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I believe you are focusing on a moving target. Electoral fraud is just the current wedge issue, it will become something else next when a lot of effort and thou

by piva00 4y ago

I believe you are focusing on a moving target. Electoral fraud is just the current wedge issue, it will become something else next when a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken to be causing such uproar. You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole game against the firehose of bullshit. It's electoral fraud now, something to do with green energy plans next, then whatever welfare issue is hot in the moment. Something with immigrants and then start repeating.

rayiner 4y ago
It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. There is a reason even a high-trust, homogenous society like Taiwan does vote counting like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw Lack of trust in the election system isn't a partisan issue. When I was a young Democrat, the kerfuffle was over how Diebold voting machines delivered Ohio for George W. Bush. In 2018, two thirds of Democrats polled said they believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President." Programmers should understand this. When a system is opaque and hard to reason about, people won't trust it. We can't afford for our election system to be like that.
- godelski 4y ago
  > It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. This is one of the big reasons I endorse cardinal style voting over ordinal systems. The act of counting the vote is trivial in comparison (singular round, no runoffs, trivially parallelizable). There are other reasons I advocate for it, but this is a major one: transparency. I definitely a agree that creating a highly transparent system is integral to our elections. I think we need substantially more transparency than we have now. But not just with how votes are counted, but also in who has power and how they are making decisions. The left has been discussing quite a bit about how the right is trying to hijack the system. So I think even both sides would be highly in favor of increased transparency. But like I said in my OP, complex problems require complex solutions. The original post was about one such need. I think this is another need under the same umbrella and I think there are many more too.
theptip 4y ago
> you are focusing on a moving target. Election security might be a moving target for you, but this is something I have been paying attention to for at least a decade. I think it's important to note that there is an underlying bipartisan issue here that has been known for a long time. > a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken This is certainly the blue-tribe talking point right now, but it's an oversimplification, and I encourage you to actually read and engage with the materials I linked. There are security vulnerabilities and auditability failures in the system which should be fixed, and this was a common blue-tribe issue prior to 2020, when it switched to being a red-tribe issue. I don't think these issues are catastrophic failures that invalidate the election results, but they are serious and worth attention. I think one should separate out concrete claims of fraud in 2020 that have since been refuted by recounts (e.g. Antrim County) as examples of the motivated reasoning I referred to, vs. issues like un-auditable DRE machines which are actual problems that need to be fixed. I do understand where you're coming from; the instinctive reaction in a low-trust partisan environment is that giving oxygen to the bad-faith/motivated-reasoning claims of election fraud does more harm than good. However for one example, I think if the red tribe has a good showing tomorrow (i.e. lose some of their incentive to cry fraud), then that would be an ideal time to get some bipartisan legislation in place to try to bleed the issue of salience ahead of the 2024 elections where it could be extremely dangerous. > You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole The point I was making is that there is some set of policy changes that the blue team thought were beneficial in 2016, and perhaps we could all agree to do them. It's not merely whack-a-mole if you leave the world a better place after whacking the first mole. The goal I'm advocating here is not to play zero-sum games to "whack the opponent", it's to actually make objective improvements to the system that in normal times would be uncontroversial bipartisan proposals. If we can execute the political Ju-Jitsu to redirect the current toxic discourse into actual improvements that would be a major win. Sure, following that there will be another wedge issue; that's politics. But I think the important question is whether we make non-zero-sum gains during each issue cycle, and sometimes it is possible to do so.

by piva00 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. There is a reason even a high-trust, homogenous society like Taiwan does vote counting like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKt-lPfJuw Lack of trust in the election system isn't a partisan issue. When I was a young Democrat, the kerfuffle was over how Diebold voting machines delivered Ohio for George W. Bush. In 2018, two thirds of Democrats polled said they believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President." Programmers should understand this. When a system is opaque and hard to reason about, people won't trust it. We can't afford for our election system to be like that.

godelski 4y ago
> It's essential to the voting system that different groups who do not trust each other can trust the vote counts. This is one of the big reasons I endorse cardinal style voting over ordinal systems. The act of counting the vote is trivial in comparison (singular round, no runoffs, trivially parallelizable). There are other reasons I advocate for it, but this is a major one: transparency. I definitely a agree that creating a highly transparent system is integral to our elections. I think we need substantially more transparency than we have now. But not just with how votes are counted, but also in who has power and how they are making decisions. The left has been discussing quite a bit about how the right is trying to hijack the system. So I think even both sides would be highly in favor of increased transparency. But like I said in my OP, complex problems require complex solutions. The original post was about one such need. I think this is another need under the same umbrella and I think there are many more too.

theptip 4y ago

> you are focusing on a moving target. Election security might be a moving target for you, but this is something I have been paying attention to for at least a decade. I think it's important to note that there is an underlying bipartisan issue here that has been known for a long time. > a lot of effort and thought is wasted trying to fix a system that is not that broken This is certainly the blue-tribe talking point right now, but it's an oversimplification, and I encourage you to actually read and engage with the materials I linked. There are security vulnerabilities and auditability failures in the system which should be fixed, and this was a common blue-tribe issue prior to 2020, when it switched to being a red-tribe issue. I don't think these issues are catastrophic failures that invalidate the election results, but they are serious and worth attention. I think one should separate out concrete claims of fraud in 2020 that have since been refuted by recounts (e.g. Antrim County) as examples of the motivated reasoning I referred to, vs. issues like un-auditable DRE machines which are actual problems that need to be fixed. I do understand where you're coming from; the instinctive reaction in a low-trust partisan environment is that giving oxygen to the bad-faith/motivated-reasoning claims of election fraud does more harm than good. However for one example, I think if the red tribe has a good showing tomorrow (i.e. lose some of their incentive to cry fraud), then that would be an ideal time to get some bipartisan legislation in place to try to bleed the issue of salience ahead of the 2024 elections where it could be extremely dangerous. > You waste resources playing a whack-a-mole The point I was making is that there is some set of policy changes that the blue team thought were beneficial in 2016, and perhaps we could all agree to do them. It's not merely whack-a-mole if you leave the world a better place after whacking the first mole. The goal I'm advocating here is not to play zero-sum games to "whack the opponent", it's to actually make objective improvements to the system that in normal times would be uncontroversial bipartisan proposals. If we can execute the political Ju-Jitsu to redirect the current toxic discourse into actual improvements that would be a major win. Sure, following that there will be another wedge issue; that's politics. But I think the important question is whether we make non-zero-sum gains during each issue cycle, and sometimes it is possible to do so.