I’ve seen picture of US lemming already voting, How does that even work

I volunteered a few time to run a voting station in France, one of the first stuff I learned is always have two persons near the ballot box. If a dishonest person is alone, it’s pretty easy to add a few ballots in the box and sign near the name of persons who are too sick/old to go voting in person.

Logistically speaking, it’s in general not too hard to find enough volunteers (especially on a Sunday) to keep an eye on the vote from Let’s say 7:30 when the empty box is sealed to 22:30 when counting is done and you’ve signed the paperwork. But this work if the vote occurs only over one day.

I see US-Americans voting almost 2 weeks before the election, how does it happen practically, do you have enough volunteer to run ballot station for 2 weeks ? Are civil servant paid to do so ? How do you make-sure nobody tampers the box at night ?

  • Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 days ago

    Oh, we’re not that organized. The only thing that they really do is require some form of government ID. They don’t really care what they just need to identify you.

    They don’t check if you’re allowed to vote, or if you’ve already voted before you vote, as those machines aren’t connected to the internet, so there’s no database to check against. It is checked after the fact when they start counting as the counting machines are connected to the internet.

    We had an issue about a decade ago where they were able to hack voting machines on election day, ever since then voting machines aren’t allowed to be connected to the internet.

    • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      9 days ago

      I mean, not connecting machines to the internet is entirely reasonable (though in my opinion having them at all is insane).

      That’s really interesting though, because your model creates a system where fraud can exist but can be checked (and thus it will, not doing it would be insane), whereas ours removes the problem entirely. I know that you personally don’t have the power to change it, of courses I’m just fascinated by the ways society manages to create deeply flawed systems and prop them up like we can’t do any better.