5 ms·

>I have to trust the authorities who did that. Poll workers who do the count aren't "authorities" who lord over us. They are us. I volunteer to be a poll worke

>I have to trust the authorities who did that. Poll workers who do the count aren't "authorities" who lord over us. They are us. I volunteer to be a poll worker. You can too. Anyone who's an eligible voter can be part of the counting process and see how it's done. In my precinct, it's exactly what people see when they vote: they feed the machine their completed ballots and the machine spits out the count at the end of the night. If there's a problem, all the ballots are kept in sealed boxes and can be re-tallied independent of the scanner software/hardware. If you think there's monkey business going on in your precinct, you're free to participate in the process and verify it for yourself.

koheripbal 6y ago
The number of people actually tabulating the results is still very very small - especially in key swing state districts. You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote.
- the_snooze 6y ago
  What do you consider "very very small?" Tabuation is done at the precinct level, and there are many many precincts involved in an election. Also jurisdictions can do risk-limiting audits (RLA) to spot-check that the electronic counts are in line with the results. "Following your vote" is dangerous because it opens up the possibility of at-scale voter intimidation or vote-buying. "Receipt-freeness" is a desirable property because it eliminates this risk. RLAs allow for aggregate verification while maintaining receipt-freeness.
  - singron 6y ago
    Receipts (paper records received after voting) are OK as long as they don't reveal who you voted for. Confusingly, sometimes this is called "receipt-free".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - the_snooze 6y ago
      >OK as long as they don't reveal who you voted for. Yup, an "I voted" sticker is OK. An "I voted" sticker with your ballot's serial number isn't.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  >You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote. But that also means the guy with the big wrench can follow your vote and so see whether you voted the way he told you or not, and that allows him to decide whether to smash your kneecaps in. Electronic voting enables corruption.
  - eloff 6y ago
    That's not at all a required feature of electronic voting.
    - owenmarshall 6y ago
      I have seen systems that allow for a real vote as well as a masked vote - so you get verified votes but have a fake vote to show if you want or need. But consider: at this very moment, right above you is a comment with a picture of ballot that was filled out improperly and lead to a tied election. If we can’t teach people to fill in a circle properly, how in the world do we expect them to use or understand a system that guarantees verifiability as well as anonymity.
      - godelski 6y ago
        Is the problem "people not filling in circles properly" or is the problem that there are other errors. If I'm not mistaken you're referring to the hanging chad issue. The reason it was an issue is because it is hard to see the chad. We're in tech, this should be unsurprising that machines don't work with 100% efficiency. If your machine (human or computer) is marking a ballot it would be unsurprising if the mark is transposed or warped or incomplete. Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner.
        the_snooze 6y ago
        >Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner. We already have these systems in deployment. My precinct uses optical-scan paper ballots where any mark inside the bubble is valid. You can fill, dot, cross, check, whatever---the machine will count it as a mark. If you have a stray mark that results in an overvote, the machine will reject your ballot, then prompt you to either correct the overvote or override the error. The scanner will also accept ballots fed in any orientation as long as it's not folded or wrinkled. It's surprisingly robust and user-friendly.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  2000 and Bush Gore. They had three official recounts. The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. The Supreme Court ended up appointing Bush and the nation's voting commissions learned an important lesson. But like OP said, volunteers could see the process. The recounts were actually pretty damn close; it was just the election was way too close for that to be acceptable. In general the US system, as crap as it is (first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems), the electoral and state-based rules do mean that election fraud isn't too big a deal. New York will likely always go Blue. Tennessee will always go Red. Even if there is same fraud there, it doesn't matter that much because of the way votes are allocated per state. It's not fair, but that's the system the US has. Fraud matters greatly in states were elections are close (Florida, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) and it will get even worse thanks to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, if that gets triggered. Potential fraud in swing states or NaPoVolIterCo are incredibly dangerous right now, because what we cannot have in America is loss of faith in the election system. That will be disastrous. We would not survive the 2000 Bush/Gore election today.
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    >The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. This shows that recount disputes almost always boil down to whether to accept a particular ballot one way or another. It's not fraud. You're just bound to run into ambiguity once or twice in a large election. It usually doesn't matter, but it can pop up when an election is really close. There was a literal tied election in Virginia a few years ago that stemmed from an ambiguous mark for delegate: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ballot_94_AP_cropped.jpg https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ballot_94_AP_cro...
  - godelski 6y ago
    > first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems I'm guessing you watch a lot of CPG Grey. You should check out Cardinal Voting systems[0], specifically Approval[1] and STAR[2], as these better fix a lot of the problems. Fargo recently had great success with approval[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting [3] https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-first-approval-voting-election-results-and-voter-experience/ https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-f...

