7 ms·

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge. It could be like selective service. Sign up after your ei

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge. It could be like selective service. Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote. Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge. This exists, it's called registering with your address and then going to your local polling place. Voter fraud is essentially a nonexistent problem.
- codr7 3y ago
  One day you're going to look back at this comment and it will feel about as comfortable as Gate's yapping about 640k being enough for anyone.
  - saveferris 3y ago
    I am curious what you think could happen. I did a lot of looking after all the allegations and all the lawsuits. It is remarkably secure today, all the lawsuis that have been filed, etc. and nothing was found. Where do you think the vulnerabilities are that can be exploited?
    - codr7 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        Nothing was found by courts. Or governments. Or the media. Or anyone, really. Put up proof that something was off or STFU. I said the same thing to myself and many others when there were a few cries of voter fraud after the 2016 election. Those cries died down within a month or so of the election because the loser wasn't actively amplifying that position.
        codr7 3y ago
        Doesn't it bother you even a little bit that all of the so called "investigators" are in the same boat? I don't have proof, that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to speak. As a general rule of thumb; whenever you get terribly upset that someone else has a different opinion, it's time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        >Doesn't it bother you even a little bit that all of the so called "investigators" are in the same boat? I don't follow this sentence at all. Can you be a bit clearer about what you mean here?
        codr7 3y ago
        None of these so called "investigators" were even close to objective.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        I don't see a conspiracy spanning every level of government and the media, I guess? It seems like something close to that would be required for so many people from so many different political backgrounds to look and find nothing. Or maybe you're defining "not objective" as "doesn't produce the result I wanted"...
        codr7 3y ago
        It's a theory, an alternative explanation, we are allowed to have those without evidence and it's OK to have multiple competing explanations. A better question would be: Why are you so desperate to believe one thing or the other?
        sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        At some point that just devolves into one person pointing at a dog and saying "that's a dog" and the other saying "nu'uh it's a cat". Cat guy isn't doing anything illegal but they're still making a claim without evidence and refusing to let go of the claim in the face of contrary evidence. I'm genuinely worried about my country's ability to recover from what the Big Lie is doing to it, so I do care about the topic, and I do try to argue for sanity and truth where I can.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
      This is why I imagine it was so weird to be Brad Raffensperger during / immediately after the 2020 election. He ran for GA Sec of State on a platform of election security. He took actions he felt were in pursuit of that goal. He was proud of what he had done and the security of Georgia's elections. He supported Trump in the 2020 election. I am not in agreement with some of his approaches but by all accounts he was passionate about his role and generally did his job of making elections happen. Then his preferred candidate loses. The loser tosses accusations at Raffensperger and friends ranging from incompetence to outright malice. The loser claims the systems Raffensperger has been knee deep in the previous two years are insecure, suspect, compromised. The loser puts personal pressure on Raffensperger to "find" votes. That had to be one hell of a "what did I do to deserve this?" feeling throughout that time frame.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    Bill Gates never actually said that. He had a very detailed idea of exactly what was coming in the next year from that point on and what it would get used for. Also using mail to register to vote has been used for over 150 years and current voter fraud is practically zero. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-find...
    - codr7 3y ago
      Could be true; I also don't trust anything coming from Bill Gates these days, he has his icky fingers in too many pies. Yes, and the longer a game is played, the more loop holes are found.
      - CyberDildonics 3y ago
        Could be true; I also don't trust anything coming from Bill Gates these days, He explains it here. Where is the evidence that he said it? https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/ https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-e... Yes, and the longer a game is played, the more loop holes are found. This is vague FUD nonsense. What are you talking about and where is your evidence?
ausbah 3y ago
but why, voter fraud isn’t a problem in the US. trying to sate the lies of one political party won’t “prove them wrong” either, they’ll just fine new things to cry foul about somehow
- thsksbd 3y ago
  [flagged]
- gustavus 3y ago
  Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow. The purpose isn't to convince the diehard zealots, it's to convince the people that might be on the fence and could see it go either way. Maybe Joe down the street isn't very much into politics, but he's been hearing all about these electronic voting machines being the source of fraud, and he know it sounds unreasonable, but it does introduce some doubt, especially when he finds out that no one knows what's in them and that people can access em "over the internets", it's enough out of his wheelhouse to get him wondering.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow. It might do the opposite; "see, they finally admitted it's a problem!"
    - splintercell 3y ago
      And this is how the Democrats have been painted in the corner. Presuming there was no problem: - Not doing any 'improvements' would result more of what is going on right now, an inability to prove the otherside wrong, and doubling down on the (near ridiculous) claim that it was the 'most secure election of all times'. Presuming there were issues: - Doing anything to improve them would mean that the one election they truly really wanted to win (i.e. defeating Trump), they will be accused of finally admitting that there were problems. - Which means from their perspective, keep doubling down on the claim that it was the most secure election of all times - OTOH if you didn't care that much about defeating Trump, and truly want there to be improvements if they are needed, then the Democrats claiming that these were the 'most secure elections of all times' just makes you start not believing it
Y-bar 3y ago
> Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote. Offer may differ for some communities, certain may experience having to sign up two counties over, in the basement, on the second Wednesday every odd month, behind a locked door with a sign "Beware of the leopard". Better if everyone just gets enrolled by default.
- saveferris 3y ago
  There is a lot of things wrong with this but I have said that in order to get your tax refund you have to show proof you registered to vote. I'd like to say proof that you voted but that may be a step too far... Agree, it should be easier not harder to register and to vote
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    Tax refunds? What are those?
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      Not sure if you’re being facetious, but some of us have too much of our pay deducted from payroll throughout the year compared to our tax burden, so the IRS returns the extra money to us.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Why not adjust your withholdings to avoid that?
        lockhouse 3y ago
        Sometimes you can’t because of the way deductions work.
  - slipheen 3y ago
    Did you happen to know that not everyone is required to file a federal income tax statement? The IRS does not require you to pay income tax, or file taxes, unless you make over $19,400 (as of 2022) https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501 It's really difficult to tell what percentage of people that applies to, but just for one example I got from Google, The Tax Policy Center estimates that 70 Million Americans do not need to pay income tax. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-dont-pay-federal-income-tax-drops-pre-pandemic-levels https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-...
echelon 3y ago
> Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge. The opposition argues that this is discriminatory and would favor richer voters. If I understand their argument correctly, there is a non-zero cost to going to obtain these forms of identification that disproportionately impact the poor. You have to take off work, commute (potentially without a car or bus), pay a fee, be capable of understanding the instructions, etc. > Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board. The state of Georgia switched to these! They're awesome. You digitally record your vote and get a printout with your selections. The printout becomes your ballot, and you're able to verify it before submitting it. The choices are super legible in big fonts. There's a big QR code in the corner that an automated scanner can use to read the values, but a human can manually verify the printed names and ballot initiatives. The printed ballots look like this: https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imagecast-x-ballot2.jpg https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imagecast-x-ballo...
- mcculley 3y ago
  This seems worse than scantron to me. An unaided human cannot read the QR code to verify it.
  - echelon 3y ago
    I agree with you - we still have work to do. That said, if there's any suspected discrepancy between recorded choice and the QR code encoding, the ballots can be statistically sampled for divergence. Scantrons might be difficult to implement for ballots with lots ballot choices or lots of options. You'd want to maintain readability for those with poor eyesight. You probably don't want to hold up the line with people scanning the matrix to make sure it encodes the correct choices, either. I'm not sure what the optimal solution is here, but we are improving. No more "hanging chads".
    - mcculley 3y ago
      We have been using scantron ballots in Florida since 2002. (Statewide, that is. I think some counties were doing it before the reforms.) I can't imagine any ballot that would be hard to encode on them.
saveferris 3y ago
One of the interesting by products of all of this is that elections are getting less secure instead of more secure. After all these allegations came out and if you dug into how elections are run, they are pretty secure - not perfect of course. Now, you have states opting out of things like the registry that can detect if a voter votes in more than one state. So, it will be harder to catch a person voting in more than one state now. I guess that only applies to presidential elections where that would be illegal but I am sure people have voted in more than one local election too and they should not have. I live in Illinois and I don't know if it is free or not but you can get a sate ID here that is not a drivers license and use that to register to vote. A national version could make sense. Since the more voters there are only helps one party, we'll never see anything like that on a national level no matter how much sense it makes.
schemathings 3y ago
Slight tweak - you're eligible to vote in the primaries if you'll be 18 by the general election.
tzs 3y ago
> Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board. That's almost the right way to do it. Just add some additional data printed on the ballots in a special ink that is normally invisible, and provide voters with a special marker to fill in the bubbles that reacts with the special ink to make it visible, use some clever cryptographic techniques to figure out what should be printed with that special ink, and you get this [1]. With that, people who just want to vote and trust that others will deal with auditing and counting go into the booth, fill in the bubbles for their candidates, drop the ballot in the collection box, and then just wait for the machine count to see who won, just like now. But after the election all the cast ballots can be published allowing anyone to check the count. Individual voters who noted a code that was on their ballot can check the published ballots and verify that their ballot was counted correctly (but they cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate). This system also allows a voter before voting to verify that the ballots have been correctly printed. Voting systems with those properties are called end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting systems [2], and there have been several proposals for such systems, including many that like Scantegrity do not rely on electronic voting machines. Here is the original paper on this (PDF and HTML), and a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3][4][5]: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy... [3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [4] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [5] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Its and interesting idea, but what do you do when Joes says his vote was miscounted? Can you prove him wrong? Can he prove it? Because if not, it all seems pointless to me.
bediger4000 3y ago
This sounds close to what Colorado does. Ballots are hand marked and human readable, but machine counted. Risk limiting audits are performed for (I think) every election above small town level. Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter, but you can go vote if you really like your precinct.

