COVID-19 pandemic has been dragging on for months by now, with no end in sight. This means that having elections in the middle of a pandemic becomes a necessity. And yesterday we had elections where I live.
Well, we were supposed to have this election back in spring. However, with COVID-19 cases on the rise, nobody wanted to have an election back then. So it was postponed. This is the land of coalition governments, so everybody is already used to having no functioning government for a while every now and then. It’s not like a city cannot survive for four months without a major (we survived).
In my part of the world, COVID-19 cases dropped by the beginning of summer. Closing international borders, testing, contact tracing, practicing social distancing, mandatory quarantines for everybody who is either infected, has been abroad, or has been in contact with somebody infected—it all works, which by now is no surprise for anybody. Anyway, back in June social distancing rules were relaxed and international borders were opened. And no, it wasn’t the result of some politician wanting to pander to populism or worrying about stock markets. Here ministers of health are expected to have a degree in medicine and responses to emergencies are managed by people who have a clue what they are doing. Deciding how strict social distancing rules and travel restrictions you should have is a tradeoff between reducing the number of infections and not totally paralyzing the economy. When the rules got relaxed, the number of new infections increased a little, but so far it remains stable. Here’s the graph:
Daily confirmed COVID-19 cases in Latvia.
Anyway, the day for the postponed election finally arrived.
The main election day was Saturday, 29th August. But polling stations were open also for a few days in advance. Normally this is to make sure that people who cannot vote on Saturday are given a chance to do so in advance. This time the main purpose was to reduce crowding—more hours during which people can vote means fewer people inside the polling station at any given moment.
Citizens were also encouraged to take their own pens and face masks to the polling station. At the entrance, there were bottles of hand sanitizer, plastic gloves and also face masks for everybody who had forgotten to arrive with their own mask. People who didn’t have their own pen with them could take a pen, which had to be deposited in a large box after usage so that workers could sanitize these pens before letting the next voter touch them.
Here we have paper ballots. Unlike voting machines, they cannot malfunction or get hacked. Observers are allowed to watch while the votes are getting counted. Political parties usually send their members to polling stations as observers. When numerous people with different preferred election outcomes all sit in the same room while votes are being counted, it becomes impossible for a single person to manipulate the result. Anyway, this is how ballots look like.
Each ballot is for one of the parties. Pick one party, add “+” to candidates you like and strike out candidates you dislike, put the ballot in an envelope, then put said envelope in the ballot box. Previous years there were individual cabins with fabric curtains so that each voter could pick and fill out their ballot in secrecy. Of course, this time fabric curtains were not an option—everybody would touch them and sanitizing those would be impossible. Instead we had cardboard walls and we filled out our ballots while facing the wall.
On the floor, there was tape indicating where people could stand while waiting in lines (not that there were any when I voted). Basically, you had to keep a two meter distance from other people.
Obviously, workers covered their faces and wore disposable gloves. They also regularly sanitized all the surfaces that voters touched.
Inside a polling station. Image from here.
Whenever I read other Freethoughblogs bloggers writing about elections in the USA, I have to conclude that theirs is not a civilized country. Anything similar to gerrymandering cannot happen here—the party or candidate who gets the most votes wins regardless of where each voter lives.
Here a huge emphasis is placed on making sure that every citizen can vote. People who don’t have a passport are given special voter cards for free. Prison inmates can vote from inside the prisons. Sick people can vote from their homes. No politician would even think about proposing some law that makes it impossible for some group of citizens to cast their vote.
Voting from home means that a poll worker arrives to your chosen address with the ballots, an empty envelope, and the ballot box. This year, when visiting voters who were either confirmed to have COVID-19 or in home quarantine due to having been abroad or in contact with COVID-19 infected patients, poll workers arrived covered from head to toe in personal protective equipment, which they disinfected after every visited address.
Now that this election is over, I’m looking forwards to seeing how it will impact the number of COVID-19 cases. I really hope that safety measures were adequate and sufficient.
By the way, here postponing an election was no big deal. I mean, it was very unusual, but nobody worried that having an election a few months later once COVID-19 cases have dropped could result in a coup d’état or anything else that was terrible and unconstitutional. Back in spring, everybody agreed that waiting for a while was the reasonable thing to do. I must admit that I was surprised when I saw Americans getting worried about the mere suggestion that an election could be postponed. Then again, many Americans seem adamant to refuse to even wear face masks, never mind any harsher social distancing measures. If the number of COVID-19 cases fails to noticeably drop, there is no point postponing an election anyway.
In my state in Germany we’ll have local elections in September.
I expect the the procedure at the polling station, with or without the pandemic, was and will be not much different from Latvia.
But I haven’t been to a polling station in many years. Voting by letter is trouble-free, and it gives you ample time to look over and fill out the ballot papers on your own pace.