koheripbal 6y ago

The number of people actually tabulating the results is still very very small - especially in key swing state districts. You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote.

the_snooze 6y ago
What do you consider "very very small?" Tabuation is done at the precinct level, and there are many many precincts involved in an election. Also jurisdictions can do risk-limiting audits (RLA) to spot-check that the electronic counts are in line with the results. "Following your vote" is dangerous because it opens up the possibility of at-scale voter intimidation or vote-buying. "Receipt-freeness" is a desirable property because it eliminates this risk. RLAs allow for aggregate verification while maintaining receipt-freeness.
- singron 6y ago
  Receipts (paper records received after voting) are OK as long as they don't reveal who you voted for. Confusingly, sometimes this is called "receipt-free".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    >OK as long as they don't reveal who you voted for. Yup, an "I voted" sticker is OK. An "I voted" sticker with your ballot's serial number isn't.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
>You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote. But that also means the guy with the big wrench can follow your vote and so see whether you voted the way he told you or not, and that allows him to decide whether to smash your kneecaps in. Electronic voting enables corruption.
- eloff 6y ago
  That's not at all a required feature of electronic voting.
  - owenmarshall 6y ago
    I have seen systems that allow for a real vote as well as a masked vote - so you get verified votes but have a fake vote to show if you want or need. But consider: at this very moment, right above you is a comment with a picture of ballot that was filled out improperly and lead to a tied election. If we can’t teach people to fill in a circle properly, how in the world do we expect them to use or understand a system that guarantees verifiability as well as anonymity.
    - godelski 6y ago
      Is the problem "people not filling in circles properly" or is the problem that there are other errors. If I'm not mistaken you're referring to the hanging chad issue. The reason it was an issue is because it is hard to see the chad. We're in tech, this should be unsurprising that machines don't work with 100% efficiency. If your machine (human or computer) is marking a ballot it would be unsurprising if the mark is transposed or warped or incomplete. Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner.
      - the_snooze 6y ago
        >Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner. We already have these systems in deployment. My precinct uses optical-scan paper ballots where any mark inside the bubble is valid. You can fill, dot, cross, check, whatever---the machine will count it as a mark. If you have a stray mark that results in an overvote, the machine will reject your ballot, then prompt you to either correct the overvote or override the error. The scanner will also accept ballots fed in any orientation as long as it's not folded or wrinkled. It's surprisingly robust and user-friendly.
djsumdog 6y ago
2000 and Bush Gore. They had three official recounts. The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. The Supreme Court ended up appointing Bush and the nation's voting commissions learned an important lesson. But like OP said, volunteers could see the process. The recounts were actually pretty damn close; it was just the election was way too close for that to be acceptable. In general the US system, as crap as it is (first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems), the electoral and state-based rules do mean that election fraud isn't too big a deal. New York will likely always go Blue. Tennessee will always go Red. Even if there is same fraud there, it doesn't matter that much because of the way votes are allocated per state. It's not fair, but that's the system the US has. Fraud matters greatly in states were elections are close (Florida, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) and it will get even worse thanks to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, if that gets triggered. Potential fraud in swing states or NaPoVolIterCo are incredibly dangerous right now, because what we cannot have in America is loss of faith in the election system. That will be disastrous. We would not survive the 2000 Bush/Gore election today.
- the_snooze 6y ago
  >The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. This shows that recount disputes almost always boil down to whether to accept a particular ballot one way or another. It's not fraud. You're just bound to run into ambiguity once or twice in a large election. It usually doesn't matter, but it can pop up when an election is really close. There was a literal tied election in Virginia a few years ago that stemmed from an ambiguous mark for delegate: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ballot_94_AP_cropped.jpg https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ballot_94_AP_cro...
- godelski 6y ago
  > first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems I'm guessing you watch a lot of CPG Grey. You should check out Cardinal Voting systems[0], specifically Approval[1] and STAR[2], as these better fix a lot of the problems. Fargo recently had great success with approval[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting [3] https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-first-approval-voting-election-results-and-voter-experience/ https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-f...