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I work for the municipality of Skanderborg, Denmark. We have what we call digital elections, but what’s digitized is the registration process. Basically every a

I work for the municipality of Skanderborg, Denmark. We have what we call digital elections, but what’s digitized is the registration process. Basically every adult gets a voting card with their information + a barcode, we scan those barcodes when they turn up to receive their ballot(is that the right word for voting list?), and then they are registered. The actual voting takes place on paper, and while it takes time to prepare the ballots and count the votes, the process of voting doesn’t take very longer than a few minutes for the individual citizen. From they enter the voting place till they are done. I think that’s the way to digitize elections, you make them speedy for the citizens, but safe for democracy. I can’t for the life of me understand why you would ever do a digital vote. It’s just so risky. I guess you save money by adding effectiveness to the process surrounding an election, preparing ballots and counting votes, but those parts of the process are owned by the public sector and I don’t think the government should ever value the safety of our democracy as less important than money. We count votes by enlisting employees of the municipality, members of political parties and paid help from local NGOs, and everything is monitored and counted a few times. It’s a little taxing, but everyone involved enjoy the process, and financially it’s not that expensive compared to paying a license for voting machines.

dev_dull 8y ago
Believe it or note, requiring ID to vote in the United States is considered controversial.
- return-value 8y ago
  We don’t require ID as such. Every citizen is issued a little piece of paper that they can trade in for a ballot for that specific election. We used to look people up in big books, that are printed for the occasion, to make sure their piece is valid and they haven’t already voted - which took a long time and led to queues. That’s the part we digitized. But you can vote without ID as long as you have that piece of paper and know your birthdate. I’m actually not sure how the homeless vote (they can’t receive the piece of paper), but I guess they probably do a mail vote at their local municipality.
  - redorb 8y ago
    But there was some ID to get that piece of paper right?
    - return-value 8y ago
      Well, it’s sent to your address. We do have a central registry of every citizen, so I guess that might scare some Americans. You don’t need that though, you could pick up your registration at any municipality with your ID. That’s how I vote, I work from before the voting starts to after it closes, so I vote via mail.
      - cobookman 8y ago
        > We do have a central registry of every citizen, so I guess that might scare some Americans. US has same registry. It might not include every american but I'd be suprised if it doesn't have 99.99% of all Americans in it.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- RobAtticus 8y ago
  It sounds like this is done via automatic registration, which solves a major objection that opponents of voter IDs in the USA generally have (i.e., IDs are too hard for some people to get to make them a prerequisite). Automatic registration is likely controversial in the US for different reasons, as other posters mentioned.
- slg 8y ago
  Because citizens are not required to have ID and those that don't have one are disproportionately racial minorities and/or in lower socioeconomic classes. Democrats would be much more willing to allow ID to be required to vote if there was a national ID card issued to every citizen, but Republicans would be against any system that would try to create a national ID.
  - jniedrauer 8y ago
    We desperately need a national ID card. Social security was never designed for this purpose and it's terrible for it. Drivers license requires having access to a car and some way to learn how to use it.
    - QuercusMax 8y ago
      If we're going to have a national ID card, then it needs to be: 1) Free. Period. Otherwise you're going to disenfranchise poor people who can't afford even $50 to get an ID. 2) Universally accessible. If we're going to require it, then we need to make sure everyone has one, from a little old lady living 100 miles from civilization in Montana, to the homeless living in camps near San Jose.
      - tjoff 8y ago
        Neither of those points could possibly be a problem.
        dev_dull 8y ago
        You’ve clearly never seen your local government at work.
        AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        I think tjoff was being sarcastic, but I'm not certain.
      - 8y ago
- howard941 8y ago
  My polling place features first a comparison of photo id to the person and then an amateur attempts and fails to properly frank the voter's signature. How is it that passing the Real-ID photo-ID hurdle but failing the amateur-verified signature franking is acceptable in this country?
- XorNot 8y ago
  The example in the OP notes that every adult gets a voter registration card, by default. No proposal for voter ID in the US has ever accompanied a serious effort to ensure all citizens have easy access to suitable ID. Many proposals have been explicitly crafted on the back of data gathering campaigns to determine which forms of ID "unfavorable" groups generally do not have.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  We require ID to vote in Ireland (theoretically; it’s a spot check thing). The difference is that practically anything is ID for this purpose; a social services card, bank statement, debit card, birth certificate etc etc. So if you either receive any type of social welfare or have a job you almost certainly have ID. This doesn’t seem to be the case for most of the proposed American requirements, at all. Most other countries in Europe have mandatory govt id anyway, so it’s not a major burden.
hashkb 8y ago
What you say makes sense. But we are talking about the USA.
jniedrauer 8y ago
> It’s a little taxing, but everyone involved enjoy the process This is part of the problem in the United States. Voting is a chore, and you're often going to lose money (unpaid time off) to do it. If elections were national holidays and voting was treated as a privilege instead of a chore, we would be much better off.
- return-value 8y ago
  Can’t you vote by mail in month leading up to the election? We can, that’s what I do since I’m working on election days.