So, a few days ago I dropped the letter with the filled-out forms into the town hall’s letter box on my evening walk.
And of course, from decades of experience, I don’t expect any irregularities. At least none that won’t be sorted out within hours, and without major upheaval.
Andreas, there a lot forms in your photo for one Riga city council election. Are those for all of Riga? I can’t imagine they are just for your district/polling station.
@#2
More than a dozen parties participated in the election. Each piece of paper is for one party. At the top is written the party name. Below is a list of up to 63 people who are all members of this party. A voter gets a pile of papers. From this large pile they select one paper with the party they have chosen. On this single paper you can add “+” to candidates you like and strike out candidates you dislike, then you put this one ballot in an envelope, then put said envelope in the ballot box.
The pile of papers in the photo is everything I got. And yes, we waste a lot of paper. They are blank on one side, which is why after elections school teachers tend use these sheets of paper for giving tests to their kids.
Ha! Here, currently, you don’t need either. You do get sent a registration card (not receiving one by a certain date before the election is a good clue you need to get in touch with the electoral registration office fast to find out why), and that is useful to wave at the poll clerks to save a bit of time, but you don’t even need that. Just stating your name and address is enough, usually no need to prove either.
Election fraud, while it does exist, is very low level and nothing that could really affect the integrity of our democracy as a whole:
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/our-views-and-research/our-research/electoral-fraud-data
Of course that fact doesn’t get in the way of the current tories trying to introduce requirements for photographic government-issued ID for voting. (Every bad idea the US has, we try to import 5 years later.) Of course that is all about reducing the (almost non-existent) levels of voting fraud and nothing to do with making it harder to vote for a bunch of poor non-tory voters who can’t afford such ID (it currently costs £75.50 to renew your passport, and no, it’s not one of the things people on low incomes or benefits get any assistance with.)
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/campaigns/upgrading-our-democracy/voter-id/
I’m wondering how the winner is determined. Is a plus sign worth +1, a strike-out worth −1, and the absence of any mark worth 0? Or something like that? And what determines how many candidates from each party get seats?
(I’m assuming that Latvia has a parliament with a coalition of several parties ruling. Is that right?)
(Ah, I thought I might be mistaken there: £75.50 for online application. Applications on paper are £85 which is what I was going to say before I googled it. Of course when I applied for my first adult passport, it was only £21. The rise is more than double inflation over the period.)
I am too very glad that when the process was being decided in CZ after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was decided to NOT go with the USA or UK models of voting districts, and “winner takes all” in them. That way we have avoided a two-party system (so far) and even smaller parties have had and remain to have some influence on policy. Which is good, even though some of the small parties are decidedly bad. So far no party has managed to get such a huge minority that they could ignore everyone else and do as they please, not for long anyway.
We receive voting balots per mail too. And since every citizen is issued a free-of-cost citizen ID, identification is not an issue and I have never even heard of voter fraud. During the election people simply go to the polling place, show their ID, the clerk checks them against the list, they cast the vote and that’s it done. If voter fraud happens, it is on such a small scale that it is not even worth the headline.
Ooooh I like that you can choose to vote for specific candidates within the party you vote for. The only time we have had preferential voting was for the European Parliament elections and then you put the parties in your preferred order, but the party chooses the order of the party list and the top how ever many are elected. We can’t say “no I do not want this person to represent me” without voting against their party, which is not ideal with parties that are traditionally quite broad.
Hmmmn I am now wondering if we got some sort of preferential voting for the “city” mayors or for the political police commisioners (or whatever their proper title is), can’t remember, can’t be bothered to look it up, sorry.
billseymour @#5
How many seats each party gets depends on how many people voted for said party. For example, this time, the winning party got 26.16% of all the votes, and this landed them 18 seats.
The party as a whole gets 18 seats, but more than 18 people from this party participated in the election. Which party members get a seat depends on how many “+” marks or strikeouts each individual person got.
Yep, we always get lots of parties.
xohjoh2n @#4
I strongly prefer people getting free voter cards/ID cards/passports/whatever instead of being able to vote without proving their identity in any way whatsoever.
But yes, when you have a society in which poorer people don’t have passports or whatever other identification document, then you cannot deny the right to vote to people without said document.
Why? We obviously don’t need it.
Our levels of voter fraud are negligible. If there’s an allegation, or an identified problem (they do of course have a list of registered voters at each polling station and you’re crossed off when you turn up: attempting to use someone’s vote twice would be *noticed* and does not work) it’s investigated and dealt with.
As I see it we have a severity of enforcement balanced to the scale of the problem – that is, low and low – and in return we achieve almost no barriers to the actions of legitimate voters.
xohjoh2n @#12
In Latvia I cannot even pick up my mail without showing my passport/ID card to the post worker. Nor can I enter many office buildings as a guest without showing my identification to the guard. And whenever I go to a doctor, the person who registers patients will ask to see my passport (for the purpose of record keeping and preparing papers for insurance companies). Here people do not trust each other to not lie about their identity.