CyberDildonics 3y ago

Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge. This exists, it's called registering with your address and then going to your local polling place. Voter fraud is essentially a nonexistent problem.

codr7 3y ago
One day you're going to look back at this comment and it will feel about as comfortable as Gate's yapping about 640k being enough for anyone.
- saveferris 3y ago
  I am curious what you think could happen. I did a lot of looking after all the allegations and all the lawsuits. It is remarkably secure today, all the lawsuis that have been filed, etc. and nothing was found. Where do you think the vulnerabilities are that can be exploited?
  - codr7 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
      Nothing was found by courts. Or governments. Or the media. Or anyone, really. Put up proof that something was off or STFU. I said the same thing to myself and many others when there were a few cries of voter fraud after the 2016 election. Those cries died down within a month or so of the election because the loser wasn't actively amplifying that position.
      - codr7 3y ago
        Doesn't it bother you even a little bit that all of the so called "investigators" are in the same boat? I don't have proof, that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to speak. As a general rule of thumb; whenever you get terribly upset that someone else has a different opinion, it's time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        >Doesn't it bother you even a little bit that all of the so called "investigators" are in the same boat? I don't follow this sentence at all. Can you be a bit clearer about what you mean here?
        codr7 3y ago
        None of these so called "investigators" were even close to objective.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        I don't see a conspiracy spanning every level of government and the media, I guess? It seems like something close to that would be required for so many people from so many different political backgrounds to look and find nothing. Or maybe you're defining "not objective" as "doesn't produce the result I wanted"...
        codr7 3y ago
        It's a theory, an alternative explanation, we are allowed to have those without evidence and it's OK to have multiple competing explanations. A better question would be: Why are you so desperate to believe one thing or the other?
        sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
        At some point that just devolves into one person pointing at a dog and saying "that's a dog" and the other saying "nu'uh it's a cat". Cat guy isn't doing anything illegal but they're still making a claim without evidence and refusing to let go of the claim in the face of contrary evidence. I'm genuinely worried about my country's ability to recover from what the Big Lie is doing to it, so I do care about the topic, and I do try to argue for sanity and truth where I can.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
    This is why I imagine it was so weird to be Brad Raffensperger during / immediately after the 2020 election. He ran for GA Sec of State on a platform of election security. He took actions he felt were in pursuit of that goal. He was proud of what he had done and the security of Georgia's elections. He supported Trump in the 2020 election. I am not in agreement with some of his approaches but by all accounts he was passionate about his role and generally did his job of making elections happen. Then his preferred candidate loses. The loser tosses accusations at Raffensperger and friends ranging from incompetence to outright malice. The loser claims the systems Raffensperger has been knee deep in the previous two years are insecure, suspect, compromised. The loser puts personal pressure on Raffensperger to "find" votes. That had to be one hell of a "what did I do to deserve this?" feeling throughout that time frame.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  Bill Gates never actually said that. He had a very detailed idea of exactly what was coming in the next year from that point on and what it would get used for. Also using mail to register to vote has been used for over 150 years and current voter fraud is practically zero. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-find...
  - codr7 3y ago
    Could be true; I also don't trust anything coming from Bill Gates these days, he has his icky fingers in too many pies. Yes, and the longer a game is played, the more loop holes are found.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Could be true; I also don't trust anything coming from Bill Gates these days, He explains it here. Where is the evidence that he said it? https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/ https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-e... Yes, and the longer a game is played, the more loop holes are found. This is vague FUD nonsense. What are you talking about and where is your evidence?