  - BatFastard 8y ago
    Depends on what state you live in. I know in my state (GA) you have to be military or demonstrably out of town during the period to qualify for an absentee ballot.
- seren 8y ago
  Why are elections not held on Sundays ? I assume that on average there are less people working that day that Monday - Friday, so less people would have to take time off from their job. Edit: Found this > In 1845, the United States Congress chose a single date for all national elections in all states. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen so that there would never be more than 34 days between Election Day and the first Wednesday in December. Election Day is held on a Tuesday so that voters will not have to vote or travel on Sunday. This was an important consideration at the time when the laws were written and is still so in some Christian communities in the United States. This seems a pretty dated reason. Why no one is proposing to change it ?
  - BatFastard 8y ago
    Elections are held on Tuesday as a way of restricting who can vote PERIOD. Poorer voters have a harder time getting off work, and getting transportation to voting site, which is usually close to their home, but not their work.
martin_bech 8y ago
I also live i Skanderborg. As a side note our Politicians in Denmark, just trashed the posibility of using evoting, citing security, and that our current election system, is actually superior. The only thing we would gain, would be fast vote counting. Why sould we trade security for that?
sgeisenh 8y ago
I trust good digital voting systems more than a paper ballot. Specifically, the system should be auditable in a way that makes it difficult to trace individual votes back to voters, but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly. There must be a good way to accomplish this while also addressing potential voter fraud. Does anybody know of any research in this area? With paper ballots, I have no way of knowing whether or not my vote was counted correctly. And I find that really unsettling.
- learc83 8y ago
  >but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly. If everyone can prove how they voted it becomes much easier to intimidate or incentivize people to vote a certain way.
  - yoha 8y ago
    That is indeed the main issue with verifiable voting. The usual solutions offer various compromises, but it is not possible to both guarantee the ability to verify that one's ballot is counted correctly, and that you cannot prove for whom you voted.
- contravariant 8y ago
  That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements. In theory you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a particular way to ensure you can't be intimidated into changing you vote. Unless it's good enough to verify whether your vote was counted, that should be fairly easy to do.
  - yoha 8y ago
    > That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements Untrue. You can use strong encryption to ensure confidentiality and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure integrity. Then, you can use methods from homomorphic encryption to tally the ballots. There is a whole area of research dedicated to this.
alphakappa 8y ago
>The actual voting takes place on paper, and while it takes time to prepare the ballots and count the votes, the process of voting doesn’t take very longer than a few minutes for the individual citizen. From they enter the voting place till they are done. How is the counting done in Denmark? Do they still have to collect all the paper ballots and count them in a central place? If so, how do you avoid all the 'hanging chad' issues?
- tokai 8y ago
  No they count them at every voting place, and sum the results.
zdragnar 8y ago
Registration for voting varies by the state you live in. In MN, you basically just need to walk in, have someone else who is already registered vouch for you, and you can register + vote on the spot. Every attempt to firm up voter registration roles (such as proving identity, eligibility, etc) is met with cries of racism.
- bdamm 8y ago
  That's because schemes such as bringing a driver's license are racist when you look at mobility and accessibility to government services. Back in my home country (Canada), voter eligibility was done by bringing evidence of residence in the district, which is roughly the same hurdle as getting a library card. I don't see why it ought to be any harder than that.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    Notice that I didn't mention a driver's license. Also, I find the argument a bit hard to believe, since the same form of ID are required for cigarettes and alcohol, which nobody complains about being racist. Finally, rural areas with difficult access to government centers are typically more white and tend to vote more Republican anyway; the disparate impact of accessibility argument is a bit disingenuous.
soundwave106 8y ago
For a little bit of context, from what I recall, the real push towards electronic voting in the United States came after the 2000 presidential election and the controversies that happened with paper ballots and the tight recount in Florida (eg "hanging chads"). (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/electronic-voting-machines-2012_n_1992992.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/electronic-voting-...) Paper isn't perfect and I think the thought at the time was pushing elimination of all of paper's errors. That being said, digital voting of course has far worse problems if you don't do it right (and it's pretty clear it hasn't been done very well in the US). In hindsight, that was a poor push. I imagine it's actually possible to design a digital voting system that is fairly secure (eg air-gapped voting machines, secure data storage and transmission, integrity verification, redundant security features, thoroughly tested, and -- most critical of all -- paper backups), but it would be very difficult compared to designing a better paper ballot system, and probably quite a bit more expensive.
rmetzler 8y ago
As a fellow European my view changed a little bit, when I understood how US votes differ. I'm used to vote one or two items, sometimes three on one election day. US votes often have dozens of different items. They vote on proprositions for laws, we usually don't do this. US citizens vote for their sheriffs and maybe many more jobs. I also think, you shouldn't use voting machines. But I understood them better when I found out that their ballots are different from our ballots.

