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Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without di

Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without direct transfer from Internet, then you can bet North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China will pour billions to do the same thing. Voting ID cards too, though I admit I don’t know enough about that. Even if it costs billions to get it done, confidence in fair and free elections is the cornerstone of our democracy.

jadedhacker 8y ago
The first is a good idea, but the second is not. Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote and thus compromise elections. In person fraud is very uncommon, and it would be very difficult for a foreign government to pull off a large scale interference without being detected. After all, we struggle to get people to show up to vote once already! The idea of mass ballot fraud seems difficult to countenance without literally paying masses of people to vote (which I believe is extremely illegal). EDIT: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 EDIT 2: If you want to see real foreign interference, check out that time that Bill Clinton publicly aided the election of Boris Yeltsin. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agree-on-a-loan-for-10.2-billion.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agre...
- erentz 8y ago
  Right. The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. You’d need thousands of people doing it in most districts to have any impact, and that would get obvious really bloody quickly. I think this is a pretty good example of what I find to be the typical of an American practice of cutting off their own nose to spite their face. [1] Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off. In this case it’s the hysteria around a few cases of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions, so they’d prefer to see a system enacted in which tens of millions of voters will be disenfranchised. Silly and out of proportion. [1] this doesn’t seem to be the saying I want for this situation but I couldn’t think of a more appropriate one.
  - wavefunction 8y ago
    >Americans Yeah well not all of us, thanks.
    - erentz 8y ago
      Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean all Americans are that way.
    - jadedhacker 8y ago
      On behalf of USians, I apologize for monopolizing the word "Americans" when two entire continents have a right to the word.
      - irrational 8y ago
        Please never use the slur USians again. Thank you.
        krapp 8y ago
        Yes... the preferred term is Murcans.
  - zebraflask 8y ago
    You've overlooked the race, income, etc. factors, which still matter more than most people would like to admit. Consider a "radical" idea. Who doesn't get to vote if they don't have an ID card?
  - hueving 8y ago
    Double-voting is only one thing people are paranoid about. The other is the 12 million possible votes from undocumented (a.k.a illegal) immigrants.
    - jadedhacker 8y ago
      Let them. There should be citizenship for anyone living or working in this country for six months regardless of how they get here. To do otherwise is to exploit people and subject them to man's inhumanity to man as we are seeing with recent administration policies. That and the precarity and exploitation foisted upon undocumented workers by US corporations using the threat of state violence while crowds call for blood.
- xienze 8y ago
  > Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote Is that the case in the numerous other countries that require voter ID? I find it funny how we always use “but every other country does it!” when talking about things the US should adopt (e.g., the metric system, socialized healthcare), but that’s apparently not a good reason when talking about voter ID. Even countries with far poorer populations than our own seem to think being able to provide proof of who you are at the time of voting is a good idea, why can’t we?
  - devmunchies 8y ago
    I have no idea why this has become a right vs left, polarized issue.
    - untog 8y ago
      This might be my political bubble speaking, but the vast, vast majority of voter suppression stories I've seen have been Republican legislatures trying to deprive the Democratic party of votes. But even if that's not the case, it stands to reason it'll end up being a left/right thing, because it's the right trying to deprive the left of a vote, or vice versa. The two party system guarantees it.
    - jadedhacker 8y ago
      It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by not advertising the date in my community) to restrict ideological choices.
      - prolikewh0a 8y ago
        >The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority. No party is currently doing this unless you include third parties. The American left works for business too.
- csours 8y ago
  Voter ID laws would be OK if they were passed along with funding to provide Voting IDs to citizens. Somehow, they never are... (generally speaking, in the US)
- mikejholly 8y ago
  Voting requires ID in almost every other western democracy, including Canada. The rest of the world see it as very reasonable to identify yourself at a polling station. It's odd that this is so contentious in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws
  - s2g 8y ago
