Re:Voting in France: Paper ballots, cast in person; no machines
by rayiner on Friday April 08, 2022 @10:28PM
(#30964782)
> requiring IDs to vote is a solution in search of a problem in the US
It's not, you're just failing to correctly identify the problem. Elections must not only be secure as a matter of fact, but be perceived as secure. The security of an election must be apparent on its face, to different groups who have adverse interests and don't trust each other. Watch how people in Taiwan count votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw. They don't do it this way to address fraudulent elections in the past. They do it so that the vote counting is above question.
Election procedures where the integrity of the voting is established by after-the-fact studies or the results of litigation showing the absence of fraud are bad procedures that don't actually satisfy all the requirements for good elections. This is not a republican versus democrat thing. Election denial after 2020 undoubtedly has been especially bad--which in part shows that election procedures should be robust against demagoguery!--but more than a third of democrats believed that the 2004 election was stolen, and about the same percentage of republicans believed the same thing about the 2012 election: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/04/many-repu.... The numbers for the GOP right now are double that, but it's also worth observing that the 2004 and 2012 elections didn't occur against the backdrop of last-minute pandemic-related changes to voting procedures.
Either way, a system where an incumbent wins by multiple points (Bush won by 2.4 and Obama by 3.9) and still one out of three members of the losing party still think they cheated is dangerous to democracy.
It's not, you're just failing to correctly identify the problem. Elections must not only be secure as a matter of fact, but be perceived as secure. The security of an election must be apparent on its face, to different groups who have adverse interests and don't trust each other. Watch how people in Taiwan count votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw. They don't do it this way to address fraudulent elections in the past. They do it so that the vote counting is above question.
Election procedures where the integrity of the voting is established by after-the-fact studies or the results of litigation showing the absence of fraud are bad procedures that don't actually satisfy all the requirements for good elections. This is not a republican versus democrat thing. Election denial after 2020 undoubtedly has been especially bad--which in part shows that election procedures should be robust against demagoguery!--but more than a third of democrats believed that the 2004 election was stolen, and about the same percentage of republicans believed the same thing about the 2012 election: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/04/many-repu.... The numbers for the GOP right now are double that, but it's also worth observing that the 2004 and 2012 elections didn't occur against the backdrop of last-minute pandemic-related changes to voting procedures.
Either way, a system where an incumbent wins by multiple points (Bush won by 2.4 and Obama by 3.9) and still one out of three members of the losing party still think they cheated is dangerous to democracy.