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Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. Everything else could be manipulat

Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. Everything else could be manipulated or hacked. And when there's trillions of dollars and world power on the line, it's just a matter of time when the "could be" turns to "would be".

lawlessone 1y ago
I wouldn't say it's 100% fool proof, but paper does require a lot more people to be "In" on it.
alistairSH 1y ago
Paper ballots can be faked. Or lost. Or stuffed. Anyways, haven’t most/all districts gone to paper ballots, the electronic part is just auto tabulation. They can be counted manually if necessary.
- jeltz 1y ago
  What is the point then? Why introduce a machine where none is needed. In most countries all votes are counted twice by his d and the initial voubt finishes in a few hours.
  - bediger4000 1y ago
    They're faster.
    - normalaccess 1y ago
      Are they? we used to have same day numbers... Now elections can take weeks to figure out who won. Progress in the negative direction.
      - bediger4000 1y ago
        Can you point to a solid reference that national elections had same day numbers and the years of those election s?
    - jeltz 1y ago
      Same day results should be more than good enough and that is possible with hand counting in most of the world.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    We had half the country believe a conspiracy theory based upon the fact that they didn't get to know who won the Election day of. There is NO way Americans would accept universal hand counting.
thejazzman 1y ago
unpopular for many valid and party leaning ressons.
- quink 1y ago
  Australian here. Electronic voting is a joke. And a not very funny one.
  - quink 1y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country In fact, I’d call electronic voting unpopular given the many, many examples on this page.
Volundr 1y ago
> Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. I don't know that it's that unpopular. I disagree with the 100% fool proof and verifiable claim though. I can think of lots of interesting ways of screwing with it, e.x. manipulating the chain of custody or tampering with the ballots to make errors likely. Everything is a balance. Paper ballots aren't magically 100% secure, and in person voting comes with trade offs. Ex making it difficult for the military to vote, and making it such a big production for my highly disabled sister that she probably wouldn't bother. I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. That doesn't mean I disagree that in person isn't "more" secure.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  > I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. You can't trust the machines. You can't trust the election authorities. You can't trust the post office. Those are fundamental assumptions, not FUD or measured concerns. Elections should be designed for bad situations, because the results don't matter that much when things are good. Maybe a civil war is likely, or maybe it just ended and people are trying to rebuild trust. In any case, people don't trust each other, and they don't trust the authorities, but they are still trying to have legitimate elections. The goal is not 100% security, 100% correctness, or something equally silly. The goal is a system where either every major party has a justified belief that the elections were legitimate and fair, the reported results are mostly correct, and there was no substantial fraud. Or at least one party questions the results due to widespread fraud. You want to trust the results, even when you can't trust the people running the elections. Many paper ballot systems have been designed under such assumptions. The system assumes that the people running the elections cannot be trusted, but they also can't trust each other. You can't trust the people, but you trust that the system will detect and report any attempts at large-scale fraud.
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FridayoLeary 1y ago
The counterargument is that mail in ballots help increase voter turnouts and that requiring id will turn people away. It's a weak argument because you shouldn't try to increase turnout by making voting less secure. Any other solution should be found instead.
- kg 1y ago
  If we really want to increase turnout, we can just make voting mandatory like other countries have. Requiring ID is a problem given that a lot of people don't have easy access (or access at all) to legal ID, for various reasons, some as simple as cost. Having a license costs money on an ongoing basis and you need to have access to documents to prove your identity like a birth certificate, and some citizens don't have those through no fault of their own, like losing everything in a fire or even the relevant records agency itself burning down. Thankfully there are often fee waivers for hardship but there are certainly corner cases where saying 'if you want to vote you need ID' is basically a poll tax, something we rightfully banned in the US a long time ago.
  - baggy_trough 1y ago
    You have to have an ID to work. If we need to get non-workers ID in order to have secure elections, that is money well spent.
