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The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thin

The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thing. Currently, that practice is limited by in-person voting for a couple of reasons; first that you have to show up at the polling place and sign in the book, second is that there is no way for a third party to verifiably see that you have voted the correct way, much less fill out the ballot on your behalf. While both of these can be worked around, it is at much higher cost in terms of the possibility of being caught. How concerned we should be about this is a matter of opinion; there's not really a practical way to measure whether it makes a difference, since the fraud is so undetectable. The other thing is that this does not solve the voter turnout problem -- Washington, Oregon, and Colorado all do well for voter turnout, but don't lead the pack compared to other states with in-person voting.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thing. Buying votes is pretty much impossible to do on any meaningful scale undetected. You eliminate it by making it illegal, setting up stings and imposing jail sentences on offenders. It's a terrible reason to avoid any voting system. It's not credit card fraud ffs. The offender advertises their presence by the very nature of what they do.
- andrewla 9y ago
  You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Criminals will adapt their patterns based on the incentives. If it becomes a valuable market, all you need to do is set up blinds where people send a copy of their ballot to some email address, and then the votes are printed and submitted. Maybe you can use a sting to trick people into selling their votes to an election official, but that's small potatoes if you can't catch the buyers doing it in bulk. Or you engage in large-scale attempts to invalidate votes by submitting fake ballots to cancel out ones you don't like. You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    >You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Eliminate. Think about it for a second. How exactly is a public figure supposed to advertise to a large number of people in complete secrecy that they are willing to purchase your vote? Both conditions need to be met for voters to sell their vote and the candidate to get away with it. No seriously, what's your threat model here? Just a quick example of one plausible threat of more than a thousand votes sold that you can't eliminate even with a semi-motivated police force. >You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult. In the UK it ended with the British Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. The US essentially copied that. The hard part wasn't making it structurally difficult, the hard part was getting that law passed and enforcing it and getting the courts to prosecute people for it. Other forms of voter fraud are a risk even after you make them illegal and crack down on it (e.g. ballot stuffing). This one is not.
    - andrewla 9y ago
      Why complete secrecy? The person whose vote you are purchasing doesn't even have to know which way their ballot is being used -- they can simply sign it and drop it off at the designated location, or, more feasibly, just scan the signed unfilled ballot and send it to the address they were given in exchange for some Bitcoins or something. The signature isn't a cryptographic one that contains a hash of the votes, it's just an image that can be copied. Both Tammany Hall and the Cook County Democratic Machine extensively used vote purchasing in addition to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Those are just the best documented cases; there have long been rumors of ballot purchasing and intimidation on the part of large unions. As for the relevant law, you sound more knowledgeable than I am in this field, so I'll grant that enforcing the laws is part of what made some forms of voter fraud less possible, but even a cursory glance at the text of the act shows that it is a mix of definitions of crimes and structural remedies, like keeping rolls of electors and permitting access to polling places.
_delirium 9y ago
> The other thing is that this does not solve the voter turnout problem I'm honestly surprised it didn't improve turnout at least a little bit, but indeed it seems not to have. If you look at Washington turnout statistics, for example, there is absolutely no change around 2011, when it went to all-mail voting: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx In the last two presidential elections before the change, turnout was 62% and 61%. In the two that have been held since then, it was... 61% and 61%. Which is an impressively stable turnout rate at least.
saas_co_de 9y ago
> does not solve the voter turnout problem Refusing to vote is a perfectly valid choice in a democracy. Politicians like to pretend that the 40-60% of the people who don't vote are not voting because they are stupid, ill-informed, or whatever, but the much more likely explanation is that this group recognizing (rightly) that voting is a waste of time in a political system as corrupt as the U.S. or the refuse to vote as a form of conscientious objection. In reality the winner of every election in decades has been "none of the above."
- andrewla 9y ago
  I agree to a very large extent; I was just commenting on a response to an article about increasing voter turnout. The suggested approach (mail-in-only voting), while nice in many ways, does not (empirically) have that particular effect. I think voter turnout has become the axis on which all modern (presidential) elections have hinged. Trump didn't beat Hillary in the rust belt by convincing hoards of Obama supporters to bot Republican. What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home. The numbers bear this out (although we don't have individual tallies) -- Trump didn't win any more votes in those states than Romney did in the last election. The same voters who pulled that lever came out and did the same thing they did in the last cycle. That's also why the polls were so off -- they rely on "likely voter" models, not realizing that what they should be measuring is not who likely voters will vote for, but whether or not people will show up at the polls. Instead, they used "likely voter" criteria that they learned in the Obama election and gauged sentiment in that group.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    > What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home The group of Obama voters that declined to vote for Clinton was definitely large enough to lose her the election. That sort of reinforces my point about role of refusing to vote in a democracy. The political power of those protest non-voters far exceeded the power of anyone who voted.
DrScump 9y ago
there is no way for a third party to verifiably see that you have voted the correct way Hopefully, nobody will ever invent small, discreet cameras that can fit into everyday devices.
- andrewla 9y ago
  Ballots can easily be voided, and election officials are usually present at the point where the ballot is fed into the machine (at least in the states where I've voted), making it hard to maintain a video trail from marking the ballot through submitting it. Still, clearly, if you are assuming that voters are lazy, then you can probably do fairly well purchasing votes, and there's some limited evidence that this occurs in modern elections, though it's hard to judge the scale.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    Ballots can easily be voided How? Voting secrecy requires that ballots (excluding provisional ballots) be separated from any individually identifying characteristics immediately. election officials are usually present at the point where the ballot is fed into the machine Unless the voter votes directly into a machine, that essentially never happens to my knowledge. I can't imagine a scenario where ballot-tallying machinery would be replicated at each and every precinct. What happens here in ultra-high-tech Silicon Valley is that ballots are large paper sheets which get dumped into cardboard boxes, then later sent en masse to the county Registrar for tabulation. Please describe a scenario where a ballot can be voided by precinct workers. At best, if a voter is caught recording, they could be directed to vote over again with a new ballot. Precinct workers could neither deny that voter the franchise nor even confiscate the recording.
    - andrewla 9y ago
      I don't think we're in as much disagreement as you may think. By "voided", I mean a voter voluntarily says that they messed up and wish to get a new ballot. This is done routinely because of mismarked ballots, etc. The scenario here is simply that a voter accepts an offer to sell their vote, marks the ballot in the proscribed way, takes a picture, voids it, and then submits a new ballot with their actual vote. In New York (and in Washington, where I used to live, before they went mail-in only) after marking your ballot (in NY with a pen, in WA on a screen and getting a printout) you put your ballot into a machine which scans the ballot and puts it in the local tally, and dumps it into a cardboard box, as you say, you counting later. That's the "machine" I'm talking about. By the poll worker's presence, I simply mean that if the vote buyer requires a video of the ballot being filled out and put into the machine (or the cardboard box) the poll worker will notice that the person is taking a video and will ask them to stop. Rather than preventing people from photographing their ballot through enforcement, this just makes the value obtained for "buying" a vote lower, thus serving as a disincentive. I mean, a vote purchaser could just take people's word for it too if the purchaser is not worried about being tricked by "unscrupulous" voters.

