I keep seeing comments about how Canada avoided a similar fate because of its strict use of paper ballots; the US must have changed its system to include these electronic and possibly not airgapped machines.
I keep seeing comments about how Canada avoided a similar fate because of its strict use of paper ballots; the US must have changed its system to include these electronic and possibly not airgapped machines.
I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.
But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.
I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.
For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.
So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all
Is it just a sacred cow? “you can’t change anything about voting”? Or do they believe in some specific obstacle? I was discussing this with a friend recently, and the only guess as to why it wouldn’t work in America is that it requires a reasonable number of volunteers, and maybe Americans are too busy working insane hours and surviving to add civic responsibilities.
That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.
I have some fragments.
I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .
Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.
Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.
Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.
So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.
This is a way for the monied class to deflect criticism about the country’s various failures to improve the situation for their citizens. Like healthcare, when you suggest that you want to do it like they do it in, say… Scandinavia, you always get a wave of a hand and a vaguely worded “yes well, this country is just too big for that. <insert country here> can only get away with that because of their tiny, homogenous population.”