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Election fairness seems to be an increasingly contentious topic in the U.S., with many on the right alleging that democracy is being undermined via election fraud and many on the left alleging it is being undermined via attempts to disenfranchise people and throw out legitimate election results. Meanwhile, independents and supporters of alternative parties see a system that has long discriminated against them. Here are a few proposals for maximizing election fairness and security that don't just side with the left or the right:
• except for voters out of the area (e.g. overseas) or disabled (e.g. bedridden), voting should be done in person on Election Day
• voting should not require government identification; rather voters' fingers should be dipped in ink to deter repeat voting in the same election, as is done in some countries
• all candidates should have the same number of words in voter pamphlets to present their platforms
• candidates should not be charged any fees for ballot access or to have their statements published
• all party-based ballot access restrictions should be abolished
• all write-in votes should be counted, with the name of each such candidate published in the results with the number of votes received
• electronic voting should be abolished, and all ballots hand-counted (computers too subject to hacking or biased programming)
• custody of ballots should be videotaped and the video streamed online from the moment a ballot is submitted to the moment it is counted
• all candidates should be included in official debates and given equal time
• all government-funded media should be required to give equal coverage to each declared candidate
• multi-round elections and debates should be used to winnow initially large numbers of candidates that would presumably result from the implementation of some of these reforms
• seats in legislative bodies should be allocated on the basis of proportional representation as is done in some countries (e.g. a party whose candidates receive 5% of the votes gets 5% of the seats)
How does this increase election fairness or security? If it is secure enough for the distant or disabled to vote via mail, is it not secure enough for everyone else?
Edit: Just to be extra clear, I am not making a claim on whether mail in voting is good or bad. In my view, the threat of voter fraud by mail in ballots remains regardless of who its restricted to. Therefore there are only two reasonable options: 1) Disallow mail in ballots entirely; 2) Accept the risk and allow mail in ballots entirely.
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I am so baffled by American debates about this. Why the hell don't you want to use IDs to vote? Anyone too stupid to get an ID shouldn't vote.
The charitable take is that this supposedly disenfranchises vulnerable communities who might have difficulty obtaining government IDs.
The realistic take is that all the other government programs designed to help these vulnerable communities (such as subsidised housing, food stamps, medicaid, etc) all themselves require government IDs, and even in countries like India which have far greater challenges to providing voting access to all their citizens still require IDs. At this point, I'm pretty convinced its just a bargaining chip for Blue Tribe to offer up at some future legislation, because the alternative is there is a non-trivial amount of fraud being enabled by the lack of ID checks, which would be a whole different kettle of fish.
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Assuming the provision about doing it in person, what does having it be all crammed onto one day do for either fairness or security?
Why not everyone votes in person at a secure location (e.g. city hall) and voting is open for 10 days before election day to spread the load. That doesn't make it less fair, nor does it materially impact security under reasonable assumptions.
If you can do the entire election in a single shift (probably more than 8 hours, but that's a minor problem), then security becomes much simpler. If there is an observer who can vouch for the security of the ballots for the entire time between the first vote and the last report, then it becomes much harder to diffuse responsibility: "one of the dozen pollwatchers in the past 120 hours missed some misconduct" is a lot harder to fight than "Bob Jones missed some misconduct".
(I think it's actually a step back for fairness because a personal emergency is much more likely to last a day than a week.)
Bob gets a lunch break anyways though.
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What I would like to see in this type of analysis is how much each measure could improve either fairness or security. Otherwise, it's a grab bag of ideas, some of which may do nothing, while a few could potentially even be harmful.
That said, I'll argue against a specific one because I often see it presented as an unalloyed good while, in reality it's a trade off between two sets of negative consequences:
This actually works in the opposite way than how it's intended to work, ie. it gives an disproportional amount of power to some parties. Consider an election between three parties: A, B, and C. Both A and B obtain 48% of votes. C obtains 4%. Now, in order to form a government, either A or B needs to find a way to persuade C to join them, which means that party C holds, in this moment an incredible amount of power. Actually, it will continue to hold, despite accounting for only 4% of voters, an incredible amount of power because it can, at any moment, decide to break up with either A or B, leading to the break up of the government.
There's also another problem, in that assembling coalitions out of smaller parties necessarily entails going against what each party's voters voted for.
Re-using the A, B, and C example, imagine that party A is pro-X while B is anti-X, while those who voted for party C don't care about X. If party C were to assemble a government with one of the other parties, it will add its weight to the pro- or anti-X side, thereby betraying its voters' "don't care about X" stance.
(Note that I'm basically summarizing Karl Popper's thinking on this problem).
Personally, I think the two-party system works better in the US because of its dynamic, diverse culture. I would be curious if it would introduce some dynamism into other countries.
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Honestly, FPTP is inherently non democratic, and voting for politicians is likewise kinda stupid.
Ideally, we would have some sort of de-personalized voting for policy slates instead of an idiot popularity contest where being good looking or tall has a greater statistical effect on a given candidates victory than anything else.
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There is one thing I tend to see as a vulnerability that I never see addressed: reporting the results as a race. When the votes are cast and the counting begins, the result is already decided and it's just a matter of finding out what it is, I don't see any utility in gradually reporting partial counts as if it were a race, and I think that creates a vulnerability in that it tells a potential malicious actor exactly how many votes they need to add in order to flip the result without being too obvious. The longer the counting takes, the more of a vulnerability this becomes.
Now, if results were reported after the counting was done, a potential malicious actor would have to accurately guess beforehand how many votes they are going to need, and that is much more difficult to do.
This seems like an obvious fix, and would also maybe save us from tedious Election Night coverage that all the networks do with reporting every single miniscule change in the race over the course of hours and also racing to 'call' an election as quickly as possible. Would be nice to just be able to tune in once at like 11 p.m. when outcomes are known and just get a brief report reflecting said outcomes, and which are still in flux.
Although I admit that the 2016 election was amazingly high quality entertainment for me as the unexpected Trump win became apparent through the slow tally of the votes.
I'd guess, but I do NOT know for certain, there's probably some kind of rules around gov't transparency that requires results to reported as quick as possible, even piecemeal ones, so this probably will not change.
But as you say, avoiding these periods where some outcomes are known, some remain uncertain, and there are brief windows in which malicious actors can attempt to flip an outcome once they know how many votes they must fabricate would really shore up faith in overall election integrity.
I just doubt there's any way to ensure that all states get their counts done at approximately the same time, and having periods where some outcomes have been determined but not reported yet while waiting on others to catch up can make it look like there is something being hidden anyway.
I hadn’t thought of that. It seemed obvious that the media circus was business as usual for American stations. But it’s quite plausible that there’s something pushing early reporting.
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I read this as "very easy to tell what number of people voted" instead of "very easy to tell many individuals' voting preferences", and was wondering what you thought the point of voting to be.
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This fails to address voting eligibility. Not all persons present in the United States are eligible to vote.
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