    mostly cause the laws get abused to target mostly democrat voters.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      Likewise, Democrats turn a blind eye towards voting id because they benefit from non eligible voterw voting, because they usually vite Democrat. There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point
      - tzs 8y ago
        > There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point The difference between your point and his point is that he could easily provide evidence for his, since there have been numerous lawsuits over these laws by civil rights groups, and the evidence was well publicized in those cases, and there have also been academic studies of these laws. Some links: [1] [2] [3]. There are ineligible people who vote, but almost all of them do so by means that would not be stopped by voter ID laws, most commonly absentee ballots. This makes it very hard to find evidence that supports you points. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-voter-id-laws-discriminate-study/517218/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-vot... [2] https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discriminating-intent https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discri... [3] https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
  - MatrixAlgebra 8y ago
    ID requirements make a tremendous amount of sense. Fear of those laws repressing certain groups should just incentivize watchdogs and protections ensuring that repressive regulations are not passed. Seriously, just because a good law could be abused does not mean we should avoid enacting such a law. That sort of thinking would seriously restrict our legal system if it was applied in all cases.
- kilroy123 8y ago
  What about finger paint, like most other countries use? You just simply get an unwashable ink on your thumb. It does a few things. It shows you voted already. Also, puts a little bit of social pressure on people you see who don't have the mark.
  - NikolaNovak 8y ago
    Never heard of that... fascinating! I don't think it's used in Croatia, Bosnia, US or Canada. Can you provide examples? Thx!:)
    - komodo 8y ago
      I'm not sure how unique it is to Iraq, but there were tons of photos of it on American news after that country was 'liberated' https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch
    - igitur 8y ago
      We use it in South Africa. https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592 https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592
    - Cyph0n 8y ago
      This approach has been used in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution, and is still in use.
    - kilroy123 8y ago
      Mexico does it and just had a huge election and turnout.
- Mountain_Skies 8y ago
  All of the drivers license offices in the city limits of Atlanta were shutdown at the same time Georgia enacted a photo ID requirement for voting. Though only a temporary situation, for a period of time anyone living in the city who wanted an ID was required to hike out to the suburbs. The state responded to criticisms of how difficult it could be for some to get an ID even if offered for free by having a bus travel around the state with the state issued ID issuing facilities available on the bus. That program was poorly funded, the bus often broke down, and usage was very low. Think they ended up doing away with the bus. The city of Atlanta eventually did get a new drivers license center and photo IDs are available free of charge to those who fill out an affidavit stating they cannot afford the ID fee. It's difficult to know how much fraudulent voting takes place. I'd like it better if there were photo ID requirements in place but if we're going to do that, the process for obtaining such an ID must be made orders of magnitude easier. For those in rural areas, getting to the county seat can be a challenge. Polling places are much more widespread than locations to obtain photo IDs. The added requirements of the Patriot Act for government IDs likely has made this situation even worse. Photo IDs are useful for many purposes beyond voting. I don't want to have a society in which one must carry a photo ID at all times but I'd also like to live in one where anyone can easily obtain one. Seems like this is the real problem that needs to be solved.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  > Voter ID cards are historically used to I'm so sick of this excuse. The correct response is "... so let's not do that this time, mkay?" Specifically, make them absolutely free-as-in-beer and only require minimal time and effort to obtain (benchmark: proof of address is too much effort). You do this explicitly on the basis that voting is a universal right and requiring money for it is abhorrent, as is any other obstacle not strictly required for ensuring uniqueness. Now you can also get rid of the half-assed national ID system comprised by our driver's licenses, state IDs, etc. And the people who want to use voter IDs to disenfranchise people have to shut up because you've addressed their supposed point. Get it over with, already.
  - oxide 8y ago
    If the entire point is to disenfranchise a voting base, why would the entity pushing for the adoption concede these barriers? If I am throwing a wall up, I generally don't build ladders into the wall itself.
    - andrewflnr 8y ago
