I dislike the idea of adding another public holiday. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the Fourth of July are the only holidays truly embedded in popular culture inasmuch as people celebrate them at home with their own efforts. Moving the election day to Saturday will do.

— Art Deco

That could work too, but I suspect making E-day a holiday would work better. It would emphasize exactly what it is. Instead of voting for six months, here there and anywhen, re-emphasize that this is Election Day.

Purging “inactive” names from the rolls only removes names that are not voting anyway. The problem at hand is people voting who should not be voting: non-citizens, felons, the dead, etc. As long as those names are on the active rolls and they continue to vote, they will remain on the rolls and continue to make election results questionable.

Just evaluating names that have a DOB making them over 90 years of age would be a starting place to stop the dead from voting. In the big picture, not that many reach that age… Checking those against the death index should eliminate some; some “proof of life” should settle the rest.

Search for residence addresses that claim to house 5 or more voters. A scan of property records could clear up some of this, a drive-by to verify the existence of a residence would also clear up some of those.

These things take some time and effort, and require some activity other than sitting on one’s butt in front of a computer… but the integrity of elections is important.

I return you now to your regular programming….

And you can *verify* whether those transactions were completed in the way that you intended. If you pay $37.05 for a particular product and you get charged $43.20, you can see the correct amount on your credit card. This is *not* the case with voting.

Mate, your last major series of posts here was trying to blame the ICE Agent hit by the Minneapolis driver by claiming he and the others should have shot out the tires. In doing so you not only displayed absolutely zero idea what a horrible idea this would be (going directly against the reasons given for it) but also cited TV shows. And midway through you stopped responding or for all I know looking.

Maybe consider some prudence before posting rate.

Yes, in person voting used to work (and still does) in small towns and suburban areas where there are few voters and lots of voting places. The problem is urban areas where there are millions of voters and relatively few voting places.

Do you think the Bharar Ganarajya- the Republic of India – is a “small town (or) suburban area where there are few voters and lots of voting places”? I have a lot bad to say about India, but outside the nadir of the Gandhy dynasty during the Emergency it has and remains a fairly stable, robust democratic republic ruling over the largest population in recorded human history, and it overwhelmingly uses in person voting and paper ballots. Electronic voting is an increasingly large minority, but it is still distinctly a minority.

Now far be it from me to say there is absolutely no corruption in India or that none of that seeps to the ballots.
But it is almost certainly less corrupt and more secure as a whole than about half of the US states, with even the electronic voting machines being limited and defined to trustworthy brands and models, and each being audited weeks before each election to ensure no funny business.

But even then the majority – and it is not even close – use paper ballots and ink. And while the process on the national level is too gigantic to handle in one go, it does work over the course of six weeks with staged voting.

There are people waiting eight to ten hours in line to vote, only to find the polling place closed when it’s finally their turn. It takes a lot longer to count millions of votes than it does to count fifteen or a few hundred or a thousand, leading people to suspect there’s cheating when there’s a long time to count the votes.

And yet somehow even India – oh so famous for not being overcrowded or subject to long waiting – is able to deal with this through the magic of “having more polling places open so you can divide the gigantic workload easier.” Hence why the idea is that no citizen should be more than 2 kilometers (about 1 and 1/4th of a mile in American Customary) from a polling station and that they should serve a maximum of 1,500 people. And yes, this requires millions of polling stations for national elections, but they have the people and material to run them. The big downside of this is the overall time for national level, vote by stage elections but even then it was comparable to the legal wrangling over Florida in 2000 at the worst.

I am absolutely not gonna claim India has all the answers and knows how to do it perfectly and there are some parties (especially radical leftist ones in Bengal) I suspect would wantonly abuse it and get around the safeguards. But it is still a living, breathing system showing how paper and ink centric voting ballots can work on just about the largest stage imaginable, while also showing how EV can be incorporated with a minimum of scandal or dispute.

The idea that this can only work on the archetypical New England Town’s scale is indefensible.

The solution could be online voting.

Even the electronic voting systems that are at work take pains to show they cannot be used online precisely because that would involve external connection and thus the risk of external tampering. Online voting at present is a terrible idea.

Everyone’s increasingly online: we do a lot of previously in person transactions this way, like banking, taxes, sales, library materials, etc.

Everyone’s increasingly online, including criminals and scam artists. And among the things people increasingly do online is get scammed or defrauded. This is bad enough when dealing with one’s personal belongings and information, but it is absolutely indefensible when it comes to the right of people across the country to govern themselves. Maybe that might change some time in the future, though it would require almost root and branch changes. But it is not here now.

The voter (let’s say the voter is she, in honor of Neo) would do this: she takes out her phone, tablet, etc., goes to vote.gov, and requests a ballot. Vote.gov sends a temporary security number to her phone, so she enters the security number, verifies the captcha, and logs in. She sees the ballot, registers her choices, does her electronic signiture, and sends her vote in. She’s done in two minutes. The vote is electronically registered and automatically tabulated.

Which raises the obvious issue of where the tabulation takes place, who oversees it, and how this would go.

Now, I hear all the contrarians saying “What about vote hacking?” There are ways to safe guard the vote that can be done electronically, from fingerprints to facial recognition.

And all of the ones you mention are user sided, but not enough on the backend.

She can run off a paper copy of her vote at home, bring it into the polling place and drop it in the box. If voters don’t have a printer at home, they can get their vote printed at the library, post office, poll station, etc. If all the votes are tabulated and a recount is needed, the ballot box can be opened and the paper ballots counted by hand.

That kind of backup would be useful but if it is so it would be at least as functional and far more secure to just go with that. France and India can do it.

Our system is dysfunctional not because in person voting with paper ballots is inherently so, but because much of the country is dominated by political systems that seek to make it so.

Yes, to everyone who says this!

France, for all its faults, manages its voting in one day, in-person, with paper ballots, local hand counts and centralized rules. The results are usually known that night with little litigiousness.

They also schedule voting on a Sunday, which seems an obvious good idea, rather than cramming it into a working day, which causes crowded polls morning and evening.