    - platevoltage 1y ago
      That has to happen before we can even talk about Voter ID requirements. I've NEVER seen a Republican mention this as an idea.
      - bediger4000 1y ago
        The "before" part is important. Guess the order in which these two things get implemented.
  - jeltz 1y ago
    The solution is obvious: make ID free and as hassle-free as possible to get.
marstall 1y ago
The arguments pro and con are purely motivated by partisan concerns. its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id, therefore voter id laws supposedly favors republicans. that supposed fact is at the heart of the entire debate and as far as i know there is nothing more to it.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  > its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id This notion that Democrats keep pushing - that a sizable portion of their voting base is too dumb to get an ID - when massive developing countries like India that are still struggling with basic things like sanitation have long ago solved this problem - is nothing short of embarrassing. There are people in rural India that live in straw huts that have EPIC cards. The solution, if this problem exists as they say, is to get everyone proper ID. Not "let's have just anyone vote and we'll trust their word". Universal PKI-backed national ID would be a program everyone should be behind but it would never see the light of day in the US, because maintaining a "disenfranchised" voting bloc is more valuable as a bargaining chip than the positive social contributions of such a program.
  - jeltz 1y ago
    This goes to show neither party is interested in a working society. I find republicans a lot worse but as you say of the democrats actually cared they would have done like most of the rest of the world and made sure IDs are easy to get.
    - favorited 1y ago
      How exactly are the Democrats supposed to do that? Somehow require everyone to get a passport card? Introduce some new kind of federal identification card? That would go over great. It's impossible enough to get things done these days, why should they waste political capital solving a problem that doesn't exist?
  - otterley 1y ago
    We've been trusting our voters' word for centuries and it hasn't been a problem yet. Why all the distrust all of a sudden? What changed?
the_gastropod 1y ago
There were literally Russian-sourced bomb threats at several major democratic strongholds' polling locations in the last presidential election. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-voting-bomb-threats https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-vo... Voter ID and blocking mail-in / early voting are just a few examples of contemporary Republican voter suppression efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  Count me as one who strongly opposes mail-in and early voting because I believe it violates the sanctity of the voting booth.
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    Do you have anything beyond a gut feeling here? Several states do primarily mail-in voting and it seems to work fine.
    - baggy_trough 1y ago
      How would you know if it didn’t? The very nature of the problem means that it’s hidden!
      - nobody9999 1y ago
        >How would you know if it didn’t? The very nature of the problem means that it’s hidden! Even if it's at a polling place on the day of, it's still a secret ballot. As such, of course it's hidden. It's a secret ballot. What are you going on about?
        baggy_trough 1y ago
        Absolutely, which is why I oppose mail in ballots. They don't have that property!
TacticalCoder 1y ago
You're downvoted but requiring voter ID should be 100% mandatory. There's a near 100% overlap between states not requiring voter ID and states where democrats won. And that since many elections. The correlation statistically makes absolutely zero sense. The only logical explanation is that illegals do vote and that they do mainly vote for democrats.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  > There's a near 100% overlap between states not requiring voter ID and states where democrats won. Interesting how there's a near 100% overlap of states which didn't implement this form of voter disenfranchisement and states where Democrats won. Thank you for informing me of that.
virgildotcodes 1y ago
How on Earth are we able to have a global digital financial system that is able to keep track of trillions in transactions per year but running a seasonal election with < 100 million participants through a digital system seems too hard?
- dkiebd 1y ago
  Those handling the financial system have an interest in it running right whilst those handling the election system have an interest in tampering with the results.
- dmix 1y ago
  Listing a few: Market incentives, general competency of the organizations running the systems, government procurement using the same set of bigcos who only care about getting the contract not about delivering quality after. Not that I have an opinion on paper ballots but I understand the concern for such a sensitive system.
- peanut-walrus 1y ago
