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Paper ballots are better than any purely electronic form. Like that's not even a debate except by people who are trying to sell electronic voting machines. The

by cletus 5y ago

Paper ballots are better than any purely electronic form. Like that's not even a debate except by people who are trying to sell electronic voting machines. The gold standard is either print outs from a voting machine or a ballot you fill in with circles with a pencil that a machine can verify. Counting these ballots is nondestructive (unlike punch cards) and highly accurate. Audits of elections involving these can be done easily by hand. As for the 2000 election, this is a whole rabbit hole. You're right the butterfly ballot probably caused miscast votes. But that's user error. Punch cards are a ridiculous form of voting technology. All the recounts weren't about being more accurate. They were about passing punch cards through counting machines that would knock out chads every run through and changing voting standards after the fact (eg pregnant and dimpled chads). Blaming 9/11 and the grand misadventure of the Iraq war on paper ballots is... a stretch. I mean, 9/11 had been in planning for years and probably would've happened anyway. I suspect a war in Iraq would've happened anyway with Gore in office. I mean a good chunk of Democrats (including Hilary Clinton) voted for the Iraqi war resolution. Many of these same people (including Biden) are now threatening to start a war with Russia over Ukraine. > Just one of hundreds of innovations. I disagree. Contracts enforced by the blockchain only have value when the entire context of that contract is on the blockchain. As soon as you leave that system you need traditional infrastructure and systems to enforce contracts and handle disputes.

EGreg 5y ago
Ha ha ha. Not even a debate? Why would something so non-obvious not be up for debate? Are you afraid to lose the debate? What's next, telephone switchboard operators are better than VOIP? We went from paying $3 a minute for long distance audio calls to nearly free calls with multi-way high res video broadband, simply by automating away the infrastructure to get things done. Why can't the same be done with voting? Today we spend 16 billion dollars on a national election with shitty turnout, tomorrow any small organization can have a poll and vote about anything, in any number of ways, and turnout will be much better too. There was a time that chess playing programs were laughably bad. And within a couple decades they are able to beat any grandmaster. Give it time. About the 2000 election: I regret even mentioning the butterfly ballots, because the real point is that it took TOO LONG to recount the votes, BECAUSE it was paper ballots, and thus GWB was elected because the Supreme Court stepped in. Paper ballots and their inefficiency have consequences and downsides, you just might choose to ignore them in order to not have the debate of pros and cons vs electronic form. (9/11 may not have happened if Bush had acted on intelligence like "Osama Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L2513JFJsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L2513JFJsY) Agreed about the war with Russia over Ukraine, Democrats have their own issues, absolutely. (As do leaders of other countries). > I disagree. Contracts enforced by the blockchain only have value when the entire context of that contract is on the blockchain. As soon as you leave that system you need traditional infrastructure and systems to enforce contracts and handle disputes Even if that were strictly true, we can have all these applications on the blockchain today: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications But it's not even true. People don't need the entire source of truth in a byzantine fault tolerant network. They just need to secure that it wasn't tampered with. The key is that you can turn over control to a computer program + protocol rather than elected representatives, magazine publishers, librarians or telephone switchboard operators. And we have been increasingly doing that.
- cletus 5y ago
  > Ha ha ha. Not even a debate? You brought up paper ballots for voting and then blamed them for 9/11 and the Iraq war. If that's your definition of "debate" I don't think I can help you. > What's next, telephone switchboard operators are better than VOIP? If you're so into debate you might want to look up "straw man argument". The key design principle for a voting system is that voters should be confident in the results. That means if there's a paper ballot, the voter should be able to understand what it says (ie not just some QR or PDF417 or similar code). The worst that can really happen with paper ballots is ballot-stuffing but there are lots of checks and balances in place such that there's no evidence of this having ever been a widescale problem in the US, let alone has changed the result of an election. A pure electronic count has no such safeguards and no real capability for an audit trail. > There was a time that chess playing programs were laughably bad. And within a couple decades they are able to beat any grandmaster. Give it time. Here you come across as the very kind of person I mentioned, a Blockchain Andy who has completely drunk the Kool-Aid. Chess is a compute power problem. Electronic voting is not a computing power of algorithm or even a technical problem. > ... because the real point is that it took TOO LONG to recount the votes, No, it wasn't. The real problem in 2000 was that multiple recounts were done selectively to a changing standard of what constituted a valid vote even contradicting the instructions given to voters to "divine the intent of the voter". > and thus GWB was elected because the Supreme Court stepped in GWB won because he got more votes with the rules that existed for that election. Period. I don't say that as a partisan (for the record, I'm a leftist closest to the Bernie camp). It's just fact. Even a comprehensive review of ballots by the NYTimes after the election showed GWB won even with the most favourable change of rules (eg dimpled chads).
  - EGreg 5y ago
    > GWB won because he got more votes... I am aware that there are various opinions on it, but once again, it's not so "clear cut" as to not have a debate. In fact, the sources I'm following, such as Wikipedia, say exactly the opposite about the media recounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Recount_by_media_organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Recount_by_media_... In 2001, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of 175,010 ballots that vote-counting machines had rejected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted.[3] The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The study was conducted over a period of 10 months. Based on the review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes.[4] On the other hand, under scenarios involving review of limited sets of ballots uncounted by machines, Bush would have kept his lead. In one such scenario — Al Gore's request for recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Bush would have won by 225 votes.[a] In another scenario (if the remaining 64 Florida counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on December 8, applying the various standards that county election officials said they would have used), Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.[b][81] The emphasis above was added by me... far more media organizations, and a comprehensive analysis, and so forth. How much more extensive can you get, and the result is that Al Gore would have won under any uniform standard at all. And again ... this was all because of the outdated technology. Call it what you want, paper ballots, rejecting by voting machines that counted them, etc. The fact is, the election would have been a lot MORE reliable if it was done with Merkle Trees and private keys, as I said. And no, I'm not a Blockchain Andy who's completely drunk the Kool-Aid. I often critique Blockchain right here on HN, I think Blockchain holds Web3 back. But the actual applications are very viable (if we move past blockchain as the technology on which they are built) and we'll all be voting from our phones in 10 years. Do you think that somehow voting is one application that won't make the switch from manual paper-based counting to technology, because people can't be "confident of the results" from their electronics?

