Mon 3 Dec 2007
Here’s a premise: somehow, some organization manages to subvert the voting machines used in the US Presidential general election in November, 2008. The vote is not just fixed, it is broken — some viable candidate is handed an implausible 99% vote, or Snoopy is elected by write-in vote; something so audacious that it’s clear that the folks involved had no intention of fooling anyone.
So, it’s Wednesday morning, November 5th, and tens of millions of votes have just been mooted and the voting systems discredited. What now? What happens?
(Inspired by this deleted Ask Metafilter question; hat tip to brina.)
Posted by Josh Millard24 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
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December 15th, 2007 at 9:38 pm[...] What would follow an utter subversion of national election results? [...]
WAIT! Before we start: BIG clarification: is it broken in an implausible way that supports none of the major candidates (Snoopy wins), or in a way that supports one of the candidates (Hillary Clinton gets 98% of the vote)? That will make a BIG, BIG difference to how this gets answered.
Intentionally left ambiguous. Pick one and run with it; personally, I’m curious about both angles.
My first-blush thought was that with a crushing landslide win for a viable candidate, no one would pin it on the candidate’s party because it’d be such an inept attempt to “cheat” that no one would dare associate it with their own campaign: ergo, it must be some independent group, whether it’s Hillary or Rudy or Snoopy that gets the impossible votes.
But I may be too comfy in my own presumptions there: what if someone on a major campaign tried to fix the vote but their fix was broken? So for the sake of the intent of the question, let’s say it’s the Snoopy scenario that I personally favor. But I think it’d be great to explore either side of the fence.
Actually, good point. If the race were neck and neck, and then the results came in showing one candidate with 65%, then there might be a lot of backlash at the candidate for fixing the results. Once we’re talking 98%, then people wouldn’t blame the candidate directly (though, of course, there would be lots of “the hackers who did this are the exact kind of immoral anti-democratic people that CandidateX attracts!” rhetoric). So, on a practical level, while Snoopy would result in less mud-slinging than Clinton or McCain, other than that there probably wouldn’t be too many differences.
With a win by that far, even the winning candidate would admit that there was a problem, so I can’t see them attempting to block any investigations or demanding that they get the Presidency, because “that’s what the vote said”. Both would request an investigation. Reporters would start out with lots of stammering and disbelief, and then have a heyday coming up with slogans (”Snoopygate”, “Presidential Elhacktion”) and graphics. People supporting each candidate would blame the other (”McCain won because hackers rigged the election for him!” “No, it was Obama supporting hackers who did it to make McCain look bad!”). The candidates would be a little reserved in their comments, because they wouldn’t want to go on the attack until they knew whose supporters did it, or (if not due to hacking) what happened. Both would be unified on the idea that this was a crime of the grandest scale, fucking with an election. There would be an inquisition, and it would probably move pretty fast, because the issue would be too big to side-line or drag out (like hanging chads). Political comedians would be in heaven. You know how people put up little daily polls (”The new Naruto: Love it? Hate it?) on their blogs? There would be a fad of putting up rigged polls as a joke on one’s own homepages.
What happens next comes down to what the cause was. If it were in any way remotely electronic, there would be immediate demands for a stop-gap paper-only election. No punch cards or scantrons or anything. If it were non-electronic, and the actual (real) election results were stored somewhere, they’d be recounted and those results used (and probably contested by the losing party based on some random spurious claim).
Oh, and if the cause could not be determined? Religious folks would say it was the hand of God.
This is why people who mess with elections always try to make it look close.
As others have said, it seems to me an election that everyone admitted was broken could and would be addressed pretty quickly by an act of Congress or executive fiat—even the procedure for a federal electoral “redo” doesn’t actually exist, if the screwed-uppedness of the election results isn’t in dispute they could get away with just declaring it null and void. The question only gets interesting when one side believes the results are suspect while the other party denies this—and in this case, historically, the answer appears to be “Declare one person the winner as quickly as you can and then stop talking about it.”
I don’t see how there’s any way that this gets resolved in the 41 days before the electoral college meets, so it seems like a lot of this depends on the forces that constrain the choosing of electors. I wonder if a state legislature could abrogate the elected slate and substitute its own choices? They’d certainly have to in the Snoopy scenario since there wouldn’t be any slate of electors at all.
Let me put on my cynical hat for a second:
There would be an immediate and thorough investigation of the causes. After all, if you don’t know exactly what went wrong the first time, and did a reelection the same way, there is the possibility that it could happen again, or, worse, if it was a hacker who did something wrong by landsliding, he could refine his technique and make the second result also improper but not noticeably.
