If an election is not close, your vote is not likely to matter because of the large margin of victory.

What a great system.

There is something broken, and I can't help but think somebody makes this happen unethically. At the very least if it is legitimate it says something about the ability of democratic voters to cast about a ballot.

In cases where a third party candidate gets a significant number of votes and no candidate gets a majority, instant run-off voting would be a solution.

Except, as explained when you last brought it up, instant runoff voting has serious issues such as being non-monotonic that make it a poor choice as a voting algorithm.

More generally, thanks to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, it's easy to show that no method of voting is going to always work right in elections with more than two candidates. And those conditions where they break tend to be close elections.

Why not have some sort of tie-breaker system for races where the margin is less than one percent?

That doesn't work, it only moves the boundary. Imagine a tiebreaker, let's say the non-incumbent party wins a tie. Well now it's a race for the incumbent to win by a full one percent.

That would certainly fix those pesky renegade voters.

Also, I do think there should always be a paper trail for any type of voting, but I also think we need to come to the realization that no voting process is without error, and there are going to be errors-either from the voter or from whatever method is used to count the votes.

I am just opposed to ballot interpretation. If the intent isn't clear, then I think the voter gives up the right to have their vote counted. My precinct used pencil and paper until this year and now they use optical scan. The directions for how to fill out the ballot are pretty clear, and there are poll workers in place for a reason, if a person can't understand them.

There should be a federal ballot and a state ballot.

Too many times a ballot is rejected because of some error made on internal state issues such as a vote about a bond issue or a judgeship or whatever and the vote for the federal office gets tossed on this minor thing since the entire ballot is tossed.

Federal ballots should require photo id and proof of voter registration no matter if the state allows walk in voters from park bench registrations for their state stuff.

Residency requirements should be enforced uniformly for federal ballots across states.

I want to see a central voter registration data base that is used to validate current and new voters to ensure there are not multiple city/county/state votes by the same person.

Also it should be updated with data on deaths so that legacy voting is impossible.

If a person moves to a new state and registers to vote they should be required to disclose their prior state information. The central database should also be used to cancel out registrations from the state of residence prior to the move.

Fix the loopholes to make it one man, one vote and only one vote.

Ensure that a unique identifier is used for registration.

Eliminate the possibility of multiple votes under several prior marriage name variations.

Stop voting in one state in person and absentee voting in another.

The whole thing is not just about ensuring the integrity of the vote process, but to prevent the doubts of the system to cause people to sit out the vote process because of faults in the system.

Votes should be inventoried and packaged up by the judges at the precinct and put into standardized boxes for transit.

Ideally machine counts should be transmitted from the polls sites via encrypted methods (VPNs would be nice) that require password entry or keys from parties to authorize the transfer.

Vote memory cards and physical ballots should all be securely transported with multiple representatives present. If a stop is needed en route that requires one of the members to stop for a call of nature the voter storage box should be witnessed by a member of the public as to have not been tampered with if the transport people were of different gender and the container was not in full 100% absolute control.

ID of the witness should be logged for trace purposes.

The only state right now that seems to get it right is Virginia..once the polls close the counts flow into a computer link to build the vote unofficial results in very short time.

Even if they go county then state it sure happens within a much quicker time span than other states tend to achieve.

*Vastly shadier, actually, but who's counting?

The historic comparisons not done with these spreadsheets tells the real story and I will have to put them up later.

But when major Black wards (not 100% Black obviously since no ward is pure Black,even in Chicago) have more voter registration but fewer voters turning out both by number and percentage than prior election cycles , the only logical conclusion is that only one class of voter was allowed to participate in the polling and others were likely suppressed.

Either it was done at the polling spots or it was done simply by putting word on the street that if you were not going to vote for Obama it might be in your best interest to find other activities to fill your time that day.

The whole process smells, and we now have a lot of sympathy for the crap Florida went thru in 2000.

LBJ used to be a master of this in south Texas.

One good example in this election is the Chicago results.

Chicago had major new voter registration for the general election but despite that the voter turnout in heavy Black precincts and wards was down not up.

Bush won about 18% of the vote but McCain turned out a little over 13%.

I captured the data before the final results of provisional votes and such were done ,but the bulk of the votes are accounted for.

In past elections there were pretty much block voting of low 90 percent in the major Black wards , but this time they were hitting over 99% in many.

There were even entire wards of over 50 precincts where McCain did not break into double digit votes for the entire ward!!! Does any one think that is realistic?

Places where Bush got 10% of the vote McCain got less than 1%..

You can see the data with a couple of online spread sheets and compare it for verification with the official Chicago Election site.

What the results show totally defies logic and historic voting patterns.

There were even wards where Obama won multiple precincts with 100% of the vote. McCain and third party candidates got no votes at all.

First Half of Data

Second Half of Data

Scroll through the data and see if you can believe this fairy tale come true.

I also do not think found votes should be counted. I am not keen on the idea of charging or fining election officials, but if a bunch of ballots are found some place they shouldn't have been, then I think you hold them to make sure numbers add up, or don't count them at all, only because found ballots appear to look as if somebody went and filled out a bunch of ballots in a back room to change the results.

I actually think a run off election-even where there are only two candidates might be better than a recount. I think at the very least the candidate that gets their voters out in the greatest numbers the second go around deserves the win. Don't think this would work in presidential elections, but the reality is that the close ones where only a few hundred votes separate the winner from the loser are state/local elections.

But I don't trust the recount systems, because it isn't just the court battles, but the appearance that one side is gaming the other to get a win for their guy, and when the process or elected offices in charge of it are controlled by one party and the candidate from their party lost on election day, but then comes back to win after the recount it smells.