Where's the link to Gunnar's blog?

Keep up the great work, Bill.

in the post - in the word "blogpage" in the text of his letter.

It looks great but I cannot read a word he is saying...except "Glenn Reynolds".

Heh...nobody tell Glenn.

I was amazed before when I saw that the visits to my site had skyrocketed upwards from the regular, and now I see why. In my opinion itīs amazing how much there is of electionfraud in America and perhaps more amazed at how easy it actualy is!

I have also stumbled across writings my many Americans where they say that this is just how it is and nothing can be done about it. Why is this a problem in the first place I ask?

Here in Iceland I do not remember fraud ever being an issue when it came to elections. So I have a hard time imagining that fraud can be tolerated.

From the stories I have read about this in the past weeks I have seen that most have in common a core problem. Which is that people need to register in order to obtain the right to vote. Therefore people abuse those registration processes and register whatever they might think of. I say whatever because I have read stories where one registers his pet to vote!

I dont think that the solution is tightening rules regarding the registration. Sure it might help some thats no doubt. But I believe that the best solution is for you to make some more radical changes and take the registration out of the equation all together.

Put every single man and woman eligable to vote on the votinglist and demand ID at the pollingbooth. Itīs awfully simple and the best thing about it is that it actualy works!

Iīm not going to make it any longer, since this is just supposed to be a short comment. But think about my suggestion because as the say, a visitors eye often sees more clearly than that of the host.

As to the cup of coffee you mention I would be delighted to buy you a cup if you ever come here to Iceland :)

Gunnar,
There are two obvious problems with your idea, but I believe them to be surmountable.

1. Not everybody in the USA has photo IDs. Or at least, they're challanging South Dakota's ID requirement in court on that basis (even though you can still vote without an ID, it just requires a bit more paperwork). The laws about what you can demand a person do in order to vote are very strict, given the history in some states in the past to deny citizens the right to vote. See poll tax, land requirements (you have to own some), education testing, and some of the jim crow laws. I think this problem is surmountable. I think you should show up with a photo ID(1), and proof of citizenship(2).

2. Absentee voters. It's important to realize that the USA is like a more tightly knit version of the EU at the moment. In many ways we're actually 50 seperate small countries. So we're not always around to vote in the state that we're citizens of. The most obvious example is our military, and embassy personnel. Because voting options can vary by city/county as well as state, running a polling booth overseas would be impossible. In order to increase the voting percent, many states have loosened up absentee ballots such that most fraud occurs in this area. Solution: Tighted absentee voting back up to require reason, and have to come from out of state. Maybe have an absentee ballot only for the regional stuff, and do the federal/state stuff on a special form (while complicated, you could do this in an overseas polling booth).

And finally, I'd like to say that the fraud isn't that incredably prevalent, and is mostly limited to a few areas. It's just that the last presidential election was so close, that the fraud/noise level might make a difference, so we're looking to reduce it. But certain parties know that they benefit from it. For example, illegal immigrants usually support democrats, given that it's the democrats who promise them more. Not to knock the EU, but has anybody ever checked Italy for voting fraud? I'm sure it happens elsewhere too.

And lastly:
ABSOLUTLY DO NOT TRUST ELECTRONIC VOTING WITHOUT A PAPER RECORD. It's just too easy to fake, and without auditing records, you can't find out they did it.

(1)Usually drivers license, but I'd hand out state ID's for free so even the 'poor' would have them.
(2) There are signs of large numbers of illegal immigrants being registered to vote in some states. Proof would be Social Security card, passport, and birth certificate. Either that or a state drivers license which notes the difference(most/all don't).

Hey, I want climbing blog readership, too, so I offer a glance at the Election Mark Up Language initiative out of OASIS:

Paul Spencer is taking comments on the doc over the weekend.

EML Benefits

EML has been designed to handle most aspects of Election and Voter Services from electoral registration, through voting to counting.

EML is not restricted to electronic voting - many parts of the language are applicable to traditional voting methods.

EML can handle many types of public and private elections, including refendums.

EML is managed by OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org), the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. OASIS is a well-respected not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards.

The OASIS Technical Committee that manages EML has a wide international participation, including Governments, technology companies and election service providers world-wide.

EML is being submitted by OASIS to ISO as a proposal for an international standard for Election and Voter Services messaging.

EML is based on a reference process model. This provides a context for the specifications without restricting their use in any way.