      The point is political judo. They've already advocated for ID cards, so they can't very well openly object to modifying them in a way that obviously increases freedom, at least not without tipping their hand in a more obvious way. They can't do it without cooperation, so it's possible to ensure that it can't be implemented in a disenfranchising way if the opposition wanted to, which frankly is evidence they don't. And really, it's not an unreasonable idea. Other countries do this just fine. We just need to not mess it up.
erentz 8y ago
I’m not sure why ID cards are necessary. If we wanted to do that we would need to make them very easy and free for everybody to get, including getting them on the day of the election. Otherwise it becomes too much of a tool to deny part of the population the ability to vote. (Which is sadly how it’s been used so far in the USA as far as I can tell.) What is needed is verification against double voting. You must enroll, and so long as you’re enrolled, your name and zip code are on the roll. You go to one of the polling booths for your area. Your name gets ticked off when you vote. If it’s already ticked off then you cry fowl and an investigation must begin why. This seems to work on most of the world not sure why it wouldn’t work here.
- voronoff 8y ago
  It works here. Voting fraud is incredibly rare.
  - nowarninglabel 8y ago
    Where is 'here'? Also, voter fraud is incredibly rare in the US, and we didn't need ID cards to accomplish that.
  - stretchwithme 8y ago
    How do we know it's incredibly rare? What evidence would we need to know that all persons voting are actually valid voters? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We have cases in California of people voting with their dead relatives' ballots. This a lot easier with voting by mail.
    - ddingus 8y ago
      Turnout is also much higher. A few dead ballots suck, but the higher turnout renders them moot.
    - ChicagoDave 8y ago
      There have been numerous studies proving that systemic (not andecdotal) voter fraud doesn’t exist. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud... And there have been public comments by GOP politicians saying they’re pushing voter ID laws explicitly to disenfranchise democratic voters. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac... Race and voting demographics show Democrats have an edge nationwide that will continue to grow over the next decade and on. Republicans know this and this is why they hit mid-terms so hard. General voting is down and it’s easier to win. Add suppression methods, including psychographic warfare and they know they have a shot to rig the system. This why Trump won and why our Supreme Court is going to take away the rights of workers, minorities, women, and immigrants.
stretchwithme 8y ago
No need to carry an ID card if you can look up each voter's face. Electronic voting systems were supposedly created to prevent the hanging chad problem. But all we actually needed was a way to properly punch the cards instead of relying upon people to do it manually. Card punch machines have been around forever. Open source software running on a PC with a card punch attached is all we really needed. And you can count the votes to double check the count of the cards. But you don't have to stop relying on the physical cards. You could even have machines at the polling place that voters could use to verify that their ballot was properly encoded before they turn it in. A PC with a punch card reader running open source software. http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-voting.html http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-v...
- NortySpock 8y ago
  Why do we need to use card punch machines? Here in Missouri, we optically scan inked ballots. Inkavote is the name of the system. Why bother with punching out the card? http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-systems/oversight/voting-systems-used-counties/how-use-your-countys-voting-system/inkavote-voting-system/ http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-systems/oversight/vot...
  - Thlom 8y ago
    In Norway we just have different voter cards for each party in the election. So you go into the voting booth, select your party's card and fold it. Then verify you are you with the election officials and put your folded card in the ballot box.
    - pseudalopex 8y ago
      Elections in the US are organized around specific offices and candidates, not parties. A general election ballot might include 20 offices and several ballot questions.
  - stretchwithme 8y ago
    You don't. Punching holes in cards is just one way to record a vote. As long as you can reliably read what's recorded, it doesn't matter.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> "...North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China..." Interesting. Only one of those four have proper elections. That is, three can't have their elections hacked.
- zaat 8y ago
  Israel elections are paper based.
madhadron 8y ago
Replace voter ID cards with mail-in ballots and no in-person voting on a particular day.
- tzs 8y ago
  Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have switched to by mail voting and it works fine.
tzakrajs 8y ago
What's the point of voter ID cards when the system you are casting your vote into is compromised?
onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
