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> The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Can you tell me how current voting

> The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Can you tell me how current voting systems work, because it is a black box to me and I can't even verify that my vote counted for the person I picked. From what I can tell, the local election officials can tally the votes however they want.

Ericson2314 6y ago
GP's critique is not a defense of the status quo. Please do not construe it as such. See https://freeandfair.us/# https://freeandfair.us/# for voting technology that still wisely involves much paper.
- techntoke 6y ago
  So where is the explanation of how it works, because I could go to a Bitcoin website and learn more about how it works quickly than on that site.
henrikschroder 6y ago
I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not. But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly. I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once. Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority. Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat. After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history. As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/01/80/3616/index.html https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0... I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret. Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  Fair, I know that US elections are more complicated because there's so many elected positions to make a choice for. I'm all for technology to help create ballots. You can have a touch-screen system that walks a voter through all the choices and prints a correct ballot, as long as the voter then manually takes this piece of paper, verifies that it says what he thinks it should say, puts it in an envelope, and observers watch him place the envelope in an urn. I'm all for OCR systems that can rapidly scan and count a large number of ballots, your voter ballot creator machine can put OCR codes that make it easier to count as well, I don't care. As long as there's no identifying info on the ballot, it is human readable, and as long as the preliminary vote count is done manually. Later on you can send all your ballots to a central counting facility and OCR the crap out of it for every single elected position, that's fine.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    > as long as the voter then manually takes this piece of paper, verifies that it says what he thinks it should say, You can make a system that allows the voter to do that but how many actually will?
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      The majority of them which happens to also be “enough of them to catch any widespread attempted fraud by printing ballots different than what the user picked”. Force a time delay that’s long enough for a typical user to validate their picks before proceeding and you might bump the figure some.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        A majority would be easily enough, but I'm not that optimistic.

Ericson2314 6y ago

GP's critique is not a defense of the status quo. Please do not construe it as such. See https://freeandfair.us/# https://freeandfair.us/# for voting technology that still wisely involves much paper.

techntoke 6y ago
So where is the explanation of how it works, because I could go to a Bitcoin website and learn more about how it works quickly than on that site.

henrikschroder 6y ago

I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not. But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly. I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once. Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority. Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat. After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history. As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/01/80/3616/index.html https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0... I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret. Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.

henrikschroder 6y ago
Fair, I know that US elections are more complicated because there's so many elected positions to make a choice for. I'm all for technology to help create ballots. You can have a touch-screen system that walks a voter through all the choices and prints a correct ballot, as long as the voter then manually takes this piece of paper, verifies that it says what he thinks it should say, puts it in an envelope, and observers watch him place the envelope in an urn. I'm all for OCR systems that can rapidly scan and count a large number of ballots, your voter ballot creator machine can put OCR codes that make it easier to count as well, I don't care. As long as there's no identifying info on the ballot, it is human readable, and as long as the preliminary vote count is done manually. Later on you can send all your ballots to a central counting facility and OCR the crap out of it for every single elected position, that's fine.
- anoncake 6y ago
  > as long as the voter then manually takes this piece of paper, verifies that it says what he thinks it should say, You can make a system that allows the voter to do that but how many actually will?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    The majority of them which happens to also be “enough of them to catch any widespread attempted fraud by printing ballots different than what the user picked”. Force a time delay that’s long enough for a typical user to validate their picks before proceeding and you might bump the figure some.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      A majority would be easily enough, but I'm not that optimistic.