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How is audit implssible? Anonymous ballots are only hide who specific person voted for. All other information is possible to verify. Electoral roll exist, coun

by SXX 5y ago

How is audit implssible? Anonymous ballots are only hide who specific person voted for. All other information is possible to verify. Electoral roll exist, counting of people voted vs total number of ballots per area is possible, etc. Exit polls also exist. Yeah US have it's thing with vote-by-mail especially due to covid, but before that most of important data points were easy to audit.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Anonymous ballots by their nature cannot be distinguished from fraudulent ballots. You can't verify that a particular ballot was ever cast, only that you have it now. You also can't verify that a ballot that was genuinely cast was cast by the same person listed on the voter roll. > Electoral roll exist, counting of people voted vs total number of ballots per area is possible, etc. Lyndon Johnson probably committed election fraud. There was no problem with the number of ballots. There was no problem with the electoral rolls. Vote counting is of course not an instantaneous process. It did happen that some votes for Johnson were discovered late. And it's interesting to note that the voters who cast them voted in alphabetical order. But that could be a coincidence. What if they'd voted in a different order, by a less lopsided margin? How would you audit the ballots? > Exit polls also exist. Considering the most recent news about exit polls is "they're diverging from the actual results and we aren't sure why", this isn't a very strong point.
- acdha 5y ago
  > You can't verify that a particular ballot was ever cast, only that you have it now. You also can't verify that a ballot that was genuinely cast was cast by the same person listed on the voter roll. There’s only one part of this which isn’t wrong. You can verify that the ballots were given to registered voters at a particular polling station where they were sealed, transported securely, and tallied without the seals being broken – these days, all with video surveillance except for the actual person filling out the ballot. The current system does that with a mix of bipartisan volunteers and government workers, making it hard to tamper with unless you have a truly massive conspiracy which manages to avoid revealing any trace of its existence. The only thing you can’t do is say that person A voted for candidate B, because that would guarantee attempts at coercion.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > You can verify that the ballots were given to registered voters at a particular polling station where they were sealed, transported securely, and tallied without the seals being broken – these days, all with video surveillance except for the actual person filling out the ballot. This is not even a requirement of a legitimate ballot. How are you supposed to "verify" something that isn't true?
    - acdha 5y ago
      What part do you not think is true? What I described is the common situation in the United States where you have observers confirming that people are checked against the voter registration lists, the ballots are collected in sealed boxes, transported securely, etc. At every stage they verify seals so they can confirm that while they don't know _how_ you voted there's no serious question that the ballot being tallied is the one you dropped in the box at your polling station. This is one of the major reasons why all of those election lawsuits failed: an alleged tampering scheme would need hundreds of people altering many thousands of records, and it would need to involve members of both parties and city employees without leaking any trace of its existence. One very nice property of physical seals and paper ballots is that you can't alter them without doing a lot of manual work which would obviously be different from normal activities. The conspiracy theorists tried but they couldn't come up with a remotely plausible way that people could have been shifting truck-loads of ballots around in perfect secrecy.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        A ballot need not be given to a voter at a polling station. There is no such requirement, and in fact this is not true of many ballots. They can be received elsewhere and filled out elsewhere.

by SXX 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago

Anonymous ballots by their nature cannot be distinguished from fraudulent ballots. You can't verify that a particular ballot was ever cast, only that you have it now. You also can't verify that a ballot that was genuinely cast was cast by the same person listed on the voter roll. > Electoral roll exist, counting of people voted vs total number of ballots per area is possible, etc. Lyndon Johnson probably committed election fraud. There was no problem with the number of ballots. There was no problem with the electoral rolls. Vote counting is of course not an instantaneous process. It did happen that some votes for Johnson were discovered late. And it's interesting to note that the voters who cast them voted in alphabetical order. But that could be a coincidence. What if they'd voted in a different order, by a less lopsided margin? How would you audit the ballots? > Exit polls also exist. Considering the most recent news about exit polls is "they're diverging from the actual results and we aren't sure why", this isn't a very strong point.

acdha 5y ago
> You can't verify that a particular ballot was ever cast, only that you have it now. You also can't verify that a ballot that was genuinely cast was cast by the same person listed on the voter roll. There’s only one part of this which isn’t wrong. You can verify that the ballots were given to registered voters at a particular polling station where they were sealed, transported securely, and tallied without the seals being broken – these days, all with video surveillance except for the actual person filling out the ballot. The current system does that with a mix of bipartisan volunteers and government workers, making it hard to tamper with unless you have a truly massive conspiracy which manages to avoid revealing any trace of its existence. The only thing you can’t do is say that person A voted for candidate B, because that would guarantee attempts at coercion.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > You can verify that the ballots were given to registered voters at a particular polling station where they were sealed, transported securely, and tallied without the seals being broken – these days, all with video surveillance except for the actual person filling out the ballot. This is not even a requirement of a legitimate ballot. How are you supposed to "verify" something that isn't true?
  - acdha 5y ago
    What part do you not think is true? What I described is the common situation in the United States where you have observers confirming that people are checked against the voter registration lists, the ballots are collected in sealed boxes, transported securely, etc. At every stage they verify seals so they can confirm that while they don't know _how_ you voted there's no serious question that the ballot being tallied is the one you dropped in the box at your polling station. This is one of the major reasons why all of those election lawsuits failed: an alleged tampering scheme would need hundreds of people altering many thousands of records, and it would need to involve members of both parties and city employees without leaking any trace of its existence. One very nice property of physical seals and paper ballots is that you can't alter them without doing a lot of manual work which would obviously be different from normal activities. The conspiracy theorists tried but they couldn't come up with a remotely plausible way that people could have been shifting truck-loads of ballots around in perfect secrecy.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      A ballot need not be given to a voter at a polling station. There is no such requirement, and in fact this is not true of many ballots. They can be received elsewhere and filled out elsewhere.