I watched a Taiwanese election in Taiwan. I observed their polling stations. A Taiwanese citizen started a conversation and educated me, an American, on democracy and elections.
This Taiwanese person told me that elections are for the loser. If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election. Electronic voting machines exchange trust for a more efficient election. That is why Taiwan does not use electronic voting machines.
That is a pretty impressive insight that was absent from my American civic education. I was very impressed with the civic education in Taiwan, and I was impressed with the average level of education in Taipei.
My subjective experience as an American was that Democracy is more healthy in Taiwan than it is in America.
Have to agree, from study in Taiwan, life in the PRC, Hong Kong, and South Korea over decades: democracy in Taiwan is healthier than that in the U.S.
For the skeptical, check out videos of how ballots are counted in Taiwan. Individual ballots are lifted out on the ballot box, one-by-one, and held up for any and all observers to verify. Compare this to how the matter is typically conducted in the U.S., in near-secrecy behind closed doors, involving convoluted use of a congeries of machines, having closed-source software.
every single election in the US is subject to a complete audit after the fact. counting quickly and verifying accurately after the fact are not mutually exclusive.
If you're an American, you'll be all too aware of what a mess the US electoral system is, subject to varying rules across thousands of jurisdictions, large and small, and involving now prolonged "early voting", "absentee voting" for a wide variety of reasons, mail in ballots only for some states, little or no ID verification for some states, outdated voter rolls, legal "ballot harvesting" etc.
Growing up we used to politely nod at the common belief that the 1960 presidential race (Kennedy vs. Nixon) was decided by Mayor Daley's corrupt intervention in Chicago. And, of course, the wild 2000 Gore vs. Bush race decided in Florida further eroded hugely trust in the electoral system. And etc. etc.
Considering how close you came to a coup and how the elected president could spend months trying to destroy democracy while also personally using his power and influence to try to sway local officials, it doesn’t seem like the complete audit isn’t really helping. Especially when 40%+ of the population thinks those audits are manufactured lies from main stream media.
How is the coup narrative so pervasive? There was no institutional support, nobody got killed except for a rioter, they all cleared out promptly by curfew. By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
We know what rioters are capable of when they actually want to overthrow govt: look at the autonomous zones and capitals that got ransacked in the upper north west (Seattle, Portland, etc). Those were over weeks where cops weren't allowed into entire city blogs, they declared themselves autonomous, and people were killed to that ends. They also received tons of institutional support from media, politicians, and wealthy people.
I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup. At LEAST the other riots were coups too, or more truly, only the leftist partisan riots can be considered attempted local coups given their stated goals and actions.
If you remember how the narrative evolved in real-time: in the preceding months the talking point was "only leftists riot", then on the capital riot and following days, the dominant narrative was "SEE! right wing people ALSO riot". Only days after that did the language start to coalesce around "actually this was was a COUP", and even then it was seen as hyperbolic even on reddit. Now it's been repeated so many times it's just taken as fact.
Even a successful coup is possible with no one getting killed;
> they all cleared out promptly by curfew
Because the coup attempt had already failed.
> By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
“Coup” is not defined by intensity but by objective. The overtly intent was to use intimidation and/or violence against government officials to coerce a rejection of the electoral votes from sufficient states to allow the sitting President to extend his term nothwithstanding having been defeated in the election, at the instigation of the sitting President. It is a textbook autocoup attempt by its goals and ultimate instigation, which failed because the rioters were held back long enough for members of Congress to escape, but not by a wide margin.
Was it a hastily conceived, poorly coordinated, amateurish autocoup attempt? Yes, absolutely. Does that reduce its severity as a crime? No, no it doesn’t.
> I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup.
It was a coup attempt, specifically an attempted autocoup. It wasn't a coup, because it failed.
> At LEAST the other riots were coups
No, none of those were coups, or even coup attempts. (The “Autonomous Zone” might be viewed as a hyperlocalized secession attempt, but that’s a distinct thing from a coup, seeking to separate territory from the control of an established government, not unlawfully take or extend control of said government.)
Why did the "coup" fail? We've all seen the videos, police never really showed up in force, army never showed up, national guard never showed up. It ended because...people went home. If it were actually an attempted coup, why didn't they dig in? Why didn't a single politician back them?
You just seem convinced of a coup and nothing will shake you. What did they do that was wholly different from a regular riot? Even on the inside they're just taking photos and walking around.
I think you are oriented for defending the American election. I think a better way to orient is to compare how Taiwanese elections are run to how American elections are run.
My assertion is that Taiwanese elections are much more simple and therefore much more understandable and much more trustable. American elections might be cheaper per capita.
