9 ms·

I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linea

by ggm 9mo ago

I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down. (this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship) -I have been offered voting remotely in elections for my home economy of the UK and I would have welcomed some kind of homomorphic encrypted, secured voting method, given I have done KYC with the UK government to get my pension paid, I don't see there is a problem with them knowing who I am online. I therefore do not totally agree with the headline, but I'm willing to be convinced by the article, because comparing the land of hanging chad to my own, I think paper and pencil is just fine. BTW we have a senate election which demands ballot papers cut from A0 paper in long strips. Hundreds of boxes to be filled in. What we don't have is the vote for every judge, official, proposition on the table, we just elect representatives and senators, but we have a complex vote method. It just works. We do machine reading, but every single paper is reviewed by people, and parties have rights to monitor the vote, in secured spaces. We do not have a serious concern with the integrity of our vote, and the question is regularly asked and tested. (it's not just because we believe its secure and don't check) Its a great list of signatories, includes people I respect. I would think that the prime question for americans is "how much worse or better than the current approach could this be?"

BurningFrog 9mo ago
Australia really uses erasable pencil markings to vote? I would feel much better if they required ink.
- b112 9mo ago
  It's pencil in Canada too. Pencil works. Ink pens stop working, and are far more expensive than pencil in bulk. Voting is old. Using fountain pens, and quills to vote, is far more annoying than pencil when it just works. The mark of vote being indelible or not is irrelevant. The monitoring and protection of the ballots is far more important. For example, representatives of all political parties are involved in the count, oversight by an agency, etc. If you had time to erase and re-mark ballots, you could swap out paper ballets too.
- xmprt 9mo ago
  If you're worried about someone taking away your vote by erasing your pencil marking, then you should be equally/more worried about someone spoiling your ballot by voting twice on the same ballot, thereby invalidating it. You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that.
  - tacticus 9mo ago
    > You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that. Given the number of people involved in watching ballots the entire time it is happening this would require a lot of compromised people and a lot of compromised scrutineers.
- hydrox24 9mo ago
  Yes, and the reasons are outlined by the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body that runs Australian elections (see the first FAQ)[0]. There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts. If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?). Pen markings are perfectly valid however, so you can bring a pen to the booth to vote with if you'd like to do so. It's also true of course that erasers don't quite erase pencil. It would be fairly obvious that the paper was tampered with. [0]: https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm
  - anon291 9mo ago
    > If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?). I mean the same is true in the United States. One of the key issues with the 2020 election was footage from several jurisdictions where the public was physically blocked from viewing the counting by election officials literally holding up giant white boards. The optics of that were extremely bad.
    - tacticus 9mo ago
      Unlike the US the elections aren't run by some local arsehat with local rules. they have consistent rules over the entire state or country (depending on election in question) Scrutineers are also not members of the public. They are declared and appointed by candidates and parties for polling oversight and have complete access to the counting and polling area. They're not allowed to touch ballots but they can challenge and bring them up to all the scrutineers in the location (and EC staff) and finally they can take it to the court afterwards Election officials are also not local council\elected people they're people working for the AEC\State Electoral commission. which is as mentioned above a non partisan organisation (which is highly different from bipartisan framing) You also have a large number of counting staff. who do the sorting and then counting with machine assistance (how many sheets are here in this stack do they match the tally the 2 people already made on that pile) Though the senate elections have a more complex voting software stack due to STV fun.
- ben-schaaf 9mo ago
  Someone needs to gain physical access to the ballot after voting in order to erase it. If they can do that they can just as well make it invalid using a pen, or they can just tear it up. On the other hand, disappearing ink has been around for a long time.
- crote 9mo ago
  The problem is that disappearing ink is a thing, and someone could swap out the source of ink (pen, stamp pad) in the voting booth. Erasing is indeed a possibility with pencil markings, but this can only happen during the counting process - which should be open to anyone to audit, and anyone messing around with an eraser during the counting process would stand out like a sore thumb.
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    Where I have seen stamp pads used for voting, you do not take them with you in the voting booth. You must press the stamp on the stamp pad at the official who gives you the stamp. Stamping is fast and convenient. While corrupted officials could apply additional stamps during the counting, to make the vote invalid, that should be prevented by witnesses belonging to the parties that compete in the election.
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I've heard great things about the way that India votes. It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
- phanimahesh 9mo ago
  Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby (<2km away from registered address). Including a monk who gets his own polling booth because he lives so far from everyone and everything else. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth-inside-a-forest-in-india-for-just-one-voter https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth... Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-gets-own-polling-station-indian-election-2024-05-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him. There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).
    - autoexec 9mo ago
