Voting for PCC
Nov. 15th, 2012 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI managed to vote. (About 8.30 -- I felt very organised :))
I wasn't positive, but I felt even "not one of the awful parties" was a better heuristic than most people would use, so I went with my best guess (both independents)
Is spoiling your ballot superior to not turning up? My instinct says very much yes -- a ballot with 100% turnout and 100% spoiled ballots is a clearer protest than 0% turnout, since the latter might just be apathy. But it's also true that many people will judge purely by the turnout and not the results, or attribute all spoiled ballots to incompetence.
I was interested to observe the process. I virtuously filed my polling card in my "electoral reg" file, and found it instantly on polling morning, so a big win for organisation there: usually I'd have it, but it'd be sitting on my "urgent stuff" pile between when I received it and when I used it.
Unfortunately, it seemed the postman had exchanged poll cards with my neighbour and neither of us noticed until it was too late. So I felt a little silly, but I was very glad I didn't need it to vote, else I likely wouldn't have been able to, or only if I went through some additional faff. I don't know if I'd have managed to check sooner if I'd known it was necessary: maybe, but it made me appreciate how easy it is for a small mistake to deny someone the right to vote if the government cracks down. Especially if the government has a plausible excuse for cracking down in some areas and not others: that's blatant election rigging.
On the other hand, I was surprised that you really do only need to give your name and address to vote. It works surprisingly well considering, and I guess if you tried to vote for someone else, they'd notice when the real one came in, although at that point there's presumably no way of recovering the first ballot paper? But if you know someone's not voting, it seems there's nothing really stopping you claiming to be them.
And recording who's voted is itself a potential security flaw: voting is private, traditionally to prevent people being manipulated into voting for someone. But if you were in a position to intimidate someone into voting for who you wanted, you could do half as well by telling them not to vote, and it seems fairly easy to spot who has and who hasn't.
I wasn't positive, but I felt even "not one of the awful parties" was a better heuristic than most people would use, so I went with my best guess (both independents)
Is spoiling your ballot superior to not turning up? My instinct says very much yes -- a ballot with 100% turnout and 100% spoiled ballots is a clearer protest than 0% turnout, since the latter might just be apathy. But it's also true that many people will judge purely by the turnout and not the results, or attribute all spoiled ballots to incompetence.
I was interested to observe the process. I virtuously filed my polling card in my "electoral reg" file, and found it instantly on polling morning, so a big win for organisation there: usually I'd have it, but it'd be sitting on my "urgent stuff" pile between when I received it and when I used it.
Unfortunately, it seemed the postman had exchanged poll cards with my neighbour and neither of us noticed until it was too late. So I felt a little silly, but I was very glad I didn't need it to vote, else I likely wouldn't have been able to, or only if I went through some additional faff. I don't know if I'd have managed to check sooner if I'd known it was necessary: maybe, but it made me appreciate how easy it is for a small mistake to deny someone the right to vote if the government cracks down. Especially if the government has a plausible excuse for cracking down in some areas and not others: that's blatant election rigging.
On the other hand, I was surprised that you really do only need to give your name and address to vote. It works surprisingly well considering, and I guess if you tried to vote for someone else, they'd notice when the real one came in, although at that point there's presumably no way of recovering the first ballot paper? But if you know someone's not voting, it seems there's nothing really stopping you claiming to be them.
And recording who's voted is itself a potential security flaw: voting is private, traditionally to prevent people being manipulated into voting for someone. But if you were in a position to intimidate someone into voting for who you wanted, you could do half as well by telling them not to vote, and it seems fairly easy to spot who has and who hasn't.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 09:46 am (UTC)But if you know someone's not voting, it seems there's nothing really stopping you claiming to be them
and
you could do half as well by telling them not to vote
And now all you need is a big enough gang that the poll workers don't spot you voting 50 times.
We don't have very good checks for preventing voter fraud, but I think we also don't really have a reputation for a lot of voter fraud actually happening. I'm torn about this - because obv. voter fraud is bad and we should be catching it; but equally obv. almost anything you do to stop it will make it harder for some voters to legitimately cast their vote.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 11:06 pm (UTC)But I want to be aware of it, because we don't really want to leave security holes lying around. In fact, hopefully explicit fraud is less likely than illegal-but-deniable shenanigans like collecting postal votes, gerrymandering, preventing people voting, etc.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 05:09 pm (UTC)Okay. There aren't many checks. It could be better. What a far though - to find 20 people in different polling districts who you know won't vote, and a whole day of travelling here and there for about 20 out of many thousand votes. It's such a palava that if anyone can pull it off then congratulations them.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 11:16 pm (UTC)You'd have to have a pretty big team, with good transport arrangements in place. It's probably a great deal of faff.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 06:43 pm (UTC)It's only a secret ballot by virtue of the fact that they don't bother to cross-check. If you observe the process carefully, you'll see that you are given a numbered ballot and that your name is recorded on a separate sheet against that ballot.
The reason for this is that if you turn up and discover that you've already voted (i.e. someone else gave your name), there is a procedure whereby you can cast another vote which is placed in a sealed envelope (presumably after verifying your ID). If the vote is close enough, they will then search out the original one and open yours. If the two are the same then no change, otherwise they can adjust the vote accordingly. Obviously it's no longer secret at this point.
When all procedures have been observed, the papers are all burned to destroy the record. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the record of who got which paper is kept separate from the ballot papers so that is nearly impossible for someone to discover who voted which way.
As for voting fraud, postal voting is much easier to spoof, which is why I think it's a bad thing that it's been made too easy.
D
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 11:10 pm (UTC)In fact, come to think of it, you can find out if someone voted in person by hanging around outside all day or volunteering as one of the helpers, so writing it down probably isn't worse, so um, never mind :)
I agree postal voting, while I love its convenience, seems to have a problem here.