If we are choosing a method of elections that is more complex and results in less trust, why are we doing it that way?
In many places in the US you cannot bring your children with you to vote. So many people rely on public schools as day care so that they can vote. In places that cancelled school on election day recently (people vote at schools often, and there were security concerns after recent shootings), the voter turnout was lower in segments of the population that statistically are less likely to have family/partner available to watch children, or the means to pay for childcare.
I think it is fair to restate that your argument is: "Because there are classes of people who cannot vote because children are restricted in voting areas, election day should not be a federal holiday."
I am having a little trouble taking that in good faith. For one, the evidence presented is not of a holiday shared by everyone (friends who could watch kids, partners who also have jobs, etc).
That's before asking if it's right that children cannot be with you to vote or if that could be done better. That's before asking if there was higher turnout in other groups, like underpaid teachers.
That really wasn't my argument at all. In so far as I had one. The US system has so many more severe issues that a holiday seems minor and it is somewhat complex as an issue. Letting a parent bring in five children probably does create concerns as well.
Other than bankers and people who work for the government (like teachers) few people get government holidays in my experience. There is a surge of temporary daycare workers for those days so parents can still go to work. Poorer parents dread those days. Public school, especially post pandemic has turned into free childcare and little more due to teacher shortages.
Early voting seems like a good thing to continue to me.
Fixing the issues that make your vote irrelevant at the national level unless you live anywhere but a very short list of places would be much higher on my list than a holiday. The gerrymandering is painfully obvious on the voting maps.
How hard an election is to rig is not the issue,itshow obviously unriggable it appears to the losing voters. That's the (well, an) important thing the American system is missing.
I disagree. There was no evidence of fraud in 2020, yet the losing party at 80-90% rate still believes it was stolen. At that point, there's nothing that can be done to dissuade.
I thought there was evidence of fraud in 2020, but the problem was that the "evidence" was bogus. One of the complaints I remember was that the results swung sharply from one side to the other at some point in the reporting process, but that of course was because the initial results were from in-person voting, and the mail-in/drop-in votes were counted last, so when those results were added, then suddenly the "blue" candidates were winning, because the red voters tended to vote in-person far more than their blue counterparts. The red voters somehow refuse to believe this however and think the election was rigged.
> If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
The idea seems correct, however, unsure how electronic voting machine comes into the picture, perhaps only in a mental sense, but people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
there's that, but an electronic voting machine is more complex. Election fraud for paper ballots is "easily" detected, but not really so for electronic voting machines.
This might sound snide, but I assure you I am asking in good faith to prove a point. What does it mean to audit the election, without skipping the complexity?
A few questions I would expect to be answered:
How do we know all votes cast were legitimate?
How do we know that the voting machines recorded votes correctly?
How do we know the auditors are good faith actors?
How do we know ballots weren't lost/delayed (mail in)?
How do we know legitimate looking votes were cast by the right person?
My overall assertion is not that we can't know. It's that voting is so complex that this can't be easily explained in a satisfying way to (or by) a layman. It's so complex that "trust" is a core part of the election process.
Should I have to take a quarter long class in election mechanics to be satisfied that our voting system is legitimate? That's a bit of hyperbole, but I truly don't know how our elections work and I don't think I could understand them in an afternoon and it doesn't have to be that way.
Taiwan's elections are simple and self-evident. American elections are extremely complex and require trust in institutions.
Taiwan's elections optimize for trust. America's elections optimize for cost. Trust is priceless.
I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
> I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
Every electronic vote has a physical record, and is checked against each other. Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election.
Ok, a global wikipedia article. Is there any example in the US of fraud existing at a scale that once audited could have changed the outcome on an election?
That's an hour long technical read. Do you think your average person with high school or a GED as their highest level of education or less, ~40% of the country, is going to be able to read such a meaty document and make sense of it?
8% of Americans are basically illiterate. 54% read below a 6th grade level.
I am not trying to attack you with that statement. This is a statement form one liberal to someone else I perceive as liberal leaning:
Your education privilege is off the charts.
We could have a system like Taiwan, but instead we have an electronic voting system. How do they compare and contrast? Why were electronic voting machines pushed on us? Which one has better understand-ability properties? Which one has better trust properties? What are the properties of electronic voting machines that make them desirable? Why do we have to convince people that voting machines are good (implying a lot of people don't think they are)?
Fully electronic voting cannot be inspected sufficiently to audit. Too many points of failure, too many blackboxes, no way to detect failures.
This has been thoroughly, repeatedly, exhaustively researched and debated. Which is why most jurisdictions (in the USA) have returned to paper ballots.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
This is misleading. The vast majority will have had no exposure to that evidence (there's no big stage you can do convincing presentations on that everyone will see).
