Re: Good!
At least Australia and most other countries decide how elections at run at the federal level, so if they decide to do better they can make it happen. In the US, the federal government has almost no control of how elections are held. The states have some control, but a lot of it rests at the local level.
Improvements are pretty much impossible in the US, because the federal control that would be required to make it happen would guarantee that the republicans would be against it, no matter how well intentioned, as it would be seen as a power grab by the Feds and against states' rights.
In a way it is a good thing having so many islands of control - it would be almost impossible for a political party that gains power in Washington to compromise the elections to guarantee their re-election and control, as happens in so many other countries. While you can have a party essentially own the election process in a city (see Chicago's "Daley Machine") or even a state (see Louisiana in the Huey Long era) there's a higher level authority that can undo the damage, eventually. You'd need to control the dozen largest states to insure your party holds the White House on an ongoing basis (obviously one state would be enough in a very tight election but you don't always get those) You'd need a lot more than that to guarantee holding congress.
The real worry here is that since there are only a few vendors of electronic voting machines, and they are used in many jurisdictions across the country, it could be possible to use them (either as an insider or a hacker) to swing an election. Especially if they don't leave a paper trail. Though I have to wonder if for example it was shown that Trump won votes tabulated by Diebold machines by 58-42% and Clinton won the rest of the votes by 53-47%, what would happen? If no evidence survived, what would statistical "proof" of fraud do? There was a lot of bitterness over the 2000 recount debacle, and that wasn't so much fraud as incompetence.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