Let's not forget about how the Bushs burned a few thousand votes in Florida to win the 2000 election over Gore. It's hard to believe voting machines aren't hacked on the regular with how they're almost built to be insecure. But maybe they've never been hacked. I don't know. Either way, that doesn't make all technological solutions bad by default. A technological solution /could/ be better than a paper solution. I think the crypto bubble is very overhyped, but I'm pretty sure some form of a distributed voter database /could/ make it nearly impossible to forge a single vote, let alone forging votes at scale.
kartan 8y ago
> Voting ID cards too National ID cards is better. Requiring and ID to vote is open to actual fraud as it can be granted or denied on political basis. A mandatory national ID card is politics free. It is used to register your weapon, to get health care, to vote, to register your kids in school, etc. It helps that everybody is counted as a citizen. Instead of just removing the people that you don't like (https://www.scpr.org/news/2016/12/22/67481/you-say-you-re-an-american-but-what-if-you-had-to/ https://www.scpr.org/news/2016/12/22/67481/you-say-you-re-an...).
sharpercoder 8y ago
Sorry to say this, but the US has bigger systemic problems to fix. Voting is a small one compared to the 2-party system. The US always boasts about how it is so democratic; while in reality there isn't much democracy. In fact, the 2-party system looks suspiciously a lot on the 1-party system in existence in many other countries. Sure, you have a choice, but what value is that choice?
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  For what it's worth, changing the voting system to, e.g. ranked choice or theoretically superior variants would automatically open up the viability of third (and fourth) parties. Right now, if a popular movement becomes so excited that they put forth multiple candidates, it divides the vote and they lose.
- aaronbrethorst 8y ago
  > Voting is a small one compared to the 2-party system How exactly do you propose fixing a two party system without voting? The United States's first past the post voting system pretty much guarantees a two party system[1]. If you want to see a move to ranked choice voting or another system that would encourage third parties, then vote for candidates who are in favor of passing RCV laws and vote for ballot initiatives to pass RCV laws. > Sure, you have a choice, but what value is that choice? Clean air, clean water, a person's right to self-determination over what happens with their body, equal pay for equal work...I could go on for a while, but I don't think you're looking to be swayed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
analog31 8y ago
In my locale, you mark a paper ballot by hand, and it goes into a somewhat antiquated electronic scanner. The scanner is attached to a locked box that stores the ballots. That seems like a reasonable approach. When I was a kid, I remember going with my mom when she voted. The mechanical voting machine created this roll of paper with everybody's vote marked on it. After the poll closed, they took out the rolls and laid them out down the hallway of the school where the polling occurred. Anybody was welcome to stay and watch while the poll workers checked the tallies.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hrktb 8y ago
I am a bit sceptic that paper ballots were as good as we want them to be. I remember every elections the bunch of dead people voting reported on the news, and that must be the tip of the iceberg. For comparison, in the payment world we have the paper cheques and credit card, and though credit card fraud is strong in the mind of the public, most entities accepting payment gave up on paper cheques a while ago because of how hard it was to secure and everything that was involved in processing them. If it didn't work for money, I can't imagine it's a good idea to keep for voting.
Avshalom 8y ago
step one: universal ID cards step two: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/us/drivers-license-tennessee.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/us/drivers-license-tennes... take them away from poor people.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
You need to distinguish between two very different things. In vote result manipulation, a single actor can modify votes wholesale. In voter fraud, an individual who shouldn't vote does, or pretends to be other people and votes multiple times. The risk of the former is huge and hard to detect. The latter, despite claims the contrary from certain news outlets and Presidents, is actually extraordinarily rare. Voter ID cards are claimed to address the second issue, even though they actually alienate far more legitimate voter than fraudulent votes.
amaccuish 8y ago
How about Estonia and their online voting? No machines connected to the internet seems like it works there.
specialist 8y ago
The election integrity gold standard is paper ballots cast at poll sites tabulated on site when the polls close. Aka the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting). Any deviation from that lessens election integrity. Which may be okay, because maybe the trade off makes it worthwhile. For instance, absentee ballots and early voting enfranchises people. But the there is no free lunch with voting systems and these decisions must be measured.

