> To: election-methods <[email protected]> > > On Apr 3, 2011, at 10:10 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: > >> US Electoral College - done with each state done separately, unlike >> most any other election - meaning that various parts are done in >> different ways. > > but not to a significant degree. *every* state, except Maine and > Nebraska, simply award their entire allocation of electoral votes to > the plurality winner in that state. Maine is 4 electoral votes, > Nebraska is currently 5 electoral votes, out of 538.
Each state is done with *very* different ways in that they vary in: 1. who is allowed to vote - many states disenfranchise anyone who has committed a prior felony, even after they've served their time and done probation, 2. many states disenfranchise recent movers and students - anyone who has not lived for at least 30 days at the same address or who does not have a local state driver's license, etc. and other states do not 3. whether or not votes cast in the wrong precinct are still counted in state and federal elections, under what circumstances provisional ballots are counted, how closely the signatures have to match or not... 4. how strict the matching rules are that purge voters from the voter rolls by matching with social security, driver's license, property tax, and other databases (probably depends on the partisanship of the county voters too sadly 5. the extent to which votes are open to fraudulent manipulation - some states use e-ballots which are wide-open to undetectable vote fraud, others use auditable voter marked paper ballots but count them electronically and never audit them, some states do audits of some, but not all of their ballots (neglecting to audit any mail in ballots for instance) and no states audit sufficiently to prevent incorrect outcomes in close contests 6. the extent to which the public is allowed access to electoral records necessary to verify the integrity of the tallies (most states are highly secretive and allow no public verification of ballot security or jurisdiction-wide ballot and voter reconciliation,... 7. states vary widely in which private company they are allowing to count their votes in secret with trade secret software 8. many states have already signed the popular vote compact, which I believe is very unfortunate when states vary so widely in the public verifiability of their election outcome accuracy and so many of them are so hopelessly wide-open to undetectable vote tally manipulation via vote manipulation, ballot box stuffing, ballot substitution, ballot tampering, ballot absconding, failure to count ballots and the like. I agree with you that all states are currently winner-take-all in most state and federal elections, except for NC's one judicial contest which was IRV this year, but probably will never be again. I think the spate of IRV adoption is going to, unfortunately sour the public on the idea of any more fair, auditable electoral methods due to its many vagaries. Regards, -- Kathy Dopp http://electionmathematics.org Town of Colonie, NY 12304 "One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the discussion with true facts." Fundamentals of Verifiable Elections http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?p=174 Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf View some of my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1451051 ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