crdoconnor 9y ago

>The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thing. Buying votes is pretty much impossible to do on any meaningful scale undetected. You eliminate it by making it illegal, setting up stings and imposing jail sentences on offenders. It's a terrible reason to avoid any voting system. It's not credit card fraud ffs. The offender advertises their presence by the very nature of what they do.

andrewla 9y ago
You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Criminals will adapt their patterns based on the incentives. If it becomes a valuable market, all you need to do is set up blinds where people send a copy of their ballot to some email address, and then the votes are printed and submitted. Maybe you can use a sting to trick people into selling their votes to an election official, but that's small potatoes if you can't catch the buyers doing it in bulk. Or you engage in large-scale attempts to invalidate votes by submitting fake ballots to cancel out ones you don't like. You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Eliminate. Think about it for a second. How exactly is a public figure supposed to advertise to a large number of people in complete secrecy that they are willing to purchase your vote? Both conditions need to be met for voters to sell their vote and the candidate to get away with it. No seriously, what's your threat model here? Just a quick example of one plausible threat of more than a thousand votes sold that you can't eliminate even with a semi-motivated police force. >You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult. In the UK it ended with the British Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. The US essentially copied that. The hard part wasn't making it structurally difficult, the hard part was getting that law passed and enforcing it and getting the courts to prosecute people for it. Other forms of voter fraud are a risk even after you make them illegal and crack down on it (e.g. ballot stuffing). This one is not.
  - andrewla 9y ago
    Why complete secrecy? The person whose vote you are purchasing doesn't even have to know which way their ballot is being used -- they can simply sign it and drop it off at the designated location, or, more feasibly, just scan the signed unfilled ballot and send it to the address they were given in exchange for some Bitcoins or something. The signature isn't a cryptographic one that contains a hash of the votes, it's just an image that can be copied. Both Tammany Hall and the Cook County Democratic Machine extensively used vote purchasing in addition to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Those are just the best documented cases; there have long been rumors of ballot purchasing and intimidation on the part of large unions. As for the relevant law, you sound more knowledgeable than I am in this field, so I'll grant that enforcing the laws is part of what made some forms of voter fraud less possible, but even a cursory glance at the text of the act shows that it is a mix of definitions of crimes and structural remedies, like keeping rolls of electors and permitting access to polling places.

