure his banking information like we secure the vote, she would think you're out of your mind. But somehow, a complete lack of ballot security is just dandy. It's almost like some people feel that any means necessary to win is okay.
Who is proposing we eliminate the chain of custody for ballots? Who's actually called for that. Who has said "no observation of ballot counting" as opposed to "everyone who feels like it can come in and wander freely to investigate". Ballot harvesting has at least 3 different definitions, some of which are fine (put your ballots somewhere other than a polling place, and officials collect them) others are dubious (give some person you trust your ballot, have them deliver it to the polls). And if these things are "guaranteeing" election fraud, show me where it happened on such scale as to matter (and not some dude who did something he shouldn't but got caught and therefor disproves your point about how bad the security is).
There's bad faith arguing and then there's this.
Those did not flip nearly as hard as polls had projected.
For us Australians, I suspect that invites a huge range of questions, including how long are people normally waiting that they need water, and why would a nominally capitalist society legislate against selling libations and comestibles under these very specific conditions.
Nothing is stopping voters from drinking their own water and eating their own snacks in line.
I applaud laws that limit "gift giving" at the polls. The polls should not be a place where your vote is swayed by a gift.
If a partisan group started giving voters free food or beverages at a polling place, that would be illegal.
That sufficient number of people (to warrant passing such legislation) would be swayed on the topic of who to vote for, to disregard their experience and opinions built up over the past several years, in return for a $2 bottle of water to quench a mild thirst, seems inconceivable. I wonder if there's perhaps other reasons at play there.
I guess it may be interesting to look at whether there's any common features at all of all the state legislatures that have passed such laws this year.
I shouldn't have used Biden/Trump in my example, because where freebies really sway votes is not the POTUS, but in the dozens of other positions and issues on the ballot.
In Maryland this last election the ballot was like 4 pages long and took me many hours of prep work to determine who I wanted to vote for board of education, representatives in congress, etc. If you haven't done the prep work and only came to vote for the president, your vote in the other areas is up for grabs. That's why people at the polls try to stuff your hands with brochures and freebies that have names on them - anything to make their preferred candidate's name pop into your mind while you are filling out the ballot.
The what?! That sounds absolutely awful.
We have partisan people outside the front gates at schools etc for our polling booths, with a 'how to vote' but they tend to be very well behaved, and aren't allowed on the property, so it's a small and mild gauntlet.
At federal election time we have only two pieces of paper to fill out. A small green piece for (upper house) senate with 5-10 candidates, and a (ridiculously) large white sheet with ~130 names on it sorted in to about 40 columns for the (lower) house of representatives. Party / independent status is listed under each name on the former, and at the top of the columns on the latter.
The voting rules have relaxed slightly - several years ago for the lower house you could opt for one or more column headings with a numeric preference OR every person under the column headings. Even that typically took you less than ten minutes, and for most people the time consuming bit was to work out which fringe parties to put at the very end of your preferences.
IIRC now you can fill in as many preferences as you like below the column headings - until you get bored, basically. Either way this is a mechanism to let you select where your spill over preferences go to, rather than allowing your first preference to 'sell off' your votes, if it looks like they aren't going to obtain a seat. Ie. force your cascading preferences, rather than pass that decision onto your first preference.
Interestingly in the last federal election here a good 25% of the population did not vote for either of the two major parties (both of which are somewhere to the right of center, gung-ho on being all-in on fossil fuel, etc). That group of people is trending upwards the last several elections, so there's some small optimism that we may escape the end-game of a viciously partisan two-party system here.
In any case we have no other votes to cast at these events. (I recall a federal referendum about 20 years ago that was tied in to an election, but that would have been a 'yes or no' option on a separate, very small, piece of paper - with a LOT of public discussion preceding it, as it was the ol' chestnut of whether Australia should remove itself from the British Commonwealth and become a republic.)
Every aspect of the voting experience in the USA really does seem to be designed to be as hostile to the citizenry as possible.
Sounds like you may have interpreted @umvi's comment to mean they took "many hours" to fill out the ballot [on election day]. So, you gave a rundown of your ballot's mechanics as an example of how a ballot can be designed in a way that doesn't take "many hours" to complete.
I guess the argument is that because it's a weekday, you want to aggregate many into the one event.
An Act enabling the County to borrow money and issue bonds in an amount not exceeding $38,134,000 to finance the design, construction, reconstruction, extension, acquisition, improvement, enlargement, alteration, renovation, relocation, rehabilitation or repair of Public Safety Facilities (including Fire Department Facilities), as defined therein.
I think very few people actually bother to research such questions. They just either reflexively tick Yes or No.
