8 ms·

Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds. You get the speed of automation with a paper trail in case

by skrowl 7y ago

Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds. You get the speed of automation with a paper trail in case you have to go back and audit. EDIT for those replying that you feel voting should be anonymous. With anonymous voting, how do you stop the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" ala Broward County Florida every election? If you can't tie a ballot back to a voter, how do you know the ballot is legitimate?

mffnbs 7y ago
Depends on what you mean by voter ID.
cryptoz 7y ago
What is a "strong voter ID"? This sounds like voter disenfranchisement or a poll tax, or both (and both are unconstitutional). Voters are not required to have ID, nor should they be. Not everyone has an ID, and many states have specifically passed laws to make it more expensive and more difficult for some people to get government-issued photo ID. Without a massive outreach program intended to reach all voters and supply them with convenient, free of charge voter IDs, and a system that can continuously and quickly resolve errors, such a "strong voter ID" would be unconstitutional (for good reason).
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  Then we need to fix the problem of people not getting ID instead of using it as an excuse not to secure out elections
  - mikeash 7y ago
    It solves a problem that doesn’t exist in practice and is impossible to exploit at scale even in theory. It would be good, but it’s not terribly important.
    - blackflame7001 7y ago
      "that doesn’t exist in practice" It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. You can't even begin to analyze the problem so its laughable for you to assert such things.
      - mikeash 7y ago
        It leaves a record that the somebody else cast a vote. This would be noticed rapidly if the real person then showed up to vote and was prevented because an impersonator got there first. If that doesn’t happen, you can ask them if they voted. For people you can’t ask and know that they couldn’t have voted (for example, the record is stale and they’ve moved or died) then you know that any record of them voting must be an impersonator. How often do any of these things actually happen? It’s all public record. The data is there for analysis. And yet nobody can point to more than a handful of examples.
      - mffnbs 7y ago
        I love this argument because it exposes that voter legitimacy is not based on any sort of logic or evidence, but based on feeling more secure about it. It's especially ironic.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. If it's happening at any significant rate, without perfect knowledge of which eligible voters won't vote (or have someone else try to steal their vote, which is just as bad for the prospective vote thief), it leaves quite tangible evidence in the form of people presenting themselves to vote under names that have already voted. The absence of this occurring fairly strongly indicates that vote stealing by impersonation isn't a thing that happens at any meaningful rate.
        blackflame7000 7y ago
  - w0de 7y ago
    You're almost there. "Fixing" that problem - and you'll find many folks who don't want the federal government to have ID information for everyone - is not simple. In the meantime, multifarious ID laws will empower discrimination and disenfranchisement.
    - blackflame7001 7y ago
      What about the disenfranchisement of citizens who's will is overrun by people not eligible to vote? Are you really trying to convince me that we should make our elections insecure because some people want to vote in federal election while simultaneously not wanting the federal government to have their ID. You do realize you have to register to vote right? Why should we all make our election insecure for people who don't even trust the government themselves?
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Because its a free country, because a federal ID disenfranchises those who will find it difficult or impossible to get such an ID, because not trusting the government is the whole point of the US constitution.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  It is disenfranchisement. It can cost almost a hundred dollars just for the IDs to be issued some places. If you have lost some identity documents you may need to request records from other places to substantiate name changes. That is to say marriage licenses and divorce decrees. Gathering this additional documentation may require another hundred bucks easy. The common reply to this is that you need these documents anyway to work, to drive etc. This is true but ignores all the peripheral people you don't see. People whose roles in their family are support or who themselves are in need of support because of illness. Not all of them drive or work and they are citizens too. It seems to me that the easier solution is to make public records free. Let the taxes you already pay serve to pay the salary of the peon at the printer. Then the people clamoring for us to check ID's to keep the "illegals" from voting can be happy and those people can be enfranchised.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Honestly asking... Is the USA just ahead of everyone else when it comes to not disenfranchising voters? https://bluntforcetruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/voter-ID-laws.jpg https://bluntforcetruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/voter... edit: ok, I don't get the hate... weird.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      What is this supposed to prove?