Heck, I wouldn't know how to go about finding that evidence atm.
Democracy is about submission of the minority. To believe in democracy means to believe that when you are in the minority, you must submit to things you disagree with. There is grey area around human rights and bad faith legislation/corruption.
If I don't trust the election, that means I don't believe I'm actually in the minority, and if I don't believe I am in the minority, then I am being subjugated and oppressed by people who are using power to get their way rather than a mandate from the people to execute the people's will.
I am extremely liberal and Trump is the avatar of everything that I hate, but I don't believe the election is legitimate either. A sitting president called an election official to sway the election, and 2 years later it's not clear there are going to be any consequences. The mechanics of mail in ballots was messed with during an election cycle, and the person who did that is still in control of the postal system. If there are no timely consequences for attempting to cheat, how can you trust the integrity of the system? I don't. There are clearly no checks and balances for actual and obvious attempts to manipulate elections.
I think you can talk to just about anyone who works in security and they will tell you there is no reason to trust voting machines. On slashdot, the technical community nearly universally said "this is a bad idea" when Diebold voting machines were first adopted. That sentiment has been strong through technical communities for a long time. Even today, I think if you asked HN "from a technical point of view are voting machines a good idea?" there would be a resounding, absolutely not.
Because we won, it's less of an issue for us, but had we lost, we would question the results too. We would look around us and experience that no one else liked trump and ask "how can these results be legitimate" too, the same way they look at the people around them and go "everyone liked trump, how can these results be legitimate?" He called a Georgian election official, are we sure that didn't work? Did he call other state's officials and we didn't hear about it because it did work? How do we know? How do we know Biden didn't do that?
Denial is the first stage of grief.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
You are failing to have empathy for these people. Evidence cannot be presented, because the mechanics of elections are not able to produce evidence. I am a well educated US citizen, but I think our elections amount to "trust us." Of course people don't believe evidence presented, because the evidence amounts to "trust us." "Trust this extremely complex system that only a handful of people might know how it functions in depth."
You say "regardless of evidence presented," but what if the system is not actually capable of producing satisfying evidence? What if the evidence is actually not satisfying? What if there were systems that could be satisfying, bit this one isn't able to be?
In Taiwan I could go watch an election and I found the legitimacy of it to be self evident because I found the mechanics of it simple and hard to argue with. I don't think there is anything self-evident about our elections. In America, who runs the voting machines is an important question. In Taiwan, who facilitates the voting stations doesn't make much difference. "Are the voting stations being watched" is an important question in Taiwan. "Are the voting stations being watched" doesn't really make sense here since we have mail in ballots and other methods.
Taiwanese don't have to say "trust us" they can say "go watch the election happen."
A hard pill to swallow for most of liberal America is that conservatives can be right for very wrong reasons. It's easy to say "you don't think the results are legitimate because you lost," it's much harder to say "can somebody in good faith not trust the election results?" "what might we have done to decrease trust in elections?" "Can we make our election system more resistant to claims of bad faith?"
> That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election
Losers who have stopped believing in elections will complain about any mechanism, be it electronic or analog.
(In the US, they typically don't believe the hand-recounts, either. They do believe in gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement, though, so that's how the game gets played.)
I don't live in Taiwan but my impressions - people are a lot more engaged with politics, general political knowledge and awareness is higher, voter turnout is higher - all of these may be as a result of the ever-looming threat of being subsumed by the mainland, but also maybe an enthusiasm for democracy since it's relatively new to the country!
Taiwan has its issues with first past the post voting, quality of news media and control of media (eg by sketchy foreign corporations) and conga line of infotainment propaganda outlets. There's a big economic incentive in reunificiation for some actors which perverts politics and discourse to an extent.
But to be honest.. America is currently a really low bar for democracy in the first place (speaking as someone living outside USA as well)
Thanks for the feedback. For example, the US Congress really could use some of the technical bureaucratic competence I hear Taiwan has. US institutions are in post-WWII lows right now, which is like a moist, dark, sugary place for attracting larger-than-life-personalities to no ultimate good.
As one smart guy wrote, there's three kinds of power: tradition, institutions, and personality. My coralary: weak institutions attract strong personality.
See the other conversation re: China & Taiwan below. It'd be a shame to see a good thing go away.
This Taiwanese person told me that elections are for the loser. If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election. Electronic voting machines exchange trust for a more efficient election. That is why Taiwan does not use electronic voting machines.
That is a pretty impressive insight that was absent from my American civic education. I was very impressed with the civic education in Taiwan, and I was impressed with the average level of education in Taipei.
My subjective experience as an American was that Democracy is more healthy in Taiwan than it is in America.