1. For years I have been astounded at the lax attitude the US has toward election fraud. Elections that take days. Ballots moved around. One of the reasons is that I have seen a much better system, the system that is used in Israel. This is thread describing the Israeli system
2. First of all, scale. Israeli polling stations are tiny by US standards. In 2015 I wrote down the stats to myself, they haven't changed much since: There are 10,119 polling stations for 5,883,365 eligible voters. That's 581 people per polling station
3. Most of the polling stations are rooms in schools. A single school might have dozens of polling stations, each in its own room. When I lived in a village, the polling station was in the community center, and there was only one polling station for the whole village
4. Only one voter is allowed in the room at a time, although parents often take their children in with them. Several poll workers are seated behind a table, along with several observers. Each party has the right to appoint observers to each polling station
5. You present your ID to the poll workers, each one looks at it, and you (it has your picture) and crosses your name off the list of voters assigned to that station. One poll worker gives you a special envelope. You take the envelope to another table behind a screen
6. In Israel you vote by putting slips of paper into the envelope, but there is no reason why you couldn't fill in your ballot behind the screen, and put it into the envelope. When you are done, you seal the envelope, and in full view of everyone, you put it into the ballot box
7. At the end of the day, the ballot box is opened, and the ballots are tallied. The poll workers must agree on the tallies, and they are in the same room as the observers. There is no question about distance. They are not 6 or 12 feet away. They are almost on top of each other
8. Several checks are done on the tallies. The tallies of the poll workers must agree with each other, with the number of people who voted, the total number of envelops given out, and with the number of envelopes that remain
9. Israel permits absentee ballots only for soldiers, workers in foreign embassies, prisoners, and patients in hospital. Elderly and disabled people are given help to get to regular polls
10. Absentee ballots are cast in double envelopes. The outer envelope has the ID of the voter. Absentee ballots are counted after all other ballots, and the outer envelopes are checked against the voting record, to make sure that no one votes twice
11. There are no chain of custody issues as there are in the US. The only ballots that are moved from place to place are in hospitals, and they are only moved within the hospital, in public, and under guard. All other ballots are counted in the place where they are cast
12. Results come in within hours of the polls closing. By morning, even the absentee ballots are counted. Everything about the process is redundant, public, and secure. The key to making the whole process work is its small scale
13. There is no reason why the US can't adopt similar procedures
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