The U.S. Inability to Count Votes Is a National Disgrace. and Dangerous

I'm not particularly bothered that it might take another day or two for all the votes to be counted. I'd much rather have the devil I know than a bunch of automation and technology that might have bigger issues. Since it's not nationally controlled, and each US state (and county) can do what it wants, a big push to use tech is almost sure to backfire. And backfire in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

I just worked the polls in Pennsylvania - the new voting machines are pretty great. You get a paper ballot, you insert it, you use a touchscreen to make choices, the machine prints the ballot with your choices on it, shows it to you behind plexiglass, you check over it for correctness. If it&#x27;s all good, you hit done and the ballot is pulled in to a hopper. If not, you can redo. You get a machine count instantly at the end of the night, and a paper ballot trail for recounts that are voter-checked.<p>Apparently other locations had some problems with paper jams from the ballots, but at least my operation had 3 machines and could have easily handled our voters with just 2 active without resorting to hand-filled ballots.<p>The only real difficulty is the absentee ballots which were obviously a new effort (at this scale) lacking infrastructure. And they were prevented from processing any ahead of time. I think calling this &quot;dangerous&quot; or a &quot;disgrace&quot; is, in fact, blatantly disgraceful and dangerous.

It&#x27;s childish and destructively hostile to paint <i>a prediction of the outcome of an election giving high odds to the result that turns out wrong</i> as some kind of catastrophic failure or humiliation. It boggles my mind how many apparently otherwise smart people commit this obvious fallacy out loud.

The biggest issue is this ridiculous heterogeneity.<p>Canada is no less of a federal country with devolved decision-making powers, perhaps even more so. And yet we have one system of casting and tallying votes, presided over by one federal electoral commission, which reports to the parliament and not to the government. It was set up in 1920 and worked out very well for us, delivering 100 years of bullshit-free elections.<p>Sometimes countries adopt different laws and you cannot unequivocally say one is better than the other. But sometimes, like here, one way is clearly, unequivocally superior. This is too important to leave to amateur hour and should be done right, Canada&#x27;s way.

A member of the news media should know better than to complain about the vote tallies flipping overnight. We&#x27;ve known for weeks that it was likely for several states to flip like this because these states were not allowed to count the mail-in ballots as they came in. In the states where it was allowed to count votes early, the vote tally was released last night, in similar speed to his example of Brazil.<p>What&#x27;s really dangerous is that the same people who said that mail-in votes couldn&#x27;t be counted early in states like PA are now saying they shouldn&#x27;t be counted after election day. It&#x27;s disenfranchisement, plain and simple.

I&#x27;ve lost so much respect for Greenwald over the last few months.<p>Him joining the circus of self-interested assholes sowing unnecessary doubt in our democracy is just one more nail.

Oregon has a great voting system. Works very well - supposedly the easiest in the country. Everything is by mail. Fraud rates are <i>extremely</i> low.

Don&#x27;t forget that 300,000 votes are currently unaccounted for: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;investigations&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;03&#x2F;postal-service-blows-deadline-check-missing-mail-ballots&#x2F;6149643002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;investigations&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;0...</a>

It&#x27;s unreasonable to demand the results of an election when some states have not yet even <i>received</i> all the legally cast mail-in ballots. Further, Republican legislatures in three states forced through new rules this election to block the counting of mail-in ballots until after election day making it impossible to have instant results.<p>And it&#x27;s bizarre to indict our vote counting system based on the fact that it&#x27;s hard for the media to guess the winner from incomplete data. Nobody wins any electoral college votes until the Secretary of State certifies the results. It takes a while because they make sure all the votes are counted first. This is a feature not a bug.<p>There are some real issues in election administration in the US, but this ain&#x27;t it. If it were up to me, I&#x27;d ban the release of uncertified election results, at least for a few days. The problem he identifies is one of expectations.

This is an incredibly poor analysis.<p>If you allow mail in votes that are accepted as long as they are postmarked by election day, you can&#x27;t certify the counts on election day unless a majority of registered voters&#x27; ballots have arrived by election day. It&#x27;s as simple as that.<p>The contention is mostly in a small number of states where the Republican party has engineered electoral corruption in order to retain control, combined with the winner-take-all nature of electoral votes in most states. Most states conduct elections with few problems and little drama.<p>If the president were elected by popular vote at the national level there would be far less contention because the margin in any given local election would be much less meaningful.

I think we&#x27;re forgetting the real reason: Republicans are aggressively fighting in courts to make counting votes harder, and to stop counting votes after a certain time. If both parties worked towards the common good instead of taking a &quot;by any means necessary&quot; approach, we&#x27;d have such a better country.

The article is skimpy on evidence that other countries have perfected an efficient, trustworthy voting process. I guess the main argument is that countries that can get all the votes in by a specific deadline are more trustworthy?

The US is really 1500+ independent elections.

This is simply disinformation. The &quot;inability to count votes&quot; in many of the swing states this year was due to their Republican legislatures refusing to pass legislation allowing for the absentee ballots to be counted as they arrived, leading to a backlog after the election that they thought would make it easier to challenge these votes in court or to raise doubt about the outcome of the election. As we do every year, we will count all the votes, and each county and state will do their final canvass and report the results by the legally mandated deadline.

there are 100 things which are disgraceful about the american electoral process. Whether or not the votes are counted in one day or three is probably the least important of all of them.

I don&#x27;t think so and any responsible steward of history would also disagree. The point is to spread power out, rather than concentrate it.

Why is this flagged, exactly? Doesn&#x27;t seem too-bad in terms of how the conversation around it is being had.<p>Also, this article is a prime spot for us to have a discussion about potential improvements and tech solutions or oversight regarding the election and voting. Overall, I&#x27;d say a good topic to discuss here.

This reads to me as: `Foreigners ability to count votes is an international hero and needs to be honored!`<p>I&#x27;m not going after this individual, but this kind of journalism needs to be considered. ( Flagged or not? You tell me? )

Is he complaining about the vote counting or the prediction modeling? This piece vacillates between the two without really being clear that these are two completely separate things.

Flagged for trolling. US is holding 50 independent elections during a pandemic. Refusing to let a central authority count all the votes is a feature, not a bug.

To have consistent federal elections would require an erosion of state sovereignty. Is this something that would receive bipartisan support after this week?

I&#x27;m actually much more bothered by the fact that people can start voting 1 month before the actual election day, or that votes can be counted <i>and communicated</i> before the election day.<p>Before moving to the US, I voted a few times in a different country where the rules were simple: one election day and <i>absolutely no</i> polls&#x2F;estimations&#x2F;etc communicated in the media during the last 48 hours before the election day.

I normally like Glenn&#x27;s writing but this is just FUD. Historically it has always taken days to count up all the votes due to the heterogeneity of the ballot systems used by the State&#x27;s. Not to mention the actual electors in the College don&#x27;t even vote until December - and aren&#x27;t always faithful to the popular vote.<p>People are acting like this is the end of the world or some horrible crisis that we don&#x27;t know the outcome instantly. Patience goes a long way.