What I failed to understand is why only in the US the voting procedure is so controversial. Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. It's funny that the US criticized that EU countries were getting less democratic. Well, at least those countries have a much more sane voting process.
> Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism.
This characterization is reductive and basically a straw-man.
The principle underlying opposition to "counting in one day" is basically that every vote that is correctly placed in time should be counted, and as many people as possible should have access to voting. Mail-in voting, for example, has been shown to increase voter turnout by making voting more convenient, but you have the question of what to do with ballots that are received late. There are pretty good arguments for counting all mail-in ballots that are postmarked before the election, and I don't think "xenophobia" is among them.
In America specifically, all decisions relating to access to voting are considered against a backdrop of our widespread and systematic attempt to restrict voting. A modern example of this is related to wide disparity in the number of polling places, and therefore the amount of time required to vote, in "urban" regions of some southern states as compared to rural regions.
I have never heard of a racism-based opposition to paper ballots. I think you just made that up.
There are historical factors that contribute to those things you brought up. American minorities are disproportionately affected by things like limited hours, for example. You'd know that if you were an American POC.
GP has also taken these issues and personalized them. They're about impact and access, not whether the person raising the idea is racist or a xenophobe or whatever.
You'll find those claims in sibling comments to yours, so they are clearly pretty real!
(At the time of writing this comment there's a sibling claiming that the comment cannot possibly understand this POV because they are not "an American POC.")
The specific comment by popalchemist you're referring to is actually fine (they're talking about voter suppression, which is a problem in the US), and isn't at all one of the claims that hintymad says people are making.
Politicians just use those accusations as cover for conducting fraud or enabling the conditions that they inherently benefit from. There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.
> There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.
Sure there is. ID checks make it impossible for people who don't have government-issued ID to vote, which is a lot of people; and furthermore ID checks don't actually improve election security. Same-day counting is impossible if you are going to count all mail-in votes that were sent before the deadline.
To be clear, I'm not saying that politicians aren't agitating for conditions that benefit them. That's there job. But I also believe in supporting access to voting and fair elections, and at least some of the politicians' arguments help achieve those ends.
Yeah, I forgot voter ID. All democratic countries mandate voter ID except the US and another couple(?). Yeah, as if only the US has the "voter access" problem
There are many reasons not to do those things, "lalala not listening" isn't an excuse.
It's usually very simple, too. For voting ID: ID isn't evenly distributed, and that's not an opinion, that's a fact.
So if you require ID, then obviously you will suppress some demographics more than others. That creates a bias. Again, not opinion.
This can be solved. You will notice none of the people championing voter ID make even a thinly-veiled attempt to solve it. Instead they say stupid things like "oh wow so black people can't get ID now? Uh, buddy, I think YOU'RE the racist one!"
I think these claims are badly miscontrued at best, and match one party's outlook. The Republican Party has tried inhibiting voting in ways that benefit them, often by making it more difficult for minorities to vote.
Many of those tactics existed on a large scale in the South before the Voting Rights Act, and when the Supreme Court recently invalidated the Act, many have returned. For example, reducing voting locations in minority areas so people have to travel far and wait longer. Texas and possibly other states have criminalized errors in voter registration (iirc), making it dangerous to register voters. Georgia, and others, conducted a large-scale purge of voting rolls, requiring people to re-register. Requiring government-issued ID prevents many people from voting, often poor people and immigrants who lack what wealthier people are accustomed to. Florida's voters passed a ballot measure enabling ex-felons to vote; the Republicans added a law requiring full restitution to be paid (iirc) before they could vote, effectively canceling the ballot measure vote. And these days almost any Democratic victory is called fraud; remember the 2000 election, the lawsuits, riots, threats against ordinary citizens working on local election boards and on elections, etc.
Directly addressing the parent's claims: I've never heard of paper votes being called racism - could you share something with us? Calls to limit counting are often accompanied by calls to limit the voting period, invalidate votes received later (e.g., due to US mail delays), and calls to greatly restrict mail-in voting - all things that make it more difficult for people working two-three jobs.
The Democrats have their flaws; I've never seen them try to limit voting. That should be something everyone in the US - and in the world - agrees on: Do all we can to enable everyone to vote.
> Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting?
Why do either of these matter? If you assume paper voting in-person is secure, then there is zero reason to also limit the time spent counting or the time window for counting. Anything past that point is clearly trying to fill some sort of agenda for the sake of disenfranchising people who cannot adhere to the times you're trying to set.
Surely what you want is to enable everyone to vote, and then to count all the votes?
In the UK where I have most experience of this stuff, there are many, many small polling stations, and usually you just walk right in and vote without queueing. The longest I ever had to wait to vote was about 30 minutes. Votes are counted locally and results usually declared within a handful of hours. Some take longer due to recounts etc if the tally is very close in a certain area, but the whole thing is pretty uncontroversial and pretty low-effort.
Here in Australia, voting is compulsory, it's always on a Saturday, and there's usually a charity sausage-sizzle at the polling place, it's sorta fun. And again, AFAICT (I'm not a citizen yet) the infrastructure is over-provisioned so people aren't waiting around forever.
From what I hear about the US, in some places voting can take hours, it seems like the number of polling places is deliberately limited to make it hard for people to vote, and you have those weird/horrible rules cropping up like it being illegal to hand out water to people in line, which seems purely designed to discourage electoral participation. And then you have all these calls to stop the count after a certain time etc.
It's deeply weird from an outside perspective. If counts are taking too long, if people are having trouble voting, provision more... but of course it seems clear that there are motives for underprovisioning, because one or other group thinks it will benefit them.