dev_dull 8y ago

Believe it or note, requiring ID to vote in the United States is considered controversial.

return-value 8y ago
We don’t require ID as such. Every citizen is issued a little piece of paper that they can trade in for a ballot for that specific election. We used to look people up in big books, that are printed for the occasion, to make sure their piece is valid and they haven’t already voted - which took a long time and led to queues. That’s the part we digitized. But you can vote without ID as long as you have that piece of paper and know your birthdate. I’m actually not sure how the homeless vote (they can’t receive the piece of paper), but I guess they probably do a mail vote at their local municipality.
- redorb 8y ago
  But there was some ID to get that piece of paper right?
  - return-value 8y ago
    Well, it’s sent to your address. We do have a central registry of every citizen, so I guess that might scare some Americans. You don’t need that though, you could pick up your registration at any municipality with your ID. That’s how I vote, I work from before the voting starts to after it closes, so I vote via mail.
    - cobookman 8y ago
      > We do have a central registry of every citizen, so I guess that might scare some Americans. US has same registry. It might not include every american but I'd be suprised if it doesn't have 99.99% of all Americans in it.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
RobAtticus 8y ago
It sounds like this is done via automatic registration, which solves a major objection that opponents of voter IDs in the USA generally have (i.e., IDs are too hard for some people to get to make them a prerequisite). Automatic registration is likely controversial in the US for different reasons, as other posters mentioned.
slg 8y ago
Because citizens are not required to have ID and those that don't have one are disproportionately racial minorities and/or in lower socioeconomic classes. Democrats would be much more willing to allow ID to be required to vote if there was a national ID card issued to every citizen, but Republicans would be against any system that would try to create a national ID.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  We desperately need a national ID card. Social security was never designed for this purpose and it's terrible for it. Drivers license requires having access to a car and some way to learn how to use it.
  - QuercusMax 8y ago
    If we're going to have a national ID card, then it needs to be: 1) Free. Period. Otherwise you're going to disenfranchise poor people who can't afford even $50 to get an ID. 2) Universally accessible. If we're going to require it, then we need to make sure everyone has one, from a little old lady living 100 miles from civilization in Montana, to the homeless living in camps near San Jose.
    - tjoff 8y ago
      Neither of those points could possibly be a problem.
      - dev_dull 8y ago
        You’ve clearly never seen your local government at work.
        AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        I think tjoff was being sarcastic, but I'm not certain.
    - 8y ago
howard941 8y ago
My polling place features first a comparison of photo id to the person and then an amateur attempts and fails to properly frank the voter's signature. How is it that passing the Real-ID photo-ID hurdle but failing the amateur-verified signature franking is acceptable in this country?
XorNot 8y ago
The example in the OP notes that every adult gets a voter registration card, by default. No proposal for voter ID in the US has ever accompanied a serious effort to ensure all citizens have easy access to suitable ID. Many proposals have been explicitly crafted on the back of data gathering campaigns to determine which forms of ID "unfavorable" groups generally do not have.
rsynnott 8y ago
We require ID to vote in Ireland (theoretically; it’s a spot check thing). The difference is that practically anything is ID for this purpose; a social services card, bank statement, debit card, birth certificate etc etc. So if you either receive any type of social welfare or have a job you almost certainly have ID. This doesn’t seem to be the case for most of the proposed American requirements, at all. Most other countries in Europe have mandatory govt id anyway, so it’s not a major burden.

hashkb 8y ago

What you say makes sense. But we are talking about the USA.

jniedrauer 8y ago

> It’s a little taxing, but everyone involved enjoy the process This is part of the problem in the United States. Voting is a chore, and you're often going to lose money (unpaid time off) to do it. If elections were national holidays and voting was treated as a privilege instead of a chore, we would be much better off.