  1. There is no requirement to make it impossible to determine which transactions someone has made, in fact, quite the opposite. 2. Transactions get rolled back all the time for various reasons. 3. The global digital financial system is a result of decades of evolution and millions of man-years of work.
- normalaccess 1y ago
  Not a bug but a feature... The messier things get the more "Realpolitik" can happen (using it pejoratively).
- eirikbakke 1y ago
  If electronics is involved in the act of voting, the voter has no assurance that the ballot remains secret (even if you're a software engineer!). With paper/envelope/box, by contrast, the voter can see and understand the full process.
  - 1y ago
esafak 1y ago
Where there is a will, there is a way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899415
snickerbockers 1y ago
Im so old I can remember when this used to be a common left-wing opinion. BTW, Dominion is actually diebold amalgamated with a couple other "voting" machine vendors into a single corporation.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Yep, it's disconcerting to see HN'ers demand that their federal government trump states' rights and issue mandatory centralized digital IDs.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    We are already forced to use our social security number as some sort of personal serial number when doing things that don't involve a government funded pension.
bediger4000 1y ago
Human marked, human and machine readable both is good practice. Risk limiting audits after elections is good practice. CA, WA and CO at least do all this. What does in person (with an ID) add to election security? That practice most certainly restricts voting unless there's a holiday for election day. What keeps in person voting from being manipulated less than other good practice elections? Why did in person voting become a big issue only just before and after 2020 election? Why didn't anybody pay attention to what some states did after 2000 election?
- jeltz 1y ago
  In person voting on election day makes replacing people's votes much harder. You only need to compromise a handful of people who guard the ballots othewise. The ratio of votes per staff guarding is much lower on election day in at least my country. Compromising enough people on election day would be ridiculous in my country.
  - nobody9999 1y ago
    >Compromising enough people on election day would be ridiculous in my country. Given that there are >3500 elections (one for each county) in the US every cycle, and all the competing eyes on the polls, counts and storage of ballots in each of those 3500+ counties makes compromising enough people to affect an election incredibly unlikely.
normalaccess 1y ago
100% Agree. Let's get back to brass tacks and stop all the monkey business. Even if there is no tomfoolery goin on (and I believe there is) why not make it beyond doubt?
somat 1y ago
disagree, I think paper ballots are just as easily hacked(printers are cheap). I think that while technical mechanisms are nice and should be used, they should not be depended on to secure the election. The only real solution is to have a politically neutral well motivated uncorrupted election officer corps. and if this sounds hard, it is. Thus why people keep trying to turn to technical means to secure an election and are baffled when it lets them down. Among it's many faults, I think this is one advantage of the weird US method of running elections at the county level. While it is probably easier to corrupt individual election corps, due to it's distributed nature it is harder to systematically corrupt all of them. This does mean that US elections are strangly inconsistent from county to county, but that is the price you pay for a distributed system. As a counterpoint to the "electronic election transactions are impossible to secure" platform, look at the credit card processing systems, yes there is fraud, but compared to the volume of daily transactions it is insignificant. the point being, large scale trusted electronic transactions are possible.
tshaddox 1y ago
Are you just talking about the part of election security that ensures that only eligible voters vote (and each only once)? Because paper ballots have little to do with many other aspects of election security.
jeffbee 1y ago
It's unpopular because it's stupid and wrong, not because we are stupid and wrong.
preinheimer 1y ago
I don't think that in person voting with ID is a fool proof way to guarantee that only the people who "should be voting" get to vote. I also think you disenfranchise too many people when you do that. - People who work on oil rigs won't get to vote - People who do shift work covering the hours the polls are open wont get to vote - People who are of sound mind, but too unwell to travel to a polling location wont get to vote - November is Red/blue king crab season in Alaska, guess those people don't get to vote - Flight attendants & pilots might be away from home that day. - People in the military might be on exercise that day, we're cutting them off (though I'll assume deployed service members will get to vote wherever they are) - Long haul truckers are out of luck - Anyone on vacation is missing their chance - College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend?
- platevoltage 1y ago