So the investigation would take some time, and then a new mechanism (which avoided whatever went wrong the first time) would have to be proposed and debated. This would also take time. Eventually, the reelection would take place, because it needs to before the end of the current president’s term. But there would be aspects of the new procedure which each party would think need fixing, but there not being enough time to agree on a fix, would go in unfixed. Then, whichever party was elected would be satisfied with the new reelection results, and then the other party would declare that the reelection was invalid because of whatever aspect they were unsatisfied with, and would demand a recount / more time for a new procedure / etc.
This would be immediately construed as terrorism, regardless of the particular way the vote was manipulated. Initially, states would likely be left to their own devices to try to fix the problem, but after the hundreds or thousands of lawsuits that would result had been appealed up to the supreme court, in addition to the general civil unrest that would be almost inevitable, there would be a huge amount of pressure for the federal government to step in. The actual details of federal involvement wouldn’t matter much, since the election results would always be suspect no matter who ended up in office. This would lead quite naturally to centralized federal control of elections, granted willingly by a public worried about the possibility of an additional electoral attack. It’d probably require an amendment to the Constitution, but in the aftermath of Snoopygate, amendments would be easy to come by. The net result would be that the federal gov’t would be responsible for running elections, in the name of protecting individual rights. Ironically, the creation of a centralized election bureau would likely facilitate future vote manipulation.
My god this is so simple and obvious, it’s scary. As he did in the past two presidential elections (okay, okay…”allegedly”), G. W. Bush will tamper with the voting process. But instead of suppressing Democratic voters or getting SCOTUS to implant him, he’ll hash a deal with Diebold to engineer a 100% vote (99% is for pussies) for a candidate–any candidate, party doesn’t matter–and declare martial law in the wake of the outcry.
With martial law in place, his final solution for democracy in this country can finally unfold. All liberal voters are quarantined (you didn’t really think your vote was secret, did you?) in Californian internment camps where Schwarzenegger is upgraded from Governor to Territory Warden, a new DHS post. Satellite internment camps are set up in places like Cambridge, New Haven and Boston, and other former havens of left thought; the camps leave large metropolises like New York and Chicago balkanized. Complete control of radical thinkers is of course not possible, nor desirable. They will have their part in his grand drama.
The border between the U.S. and Mexico is finally walled (doubly so, topped with razor wire and with a half-mile landmined zone between each fence). Canada is suspected of sending insurgents into U.S. territory to alter our elections and soon U.S. troops amass along the 49th Parallel; naval blockades fill the great lakes and air force failsafes are set up over Seattle, Helena, International Falls, Sault Ste. Marie, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo and Portland. Tensions between the two nations rise despite Acting President Bush’s declarations that he would like to find a diplomatic end to the standoff.
Meanwhile, rebels still in the “free zone” perform bombings of federal buildings and other subversive acts. One bombing either goes wrong or is staged by the government itself and seventy-seven civilians are killed as a car bomb goes off outside the Atlanta FBI field office. Bush goes on television alluding to proof that these terrorists came from the California internment zone (but Schwarzenegger is still doing a heckuva job) and he gives the order to strike. Twenty B-2 bombers take flight and over the course of two weeks level every building between San Diego and Crescent City. With our air fleet stretched to its max, he stubbornly gives the order to simultaneously invade Canada. The war lasts twelve years and claims 60,000 American lives and uncountable Canadian civilians.
/paranoia
This has been worth it for ‘Snoopygate’ alone.
I have no idea how the USian election system works so I’ll wait for another less USian-centric question.
If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
From the 20th amendment to the constitution; when congress meets to ratify the election on January 3rd they would select a president or set out the process for redoing the election. It would be a partisan mess, though.
I am tempted to submit this question to an actual legal scholar or at least a legal researcher. perhaps a service like yahoo answers might provide some clue. how about collecting some dough for an answer? you *know* there has to be a clear-cut answer out there.
also: snoopy would make one hell of a president.
look at how he took care of that red baron. osama has nothing on that guy.
As for the reaction of the US population to the results, there would be a few calls for a return to paper ballots, but they would be drowned out by those calling for a technological fix, as well as increased calls for mandatory voter ID laws.
I think something similar to what march_hare described would happen if Snoopy won the popular vote. Someone would do this to demonstrate how vulnerable the current voting system is, and the result would be panic. Given the close ties between the companies producing the electronic machines that we use in the US and the GOP, I imagine the fallout would be dominated by a lot of demonizing from them (”Cyberterrorists have attacked our democracy! We must act to secure the vote! The liberals who oppose ID requirements at the polls are soft on cybersecurity and would hand our freedom over to any terrorist with a laptop.”) and counter arguments accusing the machine producers of doing unacceptably sloppy work and helping the GOP skew the vote in past elections (”Votes for sale. GOP has friends in polling places.”).