jadedhacker 8y ago

The first is a good idea, but the second is not. Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote and thus compromise elections. In person fraud is very uncommon, and it would be very difficult for a foreign government to pull off a large scale interference without being detected. After all, we struggle to get people to show up to vote once already! The idea of mass ballot fraud seems difficult to countenance without literally paying masses of people to vote (which I believe is extremely illegal). EDIT: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 EDIT 2: If you want to see real foreign interference, check out that time that Bill Clinton publicly aided the election of Boris Yeltsin. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agree-on-a-loan-for-10.2-billion.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agre...

erentz 8y ago
Right. The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. You’d need thousands of people doing it in most districts to have any impact, and that would get obvious really bloody quickly. I think this is a pretty good example of what I find to be the typical of an American practice of cutting off their own nose to spite their face. [1] Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off. In this case it’s the hysteria around a few cases of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions, so they’d prefer to see a system enacted in which tens of millions of voters will be disenfranchised. Silly and out of proportion. [1] this doesn’t seem to be the saying I want for this situation but I couldn’t think of a more appropriate one.
- wavefunction 8y ago
  >Americans Yeah well not all of us, thanks.
  - erentz 8y ago
    Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean all Americans are that way.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    On behalf of USians, I apologize for monopolizing the word "Americans" when two entire continents have a right to the word.
    - irrational 8y ago
      Please never use the slur USians again. Thank you.
      - krapp 8y ago
        Yes... the preferred term is Murcans.
- zebraflask 8y ago
  You've overlooked the race, income, etc. factors, which still matter more than most people would like to admit. Consider a "radical" idea. Who doesn't get to vote if they don't have an ID card?
- hueving 8y ago
  Double-voting is only one thing people are paranoid about. The other is the 12 million possible votes from undocumented (a.k.a illegal) immigrants.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    Let them. There should be citizenship for anyone living or working in this country for six months regardless of how they get here. To do otherwise is to exploit people and subject them to man's inhumanity to man as we are seeing with recent administration policies. That and the precarity and exploitation foisted upon undocumented workers by US corporations using the threat of state violence while crowds call for blood.
xienze 8y ago
> Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote Is that the case in the numerous other countries that require voter ID? I find it funny how we always use “but every other country does it!” when talking about things the US should adopt (e.g., the metric system, socialized healthcare), but that’s apparently not a good reason when talking about voter ID. Even countries with far poorer populations than our own seem to think being able to provide proof of who you are at the time of voting is a good idea, why can’t we?
- devmunchies 8y ago
  I have no idea why this has become a right vs left, polarized issue.
  - untog 8y ago
    This might be my political bubble speaking, but the vast, vast majority of voter suppression stories I've seen have been Republican legislatures trying to deprive the Democratic party of votes. But even if that's not the case, it stands to reason it'll end up being a left/right thing, because it's the right trying to deprive the left of a vote, or vice versa. The two party system guarantees it.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by not advertising the date in my community) to restrict ideological choices.
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      >The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority. No party is currently doing this unless you include third parties. The American left works for business too.
csours 8y ago
Voter ID laws would be OK if they were passed along with funding to provide Voting IDs to citizens. Somehow, they never are... (generally speaking, in the US)
mikejholly 8y ago
Voting requires ID in almost every other western democracy, including Canada. The rest of the world see it as very reasonable to identify yourself at a polling station. It's odd that this is so contentious in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws
- s2g 8y ago
  mostly cause the laws get abused to target mostly democrat voters.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Likewise, Democrats turn a blind eye towards voting id because they benefit from non eligible voterw voting, because they usually vite Democrat. There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point
    - tzs 8y ago