    - w0de 7y ago
      You're missing the point about IDs being incredibly easy to obtain. They are not in the US. Additionally, there's a long history of using voting requirements to disenfranchise voters. I can't comment on the countries in the picture you've linked. I'll guess that most or all of them make it both easy and required to have a national ID card. That is not the case in the United States. Consider a working class non-driver who has never travelled overseas. What is their ID? Would you propose a new state or federal ID card? Great. How likely is it that the state or federal government will produce a system for issuing these that is easy to access, widely available, free, quick to issue IDs, etc? How likely do you think it is that politicians will attempt to modify the system for issuing these IDs so that their opponents' voters will find it more challenging to receive them? If your answer is "likely" and "unlikely" respectively, you are naive to the history of voter disenfranchisement and vote-system-gaming in the United States. Much of it is based on race.
JasonFruit 7y ago
I don't want anyone to be able to look at my vote and know who did it. That's a powerful tool for thugs and tyrants.
- umvi 7y ago
  How do you prevent duplicate voting, then (i.e. me casting 100 votes for Trump)?
  - cryptoz 7y ago
    I think lots of countries will stamp your wrist and check for a stamp before allowing a vote to happen. I could be mistaken, but something akin to this is possible.
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      Just mark it down on a list. Whether someone has voted is not a secret.
    - TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
      Then you could wash off the stamp and vote again
    - codedokode 7y ago
      In Russia you need to show an ID (internal passport) to receive a ballot and put a signature into the voters registry. So duplicate voting is possible only with the help of election staff (usually in such case a person has something in their passport, or says a code word that gives a hint that he should receive a ballot without checking his name against the registry).
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
    Keep a record that I voted. Don't attach it to my vote.
    - umvi 7y ago
pmoriarty 7y ago
How do you know you have to go back and audit except by looking at the forgeable vote counting results? Those results could easily be hacked to not meet whatever the criteria are for an audit. Hand counted paper ballots are the only way to be sure, and elections are important enough to be worth it.
wang_li 7y ago
>Paper ballot tied to a voter Nope. Ballots need to be anonymous. Otherwise you can be coerced into voting a particular way.
- skrowl 7y ago
  You can't do anonymous ballots. With anonymous ballots, you can just "Find a box of ballots" and have no way to authenticate that they came from actual voters vs fraudsters.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    For some weird reason, Germany has been doing the impossible for decades now. Nobody "finds" boxes of ballots here, and all votes are cast anonymously. Several people in this thread have already explained how this magic trick works (registration book, each voter is ticked off, number of ballots from precincts are counted against ticked-off voters = can't find thousands of additional ballots).
    - skrowl 7y ago
      Unfortunately that doesn't work in the United States. We regularly get precincts reporting more votes than are even possible given their total number of eligible voters. Fraud in anonymous voting states is rampant here.
      - mszkoda 7y ago
        Yep, there were several counties where they "found" extra ballots that they missed during the count in 2018 in the US. It was across both parties in multiple states wherein the "found" votes were heavily favoring one party or the other (a few were well outside 3 standard deviations from the current votes, even in areas that were normally not heavily favoring one side).
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
jakelazaroff 7y ago
Why is the "speed of automation" important? Just hire more people to count if it's too slow. Voter ID is entirely orthogonal to this issue. Tying ballots to a voter is not desirable, since it opens the door for voter intimidation. Edit to respond to the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" comment: anonymous voting means you don't know how someone voted, but whether or not they voted is still public record. The number of ballots counted still needs to match up with the number of votes cast.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  Voter ID does not tie the ballot to a voter.
