This is why Biden will not take reporters questions

[Sylvain]

The noise about voter ID being bad has been around for a long time, and is always coming from people who have the most to benefit from voting being a less than accurate process. I was amused years ago when President Carter would tour various nations thinking that somehow his presence would make the voting in these countries more accurate. He could have just went to Chicago.

Do they not ask you anything when you show up to vote?
You just say "I'm mr.such and such" and they give you a ballot to vote?

 

[Cameramonkey]

The problem with direct voting is due to population disparity.

The large cities on the coasts will have more people in a confined area then multiple states inside the US. That means if we don’t use a representative type of voting such as our electoral college, less popular states on the interior would never have their voices heard in an election.

If you’ve ever seen the map of the US that shows how the voting went where the costs are primarily blue and the interior is primarily red you get the picture. I’ll try to dig up the 3-D vote weight that shows how much voting power cities have over rural areas.

 

[Ingomike]

Look at the 2016 election. Clinton got more votes (popular votes) but still lost.
That seems crazy to us.

Think of it his way, we have 50 separate elections with each election weighted per capita. So all 50 states conduct an election and each state gets votes representative to their population. If we did not NY and California would control the whole country

Many of us on INGO think a true democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting what to have for dinner…

 

[Sylvain]

The problem with direct voting is due to population disparity.

The large cities on the coasts will have more people in a confined area then multiple states inside the US. That means if we don’t use a representative type of voting such as our electoral college, less popular states on the interior would never have their voices heard in an election.

If you’ve ever seen the map of the US that shows how the voting went where the costs are primarily blue and the interior is primarily red you get the picture. I’ll try to dig up the 3-D vote weight that shows how much voting power cities have over rural areas.

But if you live in Montana you're less likely to have an effect in the election, compared to someone who lives in Texas or California.

 

[Cameramonkey]

And a direct election without the electoral college here in the US guarantees that a conservative president will never happen in our lifetime, if ever. There are too many people in the liberal cities to allow those of us in “flyover country“ to ever have a president of our choice.

So from a conservative/Republican perspective we might as well never have an election again.

 

[Cameramonkey]

here is the map I was talking about. The taller the tower, the higher the vote density/numbers. Note how low all that red is in the center. Those votes would never really count if we were a direct democracy. Quite literally the Electoral College is the only thing that keeps our elections somewhat fair.

And this shows it in 2D by county to get a better feel for how widespread the conservatives are. Since there are so relative few people there in the middle, their vote just wouldnt count in a presidential election. Imagine if Paris' darling candidate ALWAYS won the election, and everyone outside the city couldnt win no matter what. That's what would happen here.

 

[2in1evtime]

Do they not ask you anything when you show up to vote?
You just say "I'm mr.such and such" and they give you a ballot to vote?

Had to show state id to vote here in indiana for all elections

 

[Ingomike]

Had to show state id to vote here in indiana for all elections

But no ID required in the states where the vote theft occurred…

 

[2in1evtime]

But no ID required in the states where the vote theft occurred…

And if you look at the above provided map from camera monkey you will see that all those tall blue towers are major no id required areas!

 

[Sylvain]

Had to show state id to vote here in indiana for all elections

So it's different in all states? Some don't require any form of ID at all?

What about non US citizens in Indiana (legal permanent residents) who can have the same ID? I assume they verify a proof of citizenship when you register to vote.

 

[BugI02]

You're asking questions to a guy who knows less than you do about the whole election process.

But I do it because it is possible/likely you also have fewer biases than we do vis a vis this past election

Same reason I used to value the BBC until they seemed to get co-opted, they at one time had a far less Americentric view on the news and far less spin

Now sometimes it's Al-Jazeera that fills that role. I must confess I never paid much attention to Le Monde (other than Greg) as the French seemed to have a very Franco-centric view of everything

 

[BugI02]

Do they not ask you anything when you show up to vote?
You just say "I'm mr.such and such" and they give you a ballot to vote?