Unfortunately before the do-over vote there’d probably be a successful push to make voting more “secure” in a way that would really just skew access even more. Think GOP challengers at the polls in predominately black and Democratic areas like in 2004, with long lines and runaround, but this time everyone’s suspected not just of skewing the vote one way but of trying to undermine the entire system. Basically voting would be like going through airport security post 9-11, only instead of having your bag searched to remove nail files and pocketknives, having anything electronic would be a real problem. “No cell phones within 500 feet of the polling place!” Congress would pass a bill to secure the voting process, and depending on how accountable the Diebold et al. were at redirecting blame elsewhere, they might benefit from some government spending or be replaced by someone new.
*shrug*
Life would go on.
I imagine we’d have several United Nations… nations… lining up to bomb the shit out of us and build a functional democracy here, much as we’ve done to so many other countries with far less severe failures of government on their hands.
Snoopy for President!
you all flunk constitution 101 – the presidential electors would decide who the next president was – and the pressure would be probably enormous on those electors to vote for certain candidates other than snoopy or %99 hillary
there is no constitutional requirement that an elector appointed to represent a state actually vote for a certain candidate – and although a few states call for penalties for unfaithful electors, there’s still no means by which their votes could be reversed
so, faced with a win for snoopy, clinton and romney (let’s say) would immediately get their people to twist the arms of those state officials who appoint the electors to represent their state and further pressure the appointees to vote the right way – if, once the electoral college meets and there is no clear winner, the election would go to the house of representatives, which would vote for president by state delegation, the vice president being voted by the senate by state delegation – a majority of states would be necessary for each to win – however, if there wasn’t a 2/3rd quorum of state delegations in either the house or sentate because one party didn’t have enough votes to get a majority, but did have enough to stop a quorum from meeting, god only knows what would happen, as then we move from the 12th amendment to the 20th, which states that congress would pass a law appointing someone to be president until someone qualified – although how a bitterly divided congress would be able to do this is anyone’s guess
so actually this kind of contingency is covered under current law as long as the electors elect someone or congress agrees on someone – the turmoil, wheeling-dealing and sheer audacious bullshit that will happen along the way will probably outrage and disgust the american people to the point where they may demand real change
or not
If this happened in Canada, there would be an outcry big enough that the ‘winning’ party would have to bow out of the election, and a few weeks later we’d have another election.
However, since we use paper ballots that are hand-counted by widely disparate individuals with full public oversight, the chances of this happening here are just about nil.
Pyramid termite:
D’oh!! I even knew that state electors don’t have to actually vote any particular way, but totally forgot about it.
How often have electors broken party lines, I wonder? I am certain that it has happened, but google-fu is revealing unenlightening stuff like this , which indicates only that no renegade elector has swung an election.
I know it’s a bit off-topic, but bugbread and PT got me thinking about this. Anyway, yes, I think that the Congrefs and the Supreme Court would quickly agree to suspend the results and hold some kind of emergency election. You might even see an extension of the term of the incumbent, because no one would want to vote on hacked voting machines, and it would take some time to produce standardized paper ballots, set up the election, and tally. So in this case, we would perhaps get an extra month of GW Bush. Wow.
The silver lining would be some kind of meaningful voting reform. It may be that the only way to force election reform is to hack an election, but I hope not.
The saying is that in a democracy, power is transferred by counting heads rather than breaking heads. With the former called into question, I’d expect–well, not violence, but a lot of pushing and shoving, along the lines of the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot and the eventual 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore to halt the Florida recount.
If the nominal winner had also been the clear front-runner in the polls preceding the election (e.g. if the polls showed they had 60% of decided voters, and the election results gave them an implausible 98%), I’d expect that they’d try to claim power anyway without having another election, no matter how unfair the process (as Bush did in 2000). Conversely, I’d expect that the underdog would be pushing hard to run the election again.
I’m surprised that everyone expects investigation and reform to take place as a result of a spectacular failure of the system. There hasn’t been much movement towards fixing the electoral college despite the debacle of 2000.
Michael Tomasky: There has been a mini-movement, but it obviously hasn’t caught much fire. The idea behind the movement is called the national popular vote. Under it, states whose electoral college votes total at least 270 (a majority) would sign a compact agreeing that they would give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. This is complicated, difficult to achieve, and a little strange. Say state X signed the compact, candidate A won state X, but candidate B won the national popular vote: state X would still be committed to giving its electoral college votes to candidate B.
So why would any state do this? Because such a system, in requiring a candidate to think of winning the popular vote as opposed to winning the electoral college, would force the candidate to campaign in more states. In the past half-century, according to studies, the number of electoral college votes that are truly up for grabs has nearly halved, from 345 to about 180. A national popular vote would open that back up and force candidates to campaign in states they don’t much bother to campaign in now because they’re either firmly red or blue.
One state, Maryland, has actually passed it into law. In Illinois, it has passed both houses of the state legislature. It has been introduced in thirty-five states and passed one or both houses in five others. But the push it really needs is from the large states that are either reliably blue or red, notably California, New York, and Texas, and its progress in those states has been limited.