_delirium 9y ago

> The other thing is that this does not solve the voter turnout problem I'm honestly surprised it didn't improve turnout at least a little bit, but indeed it seems not to have. If you look at Washington turnout statistics, for example, there is absolutely no change around 2011, when it went to all-mail voting: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx In the last two presidential elections before the change, turnout was 62% and 61%. In the two that have been held since then, it was... 61% and 61%. Which is an impressively stable turnout rate at least.

saas_co_de 9y ago

> does not solve the voter turnout problem Refusing to vote is a perfectly valid choice in a democracy. Politicians like to pretend that the 40-60% of the people who don't vote are not voting because they are stupid, ill-informed, or whatever, but the much more likely explanation is that this group recognizing (rightly) that voting is a waste of time in a political system as corrupt as the U.S. or the refuse to vote as a form of conscientious objection. In reality the winner of every election in decades has been "none of the above."

andrewla 9y ago
I agree to a very large extent; I was just commenting on a response to an article about increasing voter turnout. The suggested approach (mail-in-only voting), while nice in many ways, does not (empirically) have that particular effect. I think voter turnout has become the axis on which all modern (presidential) elections have hinged. Trump didn't beat Hillary in the rust belt by convincing hoards of Obama supporters to bot Republican. What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home. The numbers bear this out (although we don't have individual tallies) -- Trump didn't win any more votes in those states than Romney did in the last election. The same voters who pulled that lever came out and did the same thing they did in the last cycle. That's also why the polls were so off -- they rely on "likely voter" models, not realizing that what they should be measuring is not who likely voters will vote for, but whether or not people will show up at the polls. Instead, they used "likely voter" criteria that they learned in the Obama election and gauged sentiment in that group.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home The group of Obama voters that declined to vote for Clinton was definitely large enough to lose her the election. That sort of reinforces my point about role of refusing to vote in a democracy. The political power of those protest non-voters far exceeded the power of anyone who voted.

DrScump 9y ago

there is no way for a third party to verifiably see that you have voted the correct way Hopefully, nobody will ever invent small, discreet cameras that can fit into everyday devices.

andrewla 9y ago
Ballots can easily be voided, and election officials are usually present at the point where the ballot is fed into the machine (at least in the states where I've voted), making it hard to maintain a video trail from marking the ballot through submitting it. Still, clearly, if you are assuming that voters are lazy, then you can probably do fairly well purchasing votes, and there's some limited evidence that this occurs in modern elections, though it's hard to judge the scale.
- DrScump 9y ago
  Ballots can easily be voided How? Voting secrecy requires that ballots (excluding provisional ballots) be separated from any individually identifying characteristics immediately. election officials are usually present at the point where the ballot is fed into the machine Unless the voter votes directly into a machine, that essentially never happens to my knowledge. I can't imagine a scenario where ballot-tallying machinery would be replicated at each and every precinct. What happens here in ultra-high-tech Silicon Valley is that ballots are large paper sheets which get dumped into cardboard boxes, then later sent en masse to the county Registrar for tabulation. Please describe a scenario where a ballot can be voided by precinct workers. At best, if a voter is caught recording, they could be directed to vote over again with a new ballot. Precinct workers could neither deny that voter the franchise nor even confiscate the recording.
  - andrewla 9y ago
    I don't think we're in as much disagreement as you may think. By "voided", I mean a voter voluntarily says that they messed up and wish to get a new ballot. This is done routinely because of mismarked ballots, etc. The scenario here is simply that a voter accepts an offer to sell their vote, marks the ballot in the proscribed way, takes a picture, voids it, and then submits a new ballot with their actual vote. In New York (and in Washington, where I used to live, before they went mail-in only) after marking your ballot (in NY with a pen, in WA on a screen and getting a printout) you put your ballot into a machine which scans the ballot and puts it in the local tally, and dumps it into a cardboard box, as you say, you counting later. That's the "machine" I'm talking about. By the poll worker's presence, I simply mean that if the vote buyer requires a video of the ballot being filled out and put into the machine (or the cardboard box) the poll worker will notice that the person is taking a video and will ask them to stop. Rather than preventing people from photographing their ballot through enforcement, this just makes the value obtained for "buying" a vote lower, thus serving as a disincentive. I mean, a vote purchaser could just take people's word for it too if the purchaser is not worried about being tricked by "unscrupulous" voters.