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Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires any expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipu

by okanat 1y ago

Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires *any* expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipulation-proof to a 7 year old, your voting system is untrustworthy. This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.

bkummel 1y ago
True! In The Netherlands, where I live, we still vote on paper ballots. The ballots are counted by hand. The counting is public, anyone can go and observe the counting.
- hannofcart 1y ago
  This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.
  - Vinnl 1y ago
    The same process is used for the Dutch part of the elections for the European Parliament.
  - abdullahkhalids 1y ago
    The total number of people voting at each polling station should be the same irrespective of the population of the country. Besides that what other scaling problems are there?
  - lucideer 1y ago
    > there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all. Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable. Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts. That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
  - lurk2 1y ago
    You don’t understand how scale works.
  - patrickmcnamara 1y ago
    The Netherlands would be the 4th biggest state if it was part of the US.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - xboxnolifes 1y ago
    This doesn't make sense. In the same way that police, firefighters, ambulance, farmers, etc, can scale to any country population, so can ballot counting.
  - erentz 1y ago
    The Netherlands is 18m people. Germany is 83m with its MMP system. There are ways to adjust and scale these other systems.
  - etiennebausson 1y ago
    France has 68M inhabitants and is on paper ballots (and function identically to Ireland on such matter). I don't quite understand how a country with a mere 5 times more population is unable to enact the same solution at their 'so much bigger' scale. And France is spread over more time zone than the U.S., so that argument doesn't work either.
oivey 1y ago
If it’s just a signature or stamp, won’t the 7 year old ask why those can’t be faked or forged?
- tialaramex 1y ago
  What signature or stamp? In my country we make any mark, although conventionally a cross is used in illustrations. Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)
- okanat 1y ago
  That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee - Secrecy of who voted for whom - Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public. Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process. Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented. Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones. The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents. The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone. After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box. Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other. If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.
elevation 1y ago
Who gets to pick the 7 year old?
lucideer 1y ago
I live in Ireland which I think has one of the best voting systems in the world (don't worry we've still got plenty of other serious problems with our electoral system). It's 100% paper PRSTV & so the counts are slow. Not only is this generally OK (because getting a rapid result is absolutely not a requirement of any well-functioning voting system) but it also has actual benefits. The main benefit is predicated on the count being engaging in and of itself. Other countries put a lot of effort into jazzing up statistical presentations on constituency predictions, cloropleths aplenty, to engage viewers. In Ireland, count centres are not only manned by trained count staff, they're also flooded with volunteer tallymen who verify the counting in realtime. Count coverage is on the ground, showing a real physical process that's intricate enough to be watchable. The entire process also serves as an education-through-doing in how our voting system works, so you get a more engaged & informed electorate (when it comes to the mechanics of voting - still unfortunately not that informed on policy, that's a worldwide problem).
- dmurray 1y ago
  One of the weird things for computer people about the Irish voting system is that it's non-deterministic! You can count the same ballots in a different order and get a different result (because it depends which votes you choose as "surplus" to redistribute). In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.
  - lucideer 1y ago
    Yeah. I think it's the best voting system in the world because I've yet to encounter one I think is better but you're right, it's far from perfect. That said, surplus distribution tends to be the main flaw raised time & time again, & whenever improvements are discussed the general conclusion tends to be that the current distribution mechanism goes a very long way toward fair representation of the actual preference distribution. It's notable that the more computationally intensive alternatives to get "fairer" outcomes are pretty recent inventions & it's really hard to justify the effort given the tiny number of cases affected.
supportengineer 1y ago
I cannot upvote this enough.
matthewfcarlson 1y ago
Just the fact that there are millions of citizens means you have to trust the process. When I go vote and stamp my votes, you need to trust my county’s counters. I find it strange we focus so much on tampering with an individual vote (machine says you voted for X instead of Y) rather than tampering with aggregation

Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires *any* expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipu

by okanat 1y ago

bkummel 1y ago

True! In The Netherlands, where I live, we still vote on paper ballots. The ballots are counted by hand. The counting is public, anyone can go and observe the counting.

hannofcart 1y ago
This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.
- Vinnl 1y ago
  The same process is used for the Dutch part of the elections for the European Parliament.
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  The total number of people voting at each polling station should be the same irrespective of the population of the country. Besides that what other scaling problems are there?
- lucideer 1y ago
  > there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all. Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable. Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts. That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
- lurk2 1y ago
  You don’t understand how scale works.
- patrickmcnamara 1y ago
  The Netherlands would be the 4th biggest state if it was part of the US.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  This doesn't make sense. In the same way that police, firefighters, ambulance, farmers, etc, can scale to any country population, so can ballot counting.
- erentz 1y ago
  The Netherlands is 18m people. Germany is 83m with its MMP system. There are ways to adjust and scale these other systems.
- etiennebausson 1y ago
  France has 68M inhabitants and is on paper ballots (and function identically to Ireland on such matter). I don't quite understand how a country with a mere 5 times more population is unable to enact the same solution at their 'so much bigger' scale. And France is spread over more time zone than the U.S., so that argument doesn't work either.

oivey 1y ago

If it’s just a signature or stamp, won’t the 7 year old ask why those can’t be faked or forged?

tialaramex 1y ago
What signature or stamp? In my country we make any mark, although conventionally a cross is used in illustrations. Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)
okanat 1y ago
That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee - Secrecy of who voted for whom - Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public. Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process. Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented. Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones. The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents. The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone. After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box. Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other. If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.

elevation 1y ago

Who gets to pick the 7 year old?

lucideer 1y ago

I live in Ireland which I think has one of the best voting systems in the world (don't worry we've still got plenty of other serious problems with our electoral system). It's 100% paper PRSTV & so the counts are slow. Not only is this generally OK (because getting a rapid result is absolutely not a requirement of any well-functioning voting system) but it also has actual benefits. The main benefit is predicated on the count being engaging in and of itself. Other countries put a lot of effort into jazzing up statistical presentations on constituency predictions, cloropleths aplenty, to engage viewers. In Ireland, count centres are not only manned by trained count staff, they're also flooded with volunteer tallymen who verify the counting in realtime. Count coverage is on the ground, showing a real physical process that's intricate enough to be watchable. The entire process also serves as an education-through-doing in how our voting system works, so you get a more engaged & informed electorate (when it comes to the mechanics of voting - still unfortunately not that informed on policy, that's a worldwide problem).

dmurray 1y ago
One of the weird things for computer people about the Irish voting system is that it's non-deterministic! You can count the same ballots in a different order and get a different result (because it depends which votes you choose as "surplus" to redistribute). In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.
- lucideer 1y ago
  Yeah. I think it's the best voting system in the world because I've yet to encounter one I think is better but you're right, it's far from perfect. That said, surplus distribution tends to be the main flaw raised time & time again, & whenever improvements are discussed the general conclusion tends to be that the current distribution mechanism goes a very long way toward fair representation of the actual preference distribution. It's notable that the more computationally intensive alternatives to get "fairer" outcomes are pretty recent inventions & it's really hard to justify the effort given the tiny number of cases affected.

supportengineer 1y ago

I cannot upvote this enough.

matthewfcarlson 1y ago

Just the fact that there are millions of citizens means you have to trust the process. When I go vote and stamp my votes, you need to trust my county’s counters. I find it strange we focus so much on tampering with an individual vote (machine says you voted for X instead of Y) rather than tampering with aggregation