  --- College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend? I personally couldn't care less as long as they only vote once.
- ThunderSizzle 1y ago
  Nearly everything you said is solved with the roll out of early voting for nearly a whole month or more prior to the actual election say. Also, all rights come with responsibilities, and part of the responsibility of voting is registering to vote, getting your ID, and showing up to vote. We shouldn't bend society to let people who don't want bare minimum responsibility to participate in their right. We have no problem putting serious restrictions on rights of people in other areas coinciding with responsibility.
platevoltage 1y ago
Should ID's be free and easy to get, because if not, this would amount to a poll tax, which has been deemed unconstitutional. We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights. We would need to set up a service where a representative from the government would come to your house on demand, verify your identity, and issue you a free ID whether you live in downtown DC, rural New Mexico, or somewhere in Puerto Rico. Otherwise this is a non-starter.
- Ancapistani 1y ago
  > We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights. Go buy a gun without ID, and tell me how it goes.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    Ah yes, one of the only parts of the constitution that feature the word "regulated".
    - Ancapistani 1y ago
      I'm not here to have that debate. I'm using it as a counter-example. You said ID was not required to carry out any other Constitutionally-protected rights. That is simply untrue, as illustrated by my example.
Nursie 1y ago
Except it doesn’t matter whether it’s foolproof or verifiable. The only thing that matters is seizing on a narrative and running with it, whipping up fear and discontent. The solution is to heal the partisanship in US society that infects everything there, and acts like poison on public discourse and trust.
yibg 1y ago
Is there evidence that in person voting is meaningfully more secure than other forms (like mail in voting) let alone 100% fool proof? Even assuming it is, how do we solve the other issues it causes if it's the only way to vote? e.g.: - How do US citizens that don't live or are not at the time of voting physically in the US vote? e.g. overseas military personnel. - People that live in remote areas of the country without easy access to in person voting stations? - Those with limited mobility and have a hard time physically getting to a voting station? - Those with limited transportation options? e.g. don't have reliable access to a car. - Those that do shift work and can't or can't afford to take the time off? - The estimated millions of Americans that don't have a valid form of ID? End of the day, even if in person voting with a valid ID is the only reliable way to vote, we also need to evaluate the marginal reduction in voting fraud against disenfranchising voters.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Here's the fun part: we don't solve those problems. Those aren't even actual problems, that's the intended goal. Disenfranchisement is not just a side effect, it's the main effect of this thought process.
  - yibg 1y ago
    Yea agree. I think the reality is a significant portion of the American population don't want actual democracy, in that they don't want everyone to be able to vote. It's a feature not a bug.
evan_ 1y ago
Sounds good until a strongman recruits tens of thousands of masked thugs to patrol cities and beat up anyone who looks like they might vote for the opponent of said strongman.
duxup 1y ago
In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1. In theory you could just run it through the exact machine again and you'd get a good test for what is going on, and you have a physical copy to count / verify. I think it is a good system, and about as close to digital as I want to get. Some solid old school tech and some reasonably new.
- deleted 1y ago
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- nobody9999 1y ago
  >In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1. That's exactly how we do it in New York as well. What's more, before I'm given that paper ballot, I need to provide my name and address, then provide a signature which is compared to the signature on file with the Board of Elections. If the signature doesn't match, I don't get to vote.
on_the_train 1y ago
Then you just throw away the ballots, mark them as invalid, fudge with the counting or the transmission of the counts. That's how we do it in my country.
ModernMech 1y ago
Why is anyone talking about voting methods when the President can call up a state and ask them to gerrymander 5 congressional seats? What's the fucking point in caring about the integrity of various voting mechanisms if they can just fix the outcome anyway? You don't need to scam the voting box, just win a majority in the legislature and then prevent the other side from ever winning again. Sidesteps the whole voting ID issue very cleanly.
yread 1y ago
Sure, give everyone a free ID, that's easy to pick up, let people vote over 2-3 days, one of them a public holiday and make sure there are enough polling stations everywhere (not just red districts)

