U.S. 2016: For whom will you vote?

[Aractus]

So, what you're saying is, someone could take a person's ballot, cross out all the numbers in pen, and change them to whatever they wanted? That's tampering with a ballot. So, pen based ballots aren't immune to tampering. The same goes with pencil based ballots as I indicated before. My point here isn't that pencil / pen based ballots are bad; I agree with you that they are better than electronic voting...BUT I do take issue with your statement that they can't be tampered with, because they so obviously can.

Okay. Pencils can't be tampered with before you write on your ballot paper - if polling places provided pens then people could tamper with the pens and put in disappearing ink - which is tampering with the ballot at an opportunity that does not exist at present. My point is that if you provide pens instead of pencils you create a new opportunity for people to tamper with ballots.

As far as tampering with ballots after they've been filled in and submitted - it's much more difficult. Ballots are kept under lock and key, and scrutineers are present at all times that they are handled. You would basically need to break into the place that ballots are stored, alter them, and leave. If you did that there would be evidence of your tampering, the election result would not be counted and there would be a do-over election for that seat or whatever it was that was compromised.

Electoral integrity is very high in Australia - yes paper ballots can be tampered with if people have the opportunity to do so. If you have safeguards in place to prevent that opportunity, then they generally cannot be tampered with, and certainly not without leaving behind evidence of it.

Also, destroying them isn't far simpler. Assuming there is a record of the number of people who voted, one of the checks one could and should do is to count the number of ballots and ensure that the numbers are at least close to one another (giving some wiggle room for human error in counting). Missing large numbers of ballots would be a huge sign of election fraud. What would work better is for ballots to be altered to vote for someone else.

Yes, but that means you would get the outcome you wanted. Let's say a candidate is ahead in counting. You break in, steal a box of ballots and burn them. You have now prevented a result being recorded in that seat and a new election would have to be held. If you tried to alter ballots and put them back then there would be evidence that you had accessed them, and the same outcome would occur. That's why there would be no point in altering ballots by hand - even if you could access them, you couldn't seal them back up undetected in their locked box.

Do you know how many Australians got to vote for their current Prime Minister? 98. The country has a voting population of over 13 million. That was the vote in Parliament. Even if you argue that the guy who won (Malcolm Turnbull) was chosen by Australians in the recent election, do you know how many Australians got a chance to vote for him directly? 88,641.

That's much the same as Maggie May - the only difference is the size of our Parliament (and the fact that Cameron resigned whereas a spill motion was brought before Abbott). It's much better than letting the party base (which I am a part of) or the public at large vote for the leader of parties. Is Turnbull the best choice for PM? Probably not. But he has the confidence of the party room which is far more important than whether he is the best choice. Abbott insisted that a leadership change would mean the Liberal is no different to Labor - but he only became the Liberal leader by bringing a spill against Turnbull in 2009 anyway, and he only won by one vote.

Let me put this into a way I'm sure you'll understand as a Pom. We have a Westminster system, and the Government is supposed to be accountable to the Parliament, as well as to the Governor General. The Parliament is then accountable to the public. In other words, it is designed for minority government (now a rarity in federal politics), and it works best as a democratic tool when that's what it has. I was hoping that we would have a minority Liberal-National government this term. In the same way that the Government is supposed to be accountable to the Parliament, the PM is supposed to be accountable to their Government's party room. Abbott lost the confidence of the party room by not being consultative and making policy announcements without the involvement of the relevant ministers. So that's exactly how our system was meant to work.

If you fiddle with that process by putting the power into appointing the leader of the parties to the party base or the public at large, then you create a system where the party leaders  does not need to have the confidence of their respective party rooms, and that can cause havoc. That's exactly the problem now with UK Labour.