7 ms·

There is absolutely no need to have electronic voting machines. Votes happen months before one needs to take office. Counting of paper ballots is an easy and so

• KSteffensen 8y ago
  While I agree with you that the risks are not worth it, there is the counterargument that votes are expensive. If votes were made less expensive it might be feasible to put more things out for popular vote Edit: typo. Stupid autocorrect set for the wrong language
  • brewrwe 8y ago
    Vores?
    • rhizome 8y ago
      Odd place for small rodents to appear, but maybe there's a lesson to be learned from them.
      • brewrwe 8y ago
        I think it was a typo on the prior commenters part, but apparently my comment got flagged. Man HN is touchy!
    • fao_ 8y ago
      Edible votes perhaps?
  • sitharus 8y ago
    A counter argument to expanding popular votes, the reason for a representative democracy is so we _don’t_ have to vote on everything. If we’re electing representatives that we distrust so much we want to directly vote on more of the laws I think we should fix the election of representatives.
    • owl_paste 8y ago
      If we can't elect good representatives, yeah, I'd hesitate to assume we'd be any better at direct democracy.
  • walshemj 8y ago
    Which is a very bad idea referendums are a terrible way to make decisions see Brexit
    • KSteffensen 8y ago
      You're arguing there should be fewer public votes in a democracy? If you don't trust the public to make decisions like Brexit, why trust them to elect representatives? Note that some of the most shameless brexiteers were publically elected MPs.
      • walshemj 8y ago
        1 A small number of mp's where Brexit most where not. 2 Yes I am saying there should be no referendums in an elected democracy its a terrible idea - Germany even outrights bans them in its constitution.
        • KSteffensen 8y ago
          1. It seems like the tories have been at civil war since the referendum so the number can't be that small. Corbyn doesn't seem too unhappy about the idea either, although for different reasons than, say, David Davies. 2. Germany may ban them in its constitution, but it seems to work for Switzerland. Again, if you don't trust people to handle referendums maturely and responsibly, why trust people to elect representatives that will handle the same issues maturely and responsibly?
• wool_gather 8y ago
  Totally agreed, but there's a variation on electronic voting I've heard proposed that I think would be very, very helpful. Long story short, the machine doesn't record the vote, it just produces the ballot. You enter all your choices on the machine, then the machine spits out a piece of paper, and the paper itself is your voting record. You verify that it is correct before it goes into the ballot box. Nothing's perfect, but this doesn't seem to have any weaknesses that existing paper ballots don't, and it gets rid of a few. It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle", and real errors like overvoting. Software shenanigans are almost pointless, because the piece of paper is the vote record, and the voter checks it.* Machines can also be more usable for people with input/output difficulties (poor eyesight, motor control, whatever). --- *I say "almost" because we all know that plenty of people won't check it. Vision problems are also a concern here, but not any more so than with plain paper.
  • cf498 8y ago
    Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day and any issues will lead to people having to wait longer or not being able to vote at all. Which you can already see happening in areas where voting machines are used. This is especially problematic if specific regions with known political majorities can be targeted and sabotaged. There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher or an overhauled ballot design. Even just keeping the problems that exist with paper ballots beats any risk that introducing electronics in the process pose.
    • wool_gather 8y ago
      > Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day That's fair, but if that happens, we have a very gentle fallback to just manually marking the ballots again. > There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher I direct your attention to the state of Florida, November 2000.
  • dan-robertson 8y ago
    I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve. If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them. A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.
• JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  We have a great compromise in New York. Paper ballot. Electronic (optical) tabulation. The efficiencies of digitisation with the robustness of a paper trail.
  • monocasa 8y ago
    Now the tabulators are the attack vector. The number of people available to count ballots scales pretty close to linearly with the number of ballots cast. So what issue is the tabulating machine addressing?
    • varjag 8y ago
      The same way human ballot counter is an attack vector. And indeed, they are compromised in places with rigged elections.
      • monocasa 8y ago
        Except the numbers of human counters increases linearly with the number of ballots cast. And the counting generally happens in a room with several people from multiple counting the same subtotals. So no, not the same as human ballot counters at all.
        • varjag 8y ago
          I'm not talking in hypotheticals. This is happening since holding sham elections became a fashion among dictatorships. Most of the human ballot counters there are compromised and cooperate on the ground.