lawlessone 1y ago

I wouldn't say it's 100% fool proof, but paper does require a lot more people to be "In" on it.

alistairSH 1y ago

Paper ballots can be faked. Or lost. Or stuffed. Anyways, haven’t most/all districts gone to paper ballots, the electronic part is just auto tabulation. They can be counted manually if necessary.

jeltz 1y ago
What is the point then? Why introduce a machine where none is needed. In most countries all votes are counted twice by his d and the initial voubt finishes in a few hours.
- bediger4000 1y ago
  They're faster.
  - normalaccess 1y ago
    Are they? we used to have same day numbers... Now elections can take weeks to figure out who won. Progress in the negative direction.
    - bediger4000 1y ago
      Can you point to a solid reference that national elections had same day numbers and the years of those election s?
  - jeltz 1y ago
    Same day results should be more than good enough and that is possible with hand counting in most of the world.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- platevoltage 1y ago
  We had half the country believe a conspiracy theory based upon the fact that they didn't get to know who won the Election day of. There is NO way Americans would accept universal hand counting.

thejazzman 1y ago

unpopular for many valid and party leaning ressons.

quink 1y ago
Australian here. Electronic voting is a joke. And a not very funny one.
- quink 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country In fact, I’d call electronic voting unpopular given the many, many examples on this page.

Volundr 1y ago

> Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. I don't know that it's that unpopular. I disagree with the 100% fool proof and verifiable claim though. I can think of lots of interesting ways of screwing with it, e.x. manipulating the chain of custody or tampering with the ballots to make errors likely. Everything is a balance. Paper ballots aren't magically 100% secure, and in person voting comes with trade offs. Ex making it difficult for the military to vote, and making it such a big production for my highly disabled sister that she probably wouldn't bother. I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. That doesn't mean I disagree that in person isn't "more" secure.

jltsiren 1y ago
> I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. You can't trust the machines. You can't trust the election authorities. You can't trust the post office. Those are fundamental assumptions, not FUD or measured concerns. Elections should be designed for bad situations, because the results don't matter that much when things are good. Maybe a civil war is likely, or maybe it just ended and people are trying to rebuild trust. In any case, people don't trust each other, and they don't trust the authorities, but they are still trying to have legitimate elections. The goal is not 100% security, 100% correctness, or something equally silly. The goal is a system where either every major party has a justified belief that the elections were legitimate and fair, the reported results are mostly correct, and there was no substantial fraud. Or at least one party questions the results due to widespread fraud. You want to trust the results, even when you can't trust the people running the elections. Many paper ballot systems have been designed under such assumptions. The system assumes that the people running the elections cannot be trusted, but they also can't trust each other. You can't trust the people, but you trust that the system will detect and report any attempts at large-scale fraud.
- deleted 1y ago
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FridayoLeary 1y ago

The counterargument is that mail in ballots help increase voter turnouts and that requiring id will turn people away. It's a weak argument because you shouldn't try to increase turnout by making voting less secure. Any other solution should be found instead.

kg 1y ago
If we really want to increase turnout, we can just make voting mandatory like other countries have. Requiring ID is a problem given that a lot of people don't have easy access (or access at all) to legal ID, for various reasons, some as simple as cost. Having a license costs money on an ongoing basis and you need to have access to documents to prove your identity like a birth certificate, and some citizens don't have those through no fault of their own, like losing everything in a fire or even the relevant records agency itself burning down. Thankfully there are often fee waivers for hardship but there are certainly corner cases where saying 'if you want to vote you need ID' is basically a poll tax, something we rightfully banned in the US a long time ago.
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  You have to have an ID to work. If we need to get non-workers ID in order to have secure elections, that is money well spent.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    That has to happen before we can even talk about Voter ID requirements. I've NEVER seen a Republican mention this as an idea.
    - bediger4000 1y ago
      The "before" part is important. Guess the order in which these two things get implemented.
- jeltz 1y ago
  The solution is obvious: make ID free and as hassle-free as possible to get.

