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Broken Systems
You would not fly on a plane, or drive in a car, that was not designed and built with a decent quality system, subject to both internal and external audits. Quality is achieved through a rigorous series of cross-checks and processes to systematically root out error. These systems rely on competing and counter-incentives to ensure that work is critically assessed.
It is not a surprise that voting systems are subject to fraud. Water flows downhill, and it is pretty easy to follow the incentives. What is surprising is that voting systems do not adopt the same kinds of quality systems and processes that govern everything from the supply of fresh eggs to finished aircraft. All of those have transparent, published processes, clear governing oversight, and cross-checking by people interested in finding mistakes and incentivized to do so.
At the very simplest level, ballots could be counted by just Republicans, and then a team of just Democrats, each tagging the ballot as they assess the vote. Discrepancies pop up and are adjudicated by mixed teams. The result would be far, far better than what we have seen.
And we could do the very same thing with signature matching, etc. The entire process, from truing the voter rolls, to ensuring ballots are not going to out-of-state residents, is not so hard to update using quality standards.
I understand that government does not want to open the kimono and show us what we already suspect: they are really very bad at just about any executive function. Nevertheless, it is necessary to do so, to ensure that we do not end up with a significant percentage of the population who believe that elections are rigged games, and they are the suckers.
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You would. You just wouldn’t know it at the time.
The engineer in me really likes the thinking here. The cynic in me knows that voting in Dem areas are intentionally fraud-friendly.
It’s probably time to look not at election systems as election scoring (ranked choice, first past the post, etc.) but just basic election operations (thousands of people just trying to poll every American who wants to fill in a ballot). The basic operations could use work.
Once we have solid results per-state, then we can probably say “Look, this is the benefit of RCV” or whatever else.
Consider it this way. A re-count goes over the same ballots. They should NEVER come up with different results, yet they regularly do (on the order of one to a few hundred votes in various cases). The count should be correct. The verification should be correct. So correct that if you did it again or did it with a different group of people or software, you would get the same answer.
Hopefully.
Unless that is part of the design from the start.
I’ll focus on the car. I grew up before the advent of the Nader bolt and where cars were considered much more as death traps if you got into a wreck. Safety belts were just coming into vogue and were not mandatory, and car seats for children were non-existent. I didn’t wear a safety belt as a child, and they were probably useless for children anyway. I even, as a child [GASP], rode in the front seat if only one adult was in the car.
More than once, as a child, the adult driving the car, usually my mother or father, might have to come to a sudden stop, and I’d end up flying off the seat and into the well of the car. It wasn’t so bad that I was ever injured. Given the actual statistics, I probably wasn’t all that lucky. The safety systems put in place have resulted in less deaths, but even so, my parents weren’t reckless drivers, and my chances were still on my side that I’d come out on the other end unscathed, as I did.
I’d argue we overdo safety, or what is now being called safetyism in our culture, and overall we’d be better off as individuals with more physical sharp edges in our lives, but that’s another discussion.
I will say that we would drive in cars with less quality assurance, because we did in my lifetime.
Regarding the voting scandals, we could use improvement in our systems and I’m for it. But statistically, things aren’t that bad. So lets improve the systems while admitting that Biden won the election.
When I was a kid, riding in the bed of a pickup truck didn’t raise an eyebrow.
You mean while admitting that Biden won* the election, right?
Back when I used to get involved in local school district affairs, I was on a committee where I complained that the parts my group wanted to get done weren’t on the proposed proposal. The chair told us, “Let’s get this done now, and then we can work on your issues.”
Right. We can work on our issues after we’ve given up all the leverage we have.
Actually, that wasn’t the only time I saw that ploy being used.
Actually, the quality standards I am talking about are not necessarily about safety. Car makers have tolerances in every manufactured part, as well as conformity requirements for everything that goes into it.
The standard quality assurance that I want to see in elections have been part of automaking for quite a long time – the concept of cross-checking and auditing to avoid shipping out cars that do not do what they are designed to do.
This is not merely cars, of course. Every manufacturing business in the nation has some version of quality control, but they all have common elements. Elements that seem to be absent for voting systems.