6 ms·

Nope, it's an idiotic idea. In the UK we have an ENTIRELY manual process, no ridiculous voting machines, butterfly ballots or hanging chads and no OCR machines.

Nope, it's an idiotic idea. In the UK we have an ENTIRELY manual process, no ridiculous voting machines, butterfly ballots or hanging chads and no OCR machines. Just marking a box with a cross, sticking it in a box and then a load of volunteers physically counting the votes while representatives of the parties and anyone else who wants to wander in watches. Postal votes are treated the same and counted at the same time in the same place. The system literally couldn't be simpler or less corruptible. There is no need for anything more complicated because the system works and can be understood by a five year old.

the_snooze 6y ago
How many contests do you have on your ballot? Here's a sample ballot from Alameda County, California in 2018 (starting on page 12 going to page 25). That wasn't a presidential year, so this is a bit on the low side. https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf Manual counts aren't practical in the US because our ballots can be crazy long with tons of contests and candidates. It would be very error-prone to do this manually.
- throwaway936482 6y ago
  1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    The ballots are designed to accomodate the governments we have in place. We can't easily change the structure of national, state, and local governments. In California, one-ballot-per-contest would mean a voter would get a stack of up to 75 ballots on a presidential year.
    - throwaway936482 6y ago
      Whereas currently they get a multi page document. Seriously, as logistical problems go, print separate ballots is really not a hard one and would cut down on the number if people who accidentally vote for the wrong candidate for the wrong thing. Counting may take longer. It may stretch over a few days. Well, fine. Count the presidential ballots first, announce the results and move on down the list until you get to the dog catcher.
      - the_snooze 6y ago
        I'm not sure then what urgent problem you're trying to solve that warrants the cost of errors introduced by the manual counting of huge amounts of paper ballots. It would also be a logistical nightmare getting reams of paper to voters and getting them back and tracking them; at my polling place, we have to make sure that the number of ballots we issued out equals the number reported by the scanner (plus the number of spoiled ballots voters returned to us for disposal). I'm just pointing out that cost. If you don't trust the tabulating machines, we have mechanisms to check them at scale. Basically, randomly sample the paper ballots and check them against the machine results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit If you don't trust the people running elections, you should know that polling places in the US are run by community volunteers. Literally anyone who's a registered voter can participate and see how the sausage is made. In fact, there's a shortage of these folks, so boards of election are thrilled to get more people participating.
staunch 6y ago
This system relies on tens of millions of people trusting a few thousand people not to have been bribed. Seems entirely corruptible and you have no idea whether it has been corrupted or not. You're just left hoping it hasn't been. A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. And could still be backed by a physical system as well, for added security. Citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify. Oddly, even most people that work in technology are incredibly pessimistic about solving technical problems.But anyone doubts that internet voting will be commonplace and incredibly secure in the future is a level beyond pessimistic. The only open questions are when and how.
- oAlbe 6y ago
  > A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. So instead of trusting a few thousands (several thousands, in reality) and a system where you can literally walk in the place where they are counting votes and observe them, you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it? How does that follow? And this doesn't even take into account the fact that a voting system, as it was mentioned, should be understood by the people voting. Good luck explaining to people what the software and the hardware are doing.
  - staunch 6y ago
    > ...you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it? Of course not. All of the software should be open source, with multiple independent implementations, test suites, etc. And the data should be open to analysis by any number of people while preserving people's right to privacy (this is one of the hard parts). Most people have no any idea how electronic voting machines work today, so why does it matter if laymen understand the internet voting system? The point is that anyone that is willing and able could verify for themselves that the system does work as intended. Not that most people will actually put in the effort. Most will rely on trusting experts, but anyone is free to verify. With paper ballots and a handful of officials involved, there is no way for a voter to verify anything, they are forced to rely on trust alone.

the_snooze 6y ago

How many contests do you have on your ballot? Here's a sample ballot from Alameda County, California in 2018 (starting on page 12 going to page 25). That wasn't a presidential year, so this is a bit on the low side. https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf https://www.acgov.org/rovapps/vig/236/38.pdf Manual counts aren't practical in the US because our ballots can be crazy long with tons of contests and candidates. It would be very error-prone to do this manually.

throwaway936482 6y ago
1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.
- the_snooze 6y ago
  The ballots are designed to accomodate the governments we have in place. We can't easily change the structure of national, state, and local governments. In California, one-ballot-per-contest would mean a voter would get a stack of up to 75 ballots on a presidential year.
  - throwaway936482 6y ago
    Whereas currently they get a multi page document. Seriously, as logistical problems go, print separate ballots is really not a hard one and would cut down on the number if people who accidentally vote for the wrong candidate for the wrong thing. Counting may take longer. It may stretch over a few days. Well, fine. Count the presidential ballots first, announce the results and move on down the list until you get to the dog catcher.
    - the_snooze 6y ago
      I'm not sure then what urgent problem you're trying to solve that warrants the cost of errors introduced by the manual counting of huge amounts of paper ballots. It would also be a logistical nightmare getting reams of paper to voters and getting them back and tracking them; at my polling place, we have to make sure that the number of ballots we issued out equals the number reported by the scanner (plus the number of spoiled ballots voters returned to us for disposal). I'm just pointing out that cost. If you don't trust the tabulating machines, we have mechanisms to check them at scale. Basically, randomly sample the paper ballots and check them against the machine results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit If you don't trust the people running elections, you should know that polling places in the US are run by community volunteers. Literally anyone who's a registered voter can participate and see how the sausage is made. In fact, there's a shortage of these folks, so boards of election are thrilled to get more people participating.

staunch 6y ago

This system relies on tens of millions of people trusting a few thousand people not to have been bribed. Seems entirely corruptible and you have no idea whether it has been corrupted or not. You're just left hoping it hasn't been. A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. And could still be backed by a physical system as well, for added security. Citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify. Oddly, even most people that work in technology are incredibly pessimistic about solving technical problems.But anyone doubts that internet voting will be commonplace and incredibly secure in the future is a level beyond pessimistic. The only open questions are when and how.

oAlbe 6y ago
> A system based on math, software, and publicly available data would be accessible to independent audit and verification. So instead of trusting a few thousands (several thousands, in reality) and a system where you can literally walk in the place where they are counting votes and observe them, you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it? How does that follow? And this doesn't even take into account the fact that a voting system, as it was mentioned, should be understood by the people voting. Good luck explaining to people what the software and the hardware are doing.
- staunch 6y ago
  > ...you'd rather trust a few tens of people to write the software and audit it? Of course not. All of the software should be open source, with multiple independent implementations, test suites, etc. And the data should be open to analysis by any number of people while preserving people's right to privacy (this is one of the hard parts). Most people have no any idea how electronic voting machines work today, so why does it matter if laymen understand the internet voting system? The point is that anyone that is willing and able could verify for themselves that the system does work as intended. Not that most people will actually put in the effort. Most will rely on trusting experts, but anyone is free to verify. With paper ballots and a handful of officials involved, there is no way for a voter to verify anything, they are forced to rely on trust alone.