marstall 1y ago

The arguments pro and con are purely motivated by partisan concerns. its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id, therefore voter id laws supposedly favors republicans. that supposed fact is at the heart of the entire debate and as far as i know there is nothing more to it.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id This notion that Democrats keep pushing - that a sizable portion of their voting base is too dumb to get an ID - when massive developing countries like India that are still struggling with basic things like sanitation have long ago solved this problem - is nothing short of embarrassing. There are people in rural India that live in straw huts that have EPIC cards. The solution, if this problem exists as they say, is to get everyone proper ID. Not "let's have just anyone vote and we'll trust their word". Universal PKI-backed national ID would be a program everyone should be behind but it would never see the light of day in the US, because maintaining a "disenfranchised" voting bloc is more valuable as a bargaining chip than the positive social contributions of such a program.
- jeltz 1y ago
  This goes to show neither party is interested in a working society. I find republicans a lot worse but as you say of the democrats actually cared they would have done like most of the rest of the world and made sure IDs are easy to get.
  - favorited 1y ago
    How exactly are the Democrats supposed to do that? Somehow require everyone to get a passport card? Introduce some new kind of federal identification card? That would go over great. It's impossible enough to get things done these days, why should they waste political capital solving a problem that doesn't exist?
- otterley 1y ago
  We've been trusting our voters' word for centuries and it hasn't been a problem yet. Why all the distrust all of a sudden? What changed?

the_gastropod 1y ago

There were literally Russian-sourced bomb threats at several major democratic strongholds' polling locations in the last presidential election. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-voting-bomb-threats https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-vo... Voter ID and blocking mail-in / early voting are just a few examples of contemporary Republican voter suppression efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

baggy_trough 1y ago
Count me as one who strongly opposes mail-in and early voting because I believe it violates the sanctity of the voting booth.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  Do you have anything beyond a gut feeling here? Several states do primarily mail-in voting and it seems to work fine.
  - baggy_trough 1y ago
    How would you know if it didn’t? The very nature of the problem means that it’s hidden!
    - nobody9999 1y ago
      >How would you know if it didn’t? The very nature of the problem means that it’s hidden! Even if it's at a polling place on the day of, it's still a secret ballot. As such, of course it's hidden. It's a secret ballot. What are you going on about?
      - baggy_trough 1y ago
        Absolutely, which is why I oppose mail in ballots. They don't have that property!

TacticalCoder 1y ago

You're downvoted but requiring voter ID should be 100% mandatory. There's a near 100% overlap between states not requiring voter ID and states where democrats won. And that since many elections. The correlation statistically makes absolutely zero sense. The only logical explanation is that illegals do vote and that they do mainly vote for democrats.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
> There's a near 100% overlap between states not requiring voter ID and states where democrats won. Interesting how there's a near 100% overlap of states which didn't implement this form of voter disenfranchisement and states where Democrats won. Thank you for informing me of that.

virgildotcodes 1y ago

How on Earth are we able to have a global digital financial system that is able to keep track of trillions in transactions per year but running a seasonal election with < 100 million participants through a digital system seems too hard?

dkiebd 1y ago
Those handling the financial system have an interest in it running right whilst those handling the election system have an interest in tampering with the results.
dmix 1y ago
Listing a few: Market incentives, general competency of the organizations running the systems, government procurement using the same set of bigcos who only care about getting the contract not about delivering quality after. Not that I have an opinion on paper ballots but I understand the concern for such a sensitive system.
peanut-walrus 1y ago
1. There is no requirement to make it impossible to determine which transactions someone has made, in fact, quite the opposite. 2. Transactions get rolled back all the time for various reasons. 3. The global digital financial system is a result of decades of evolution and millions of man-years of work.
normalaccess 1y ago
Not a bug but a feature... The messier things get the more "Realpolitik" can happen (using it pejoratively).
eirikbakke 1y ago
If electronics is involved in the act of voting, the voter has no assurance that the ballot remains secret (even if you're a software engineer!). With paper/envelope/box, by contrast, the voter can see and understand the full process.
- 1y ago

