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In India, its actually very hard and time consuming to accurately count around a billion paper votes. Paper votes kind of do not scale. Also India used to face

by z3phyr 8y ago

In India, its actually very hard and time consuming to accurately count around a billion paper votes. Paper votes kind of do not scale. Also India used to face a lot of incidences of booth capturing[1] which came to a stop after EVMs. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing

AndrewDucker 8y ago
Of course paper scales. Because if you have more people then you have more people to count the votes. In the UK every vote count happens with observers from the local area, in a semi-public manner. The process is very simple, and hard to manipulate, because the observers (from all sides) ensure it.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  The point of xem mentioning booth capturing is that it is the practice of the "observers" from one side forcibly ejecting the observers from the other sides and then proceeding to rig the ballot.
  - AndrewDucker 8y ago
    And in that case you need to have police involved. And if your response there is that the police will help one side against the other then your problem is massive corruption, and no technological solution will fix your voting problems (other than members of the public having the ability to record it and then make it public).
    - z3phyr 8y ago
      The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduction of EVMs Before the introduction of EVMs, there was a massive problem of "Illegal Votes" due to illiteracy (for most part). That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. I get where you are coming from though. Ideally, civilized behavior and rule of law should reign supreme, but a populace cannot be educated and society reformed with a single button. And we cannot forsake democracy "until the rule of law reigns us". We must find the middle ground There were impeding cases of rigging with paper ballots anyway and people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time. Everything's the same. Now people do not trust the machines.
      - Klathmon 8y ago
        > That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. Are you really implying that pushing a voting machine button is more intuitive and "absolute" than using a pencil to mark a box on a piece of paper? Have you seen these voting machines? The ones I've used before in PA were wildly complicated, and while I was there waiting to vote 2 different people had to call someone in to help them vote correctly. >people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time The beauty of a well run paper ballot system, is that if you don't trust the counters, you can go count along with them. If you don't trust someone to not tamper with the box, you can go watch it all day. If you think the "other team" is trying to pull one over on you, you can get all of your friends to go down and watch the box all day, and count along. It doesn't matter their age, their primary language, their knowledge or the amount of schooling they went to, everyone capable of voting is capable of verifying those votes. I personally am not arguing that it's impossible to rig a paper ballot system, just that it's significantly more costly (to the point that it would probably be easier to just run for the position legally if you are going to sink that much money into it), and it's magnitudes harder to get away with. Let's look at florida, a state with a population of about 20 million. In 2016 9.4 million votes were cast. Let's look at one county, st. johns county. There were 136,000 votes cast in that county across about 46 precincts. So let's assume even distribution and say about 3000 votes cast per precinct. In order to sway the election in one county, in one state, in one election, you would need to pay off or threaten around 46 people, probably a lot more. And you'd have to make sure that not one of them makes a mistake or "comes clean", and that nobody in any of the precincts you are trying to rig will sit around and decide to watch the process and blow the whistle at the first sign of something shady. And even if you were able to sway that county, you have another 66 in florida alone, and another 3000 or so across the rest of the country. Now I know a "smart" way to rig would only touch "swing states", and would be smart with where they spend their money and time on to maximize the impact, but you are still talking about thousands of people all across the country. If there were impending cases of rigging, they were found because it's monumentally difficult to cover up something on that scale.
        JdeBP 8y ago
        > Have you seen these voting machines? It's a fairly safe assumption that a person from India, where EVMs have been in widespread use since the late 1990s, with the first fully-EVM general election almost a decade and a half ago in 2004, has seen an electronic voting machine. (-: Ironically, the argument that you make about how hard it is to rig a paper election is exactly the same as the argument that the supporters of EVMs and the ECI make about how hard it is to rig the EVM system. It claims that there are roughly 1.5 million machines that one would have to tamper with, randomly assigned to voting stations (which one would have to predict ahead of time), and monitored by canditates' electoral agents and the police all of whom you would have to threaten/bribe. You're both making the same argument.
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      No, in that case the ECI introduced voting machines, and the rate of booth capturing reportedly went down. EVMs foiled some of the things that the booth capturers had in their favour with paper systems: the ability to stuff ballots at high speed with an organized gang of people (EVMs only allow a maximum of 1 vote every 12 seconds.) the ability to stuff a large number of ballots (EVMs have a cap on the number of ballots that a machine can store.). EVMs also had a panic button which could be used to shut them down in the event of an attempted booth capture. What they lacked was an auditable paper trail, and they have been surrounded by claims of hackability countered by counterclaims of intellectual property theft. Their first use was in 1982. You have over 35 years of Indian history and debate over these matters to catch up on in order to make an informed response to what z3phyr said.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  And the best part of a process like that is how inclusive it is. Anyone can help verify. Your 90 year old grandmother that doesn't speak much english can count along just the same as that 19 year old comp-sci student. With an electronic voting system you cut the people capable of verifying votes down to the thousands, and in many cases significantly less than even that due to the code being closed source.

by z3phyr 8y ago

AndrewDucker 8y ago

Of course paper scales. Because if you have more people then you have more people to count the votes. In the UK every vote count happens with observers from the local area, in a semi-public manner. The process is very simple, and hard to manipulate, because the observers (from all sides) ensure it.

