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Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, s

Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal. Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. I think the right strategy is to pick a state, implement a voting system there for people to vote on their phones, and then see if it works out or not. Had this been done a couple of years ago, we would have been more prepared for covid-19 this election. And we're only going to have more pandemics and other disasters going forward.

stansbury 6y ago
Iowa Democrats tried an app this year, and it was a colossal failure: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802583844/what-we-know-about-the-app-that-delayed-iowas-caucus-results https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802583844/what-we-know-about-...
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  That is obviously not a good way to do things. The general public wasn't informed about it, the app was from a company nobody had heard of, and evidently hadn't been tested well. No, this should be an open transparent effort, with code published online (they need not accept PR's with code BTW). It should be trialled in a few states during an off-year election.
wtracy 6y ago
> Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail. > but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. New issues are unpredictable, and do not have known mitigations. (Once they can be reliably predicted and mitigated, they are no longer "new".) There's also no known upper bound on the amount of damage these issues can cause. As an added bonus, the quantity of bugs in a long-deployed system is generally well understood, while it's difficult to place an upper bound on the number of bugs in a system that hasn't been tested in production yet. To make this concrete: Imagine finding a bug that causes several thousand phones to occasionally reboot unexpectedly. Pleased with yourself, you publish a patch and push it out to all affected devices. One week later, a thousand of those devices power off and never power on again--they've been permanently bricked by your update. Are your users angry because you refused to give the random reboots a "free pass" because of "tradition"? Or are they angry because you made drastic changes to a system that basically worked without taking the time to understand the consequences?
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  > In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail. Oh, voter suppression is well-understood and predictable. I disagree with you that mitigations have been effective.
Ericson2314 6y ago
> Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal. I am 100 for voting with machines that spit out the cannonical paper which can be hand-reviwed. The point is not the paper UX, but the paper trail. > Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. As somebody who has spent weird years pushing Haskell where it wasn't requested I know the feeling exactly, OK? :). It's just an unfortunately truth that the messy unprincipled systems today happens to involve using paper, which is in fact good in principle. I would love if we had a 3 way discourse on 1) good paper systems 2) bad current hodge-podge 3) bad purely-electronic, in order to speak truths while avoiding status quo bias.

stansbury 6y ago

Iowa Democrats tried an app this year, and it was a colossal failure: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802583844/what-we-know-about-the-app-that-delayed-iowas-caucus-results https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802583844/what-we-know-about-...

diebeforei485 6y ago
That is obviously not a good way to do things. The general public wasn't informed about it, the app was from a company nobody had heard of, and evidently hadn't been tested well. No, this should be an open transparent effort, with code published online (they need not accept PR's with code BTW). It should be trialled in a few states during an off-year election.

wtracy 6y ago

> Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail. > but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. New issues are unpredictable, and do not have known mitigations. (Once they can be reliably predicted and mitigated, they are no longer "new".) There's also no known upper bound on the amount of damage these issues can cause. As an added bonus, the quantity of bugs in a long-deployed system is generally well understood, while it's difficult to place an upper bound on the number of bugs in a system that hasn't been tested in production yet. To make this concrete: Imagine finding a bug that causes several thousand phones to occasionally reboot unexpectedly. Pleased with yourself, you publish a patch and push it out to all affected devices. One week later, a thousand of those devices power off and never power on again--they've been permanently bricked by your update. Are your users angry because you refused to give the random reboots a "free pass" because of "tradition"? Or are they angry because you made drastic changes to a system that basically worked without taking the time to understand the consequences?

diebeforei485 6y ago
> In safety-critical systems, known problems are often tolerated because they are predictable. In these cases, mitigations are understood, and there's a well-defined upper bound on the amount of damage that can be caused if the mitigations fail. Oh, voter suppression is well-understood and predictable. I disagree with you that mitigations have been effective.

Ericson2314 6y ago

> Meanwhile people have difficulty filling out paper ballots, because it's terrible UX. If you want to have a nice voting system like STV or even ranked-choice, shading ovals on paper ballots is not ideal. I am 100 for voting with machines that spit out the cannonical paper which can be hand-reviwed. The point is not the paper UX, but the paper trail. > Sometimes it feels as though existing problems get a free pass because of tradition, but new issues (even if addressed) are scary and so the entire thing should be stopped. As somebody who has spent weird years pushing Haskell where it wasn't requested I know the feeling exactly, OK? :). It's just an unfortunately truth that the messy unprincipled systems today happens to involve using paper, which is in fact good in principle. I would love if we had a 3 way discourse on 1) good paper systems 2) bad current hodge-podge 3) bad purely-electronic, in order to speak truths while avoiding status quo bias.