esafak 1y ago

Where there is a will, there is a way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899415

snickerbockers 1y ago

Im so old I can remember when this used to be a common left-wing opinion. BTW, Dominion is actually diebold amalgamated with a couple other "voting" machine vendors into a single corporation.

CharlesW 1y ago
Yep, it's disconcerting to see HN'ers demand that their federal government trump states' rights and issue mandatory centralized digital IDs.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  We are already forced to use our social security number as some sort of personal serial number when doing things that don't involve a government funded pension.

bediger4000 1y ago

Human marked, human and machine readable both is good practice. Risk limiting audits after elections is good practice. CA, WA and CO at least do all this. What does in person (with an ID) add to election security? That practice most certainly restricts voting unless there's a holiday for election day. What keeps in person voting from being manipulated less than other good practice elections? Why did in person voting become a big issue only just before and after 2020 election? Why didn't anybody pay attention to what some states did after 2000 election?

jeltz 1y ago
In person voting on election day makes replacing people's votes much harder. You only need to compromise a handful of people who guard the ballots othewise. The ratio of votes per staff guarding is much lower on election day in at least my country. Compromising enough people on election day would be ridiculous in my country.
- nobody9999 1y ago
  >Compromising enough people on election day would be ridiculous in my country. Given that there are >3500 elections (one for each county) in the US every cycle, and all the competing eyes on the polls, counts and storage of ballots in each of those 3500+ counties makes compromising enough people to affect an election incredibly unlikely.

normalaccess 1y ago

100% Agree. Let's get back to brass tacks and stop all the monkey business. Even if there is no tomfoolery goin on (and I believe there is) why not make it beyond doubt?

somat 1y ago

disagree, I think paper ballots are just as easily hacked(printers are cheap). I think that while technical mechanisms are nice and should be used, they should not be depended on to secure the election. The only real solution is to have a politically neutral well motivated uncorrupted election officer corps. and if this sounds hard, it is. Thus why people keep trying to turn to technical means to secure an election and are baffled when it lets them down. Among it's many faults, I think this is one advantage of the weird US method of running elections at the county level. While it is probably easier to corrupt individual election corps, due to it's distributed nature it is harder to systematically corrupt all of them. This does mean that US elections are strangly inconsistent from county to county, but that is the price you pay for a distributed system. As a counterpoint to the "electronic election transactions are impossible to secure" platform, look at the credit card processing systems, yes there is fraud, but compared to the volume of daily transactions it is insignificant. the point being, large scale trusted electronic transactions are possible.

tshaddox 1y ago

Are you just talking about the part of election security that ensures that only eligible voters vote (and each only once)? Because paper ballots have little to do with many other aspects of election security.

jeffbee 1y ago

It's unpopular because it's stupid and wrong, not because we are stupid and wrong.

preinheimer 1y ago

I don't think that in person voting with ID is a fool proof way to guarantee that only the people who "should be voting" get to vote. I also think you disenfranchise too many people when you do that. - People who work on oil rigs won't get to vote - People who do shift work covering the hours the polls are open wont get to vote - People who are of sound mind, but too unwell to travel to a polling location wont get to vote - November is Red/blue king crab season in Alaska, guess those people don't get to vote - Flight attendants & pilots might be away from home that day. - People in the military might be on exercise that day, we're cutting them off (though I'll assume deployed service members will get to vote wherever they are) - Long haul truckers are out of luck - Anyone on vacation is missing their chance - College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend?