      > There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point The difference between your point and his point is that he could easily provide evidence for his, since there have been numerous lawsuits over these laws by civil rights groups, and the evidence was well publicized in those cases, and there have also been academic studies of these laws. Some links: [1] [2] [3]. There are ineligible people who vote, but almost all of them do so by means that would not be stopped by voter ID laws, most commonly absentee ballots. This makes it very hard to find evidence that supports you points. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-voter-id-laws-discriminate-study/517218/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-vot... [2] https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discriminating-intent https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discri... [3] https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
- MatrixAlgebra 8y ago
  ID requirements make a tremendous amount of sense. Fear of those laws repressing certain groups should just incentivize watchdogs and protections ensuring that repressive regulations are not passed. Seriously, just because a good law could be abused does not mean we should avoid enacting such a law. That sort of thinking would seriously restrict our legal system if it was applied in all cases.
kilroy123 8y ago
What about finger paint, like most other countries use? You just simply get an unwashable ink on your thumb. It does a few things. It shows you voted already. Also, puts a little bit of social pressure on people you see who don't have the mark.
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  Never heard of that... fascinating! I don't think it's used in Croatia, Bosnia, US or Canada. Can you provide examples? Thx!:)
  - komodo 8y ago
    I'm not sure how unique it is to Iraq, but there were tons of photos of it on American news after that country was 'liberated' https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch
  - igitur 8y ago
    We use it in South Africa. https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592 https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592
  - Cyph0n 8y ago
    This approach has been used in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution, and is still in use.
  - kilroy123 8y ago
    Mexico does it and just had a huge election and turnout.
Mountain_Skies 8y ago
All of the drivers license offices in the city limits of Atlanta were shutdown at the same time Georgia enacted a photo ID requirement for voting. Though only a temporary situation, for a period of time anyone living in the city who wanted an ID was required to hike out to the suburbs. The state responded to criticisms of how difficult it could be for some to get an ID even if offered for free by having a bus travel around the state with the state issued ID issuing facilities available on the bus. That program was poorly funded, the bus often broke down, and usage was very low. Think they ended up doing away with the bus. The city of Atlanta eventually did get a new drivers license center and photo IDs are available free of charge to those who fill out an affidavit stating they cannot afford the ID fee. It's difficult to know how much fraudulent voting takes place. I'd like it better if there were photo ID requirements in place but if we're going to do that, the process for obtaining such an ID must be made orders of magnitude easier. For those in rural areas, getting to the county seat can be a challenge. Polling places are much more widespread than locations to obtain photo IDs. The added requirements of the Patriot Act for government IDs likely has made this situation even worse. Photo IDs are useful for many purposes beyond voting. I don't want to have a society in which one must carry a photo ID at all times but I'd also like to live in one where anyone can easily obtain one. Seems like this is the real problem that needs to be solved.
andrewflnr 8y ago
> Voter ID cards are historically used to I'm so sick of this excuse. The correct response is "... so let's not do that this time, mkay?" Specifically, make them absolutely free-as-in-beer and only require minimal time and effort to obtain (benchmark: proof of address is too much effort). You do this explicitly on the basis that voting is a universal right and requiring money for it is abhorrent, as is any other obstacle not strictly required for ensuring uniqueness. Now you can also get rid of the half-assed national ID system comprised by our driver's licenses, state IDs, etc. And the people who want to use voter IDs to disenfranchise people have to shut up because you've addressed their supposed point. Get it over with, already.
- oxide 8y ago
  If the entire point is to disenfranchise a voting base, why would the entity pushing for the adoption concede these barriers? If I am throwing a wall up, I generally don't build ladders into the wall itself.
  - andrewflnr 8y ago
    The point is political judo. They've already advocated for ID cards, so they can't very well openly object to modifying them in a way that obviously increases freedom, at least not without tipping their hand in a more obvious way. They can't do it without cooperation, so it's possible to ensure that it can't be implemented in a disenfranchising way if the opposition wanted to, which frankly is evidence they don't. And really, it's not an unreasonable idea. Other countries do this just fine. We just need to not mess it up.

