4 ms·

> If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose. The idea seems correct, however, unsure how electronic voting machine co

> If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose. The idea seems correct, however, unsure how electronic voting machine comes into the picture, perhaps only in a mental sense, but people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.

chii 4y ago
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented. there's that, but an electronic voting machine is more complex. Election fraud for paper ballots is "easily" detected, but not really so for electronic voting machines.
- wdkrnls 4y ago
  Google Professor Philip Stark and read some of the papers he publishes about the dangers of electronic voting machines.
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1qj9r/1/BallotMarkingDeviceVoters.pdf https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1qj9r/1/BallotMa... This is probably the main paper you are referencing?
  - fortuna86 4y ago
    If you audit every election after they are done, what is the danger of using electric voting machines ?
    - hayst4ck 4y ago
      This might sound snide, but I assure you I am asking in good faith to prove a point. What does it mean to audit the election, without skipping the complexity? A few questions I would expect to be answered: How do we know all votes cast were legitimate? How do we know that the voting machines recorded votes correctly? How do we know the auditors are good faith actors? How do we know ballots weren't lost/delayed (mail in)? How do we know legitimate looking votes were cast by the right person? My overall assertion is not that we can't know. It's that voting is so complex that this can't be easily explained in a satisfying way to (or by) a layman. It's so complex that "trust" is a core part of the election process. Should I have to take a quarter long class in election mechanics to be satisfied that our voting system is legitimate? That's a bit of hyperbole, but I truly don't know how our elections work and I don't think I could understand them in an afternoon and it doesn't have to be that way. Taiwan's elections are simple and self-evident. American elections are extremely complex and require trust in institutions. Taiwan's elections optimize for trust. America's elections optimize for cost. Trust is priceless. I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
      - fortuna86 4y ago
        > I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying. Every electronic vote has a physical record, and is checked against each other. Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election. More: https://www.eac.gov/election-officials/election-audits-across-united-states https://www.eac.gov/election-officials/election-audits-acros...
        hayst4ck 4y ago
        That's an hour long technical read. Do you think your average person with high school or a GED as their highest level of education or less, ~40% of the country, is going to be able to read such a meaty document and make sense of it? 8% of Americans are basically illiterate. 54% read below a 6th grade level. I am not trying to attack you with that statement. This is a statement form one liberal to someone else I perceive as liberal leaning: Your education privilege is off the charts. We could have a system like Taiwan, but instead we have an electronic voting system. How do they compare and contrast? Why were electronic voting machines pushed on us? Which one has better understand-ability properties? Which one has better trust properties? What are the properties of electronic voting machines that make them desirable? Why do we have to convince people that voting machines are good (implying a lot of people don't think they are)?
        fortuna86 4y ago
        > but instead we have an electronic voting system We don't. As said, every electronic vote has a physical backup that is audited.
        hayst4ck 4y ago
        > Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results
        4y ago
    - specialist 4y ago
      Fully electronic voting cannot be inspected sufficiently to audit. Too many points of failure, too many blackboxes, no way to detect failures. This has been thoroughly, repeatedly, exhaustively researched and debated. Which is why most jurisdictions (in the USA) have returned to paper ballots.
      - fortuna86 4y ago
        Most electronic ballots still carry paper or otherwise physical verification.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
concordDance 4y ago
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented. This is misleading. The vast majority will have had no exposure to that evidence (there's no big stage you can do convincing presentations on that everyone will see). Heck, I wouldn't know how to go about finding that evidence atm.
hayst4ck 4y ago
Democracy is about submission of the minority. To believe in democracy means to believe that when you are in the minority, you must submit to things you disagree with. There is grey area around human rights and bad faith legislation/corruption. If I don't trust the election, that means I don't believe I'm actually in the minority, and if I don't believe I am in the minority, then I am being subjugated and oppressed by people who are using power to get their way rather than a mandate from the people to execute the people's will. I am extremely liberal and Trump is the avatar of everything that I hate, but I don't believe the election is legitimate either. A sitting president called an election official to sway the election, and 2 years later it's not clear there are going to be any consequences. The mechanics of mail in ballots was messed with during an election cycle, and the person who did that is still in control of the postal system. If there are no timely consequences for attempting to cheat, how can you trust the integrity of the system? I don't. There are clearly no checks and balances for actual and obvious attempts to manipulate elections. I think you can talk to just about anyone who works in security and they will tell you there is no reason to trust voting machines. On slashdot, the technical community nearly universally said "this is a bad idea" when Diebold voting machines were first adopted. That sentiment has been strong through technical communities for a long time. Even today, I think if you asked HN "from a technical point of view are voting machines a good idea?" there would be a resounding, absolutely not. Because we won, it's less of an issue for us, but had we lost, we would question the results too. We would look around us and experience that no one else liked trump and ask "how can these results be legitimate" too, the same way they look at the people around them and go "everyone liked trump, how can these results be legitimate?" He called a Georgian election official, are we sure that didn't work? Did he call other state's officials and we didn't hear about it because it did work? How do we know? How do we know Biden didn't do that? Denial is the first stage of grief. > people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented. You are failing to have empathy for these people. Evidence cannot be presented, because the mechanics of elections are not able to produce evidence. I am a well educated US citizen, but I think our elections amount to "trust us." Of course people don't believe evidence presented, because the evidence amounts to "trust us." "Trust this extremely complex system that only a handful of people might know how it functions in depth." You say "regardless of evidence presented," but what if the system is not actually capable of producing satisfying evidence? What if the evidence is actually not satisfying? What if there were systems that could be satisfying, bit this one isn't able to be? In Taiwan I could go watch an election and I found the legitimacy of it to be self evident because I found the mechanics of it simple and hard to argue with. I don't think there is anything self-evident about our elections. In America, who runs the voting machines is an important question. In Taiwan, who facilitates the voting stations doesn't make much difference. "Are the voting stations being watched" is an important question in Taiwan. "Are the voting stations being watched" doesn't really make sense here since we have mail in ballots and other methods. Taiwanese don't have to say "trust us" they can say "go watch the election happen." A hard pill to swallow for most of liberal America is that conservatives can be right for very wrong reasons. It's easy to say "you don't think the results are legitimate because you lost," it's much harder to say "can somebody in good faith not trust the election results?" "what might we have done to decrease trust in elections?" "Can we make our election system more resistant to claims of bad faith?"

chii 4y ago

> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented. there's that, but an electronic voting machine is more complex. Election fraud for paper ballots is "easily" detected, but not really so for electronic voting machines.

wdkrnls 4y ago
Google Professor Philip Stark and read some of the papers he publishes about the dangers of electronic voting machines.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1qj9r/1/BallotMarkingDeviceVoters.pdf https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr1qj9r/1/BallotMa... This is probably the main paper you are referencing?
- fortuna86 4y ago
  If you audit every election after they are done, what is the danger of using electric voting machines ?
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    This might sound snide, but I assure you I am asking in good faith to prove a point. What does it mean to audit the election, without skipping the complexity? A few questions I would expect to be answered: How do we know all votes cast were legitimate? How do we know that the voting machines recorded votes correctly? How do we know the auditors are good faith actors? How do we know ballots weren't lost/delayed (mail in)? How do we know legitimate looking votes were cast by the right person? My overall assertion is not that we can't know. It's that voting is so complex that this can't be easily explained in a satisfying way to (or by) a layman. It's so complex that "trust" is a core part of the election process. Should I have to take a quarter long class in election mechanics to be satisfied that our voting system is legitimate? That's a bit of hyperbole, but I truly don't know how our elections work and I don't think I could understand them in an afternoon and it doesn't have to be that way. Taiwan's elections are simple and self-evident. American elections are extremely complex and require trust in institutions. Taiwan's elections optimize for trust. America's elections optimize for cost. Trust is priceless. I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
    - fortuna86 4y ago
      > I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying. Every electronic vote has a physical record, and is checked against each other. Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election. More: https://www.eac.gov/election-officials/election-audits-across-united-states https://www.eac.gov/election-officials/election-audits-acros...
      - hayst4ck 4y ago
        That's an hour long technical read. Do you think your average person with high school or a GED as their highest level of education or less, ~40% of the country, is going to be able to read such a meaty document and make sense of it? 8% of Americans are basically illiterate. 54% read below a 6th grade level. I am not trying to attack you with that statement. This is a statement form one liberal to someone else I perceive as liberal leaning: Your education privilege is off the charts. We could have a system like Taiwan, but instead we have an electronic voting system. How do they compare and contrast? Why were electronic voting machines pushed on us? Which one has better understand-ability properties? Which one has better trust properties? What are the properties of electronic voting machines that make them desirable? Why do we have to convince people that voting machines are good (implying a lot of people don't think they are)?
        fortuna86 4y ago
        > but instead we have an electronic voting system We don't. As said, every electronic vote has a physical backup that is audited.
      - hayst4ck 4y ago
        > Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results
        4y ago
  - specialist 4y ago
    Fully electronic voting cannot be inspected sufficiently to audit. Too many points of failure, too many blackboxes, no way to detect failures. This has been thoroughly, repeatedly, exhaustively researched and debated. Which is why most jurisdictions (in the USA) have returned to paper ballots.
    - fortuna86 4y ago
      Most electronic ballots still carry paper or otherwise physical verification.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

concordDance 4y ago

> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented. This is misleading. The vast majority will have had no exposure to that evidence (there's no big stage you can do convincing presentations on that everyone will see). Heck, I wouldn't know how to go about finding that evidence atm.

hayst4ck 4y ago

Democracy is about submission of the minority. To believe in democracy means to believe that when you are in the minority, you must submit to things you disagree with. There is grey area around human rights and bad faith legislation/corruption. If I don't trust the election, that means I don't believe I'm actually in the minority, and if I don't believe I am in the minority, then I am being subjugated and oppressed by people who are using power to get their way rather than a mandate from the people to execute the people's will. I am extremely liberal and Trump is the avatar of everything that I hate, but I don't believe the election is legitimate either. A sitting president called an election official to sway the election, and 2 years later it's not clear there are going to be any consequences. The mechanics of mail in ballots was messed with during an election cycle, and the person who did that is still in control of the postal system. If there are no timely consequences for attempting to cheat, how can you trust the integrity of the system? I don't. There are clearly no checks and balances for actual and obvious attempts to manipulate elections. I think you can talk to just about anyone who works in security and they will tell you there is no reason to trust voting machines. On slashdot, the technical community nearly universally said "this is a bad idea" when Diebold voting machines were first adopted. That sentiment has been strong through technical communities for a long time. Even today, I think if you asked HN "from a technical point of view are voting machines a good idea?" there would be a resounding, absolutely not. Because we won, it's less of an issue for us, but had we lost, we would question the results too. We would look around us and experience that no one else liked trump and ask "how can these results be legitimate" too, the same way they look at the people around them and go "everyone liked trump, how can these results be legitimate?" He called a Georgian election official, are we sure that didn't work? Did he call other state's officials and we didn't hear about it because it did work? How do we know? How do we know Biden didn't do that? Denial is the first stage of grief. > people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented. You are failing to have empathy for these people. Evidence cannot be presented, because the mechanics of elections are not able to produce evidence. I am a well educated US citizen, but I think our elections amount to "trust us." Of course people don't believe evidence presented, because the evidence amounts to "trust us." "Trust this extremely complex system that only a handful of people might know how it functions in depth." You say "regardless of evidence presented," but what if the system is not actually capable of producing satisfying evidence? What if the evidence is actually not satisfying? What if there were systems that could be satisfying, bit this one isn't able to be? In Taiwan I could go watch an election and I found the legitimacy of it to be self evident because I found the mechanics of it simple and hard to argue with. I don't think there is anything self-evident about our elections. In America, who runs the voting machines is an important question. In Taiwan, who facilitates the voting stations doesn't make much difference. "Are the voting stations being watched" is an important question in Taiwan. "Are the voting stations being watched" doesn't really make sense here since we have mail in ballots and other methods. Taiwanese don't have to say "trust us" they can say "go watch the election happen." A hard pill to swallow for most of liberal America is that conservatives can be right for very wrong reasons. It's easy to say "you don't think the results are legitimate because you lost," it's much harder to say "can somebody in good faith not trust the election results?" "what might we have done to decrease trust in elections?" "Can we make our election system more resistant to claims of bad faith?"