  - jakelazaroff 7y ago
    The comment to which I was responding advocated it: > Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds.
mtgx 7y ago
I would also add automatic recounting of votes if the electronic count is >1% of exit polls prediction, as well as some statistical recounting of various precincts to check if everything comes up as it's supposed to. Finally, the punishments need to be strong, swift, and decisive if something does come up as being wrong. You can't just be "oh well, mistakes were made with the hundreds of thousands of mis-counted votes/purged voters. What can you do?!" No way. None of that. All the people responsible in such a situation should be investigated, and if found guilty punished. Otherwise, there will be no fear of trying to steal the elections, especially if the upside is big.
hiccuphippo 7y ago
You don't want to tie it to a voter. You can tie it to a voting group so you can audit the votes for the whole group instead of a single voter.
cjslep 7y ago
You have to make that ID national, free, and easily obtained with very little to no wait time. Otherwise, it's going to disenfranchise those without time and/or money.
- anticensor 7y ago
  US Passport Card has all the features you want except for the "free"-ness thing.
  - cjslep 7y ago
    ...and except for the fact that the US Passport Card itself (DS-11) requires another ID card, so the same exact problems arise. And those IDs usually require proof of residency and/or a copy of a US birth certificate, which can be problematic to acquire or prove in their own ways for the more vulnerable to disenfranchisement (such as the homeless) in our society.
    - anticensor 7y ago
      Legislature may overcome that hurdle by amending the Passport Act, making the Passport Card free and internationally valid federal ID document on its own. And do not say that Birth Certificate is too costly.
jakeogh 7y ago
"audit" is a euphemism for recount. Recounts get challenged in court and are not guaranteed to happen.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  Audit is separate from recount, though the capacity for the former is equivalent to the capacity for the latter. Audits can be done by third parties as a review without having the force of an official recount (for instance, this happened in Florida in 2000 after the official recount was ended.) If an election method cannot be audited, it cannot be trusted.
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    It's the same thing. You can call the case where the counting is not official whatever you want, but the same bar exists. "Audit" requests get challenged in court. Note I said nothing about whether recountability is a good thing. It's clearly a good thing. Hence we should stick with hand counted paper ballots since machine counting introduces trivial ways to game the vote.
beat 7y ago
You don't need to trace individual ballots. You just need to count the number of ballots received against the number of votes signed in the registration books. With that simple audit, your whole "we just found this box of ballots" scenario falls apart. That box of ballots would have to be traced back to a precinct, which traces back to a book full of signatures of individual voters, and to handling signoffs by multiple election judges. Just because Florida is unwilling to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
- 18pfsmt 7y ago
  >Just because Florida is To be fair, I believe that is not the case across the state, just certain areas (i.e. county level).
  - beat 7y ago
    Eh. If state law were clear, county-by-county shenanigans would be impossible. Florida's whole system is a mess.
    - 18pfsmt 7y ago
      Under a proper federalized system, that shouldn't matter unless one lives in FL. Let them handle their local issues how their voters see fit; they have voter initiatives there. The only people that have issues with the way things are done in other states are people that want to use the federal government to impose their standards and values on people living 100s or 1,000s of miles away (I'm ~2,000 miles from D.C.).
      - beat 7y ago
        Bullshit. Florida's electoral incompetence and corruption (probably) handed the 2000 presidential election to Bush. Because of that, we wound up with the Iraq war, and a mind-boggling amount of American blood and treasure (not to mention Iraqi lives) wasted on lies. Florida's inability to conduct free and fair elections has tangible consequences on me as a Minnesotan. So yes, I want to impose some standards and values on their elections, because their elections lead to MY president.
18pfsmt 7y ago
None of the replies mention that a secret ballot is a concept that goes back to ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