by cletus 5y ago

EGreg 5y ago

Ha ha ha. Not even a debate? Why would something so non-obvious not be up for debate? Are you afraid to lose the debate? What's next, telephone switchboard operators are better than VOIP? We went from paying $3 a minute for long distance audio calls to nearly free calls with multi-way high res video broadband, simply by automating away the infrastructure to get things done. Why can't the same be done with voting? Today we spend 16 billion dollars on a national election with shitty turnout, tomorrow any small organization can have a poll and vote about anything, in any number of ways, and turnout will be much better too. There was a time that chess playing programs were laughably bad. And within a couple decades they are able to beat any grandmaster. Give it time. About the 2000 election: I regret even mentioning the butterfly ballots, because the real point is that it took TOO LONG to recount the votes, BECAUSE it was paper ballots, and thus GWB was elected because the Supreme Court stepped in. Paper ballots and their inefficiency have consequences and downsides, you just might choose to ignore them in order to not have the debate of pros and cons vs electronic form. (9/11 may not have happened if Bush had acted on intelligence like "Osama Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L2513JFJsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L2513JFJsY) Agreed about the war with Russia over Ukraine, Democrats have their own issues, absolutely. (As do leaders of other countries). > I disagree. Contracts enforced by the blockchain only have value when the entire context of that contract is on the blockchain. As soon as you leave that system you need traditional infrastructure and systems to enforce contracts and handle disputes Even if that were strictly true, we can have all these applications on the blockchain today: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications But it's not even true. People don't need the entire source of truth in a byzantine fault tolerant network. They just need to secure that it wasn't tampered with. The key is that you can turn over control to a computer program + protocol rather than elected representatives, magazine publishers, librarians or telephone switchboard operators. And we have been increasingly doing that.

cletus 5y ago
> Ha ha ha. Not even a debate? You brought up paper ballots for voting and then blamed them for 9/11 and the Iraq war. If that's your definition of "debate" I don't think I can help you. > What's next, telephone switchboard operators are better than VOIP? If you're so into debate you might want to look up "straw man argument". The key design principle for a voting system is that voters should be confident in the results. That means if there's a paper ballot, the voter should be able to understand what it says (ie not just some QR or PDF417 or similar code). The worst that can really happen with paper ballots is ballot-stuffing but there are lots of checks and balances in place such that there's no evidence of this having ever been a widescale problem in the US, let alone has changed the result of an election. A pure electronic count has no such safeguards and no real capability for an audit trail. > There was a time that chess playing programs were laughably bad. And within a couple decades they are able to beat any grandmaster. Give it time. Here you come across as the very kind of person I mentioned, a Blockchain Andy who has completely drunk the Kool-Aid. Chess is a compute power problem. Electronic voting is not a computing power of algorithm or even a technical problem. > ... because the real point is that it took TOO LONG to recount the votes, No, it wasn't. The real problem in 2000 was that multiple recounts were done selectively to a changing standard of what constituted a valid vote even contradicting the instructions given to voters to "divine the intent of the voter". > and thus GWB was elected because the Supreme Court stepped in GWB won because he got more votes with the rules that existed for that election. Period. I don't say that as a partisan (for the record, I'm a leftist closest to the Bernie camp). It's just fact. Even a comprehensive review of ballots by the NYTimes after the election showed GWB won even with the most favourable change of rules (eg dimpled chads).
- EGreg 5y ago
  > GWB won because he got more votes... I am aware that there are various opinions on it, but once again, it's not so "clear cut" as to not have a debate. In fact, the sources I'm following, such as Wikipedia, say exactly the opposite about the media recounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Recount_by_media_organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Recount_by_media_... In 2001, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of 175,010 ballots that vote-counting machines had rejected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted.[3] The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The study was conducted over a period of 10 months. Based on the review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes.[4] On the other hand, under scenarios involving review of limited sets of ballots uncounted by machines, Bush would have kept his lead. In one such scenario — Al Gore's request for recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Bush would have won by 225 votes.[a] In another scenario (if the remaining 64 Florida counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on December 8, applying the various standards that county election officials said they would have used), Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.[b][81] The emphasis above was added by me... far more media organizations, and a comprehensive analysis, and so forth. How much more extensive can you get, and the result is that Al Gore would have won under any uniform standard at all. And again ... this was all because of the outdated technology. Call it what you want, paper ballots, rejecting by voting machines that counted them, etc. The fact is, the election would have been a lot MORE reliable if it was done with Merkle Trees and private keys, as I said. And no, I'm not a Blockchain Andy who's completely drunk the Kool-Aid. I often critique Blockchain right here on HN, I think Blockchain holds Web3 back. But the actual applications are very viable (if we move past blockchain as the technology on which they are built) and we'll all be voting from our phones in 10 years. Do you think that somehow voting is one application that won't make the switch from manual paper-based counting to technology, because people can't be "confident of the results" from their electronics?