erentz 8y ago

I’m not sure why ID cards are necessary. If we wanted to do that we would need to make them very easy and free for everybody to get, including getting them on the day of the election. Otherwise it becomes too much of a tool to deny part of the population the ability to vote. (Which is sadly how it’s been used so far in the USA as far as I can tell.) What is needed is verification against double voting. You must enroll, and so long as you’re enrolled, your name and zip code are on the roll. You go to one of the polling booths for your area. Your name gets ticked off when you vote. If it’s already ticked off then you cry fowl and an investigation must begin why. This seems to work on most of the world not sure why it wouldn’t work here.

voronoff 8y ago
It works here. Voting fraud is incredibly rare.
- nowarninglabel 8y ago
  Where is 'here'? Also, voter fraud is incredibly rare in the US, and we didn't need ID cards to accomplish that.
- stretchwithme 8y ago
  How do we know it's incredibly rare? What evidence would we need to know that all persons voting are actually valid voters? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We have cases in California of people voting with their dead relatives' ballots. This a lot easier with voting by mail.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    Turnout is also much higher. A few dead ballots suck, but the higher turnout renders them moot.
  - ChicagoDave 8y ago
    There have been numerous studies proving that systemic (not andecdotal) voter fraud doesn’t exist. https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud... And there have been public comments by GOP politicians saying they’re pushing voter ID laws explicitly to disenfranchise democratic voters. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac... Race and voting demographics show Democrats have an edge nationwide that will continue to grow over the next decade and on. Republicans know this and this is why they hit mid-terms so hard. General voting is down and it’s easier to win. Add suppression methods, including psychographic warfare and they know they have a shot to rig the system. This why Trump won and why our Supreme Court is going to take away the rights of workers, minorities, women, and immigrants.

stretchwithme 8y ago

No need to carry an ID card if you can look up each voter's face. Electronic voting systems were supposedly created to prevent the hanging chad problem. But all we actually needed was a way to properly punch the cards instead of relying upon people to do it manually. Card punch machines have been around forever. Open source software running on a PC with a card punch attached is all we really needed. And you can count the votes to double check the count of the cards. But you don't have to stop relying on the physical cards. You could even have machines at the polling place that voters could use to verify that their ballot was properly encoded before they turn it in. A PC with a punch card reader running open source software. http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-voting.html http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-v...

NortySpock 8y ago
Why do we need to use card punch machines? Here in Missouri, we optically scan inked ballots. Inkavote is the name of the system. Why bother with punching out the card? http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-systems/oversight/voting-systems-used-counties/how-use-your-countys-voting-system/inkavote-voting-system/ http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-systems/oversight/vot...
- Thlom 8y ago
  In Norway we just have different voter cards for each party in the election. So you go into the voting booth, select your party's card and fold it. Then verify you are you with the election officials and put your folded card in the ballot box.
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    Elections in the US are organized around specific offices and candidates, not parties. A general election ballot might include 20 offices and several ballot questions.
- stretchwithme 8y ago
  You don't. Punching holes in cards is just one way to record a vote. As long as you can reliably read what's recorded, it doesn't matter.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

> "...North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China..." Interesting. Only one of those four have proper elections. That is, three can't have their elections hacked.

zaat 8y ago
Israel elections are paper based.

madhadron 8y ago

Replace voter ID cards with mail-in ballots and no in-person voting on a particular day.

tzs 8y ago
Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have switched to by mail voting and it works fine.

tzakrajs 8y ago

What's the point of voter ID cards when the system you are casting your vote into is compromised?