Back in USSR times, it was extremely common for people to vote in their family members’ place (everybody was expected to show up and dutifully vote for the Communist Party while in practice most people had no free time/desire to drag their asses to the polling station, so it was a custom for a single person to vote for their entire family). If it were possible for people to vote without showing a passport in Latvia, then (1) nobody would trust election results, because everyone would be convinced that people are voting for their family members; (2) at least some people would vote for their politically inactive family members.
Moreover, I do think that it is in general beneficial for a country to make sure that every citizen has a passport/ID card. These papers are useful for various purposes—banks have to make sure that their client who wants a loan is who they claim to be, government has to make sure that the person who wants to register a sale of their real estate isn’t actually somebody else, etc. Never mind traveling. In practice, you can make sure that everybody can get a passport by making passports cheap so that also poorer people can get them. (This is what we have in Latvia, every person is required by law to have some identification document, and everyone also has it.) Once everybody has some kind of identification document anyway, you might as well use those things for an election.
Also, people in different cultures have different levels of tolerance for voter fraud. It sounds that for you “negligible, not enough to influence election results” is good enough. In my culture even a single person managing to successfully commit voter fraud is unacceptable and makes newspaper headlines. Here we have zero tolerance for voter fraud even when it is minor.
There’s also a cultural desire to make every system safe in order to make fraud or theft as hard to commit as reasonably possible. Here people don’t trust each other and always expect that somebody will try to do something illegal. For example, if post workers left boxes in front of doors, a few would get stolen. This is perceived as unacceptable here, so instead everybody has to show their passport to the post worker before getting a box of their online purchases. By the way, I do perceive this as convenient—if I buy online some sex toys, my mother who lives in the same address won’t accidentally get the box before me. Alternatively, doctors have to check that the person with whom they are talking really is who they claim to be. Again, since I keep some medical secrets from my family members, I am glad that doctors cannot accidentally reveal facts from my medical history to somebody who claims to be me in a phone conversation. Same goes for banks where employees won’t even talk with a person who cannot show their passport/ID card.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of habit. I am used to living in a society in which systems are designed as safe as reasonably possible. I am also used to carrying around my ID card whenever necessary, so I don’t perceive that as uncomfortable. If I had to live in a different society in which strangers trust each other’s claims more casually, I would need a lot of time to get used to it, and I’d feel uncomfortable and worry about how trust can get abused.
Of course, I understand that societies differ. If different cultural expectations and safety standards work for your society, that’s fine.
Yeah, that’s bad – that *always* results in causing bigger problems. There is always an enforcement/tolerance tradeoff for every problem and zero isn’t even achievable and you destroy yourselves if you can’t accept that.
And we don’t tolerate it at all: when discovered it’s taken very seriously. Prosecutions and convictions do happen. There’s just no need for more vigorous enforcement because the problem is so minor already.
xohjoh2n @#15
No. Giving voter cards to every citizen for free does not cause “bigger problems.” It’s not that hard or expensive to print those things. Making sure that there are observers in every polling station who watch the election process and vote counting is not “bad.” It is perfectly possible to design a system that minimizes voter fraud while making sure that every citizen has an opportunity to cast their vote.
Choosing to make passports expensive and asking people to pay for them from their own pocket is a political decision, and some countries have instead chosen to make identification papers free/cheap and accessible for everybody.
From where did you get the silly idea that minimizing/eliminating voter fraud must always cause bigger problems or be bad?
Granted, even in a well designed system there’s usually room for human error and workers who do various jobs at the polling station can occasionally make a mistake. So yeah, having zero problems is practically impossible to achieve. But it is pretty simple to design a relatively foolproof system in which people cannot easily vote for their family members.
Like I said, this is a cultural difference. If I were living in your country, I’d be horrified about how it can be so easy to vote for your friends and family members. I’m willing to accept your claim that it seems to work in your society, but don’t try telling me that your way of doing things is correct and that my preference for a safer voting system is “unnecessary,” “bad” or “causes bigger problems” when that’s clearly not the case.
Like I said, here voter cards are given for free to all people who don’t have a passport, and every single citizen can cast their vote if they choose to do so. And they cannot vote for their friends and family members, because voters’ identities do get checked. It’s not rocket science. Your claim that safer voting systems “*always* results in causing bigger problems” is factually incorrect.
By the way, if I had to choose between a bit of voter fraud versus preventing poor people who have no identification papers from voting, I would of course choose to accept a bit of voter fraud. But this is a false dilemma—instead it is perfectly possible to just give poor people free/cheap identification papers.
(Your answer deserves a more thorough personal response, which I will get round to, however while in off-hours I watched this which is relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kmXpMhZqOg
)