Researching a better answer requires a lot of questions. Does the county actually need to repair its Public Safety Facilities? What new construction do they plan? Have they been spending their money well in the past?
Answering all that would take a fair bit of time. And there were a dozen items like that.
Ahahahaha. Have you tried dealing with American bureaucracy? None of it is frictionless, it’s all horribly inefficient and fragmented, and one party is steadfastly committed to keeping it that way, and the other party only vaguely recognizes how big of a problem it is. Voting needs to be made easier, but making it compulsory would not automatically do that.
edit: besides which, voting already takes me only about 5 minutes. The problem is that that experience, which I have as a wealthy white person in a liberal suburb of a blue state, is not universal.
I don’t really know about the US’s ghoulish pantomime that is government, but at least here, the understanding that one can be fined for not voting comes with the societal expectation that the roadblocks to doing so will be cleared as much as possible by them, across the board, to everyone. That way, people who fail to vote fail to do so by their own choice and thus the fine is not farcical. Australia’s government understands and honours that.
I’m also somewhat worried in this political climate that such a measure could start another civil war, for one thing, and that at minimum there would need to be federal military intervention to enforce it in southern states, as in the 1960s. The Supreme Court would also need to be packed, because the justices currently holding the majority would never support it (they gutted the Voting Rights Act with no pretense of legal argument eight years ago merely because it was an ideological goal).
Not quite: the other party is committed to keeping it that way, too, but is also content to let the first party be the fall-guy for its efforts.
The two parties both play for the same team. They're in a big club you might say, and we're not in it (apologies to Carlin for my poor rendition of his skit).
By making it mandatory:
1. everyone has to accept that voting has to be accessible.
2. it's pretty hard to contest the results of a vote when you know "everyone had their say".
In the US the variations around accessibility can significantly affect voter turnout.
Unlike Australia, New Zealand doesn't have compulsory voting. And yet, I am led to believe that the process of voting is just as boring in New Zealand as it is in Australia. And one could make the same point about a number of other countries – Canada, the UK, Ireland, much of Western Europe.
So the reason that these countries to have far less controversy over the voting process than the US does must be something other than the question of optional-vs-mandatory voting.
Everyone deserves access to public services. Everyone needs a government ID.
I'm not certain how mail-in ballots are counted currently, but it is certainly possible to have the ballots be in a sleeve, and the ballot itself only be exposed to the machine reading it. Put the ballot 'inserters' under camera if needed. It seems like a simple problem to solve.
Another commenter mentioned that a real issue is that the counting of ballots isn't transparent, which is true. When I vote, all I know is that the ballot scanner increments its 'scanned ballot' count. I can't verify that it actually voted for who I voted for, and they're closed source, so I have to rely on someone else's word that they are.
Maybe this is finally a use for blockchain? lol
Literally all of this is invalidated by a mail in voting system. You cannot be sure the proper person got the ballot, you cannot be sure the person filled it out without it being seen by others or coerced, and you cannot be sure the ballot wasn’t intercepted somewhere along the line and modified. The entire system hinges upon a signature verification process which is automated and obviously needs to avoid false positives more than false negatives, given the risk of disfranchisement. We should expect the signature check to be a poor mechanism to block hijacked ballots, anyone with a bit of sense can see why we should expect it to allow most signatures through.
What we should expect under a mass mail in voting system is fairly obvious, given the means, motive, and opportunities it uniquely affords people in highly contested elections.
It has been interesting to watch smart people (not you) who were warning about these risks years ago be forced to stop agreeing with them because of the political implications that would likely come if we had verified examples of these weaknesses being exploited.
In general, sacrificing this important principle was acceptable if the alternative was to disenfranchise the voter (eg, they are overseas.) Now it seems there are many who want to just throw it away in the name of making voting “more accessible” in general. This is a pretty bad stance imo unless you assume it is cost-free, which it isn’t.
Are you sure about that? This past election wasn't exactly very healthy.
Be careful with removing all the pageantry around elections. Symbolism is very important and singular day election days play into that. So does filling in a paper ballot, and going to a polling place with your fellow citizens.
Imagine you created an app, wherein you enter your preference (Dem or GOP) and the app goes and proceeds to vote for you automatically anytime there's an election. Would that improve democracy or alienate people from it?
What elections were?
We have a rigged two party system. Layer conservatives and liberals stacking the system on top of that and you have an unhealthy democracy pretty much guaranteed. Given the corrupt nature of the leaders of the US, and the corrupt nature of the voters as well if we're being fair, the US has a remarkably smooth functioning system. It's definitely breaking down and showing its cracks, but given the breadth and scale of the assault it's been under for about the past 40 or 50 years, you have to be impressed at how it has held up.