EML has been proven by use in pilot public elections and forms the messaging standard for the UK Co-ordinated Online Register of Electors.

The Multidisciplinary Ad Hoc Group of Specialists on Legal, Operational and
Technical standards for e-enabled voting (IP1-S-EE) of the Council Europe (representing 44 European countries) has recommended that "EML shall be used whenever possible for e-election and e-referendum applications".

EML has a tailoring mechanism to allow additional constraints to be applied for specific election scenarios.

EML is extensible, allowing additional elements to be added for specific uses without reference back to OASIS.

EML is responsive to changing requirements - additional requirements can be piloted using the extensibility of the language and added to the core specification if agreed by the Technical Committee.

EML has elements to support security features such as evidence of the right to vote and vote sealing.

EML has elements to support audit requirements including cross-referencing the number of votes counted against the number of votes cast and tracking the systems used to handle each individual vote.

In Brazil, it is obligatory to vote over 18. Brazil has 180 million people, take out the kids, that still leaves a lot of people. If you are out of your county, you can follow a procedure to vote elsewhere. We have non-photo ID docs, you have to present 3 types to vote.
Even though such a massive amount of people vote at elections, the process itself is organized. There is some fraud, but that is not the biggest problem. Since a good number of votes come from huge numbers of poor, uneducated people, politicians do all kinds of manipulative things to get those votes, including saying a lot of non-sense.
For example, we have a disgusting left-wing mayor in Brazilīs biggest city (Sao Paulo), nothing but a cheap sexologist (! of all things) that became popular on her TV show and then got into politics because of her popularity, plus because she used being married to a senator for her political ambitions.
A lot of her political discourse is directed exactly at conning the poor into supporting her while making the administration of this 15 million people city a mess, diverting a ton of money to homosexual groups (in an allegedly corrupt maneuver) while leaving inumerous innocent poor kids and adults and disabled people to die on the streets.
We have mayor elections this Sunday and hopefully we will succeed in kicking out Ms. Suplicy (the disgraceful sexologist-mayor).
So, while we have some problems with voting fraud, unfortunately that seems to be the least of our problems in the election process.

Vera

Firethorn,

I did not know about this problem with the photo IDīs and the courtcases regarding the usage of them during votecasting. But I do however believe that you simply must show up with some kind of proof that you are who you say you are when you show up to cast your vote. The proof of citizenship would probably be unnecesary as soon as a centralised votersregistry is in place, that is you are automatically put on the registry by e.g. the bureaou of census (Not quite sure what you call this!) or something equalvant to it, whether itīs federal or state does not matter, when you reach the legal voting age, gain citizenship or whatever the reason for you becoming a legal voter may be.

Regarding the absentee voters I do acknowledge that it is alot more complicated matter to handle than it is here in Iceland for an example, we are the size of Kansas and have around 290.000 citizens, but as you explane in your answer these problems can be easily surmountable. I understood it in a way that regarding people inside of the U.S. but not in theyr own state this is a bigger problem than regarding those oversees during the voting. And to be honest I am not familiar enough with the regulations regarding absentee voters in America and as you say they can differ by state to state and even county to county. So it is a highly complicated issue but I see no reason why it cant be simplyfied by e.g. a federal law wich would make the rules apply for all, that being said I know such legislation can be a very complicated thing and probably unlikely to happen. Regarding absentee voters oversees to me that problem couldnt be much easier to handle. Here in Iceland if you are oversees during elections you can contact the nearest embassy or in some cases even consulates to vote. Since America has an embassy in just about every country on earth these voters could simply turn up in the embassy to cast theyr vote. Regarding military personnel I visualise something like the highest officer of each base being given the power to act as a polling booth for his men, that is allow them to vote at a certain time and place and being rensponsible for the pollinprocess. I dont know how this is today, regarding military officials but this is one way I guess to handle them. All this being said you dont have the same ballot in all states so perhaps all this is easier said than done.

I am highly sceptical about electronic voting and would e.g. never support something like that being taken up here without a printed confirmation of the vote being given. Even though machines and computers make our lives easier in many ways they are prone to errors and are very easily manipulated. Therefore I personally trust the human hand better to count my vote marked with a pen or pencil by my own hand rather than a click of a computer.

I would also like to stress that the key issue in my opinion is the votersregistry. It needs to be changed from people having to register on it to a system where some federal or state agency will automatically update the registry with the names of those newly eligable to vote.