6 ms·

We get every election day off in Germany.

• mungoman2 10y ago
  In Sweden elections are simply placed on weekends...
  • chvid 10y ago
    In Thailand they ban alcohol on election day ...
    • chvid 10y ago
      In Denmark; you can register a new company, pay your bills, fill out your taxes and so on online with a secure national identity card. But for voting you still have to queue up on voting day, go to a box and put some marks on a piece of paper. Which tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
      • germanier 10y ago
        Or it could tell you that doing elections online is a much harder problem than company registration or filling out taxes. For starters, none of that is anonymous which makes verifiability a much simpler problem. Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
        • chvid 10y ago
          In the old system trustworthiness comes from having representatives from various political parties including opposition present at the voting stations. For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.
          • hueving 10y ago
            How could an average person without a CS background be able to ensure that all traces of a vote were destroyed to preserve anonymity?
          • foepys 10y ago
            How can you tell that even if you audited it, nobody will tamper with the system between the audit and the election? Being present at the voting stations is irrelevant because you cannot observe what the software actually does without standing right behind every voter.
        • yummyfajitas 10y ago
          How do I verify that dead people or Mexican nationals aren't voting on paper? Or that ballots from some district (packed with votes for the wrong party) aren't being lost? Or even that vote counters aren't just ignoring questionable marks on votes that skew towards the wrong candidate? The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
          • caf 10y ago
            Aren't there candidate-appointed scrutineers overseeing the counting?
            • yummyfajitas 10y ago
              Not at every single stage of the process. There is no method of, for example, challenging a voter at the voting booth. Or this: https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM (I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
              • Frondo 10y ago
                Any time anyone has studied in-person voter fraud, the observation they've made is that it's rare you can almost count the instances on one hand. No one has ever shown it's a problem, people have only claimed or insinuated that it's a problem from a place of "truthiness"; i.e. they claim to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" that in-person voter fraud is a problem.
                • yummyfajitas 10y ago
                  Similarly, if we eliminate all possible record keeping and audits for financial fraud, we will have no evidence that it ever occurs. That is essentially the system we currently have for electoral fraud.
    • UlyssesSKrunk 10y ago
      Okay, now that's just fucking stupid. What idiot thought that up?
  • borski 10y ago
    Not everyone gets to take weekends off, unfortunately.
  • kalleboo 10y ago
    And there's a 2 week pre-election period where you can vote any day of the week.
• germanier 10y ago
  That's because elections are held on Sundays (and of course some people need to work that day).