In my state, my polling place has a book with the names of all those registered to vote in that precinct along with a sample of my signature. I present proper identification and sign my name which is compared to the signature on file (by a volunteer, not a handwriting expert) and then I am assigned a machine and vote

I haven't been without proper ID since before I was eligible to vote, so I don't know what the 80 year old black grannies who don't drive do (all three of them)

 

[Cameramonkey]

In my state, my polling place has a book with the names of all those registered to vote in that precinct along with a sample of my signature. I present proper identification and sign my name which is compared to the signature on file (by a volunteer, not a handwriting expert) and then I am assigned a machine and vote

I haven't been without proper ID since before I was eligible to vote, so I don't know what the 80 year old black grannies who don't drive do (all three of them)

That signature thing is going to be a problem moving forward. Those signatures are based on how you actually sign on paper with no limitation of motion or weird cramped way of holding your hand (so you dont touch the digitizer) Our digital signatures on digitizers sitting up on a pedistal (like a cash register) look NOTHING like our real signatures. At least mine doesnt.

 

[BugI02]

Look at the 2016 election. Clinton got more votes (popular votes) but still lost.
That seems crazy to us.

Sylvain, the constitution had to set up a system of voting that would make all thirteen original colonies feel that their concerns would be heard in the face of some population disparities of over 10 : 1. Enshrined in the constitution, the electoral college system has endured through vast changes in number of states and the distribution of the population

Our elections are the results of those in a confederation of states, so likely more like an EU election where I assume each country wishes its concerns to be taken seriously rather than overwhelmed by the desires of the most populous countries. Am I correct in assuming that EU elections are not conducted by popular vote (not those of representatives to legal bodies that are conducted solely within a country, but those, if any, that are an EU wide election for a position - perhaps president or prime minister or whatever your top executive is called)

 

[Leadeye]

Do they not ask you anything when you show up to vote?
You just say "I'm mr.such and such" and they give you a ballot to vote?

I think it depends on where you are. When I lived in Indy they just asked who you were, no ID required. The poll workers were consulting some sort of paper I could not read as the print was small and upside down to me. Where I live now I have to show ID even though it a very rural area.

In places like Chicago I think they just make it up at the end of the day, sort of like Detroit where more people voted than they had people. It's been a problem for a long time, in Texas Coke Stevenson hired no less than Frank Hamer to investigate ballot stuffing in his campaign against Lyndon Johnson.

 

[KG1]

That signature thing is going to be a problem moving forward. Those signatures are based on how you actually sign on paper with no limitation of motion or weird cramped way of holding your hand (so you dont touch the digitizer) Our digital signatures on digitizers sitting up on a pedistal (like a cash register) look NOTHING like our real signatures. At least mine doesnt.

Every time I sign on one of those it looks like little kid scribble.

 

[BugI02]

That signature thing is going to be a problem moving forward. Those signatures are based on how you actually sign on paper with no limitation of motion or weird cramped way of holding your hand (so you dont touch the digitizer) Our digital signatures on digitizers sitting up on a pedistal (like a cash register) look NOTHING like our real signatures. At least mine doesnt.

Well, there will be a mark on your right hand or forehead that a machine will read in place of a signature

I hear you, the year before last I did early voting which was at a centralized location and had to sign with a stylus with a soft rubber hemisphere for a tip and a bemused individual behind plexiglass who wanted me to reach through a little opening and sign on an iPad-like screen presented at an angle of 60 degrees to the vertical. I wouldn't even recognize my signature

 

[Sylvain]

In my state, my polling place has a book with the names of all those registered to vote in that precinct along with a sample of my signature. I present proper identification and sign my name which is compared to the signature on file (by a volunteer, not a handwriting expert) and then I am assigned a machine and vote

I haven't been without proper ID since before I was eligible to vote, so I don't know what the 80 year old black grannies who don't drive do (all three of them)

Can those grannies do a proxy vote?
We have that over here.
You can vote for someone who can't show up to vote (either sick, out of the country etc).
I voted twice one year for the presidential election.
At the polling station I had to show their ID, plus mine, and a document that was made at our local police station where a senior officer acted as a notary.

 

[BugI02]

Every time I sign on one of those it looks like little kid scribble.

It is worse when I have to sign with my fingertip, although I'm not really disappointed that any digital record of my signature is a bad one

 

[Leadeye]

Machine politics being want it is, with a direct election a candidate would only have to pay a handful of big machines in big cities to win every time. While they don't use names like Tammany or The Outfit/City Hall these days, the organizations still exist. There's a law firm at the top of every machine, because with machines the line between legal and criminal gets very fine and there's an enormous amount of money to be made walking that line.