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There are really easy solutions to this that other countries use, while keeping the safe and simple paper ballots. They have many polling places, enough that q

There are really easy solutions to this that other countries use, while keeping the safe and simple paper ballots. They have many polling places, enough that queues aren’t more than a few minutes at the most. They don’t make the polling places deliberately hard to get to. They hold elections on a weekend or a public holiday so the flow evens out over the course of the whole day.

jcrawfordor 7y ago
It is important to keep in mind that using what is often called a "voting convenience center" model where a voter can appear at any precinct instead of only their own precinct essentially requires the use of a computerized pollbook, since the pollbook needs to be kept in sync across all locations to prevent double-voting at two locations. This isn't much of a difference since computer pollbooks are already nearly universal, but the computer pollbook is a risk surface for election interference that's largely overlooked by the public discussion - I think it's a major mistake that the public discussion focuses essentially only on the voting tabulation itself when often the supporting systems (pollbook, election management system, communications) are far more poorly secured. Defects in them tend to be easier to detect since there is less of an element of secrecy, but consider the chaos that could be caused by a malicious actor simply taking the pollbook offline, or the subtle manipulation that might go unnoticed if a malicious actor gained access to the pollbook and invalidated the voter registrations of people in an area and demographic making them likely to vote for a particular party... if the right number of people were chosen, you might be able to influence the outcome of the election without invalidating so many people's registrations that the election administrator can't wave it off as people who thought they were registered and weren't. This could be especially effective if you targeted an economically disadvantaged group which tend to have a harder time with their voter registrations anyway due to frequent address changes.

jcrawfordor 7y ago

It is important to keep in mind that using what is often called a "voting convenience center" model where a voter can appear at any precinct instead of only their own precinct essentially requires the use of a computerized pollbook, since the pollbook needs to be kept in sync across all locations to prevent double-voting at two locations. This isn't much of a difference since computer pollbooks are already nearly universal, but the computer pollbook is a risk surface for election interference that's largely overlooked by the public discussion - I think it's a major mistake that the public discussion focuses essentially only on the voting tabulation itself when often the supporting systems (pollbook, election management system, communications) are far more poorly secured. Defects in them tend to be easier to detect since there is less of an element of secrecy, but consider the chaos that could be caused by a malicious actor simply taking the pollbook offline, or the subtle manipulation that might go unnoticed if a malicious actor gained access to the pollbook and invalidated the voter registrations of people in an area and demographic making them likely to vote for a particular party... if the right number of people were chosen, you might be able to influence the outcome of the election without invalidating so many people's registrations that the election administrator can't wave it off as people who thought they were registered and weren't. This could be especially effective if you targeted an economically disadvantaged group which tend to have a harder time with their voter registrations anyway due to frequent address changes.