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago

Let's not forget about how the Bushs burned a few thousand votes in Florida to win the 2000 election over Gore. It's hard to believe voting machines aren't hacked on the regular with how they're almost built to be insecure. But maybe they've never been hacked. I don't know. Either way, that doesn't make all technological solutions bad by default. A technological solution /could/ be better than a paper solution. I think the crypto bubble is very overhyped, but I'm pretty sure some form of a distributed voter database /could/ make it nearly impossible to forge a single vote, let alone forging votes at scale.

kartan 8y ago

> Voting ID cards too National ID cards is better. Requiring and ID to vote is open to actual fraud as it can be granted or denied on political basis. A mandatory national ID card is politics free. It is used to register your weapon, to get health care, to vote, to register your kids in school, etc. It helps that everybody is counted as a citizen. Instead of just removing the people that you don't like (https://www.scpr.org/news/2016/12/22/67481/you-say-you-re-an-american-but-what-if-you-had-to/ https://www.scpr.org/news/2016/12/22/67481/you-say-you-re-an...).

sharpercoder 8y ago

Sorry to say this, but the US has bigger systemic problems to fix. Voting is a small one compared to the 2-party system. The US always boasts about how it is so democratic; while in reality there isn't much democracy. In fact, the 2-party system looks suspiciously a lot on the 1-party system in existence in many other countries. Sure, you have a choice, but what value is that choice?

jadedhacker 8y ago
For what it's worth, changing the voting system to, e.g. ranked choice or theoretically superior variants would automatically open up the viability of third (and fourth) parties. Right now, if a popular movement becomes so excited that they put forth multiple candidates, it divides the vote and they lose.
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
> Voting is a small one compared to the 2-party system How exactly do you propose fixing a two party system without voting? The United States's first past the post voting system pretty much guarantees a two party system[1]. If you want to see a move to ranked choice voting or another system that would encourage third parties, then vote for candidates who are in favor of passing RCV laws and vote for ballot initiatives to pass RCV laws. > Sure, you have a choice, but what value is that choice? Clean air, clean water, a person's right to self-determination over what happens with their body, equal pay for equal work...I could go on for a while, but I don't think you're looking to be swayed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

analog31 8y ago

In my locale, you mark a paper ballot by hand, and it goes into a somewhat antiquated electronic scanner. The scanner is attached to a locked box that stores the ballots. That seems like a reasonable approach. When I was a kid, I remember going with my mom when she voted. The mechanical voting machine created this roll of paper with everybody's vote marked on it. After the poll closed, they took out the rolls and laid them out down the hallway of the school where the polling occurred. Anybody was welcome to stay and watch while the poll workers checked the tallies.

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hrktb 8y ago

I am a bit sceptic that paper ballots were as good as we want them to be. I remember every elections the bunch of dead people voting reported on the news, and that must be the tip of the iceberg. For comparison, in the payment world we have the paper cheques and credit card, and though credit card fraud is strong in the mind of the public, most entities accepting payment gave up on paper cheques a while ago because of how hard it was to secure and everything that was involved in processing them. If it didn't work for money, I can't imagine it's a good idea to keep for voting.

Avshalom 8y ago

step one: universal ID cards step two: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/us/drivers-license-tennessee.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/us/drivers-license-tennes... take them away from poor people.

tasty_freeze 8y ago

You need to distinguish between two very different things. In vote result manipulation, a single actor can modify votes wholesale. In voter fraud, an individual who shouldn't vote does, or pretends to be other people and votes multiple times. The risk of the former is huge and hard to detect. The latter, despite claims the contrary from certain news outlets and Presidents, is actually extraordinarily rare. Voter ID cards are claimed to address the second issue, even though they actually alienate far more legitimate voter than fraudulent votes.

amaccuish 8y ago

How about Estonia and their online voting? No machines connected to the internet seems like it works there.

specialist 8y ago

The election integrity gold standard is paper ballots cast at poll sites tabulated on site when the polls close. Aka the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting). Any deviation from that lessens election integrity. Which may be okay, because maybe the trade off makes it worthwhile. For instance, absentee ballots and early voting enfranchises people. But the there is no free lunch with voting systems and these decisions must be measured.