          • monocasa 8y ago
            And everyone involved knows that it's a sham election. There's no scheme that'll work under those circumstances.
      • pas 8y ago
• sampo 8y ago
  > "Why can we have electronic banking, but not electronic voting, vowelless?” Secure transactions with your bank are doable, because there is no need to ensure anonymity from your bank (quite the opposite: your bank needs to know your identity). Secure transactions while keeping the secret ballot is very very difficult to do. And secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
  • btschaegg 8y ago
    This. Additionally, there's another very important factor to consider: If it is doable (it probably is), the result would be unnecessarily complex. Not only should such a system track votes in an anonymized fashion, it must also be reviewable by the public (how do you know the central server didn't just throw away your vote?). An important part in reviewability is simplicity: If you come up with an algorithm that provides all those properties but requires a PhD in mathematics to be properly understood, guess where Average Joe tells you to stick it. It's very hard to build trust with a screen that essentially just tells you "We did everything correctly! Honest!".
    • ygra 8y ago
      > An important part in reviewability is simplicity: If you come up with an algorithm that provides all those properties but requires a PhD in mathematics to be properly understood, guess where Average Joe tells you to stick it. That's the reason for the highest German court to declare voting machines unusable here.
• Svip 8y ago
  > Votes happen months before one needs to take office. In your country, perhaps, but in my country (Denmark), it's usually two weeks. But still manage to count our paper ballots. Usually within 2 days.
• anticensor 8y ago
  > Votes happen months before one needs to take office. Not always. There are jurisdictions voting is done just a week before takeover.
  • craftyguy 8y ago
    Has that always been the case? If so, then paper ballots have never been a problem for those jurisdictions, why is it suddenly one now?
• Shivetya 8y ago
  you can make an electronic system safe, safer than even paper ballots which can get lost and even altered. Simple have the machine print two reports. the copy given to the voter clearly states there vote and produces a bar code type mark at the bottom and top of the form. at the back sealed is a another copy of all bar codes printed. when an election is contested the roll of bar codes recorded can be compared to the electronic reports. a voter can also use their phone or scanner at any government office to verify their vote again and verify it was counted. however we still need some form of picture id that can be issued and encoded into the vote so that both sides are satisfied.
  • aw1621107 8y ago
    > Simple have the machine print two reports. the copy given to the voter clearly states there vote Nope nope nope. This is highly undesirable because it allows votes to be sold/forced out of people.
• walshemj 8y ago
  The UK manages to produce counts very quickly with paper ballots one constituency managed 60 minutes.
• sfifs 8y ago
  Paper ballots are safe only if everything else around the election is safe. It's very easy to stuff fake ballot papers into the ballot box or take out ballots you don't like by unsealing the box. If you don't like the way a constituency has voted, it's very easy to fire ballot box and burn the papers. It takes time and manpower to secure ballot boxes for a long time required for manual counting and to secure and transport ballot papers before that. You need to have multiple supervisors witnessing counting of each vote to prevent the counter from manipulating the count which takes time and slows down counting. All this and more has happened in the history of paper ballot elections in India - which is partly why India moved to electronic voting which is a lot harder to tamper with. Paper ballot works only in a utopian world where you assume simple thuggery doesn't happen
• rstuart4133 8y ago
  I gather you've never seen an Australian senate vote. There are so many candidates, we have hit the limit of the printing presses (a ballot paper 1.2m or so wide). No doubt that width seem reasonable at the time at it is wider than the ballot boxes - so you get a ballot paper can't actually lie flat. Sadly that wasn't enough to fix the problem, so that had to shrink the font used. In fact that shrank it so much people could no longer read it, so they issued a magnifying glass with each paper. Just so you have the picture clear in your mind: the ballot paper is so big it won't fit in the ballot box, ad the writing on it so small they issues magnifying glasses. Seeing all candidates names is literally impossible. http://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332 http://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332 Now onto the next step. The voting system is so complex, the outcome it's known for at least a month. As this is Australia they do use computers but someone has to accurately enter all those marks on a paper that has to be read with a magnifying glass. So while electronic voting may not make much sense where you live, there are places in the work where it is the only sane option.