return-value 8y ago
Can’t you vote by mail in month leading up to the election? We can, that’s what I do since I’m working on election days.
- BatFastard 8y ago
  Depends on what state you live in. I know in my state (GA) you have to be military or demonstrably out of town during the period to qualify for an absentee ballot.
seren 8y ago
Why are elections not held on Sundays ? I assume that on average there are less people working that day that Monday - Friday, so less people would have to take time off from their job. Edit: Found this > In 1845, the United States Congress chose a single date for all national elections in all states. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen so that there would never be more than 34 days between Election Day and the first Wednesday in December. Election Day is held on a Tuesday so that voters will not have to vote or travel on Sunday. This was an important consideration at the time when the laws were written and is still so in some Christian communities in the United States. This seems a pretty dated reason. Why no one is proposing to change it ?
- BatFastard 8y ago
  Elections are held on Tuesday as a way of restricting who can vote PERIOD. Poorer voters have a harder time getting off work, and getting transportation to voting site, which is usually close to their home, but not their work.

martin_bech 8y ago

I also live i Skanderborg. As a side note our Politicians in Denmark, just trashed the posibility of using evoting, citing security, and that our current election system, is actually superior. The only thing we would gain, would be fast vote counting. Why sould we trade security for that?

sgeisenh 8y ago

I trust good digital voting systems more than a paper ballot. Specifically, the system should be auditable in a way that makes it difficult to trace individual votes back to voters, but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly. There must be a good way to accomplish this while also addressing potential voter fraud. Does anybody know of any research in this area? With paper ballots, I have no way of knowing whether or not my vote was counted correctly. And I find that really unsettling.

learc83 8y ago
>but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly. If everyone can prove how they voted it becomes much easier to intimidate or incentivize people to vote a certain way.
- yoha 8y ago
  That is indeed the main issue with verifiable voting. The usual solutions offer various compromises, but it is not possible to both guarantee the ability to verify that one's ballot is counted correctly, and that you cannot prove for whom you voted.
contravariant 8y ago
That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements. In theory you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a particular way to ensure you can't be intimidated into changing you vote. Unless it's good enough to verify whether your vote was counted, that should be fairly easy to do.
- yoha 8y ago
  > That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements Untrue. You can use strong encryption to ensure confidentiality and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure integrity. Then, you can use methods from homomorphic encryption to tally the ballots. There is a whole area of research dedicated to this.

alphakappa 8y ago

>The actual voting takes place on paper, and while it takes time to prepare the ballots and count the votes, the process of voting doesn’t take very longer than a few minutes for the individual citizen. From they enter the voting place till they are done. How is the counting done in Denmark? Do they still have to collect all the paper ballots and count them in a central place? If so, how do you avoid all the 'hanging chad' issues?

tokai 8y ago
No they count them at every voting place, and sum the results.

zdragnar 8y ago

Registration for voting varies by the state you live in. In MN, you basically just need to walk in, have someone else who is already registered vouch for you, and you can register + vote on the spot. Every attempt to firm up voter registration roles (such as proving identity, eligibility, etc) is met with cries of racism.

bdamm 8y ago
That's because schemes such as bringing a driver's license are racist when you look at mobility and accessibility to government services. Back in my home country (Canada), voter eligibility was done by bringing evidence of residence in the district, which is roughly the same hurdle as getting a library card. I don't see why it ought to be any harder than that.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  Notice that I didn't mention a driver's license. Also, I find the argument a bit hard to believe, since the same form of ID are required for cigarettes and alcohol, which nobody complains about being racist. Finally, rural areas with difficult access to government centers are typically more white and tend to vote more Republican anyway; the disparate impact of accessibility argument is a bit disingenuous.

soundwave106 8y ago

For a little bit of context, from what I recall, the real push towards electronic voting in the United States came after the 2000 presidential election and the controversies that happened with paper ballots and the tight recount in Florida (eg "hanging chads"). (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/electronic-voting-machines-2012_n_1992992.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/electronic-voting-...) Paper isn't perfect and I think the thought at the time was pushing elimination of all of paper's errors. That being said, digital voting of course has far worse problems if you don't do it right (and it's pretty clear it hasn't been done very well in the US). In hindsight, that was a poor push. I imagine it's actually possible to design a digital voting system that is fairly secure (eg air-gapped voting machines, secure data storage and transmission, integrity verification, redundant security features, thoroughly tested, and -- most critical of all -- paper backups), but it would be very difficult compared to designing a better paper ballot system, and probably quite a bit more expensive.

rmetzler 8y ago

As a fellow European my view changed a little bit, when I understood how US votes differ. I'm used to vote one or two items, sometimes three on one election day. US votes often have dozens of different items. They vote on proprositions for laws, we usually don't do this. US citizens vote for their sheriffs and maybe many more jobs. I also think, you shouldn't use voting machines. But I understood them better when I found out that their ballots are different from our ballots.