platevoltage 1y ago
--- College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend? I personally couldn't care less as long as they only vote once.
ThunderSizzle 1y ago
Nearly everything you said is solved with the roll out of early voting for nearly a whole month or more prior to the actual election say. Also, all rights come with responsibilities, and part of the responsibility of voting is registering to vote, getting your ID, and showing up to vote. We shouldn't bend society to let people who don't want bare minimum responsibility to participate in their right. We have no problem putting serious restrictions on rights of people in other areas coinciding with responsibility.

platevoltage 1y ago

Should ID's be free and easy to get, because if not, this would amount to a poll tax, which has been deemed unconstitutional. We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights. We would need to set up a service where a representative from the government would come to your house on demand, verify your identity, and issue you a free ID whether you live in downtown DC, rural New Mexico, or somewhere in Puerto Rico. Otherwise this is a non-starter.

Ancapistani 1y ago
> We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights. Go buy a gun without ID, and tell me how it goes.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  Ah yes, one of the only parts of the constitution that feature the word "regulated".
  - Ancapistani 1y ago
    I'm not here to have that debate. I'm using it as a counter-example. You said ID was not required to carry out any other Constitutionally-protected rights. That is simply untrue, as illustrated by my example.

Nursie 1y ago

Except it doesn’t matter whether it’s foolproof or verifiable. The only thing that matters is seizing on a narrative and running with it, whipping up fear and discontent. The solution is to heal the partisanship in US society that infects everything there, and acts like poison on public discourse and trust.

yibg 1y ago

Is there evidence that in person voting is meaningfully more secure than other forms (like mail in voting) let alone 100% fool proof? Even assuming it is, how do we solve the other issues it causes if it's the only way to vote? e.g.: - How do US citizens that don't live or are not at the time of voting physically in the US vote? e.g. overseas military personnel. - People that live in remote areas of the country without easy access to in person voting stations? - Those with limited mobility and have a hard time physically getting to a voting station? - Those with limited transportation options? e.g. don't have reliable access to a car. - Those that do shift work and can't or can't afford to take the time off? - The estimated millions of Americans that don't have a valid form of ID? End of the day, even if in person voting with a valid ID is the only reliable way to vote, we also need to evaluate the marginal reduction in voting fraud against disenfranchising voters.

const_cast 1y ago
Here's the fun part: we don't solve those problems. Those aren't even actual problems, that's the intended goal. Disenfranchisement is not just a side effect, it's the main effect of this thought process.
- yibg 1y ago
  Yea agree. I think the reality is a significant portion of the American population don't want actual democracy, in that they don't want everyone to be able to vote. It's a feature not a bug.

evan_ 1y ago

Sounds good until a strongman recruits tens of thousands of masked thugs to patrol cities and beat up anyone who looks like they might vote for the opponent of said strongman.

duxup 1y ago

In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1. In theory you could just run it through the exact machine again and you'd get a good test for what is going on, and you have a physical copy to count / verify. I think it is a good system, and about as close to digital as I want to get. Some solid old school tech and some reasonably new.

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nobody9999 1y ago
>In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1. That's exactly how we do it in New York as well. What's more, before I'm given that paper ballot, I need to provide my name and address, then provide a signature which is compared to the signature on file with the Board of Elections. If the signature doesn't match, I don't get to vote.

on_the_train 1y ago

Then you just throw away the ballots, mark them as invalid, fudge with the counting or the transmission of the counts. That's how we do it in my country.

ModernMech 1y ago

Why is anyone talking about voting methods when the President can call up a state and ask them to gerrymander 5 congressional seats? What's the fucking point in caring about the integrity of various voting mechanisms if they can just fix the outcome anyway? You don't need to scam the voting box, just win a majority in the legislature and then prevent the other side from ever winning again. Sidesteps the whole voting ID issue very cleanly.

yread 1y ago

Sure, give everyone a free ID, that's easy to pick up, let people vote over 2-3 days, one of them a public holiday and make sure there are enough polling stations everywhere (not just red districts)