ausbah 3y ago

but why, voter fraud isn’t a problem in the US. trying to sate the lies of one political party won’t “prove them wrong” either, they’ll just fine new things to cry foul about somehow

thsksbd 3y ago
[flagged]
gustavus 3y ago
Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow. The purpose isn't to convince the diehard zealots, it's to convince the people that might be on the fence and could see it go either way. Maybe Joe down the street isn't very much into politics, but he's been hearing all about these electronic voting machines being the source of fraud, and he know it sounds unreasonable, but it does introduce some doubt, especially when he finds out that no one knows what's in them and that people can access em "over the internets", it's enough out of his wheelhouse to get him wondering.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Yes but it might make their claims ring more hollow. It might do the opposite; "see, they finally admitted it's a problem!"
  - splintercell 3y ago
    And this is how the Democrats have been painted in the corner. Presuming there was no problem: - Not doing any 'improvements' would result more of what is going on right now, an inability to prove the otherside wrong, and doubling down on the (near ridiculous) claim that it was the 'most secure election of all times'. Presuming there were issues: - Doing anything to improve them would mean that the one election they truly really wanted to win (i.e. defeating Trump), they will be accused of finally admitting that there were problems. - Which means from their perspective, keep doubling down on the claim that it was the most secure election of all times - OTOH if you didn't care that much about defeating Trump, and truly want there to be improvements if they are needed, then the Democrats claiming that these were the 'most secure elections of all times' just makes you start not believing it

Y-bar 3y ago

> Sign up after your eighteenth birthday to vote. Offer may differ for some communities, certain may experience having to sign up two counties over, in the basement, on the second Wednesday every odd month, behind a locked door with a sign "Beware of the leopard". Better if everyone just gets enrolled by default.

saveferris 3y ago
There is a lot of things wrong with this but I have said that in order to get your tax refund you have to show proof you registered to vote. I'd like to say proof that you voted but that may be a step too far... Agree, it should be easier not harder to register and to vote
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Tax refunds? What are those?
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    Not sure if you’re being facetious, but some of us have too much of our pay deducted from payroll throughout the year compared to our tax burden, so the IRS returns the extra money to us.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Why not adjust your withholdings to avoid that?
      - lockhouse 3y ago
        Sometimes you can’t because of the way deductions work.
- slipheen 3y ago
  Did you happen to know that not everyone is required to file a federal income tax statement? The IRS does not require you to pay income tax, or file taxes, unless you make over $19,400 (as of 2022) https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501 It's really difficult to tell what percentage of people that applies to, but just for one example I got from Google, The Tax Policy Center estimates that 70 Million Americans do not need to pay income tax. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-dont-pay-federal-income-tax-drops-pre-pandemic-levels https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-...