JdeBP 8y ago
The point of xem mentioning booth capturing is that it is the practice of the "observers" from one side forcibly ejecting the observers from the other sides and then proceeding to rig the ballot.
- AndrewDucker 8y ago
  And in that case you need to have police involved. And if your response there is that the police will help one side against the other then your problem is massive corruption, and no technological solution will fix your voting problems (other than members of the public having the ability to record it and then make it public).
  - z3phyr 8y ago
    The process of Booth Capturing happened during the ballot, not the counting. It was actually a very serious problem of rigging which vanished after the introduction of EVMs Before the introduction of EVMs, there was a massive problem of "Illegal Votes" due to illiteracy (for most part). That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. I get where you are coming from though. Ideally, civilized behavior and rule of law should reign supreme, but a populace cannot be educated and society reformed with a single button. And we cannot forsake democracy "until the rule of law reigns us". We must find the middle ground There were impeding cases of rigging with paper ballots anyway and people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time. Everything's the same. Now people do not trust the machines.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      > That vanished to because pressing buttons is absolute and intuitive. Are you really implying that pushing a voting machine button is more intuitive and "absolute" than using a pencil to mark a box on a piece of paper? Have you seen these voting machines? The ones I've used before in PA were wildly complicated, and while I was there waiting to vote 2 different people had to call someone in to help them vote correctly. >people did not trust the people who counted during the paper ballot time The beauty of a well run paper ballot system, is that if you don't trust the counters, you can go count along with them. If you don't trust someone to not tamper with the box, you can go watch it all day. If you think the "other team" is trying to pull one over on you, you can get all of your friends to go down and watch the box all day, and count along. It doesn't matter their age, their primary language, their knowledge or the amount of schooling they went to, everyone capable of voting is capable of verifying those votes. I personally am not arguing that it's impossible to rig a paper ballot system, just that it's significantly more costly (to the point that it would probably be easier to just run for the position legally if you are going to sink that much money into it), and it's magnitudes harder to get away with. Let's look at florida, a state with a population of about 20 million. In 2016 9.4 million votes were cast. Let's look at one county, st. johns county. There were 136,000 votes cast in that county across about 46 precincts. So let's assume even distribution and say about 3000 votes cast per precinct. In order to sway the election in one county, in one state, in one election, you would need to pay off or threaten around 46 people, probably a lot more. And you'd have to make sure that not one of them makes a mistake or "comes clean", and that nobody in any of the precincts you are trying to rig will sit around and decide to watch the process and blow the whistle at the first sign of something shady. And even if you were able to sway that county, you have another 66 in florida alone, and another 3000 or so across the rest of the country. Now I know a "smart" way to rig would only touch "swing states", and would be smart with where they spend their money and time on to maximize the impact, but you are still talking about thousands of people all across the country. If there were impending cases of rigging, they were found because it's monumentally difficult to cover up something on that scale.
      - JdeBP 8y ago
        > Have you seen these voting machines? It's a fairly safe assumption that a person from India, where EVMs have been in widespread use since the late 1990s, with the first fully-EVM general election almost a decade and a half ago in 2004, has seen an electronic voting machine. (-: Ironically, the argument that you make about how hard it is to rig a paper election is exactly the same as the argument that the supporters of EVMs and the ECI make about how hard it is to rig the EVM system. It claims that there are roughly 1.5 million machines that one would have to tamper with, randomly assigned to voting stations (which one would have to predict ahead of time), and monitored by canditates' electoral agents and the police all of whom you would have to threaten/bribe. You're both making the same argument.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    No, in that case the ECI introduced voting machines, and the rate of booth capturing reportedly went down. EVMs foiled some of the things that the booth capturers had in their favour with paper systems: the ability to stuff ballots at high speed with an organized gang of people (EVMs only allow a maximum of 1 vote every 12 seconds.) the ability to stuff a large number of ballots (EVMs have a cap on the number of ballots that a machine can store.). EVMs also had a panic button which could be used to shut them down in the event of an attempted booth capture. What they lacked was an auditable paper trail, and they have been surrounded by claims of hackability countered by counterclaims of intellectual property theft. Their first use was in 1982. You have over 35 years of Indian history and debate over these matters to catch up on in order to make an informed response to what z3phyr said.
Klathmon 8y ago
And the best part of a process like that is how inclusive it is. Anyone can help verify. Your 90 year old grandmother that doesn't speak much english can count along just the same as that 19 year old comp-sci student. With an electronic voting system you cut the people capable of verifying votes down to the thousands, and in many cases significantly less than even that due to the code being closed source.