Our Voting System Is a Joke

David Frum thinks it's time we created a credible, national system
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 6, 2012 1:05 PM CST
Our Voting System Is a Joke
Wilfredo Machavelo, 65, a retired chef originally from Puerto Rico, votes in a school on New York's Upper East Side, Nov. 6, 2012.   (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

When you vote today, you'll be doing it differently than your countrymen in other states. When the polls close, we'll wait hours to see who won. And we could have legal battles over how those polls were run—like those already unfolding in Florida. Yes, America has a unique voting system, David Frum writes for CNN: "It is the most error-prone, the most susceptible to fraud, the most vulnerable to unfairness, and one of the least technologically sophisticated on Earth."

In almost every other developed country, elections are run by impartial voting agencies, the results are known almost instantly, and contested results are rare. "Politicians of one party do not set voting schedules to favor their side and harm the other," or move polling places to their own election—they're barely involved in voting at all. We need to improve, as we swore we would after the 2000 debacle. Voting should be a simple measure of America's choice, "not one more weapon by which the parties compete." For Frum's full column, click here. (More David Frum stories.)

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