by skrowl 7y ago

mffnbs 7y ago

Depends on what you mean by voter ID.

cryptoz 7y ago

What is a "strong voter ID"? This sounds like voter disenfranchisement or a poll tax, or both (and both are unconstitutional). Voters are not required to have ID, nor should they be. Not everyone has an ID, and many states have specifically passed laws to make it more expensive and more difficult for some people to get government-issued photo ID. Without a massive outreach program intended to reach all voters and supply them with convenient, free of charge voter IDs, and a system that can continuously and quickly resolve errors, such a "strong voter ID" would be unconstitutional (for good reason).

blackflame7000 7y ago
Then we need to fix the problem of people not getting ID instead of using it as an excuse not to secure out elections
- mikeash 7y ago
  It solves a problem that doesn’t exist in practice and is impossible to exploit at scale even in theory. It would be good, but it’s not terribly important.
  - blackflame7001 7y ago
    "that doesn’t exist in practice" It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. You can't even begin to analyze the problem so its laughable for you to assert such things.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      It leaves a record that the somebody else cast a vote. This would be noticed rapidly if the real person then showed up to vote and was prevented because an impersonator got there first. If that doesn’t happen, you can ask them if they voted. For people you can’t ask and know that they couldn’t have voted (for example, the record is stale and they’ve moved or died) then you know that any record of them voting must be an impersonator. How often do any of these things actually happen? It’s all public record. The data is there for analysis. And yet nobody can point to more than a handful of examples.
    - mffnbs 7y ago
      I love this argument because it exposes that voter legitimacy is not based on any sort of logic or evidence, but based on feeling more secure about it. It's especially ironic.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. If it's happening at any significant rate, without perfect knowledge of which eligible voters won't vote (or have someone else try to steal their vote, which is just as bad for the prospective vote thief), it leaves quite tangible evidence in the form of people presenting themselves to vote under names that have already voted. The absence of this occurring fairly strongly indicates that vote stealing by impersonation isn't a thing that happens at any meaningful rate.
      - blackflame7000 7y ago
- w0de 7y ago
  You're almost there. "Fixing" that problem - and you'll find many folks who don't want the federal government to have ID information for everyone - is not simple. In the meantime, multifarious ID laws will empower discrimination and disenfranchisement.
  - blackflame7001 7y ago
    What about the disenfranchisement of citizens who's will is overrun by people not eligible to vote? Are you really trying to convince me that we should make our elections insecure because some people want to vote in federal election while simultaneously not wanting the federal government to have their ID. You do realize you have to register to vote right? Why should we all make our election insecure for people who don't even trust the government themselves?
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Because its a free country, because a federal ID disenfranchises those who will find it difficult or impossible to get such an ID, because not trusting the government is the whole point of the US constitution.
michaelmrose 7y ago
It is disenfranchisement. It can cost almost a hundred dollars just for the IDs to be issued some places. If you have lost some identity documents you may need to request records from other places to substantiate name changes. That is to say marriage licenses and divorce decrees. Gathering this additional documentation may require another hundred bucks easy. The common reply to this is that you need these documents anyway to work, to drive etc. This is true but ignores all the peripheral people you don't see. People whose roles in their family are support or who themselves are in need of support because of illness. Not all of them drive or work and they are citizens too. It seems to me that the easier solution is to make public records free. Let the taxes you already pay serve to pay the salary of the peon at the printer. Then the people clamoring for us to check ID's to keep the "illegals" from voting can be happy and those people can be enfranchised.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Honestly asking... Is the USA just ahead of everyone else when it comes to not disenfranchising voters? https://bluntforcetruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/voter-ID-laws.jpg https://bluntforcetruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/voter... edit: ok, I don't get the hate... weird.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    What is this supposed to prove?
  - w0de 7y ago
    You're missing the point about IDs being incredibly easy to obtain. They are not in the US. Additionally, there's a long history of using voting requirements to disenfranchise voters. I can't comment on the countries in the picture you've linked. I'll guess that most or all of them make it both easy and required to have a national ID card. That is not the case in the United States. Consider a working class non-driver who has never travelled overseas. What is their ID? Would you propose a new state or federal ID card? Great. How likely is it that the state or federal government will produce a system for issuing these that is easy to access, widely available, free, quick to issue IDs, etc? How likely do you think it is that politicians will attempt to modify the system for issuing these IDs so that their opponents' voters will find it more challenging to receive them? If your answer is "likely" and "unlikely" respectively, you are naive to the history of voter disenfranchisement and vote-system-gaming in the United States. Much of it is based on race.

JasonFruit 7y ago

I don't want anyone to be able to look at my vote and know who did it. That's a powerful tool for thugs and tyrants.

umvi 7y ago
How do you prevent duplicate voting, then (i.e. me casting 100 votes for Trump)?
- cryptoz 7y ago
  I think lots of countries will stamp your wrist and check for a stamp before allowing a vote to happen. I could be mistaken, but something akin to this is possible.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    Just mark it down on a list. Whether someone has voted is not a secret.
  - TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
    Then you could wash off the stamp and vote again
  - codedokode 7y ago
    In Russia you need to show an ID (internal passport) to receive a ballot and put a signature into the voters registry. So duplicate voting is possible only with the help of election staff (usually in such case a person has something in their passport, or says a code word that gives a hint that he should receive a ballot without checking his name against the registry).
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  Keep a record that I voted. Don't attach it to my vote.
  - umvi 7y ago

pmoriarty 7y ago

How do you know you have to go back and audit except by looking at the forgeable vote counting results? Those results could easily be hacked to not meet whatever the criteria are for an audit. Hand counted paper ballots are the only way to be sure, and elections are important enough to be worth it.

wang_li 7y ago

>Paper ballot tied to a voter Nope. Ballots need to be anonymous. Otherwise you can be coerced into voting a particular way.

skrowl 7y ago
You can't do anonymous ballots. With anonymous ballots, you can just "Find a box of ballots" and have no way to authenticate that they came from actual voters vs fraudsters.
- Slartie 7y ago
  For some weird reason, Germany has been doing the impossible for decades now. Nobody "finds" boxes of ballots here, and all votes are cast anonymously. Several people in this thread have already explained how this magic trick works (registration book, each voter is ticked off, number of ballots from precincts are counted against ticked-off voters = can't find thousands of additional ballots).
  - skrowl 7y ago
    Unfortunately that doesn't work in the United States. We regularly get precincts reporting more votes than are even possible given their total number of eligible voters. Fraud in anonymous voting states is rampant here.
    - mszkoda 7y ago
      Yep, there were several counties where they "found" extra ballots that they missed during the count in 2018 in the US. It was across both parties in multiple states wherein the "found" votes were heavily favoring one party or the other (a few were well outside 3 standard deviations from the current votes, even in areas that were normally not heavily favoring one side).
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]

