There is no confidence in the US regarding EITHER the counting OR the maintenance of the rolls. Parties in power purge the rolls of voters known to be for party-not-in-power so regularly it's not even addressed by the courts any more, and NEGATIVE votes for candidates have been known to be certified as true by authorities who coincidentally are activists for other candidates in the election.
There are several collection methods that preserve the secret ballot but allow auditability of election results. Until one of those are mandated in the US, no one in the free world should consider any US election (whether for mayor or president) "honest and fair" in any sense of the terms. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Raph Frank Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [EM] Question on RCV/IRV multi-seat method used in Minneapolis On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 9:25 PM, Kathy Dopp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> This is similar in Ireland, confidence in the count is high. The >> electoral register on the other hand isn't trusted quite so much. > > Unfortunately in most US states, we have utterly SECRET ballot > security procedures and no publicly verifiable ballot reconciliation, > so that no one can know if the ballots have been tampered with, > substituted, properly handled, or what. Secret ballot security measures are clearly a bad idea, especially if they are the only measures. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
