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100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.
I don't understand why it's so difficult. In France voting is done entirely on paper and results are often released later that night, and almost all the results are in by the next day. Same in the UK, although it generally takes them a few hours longer, probably because the polls close later in the evening.
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."
In California we're all mailed paper ballots, which we can return by mail (no stamp needed) or designated ballot box, or in person at a polling place up to closing time on Voting Day. My ballot (in a westside Los Angeles district) had 37 items, (on about 7 pages iirc) some of which were yes/no on propositions, others of which had a choice between 2 to 15 candidates for various offices. From school board to US President. It was very clear, just needed a black pen to fill the circles, and I could have gotten it in a dozen different languages. It's also accessible for my quadriplegic husband, who can't get to a polling place. But it took time and thought. It wasn't like the pictures I've seen of French ballots which were just a single name on a sheet of paper, take the one from the stack of your choice, I guess? So counting them takes more time. Plus counting ballots that were mailed and postmarked by the deadline, those are allowed 2 weeks to arrive.
*(A couple of edits to clarify details)
I heard Ireland does too, but they also use Rank Voice Voting so it takes them about a week. Seems like a potential benefit that the process of democracy is so visible, imo.
Some places have hybrid machines; an electronic interface but gives you a printout of your choices (like a Scantron form filler). I'm fine with this option so long as hardcopies are preserved for 2 years minimum and randomized checks are performed before and after an election on EVERY machine.
Kansas has the hybrid style so I fill out a paper ballot and it is scanned and the results tabulated electronically with a paper trail for auditing. This actually seems even more reliable to me than only paper or electronic with printed out copies for a paper trail.
Same here. Paper ballots that can be machine scanned and stored for manual audits seem like the best possible method.
Trump's Justice department just demanded all records on 2020 and 2024 federal elections from Colorado.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/11/nx-s1-5426097/trump-justice-department-voter-data-colorado
Where I live, we have voting machines with a paper receipt. Voters use a touchscreen and then get a printed ballot. The voter can then check to make sure that what they cast electronically is correct, and then the paper ballot is scanned and saved. You can perform an audit anytime you like to compare the instant electronic results to hand counted ballots.
Washington uses paper ballots absentee only and only needs more than a few hours to figure out results unless there's a very tight race.
Yes cause so much harder to modify a paper ballot, especially the mailed ones. No way one of the USPS employees, or a corrupt election worker, clerk, etc. would ever do anything wrong. If anything, our recent elections have shown us really people are infallible & honest, and it is computers that are inherently flawed.
It's far harder to achieve mass manipulation of the ballot when it's all being handled by a lot of human hands. If it's managed by computers, then by finding a bug or other vulnerability in the software or database you could alter the whole election.
Meanwhile, to manipulate a paper ballot & hand-counted election in the same way you'd need the cooperation of a huge number of people, and you'd need them all to keep their mouths shut. That's far more difficult than defeating a computerised system
It's actually much easier, especially with mail-in ballots. Paper ballots can discarded, modified, etc. Many of them sit in election boxes that aren't under reliable surveillance. The election workers, usually only two, come and put them into giant trash bags. They are not monitored at that point either, allowing them to modify the ballots. I haven't seen any reliable checks of the envelopes at that point either, where if they're opened & resealed, it wouldn't even raise flags. You also have no way to confirm the tally of your vote to ensure it wasn't manipulated. If you want to have multiple checks with multiple isolated computer systems, you absolutely can.
I for one, actually believe a blockchain ledger system of voting like that of Monero would provide a great option. Most of all, they could anonymously verify their vote which to me is the most important. Having some verification that my vote was actually calculated as casted is extremely important to me. Furthermore, you'd have top academics, mathematicians, cryptographers providing the exact details on its design with an open source solution that anyone could search & scan for vulnerabilities, meaning it would receive a significant amount of review & testing.
You also would have a huge amount of people like myself that actually understand the tech, and plenty of individuals willing to explain its design & safety in a format comfortable for you. It is a shame people are so opposed to new ideas & real progress, especially after Democrats just lost to Trump. I guess just keep what you're doing & we'll finally get a viable third party.
Correct. It is. Because to do enough to change the result you need to do it alot, and that's really hard to get away with.
In Canada we count the ballots with witnesses (called scutineers) to validate.
I'm not sure if they called it a scrutineer but I used to volunteer at elections (US) and they did the same. The counters would sit at a long table with people watching from both sides. If I remember correctly, everyone had to stay until it was done and there was a sign-in/out sheet.
I understand that there's more people voting for federal elections but it really didn't take that long. Polling closed at 7 and the results/physical ballots were delivered to city hall by 10
In my case the scrutineers were volunteers from the political parties and didn't have to stay if they didn't want to, but I was a deputy returning officer and I couldn't leave until the count of ballots matched the number of ballots I had given out to people.
All of this talk about election fraud is just power hungry psychopaths inventing reasons they lost. Large scale cheating with paper ballots is much harder than digital systems.
One difference I've seen between out elections is we have more polling stations. It's unusual for people to wait longer than 15 minutes to vote.
We always have results that evening. Polls close at eight pm and results are finalized by midnight.
It might have been party volunteers here too, not sure as I was the "lowest level" of volunteer..
I think you hit the nail on the head with the amount of polling stations. Politicians of a certain party here really like voter suppression.