jakelazaroff 7y ago

Why is the "speed of automation" important? Just hire more people to count if it's too slow. Voter ID is entirely orthogonal to this issue. Tying ballots to a voter is not desirable, since it opens the door for voter intimidation. Edit to respond to the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" comment: anonymous voting means you don't know how someone voted, but whether or not they voted is still public record. The number of ballots counted still needs to match up with the number of votes cast.

jakeogh 7y ago
Voter ID does not tie the ballot to a voter.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  The comment to which I was responding advocated it: > Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds.

mtgx 7y ago

I would also add automatic recounting of votes if the electronic count is >1% of exit polls prediction, as well as some statistical recounting of various precincts to check if everything comes up as it's supposed to. Finally, the punishments need to be strong, swift, and decisive if something does come up as being wrong. You can't just be "oh well, mistakes were made with the hundreds of thousands of mis-counted votes/purged voters. What can you do?!" No way. None of that. All the people responsible in such a situation should be investigated, and if found guilty punished. Otherwise, there will be no fear of trying to steal the elections, especially if the upside is big.

hiccuphippo 7y ago

You don't want to tie it to a voter. You can tie it to a voting group so you can audit the votes for the whole group instead of a single voter.

cjslep 7y ago

You have to make that ID national, free, and easily obtained with very little to no wait time. Otherwise, it's going to disenfranchise those without time and/or money.

anticensor 7y ago
US Passport Card has all the features you want except for the "free"-ness thing.
- cjslep 7y ago
  ...and except for the fact that the US Passport Card itself (DS-11) requires another ID card, so the same exact problems arise. And those IDs usually require proof of residency and/or a copy of a US birth certificate, which can be problematic to acquire or prove in their own ways for the more vulnerable to disenfranchisement (such as the homeless) in our society.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    Legislature may overcome that hurdle by amending the Passport Act, making the Passport Card free and internationally valid federal ID document on its own. And do not say that Birth Certificate is too costly.

jakeogh 7y ago

"audit" is a euphemism for recount. Recounts get challenged in court and are not guaranteed to happen.

dragonwriter 7y ago
Audit is separate from recount, though the capacity for the former is equivalent to the capacity for the latter. Audits can be done by third parties as a review without having the force of an official recount (for instance, this happened in Florida in 2000 after the official recount was ended.) If an election method cannot be audited, it cannot be trusted.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  It's the same thing. You can call the case where the counting is not official whatever you want, but the same bar exists. "Audit" requests get challenged in court. Note I said nothing about whether recountability is a good thing. It's clearly a good thing. Hence we should stick with hand counted paper ballots since machine counting introduces trivial ways to game the vote.

beat 7y ago

You don't need to trace individual ballots. You just need to count the number of ballots received against the number of votes signed in the registration books. With that simple audit, your whole "we just found this box of ballots" scenario falls apart. That box of ballots would have to be traced back to a precinct, which traces back to a book full of signatures of individual voters, and to handling signoffs by multiple election judges. Just because Florida is unwilling to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.

18pfsmt 7y ago
>Just because Florida is To be fair, I believe that is not the case across the state, just certain areas (i.e. county level).
- beat 7y ago
  Eh. If state law were clear, county-by-county shenanigans would be impossible. Florida's whole system is a mess.
  - 18pfsmt 7y ago
    Under a proper federalized system, that shouldn't matter unless one lives in FL. Let them handle their local issues how their voters see fit; they have voter initiatives there. The only people that have issues with the way things are done in other states are people that want to use the federal government to impose their standards and values on people living 100s or 1,000s of miles away (I'm ~2,000 miles from D.C.).
    - beat 7y ago
      Bullshit. Florida's electoral incompetence and corruption (probably) handed the 2000 presidential election to Bush. Because of that, we wound up with the Iraq war, and a mind-boggling amount of American blood and treasure (not to mention Iraqi lives) wasted on lies. Florida's inability to conduct free and fair elections has tangible consequences on me as a Minnesotan. So yes, I want to impose some standards and values on their elections, because their elections lead to MY president.

18pfsmt 7y ago

None of the replies mention that a secret ballot is a concept that goes back to ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot