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Spoken like someone who has never actually looked at how an election works in a county in the USA, doesn’t care about the actual legal requirements, seems to ig

Spoken like someone who has never actually looked at how an election works in a county in the USA, doesn’t care about the actual legal requirements, seems to ignore all concerns for accessibility (eg. Scantrons are terrible for old people with bad/no eyesight, have motor control issues with hands, etc), doesn’t know what scantrons actually did with the scan results, hasn’t thought through the complexity of ID in the USA (we don’t have a single ID number and the alternative is to store photo ID cards for everyone to see and collect) and doesn’t have a plan for absentee voters or military deployed voters. And that doesn’t even address any of the human factors (eg. people lose their ID, they lose their ballot, ballots get crumpled by voters and stuck in the scanners, electricity isn’t up 99.999% of the time, etc). Elections are hard for a reason — the requirements are complex. Everyone wants 160million+ votes to be collected, counted, and results published by 9p on election day. Everyone wants the registry to work perfectly and wants the convenience of not having to travel far to a polling place. In practice, these create a huge number of hurdles that election officials must navigate, plan for contingencies (eg. the hurricane immediately before the election in Florida 2022). Maybe my best advice to you is the snide “don’t reinvent the wheel in Hacker News comments, but rather get involved as a polling place volunteer next year, then see all of the edge cases in action”. Then don’t propose your MVP v2 to me, propose it to your county election board. Only you will be ignored because elections in the US have 250 years of learning from the previous errors, but you seem quite content to ignore all of those hard-earned lessons.

somenameforme 3y ago
Let me point one thing out here - and don't take it the wrong way. Instead of finding any meaningful flaw with the idea you pointed to one edge case, which is a problem in even the current system and then moved onto a mixture of ad hominem and appeal to authority. I only mention this because you may well not even realize you're behaving (or thinking) this way. But back to the issue, nothing you offered is a meaningful hurdle or a new problem introduced by "my" rather obvious solution. The issues would generally be handled using the exact same workarounds, because they're also issues in the current system. For instance if somebody is blind, enfeebled, or otherwise unable to vote without assistance, then assistance can be rendered in a fashion similar to the current status quo. They can bring a family member to assist, and if that's not possible then aid can be rendered with an assistant from each 'side' helping simultaneously. And so on. This is precisely why I said "What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?" You get a system that improves the status quo exponentially, and introduces no new downsides. Basically America is obviously becoming far more divided. Our politicians and "political figures" in general are, if not simply becoming even more unethical, then having their lies and deceptions exposed in a far more realtime and active fashion. This is understandably sending trust to some value approaching zero. You simply cannot have systems where trust in a large component in its operation, and expect people to simply have faith in the results.

somenameforme 3y ago

Let me point one thing out here - and don't take it the wrong way. Instead of finding any meaningful flaw with the idea you pointed to one edge case, which is a problem in even the current system and then moved onto a mixture of ad hominem and appeal to authority. I only mention this because you may well not even realize you're behaving (or thinking) this way. But back to the issue, nothing you offered is a meaningful hurdle or a new problem introduced by "my" rather obvious solution. The issues would generally be handled using the exact same workarounds, because they're also issues in the current system. For instance if somebody is blind, enfeebled, or otherwise unable to vote without assistance, then assistance can be rendered in a fashion similar to the current status quo. They can bring a family member to assist, and if that's not possible then aid can be rendered with an assistant from each 'side' helping simultaneously. And so on. This is precisely why I said "What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?" You get a system that improves the status quo exponentially, and introduces no new downsides. Basically America is obviously becoming far more divided. Our politicians and "political figures" in general are, if not simply becoming even more unethical, then having their lies and deceptions exposed in a far more realtime and active fashion. This is understandably sending trust to some value approaching zero. You simply cannot have systems where trust in a large component in its operation, and expect people to simply have faith in the results.