echelon 3y ago

> Or we could just offer secure voter IDs to everyone that is legally eligible to vote free of charge. The opposition argues that this is discriminatory and would favor richer voters. If I understand their argument correctly, there is a non-zero cost to going to obtain these forms of identification that disproportionately impact the poor. You have to take off work, commute (potentially without a car or bus), pay a fee, be capable of understanding the instructions, etc. > Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board. The state of Georgia switched to these! They're awesome. You digitally record your vote and get a printout with your selections. The printout becomes your ballot, and you're able to verify it before submitting it. The choices are super legible in big fonts. There's a big QR code in the corner that an automated scanner can use to read the values, but a human can manually verify the printed names and ballot initiatives. The printed ballots look like this: https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imagecast-x-ballot2.jpg https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imagecast-x-ballo...

mcculley 3y ago
This seems worse than scantron to me. An unaided human cannot read the QR code to verify it.
- echelon 3y ago
  I agree with you - we still have work to do. That said, if there's any suspected discrepancy between recorded choice and the QR code encoding, the ballots can be statistically sampled for divergence. Scantrons might be difficult to implement for ballots with lots ballot choices or lots of options. You'd want to maintain readability for those with poor eyesight. You probably don't want to hold up the line with people scanning the matrix to make sure it encodes the correct choices, either. I'm not sure what the optimal solution is here, but we are improving. No more "hanging chads".
  - mcculley 3y ago
    We have been using scantron ballots in Florida since 2002. (Statewide, that is. I think some counties were doing it before the reforms.) I can't imagine any ballot that would be hard to encode on them.

saveferris 3y ago

One of the interesting by products of all of this is that elections are getting less secure instead of more secure. After all these allegations came out and if you dug into how elections are run, they are pretty secure - not perfect of course. Now, you have states opting out of things like the registry that can detect if a voter votes in more than one state. So, it will be harder to catch a person voting in more than one state now. I guess that only applies to presidential elections where that would be illegal but I am sure people have voted in more than one local election too and they should not have. I live in Illinois and I don't know if it is free or not but you can get a sate ID here that is not a drivers license and use that to register to vote. A national version could make sense. Since the more voters there are only helps one party, we'll never see anything like that on a national level no matter how much sense it makes.

schemathings 3y ago

Slight tweak - you're eligible to vote in the primaries if you'll be 18 by the general election.

tzs 3y ago

> Also, use scantron style ballots that use computers to automate vote counting but not vote casting, with members of all major political parties monitoring polling stations and vote counting to ensure everything is above board. That's almost the right way to do it. Just add some additional data printed on the ballots in a special ink that is normally invisible, and provide voters with a special marker to fill in the bubbles that reacts with the special ink to make it visible, use some clever cryptographic techniques to figure out what should be printed with that special ink, and you get this [1]. With that, people who just want to vote and trust that others will deal with auditing and counting go into the booth, fill in the bubbles for their candidates, drop the ballot in the collection box, and then just wait for the machine count to see who won, just like now. But after the election all the cast ballots can be published allowing anyone to check the count. Individual voters who noted a code that was on their ballot can check the published ballots and verify that their ballot was counted correctly (but they cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate). This system also allows a voter before voting to verify that the ballots have been correctly printed. Voting systems with those properties are called end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting systems [2], and there have been several proposals for such systems, including many that like Scantegrity do not rely on electronic voting machines. Here is the original paper on this (PDF and HTML), and a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3][4][5]: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy... [3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [4] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [5] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

tomjen3 3y ago
Its and interesting idea, but what do you do when Joes says his vote was miscounted? Can you prove him wrong? Can he prove it? Because if not, it all seems pointless to me.

bediger4000 3y ago

This sounds close to what Colorado does. Ballots are hand marked and human readable, but machine counted. Risk limiting audits are performed for (I think) every election above small town level. Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter, but you can go vote if you really like your precinct.