      Yep. Physical voting places are great, but they're also an easy target for voter suppression. There should be a requirement that there be a nearby polling location, we should also have multiple days to vote there and employers should be required to give every one of their employees at least one of those days off.
      - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        Georgia made sure African Americans had crowded long line voting locations with no access to water. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were doing that. The South is still pretty racist.
golem14 9mo ago
The problem, as I understand it, is that if you can prove to yourself that your vote was counted right, you can also prove it to the guy with the sledgehammer next to you saying "it would be a shame if something happened to your family, so prove how you voted"...
- badestrand 9mo ago
  By that logic we have to get rid of mail-in voting as well because there could always be a sledgehammer guy standing next to someone in their own home.
  - zamadatix 9mo ago
    Some do think so, but there is also a material difference in needing to be intimidated at the time of the vote being cast vs any point in the future as well.
    - godelski 9mo ago
      I think the bigger concern is that mail in ballots lead to fake ballots being submitted. Though I've seen no convincing evidence of this happening at any meaningful scale and the arguments seem unconvincing since you don't get a ballot unless verified with a state ID and your ballot has a unique ID associated with your name, preventing a double spend. Personally, my concern is that with mail in ballots some nutjob that believes there's ballot stuffing can set fire to the ballotbox and even though they're caught it's a major inconvenience to get a replacement ballot and the websites that show your ballot is received take days to update. But I still love mail in voting. My state sends a candidate brochure with it and I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies. It takes me hours to actually fill out my ballot but that's a feature, not a bug (there's nothing preventing you from along party lines but frankly I'd be happier without parties)
      - usefulcat 9mo ago
        > I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies But you can already do that, regardless of mail in voting or not?
Tagbert 9mo ago
Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. the counting is done by simple photoelectronic tabulators and there is a built-in, human readable record that can be checked by hand. It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. i hate the idea of using internet voting. I also don’t trust the electronic voting booths where the whole action is virtual or the older mechanical systems with the chads. Just a pen and paper is sufficient.
- schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
  >Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. >It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams. Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem. Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
  - crote 9mo ago
    > People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. Or more subtle: watching them vote, with the implicit threat of violence if they vote the "wrong" way. > The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. In my country it is mandatory to give time off to vote if necessary. But the booths are open from 07:30 to 21:00, are located in a bunch of convenient locations (schools, libraries, train stations, shopping malls), and have basically zero waiting time, so in practice rarely anyone needs to make use of it.
xp84 9mo ago
At this point the main problem here is one of trust either way. Most Americans, of any party affiliation, believe that one party’s officials are presiding over a vast conspiracy to steal every election. The Left thinks the GOP is intimidating real citizens who happen to be immigrants from voting by trying to pass laws for proof of identity, and the Right thinks Democrats are trucking in illegals to stuff the ballot box, or that some random voting machine company is systematically rigging every vote. All these positions are presented without evidence. Then both parties think that if their party’s guy isn’t in charge of the election itself, that the vote counting itself is being faked. Of course, these concerns only ever come out when their preferred party loses. Mix internet voting into this, and the average person’s utter cluelessness about computers, and no amount of fancy crypto, blockchain, etc. would ever convince any American that their party lost fair and square. “The new online voting system was rigged!”
- slg 9mo ago
  >All these positions are presented without evidence. What evidence do you need that making it more difficult to vote will result in fewer people voting? Isn't it common sense?
- creata 9mo ago
  There's plenty of evidence of voter suppression in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
themafia 9mo ago
> we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship Then my refusal to vote should be counted. If enough people refuse to vote then the entire election should be cancelled and new candidates found. Otherwise this is a ridiculous catch 22 of state bullying to no actual purpose. Who would even think to create such a law?
- crote 9mo ago
  Which country doesn't count spoiled or blank votes? And the whole "cancel the election and find new candidates" is pretty pointless when anyone can start a political party of their own and participate in the election.
  - themafia 9mo ago
    > Which country doesn't count spoiled or blank votes? The USA. We have districts where turnout is as low as 25% of eligible voters. > anyone can start a political party of their own and participate in the election. You don't get federal funding and the FCC doesn't force networks to cover your party or include you in debates until you win 5% on a national platform. Have fun actually doing this. Which was the only reason I voted for Nader. I wanted the greens to have a standing in the US. It's never even come close to happening since. > "cancel the election and find new candidates" Then your political parties will engage in a race to the bottom with you. You don't sense this already happening?
- Nursie 9mo ago
  You can pay the fine or spoil your paper. If significant numbers do this, it will be reported publicly. As it is though, people tend to vote for one of the parties on offer, of which there are many. And as it's also preference voting, Australia is not stuck in the trap of "better vote for A or B will get in" either. You can vote for C, with a fallback to D, E and F before putting in A as a back-stop.
  - themafia 9mo ago
joshcsimmons 9mo ago
That seems common sense. It’s wild that this is an extremist position in the US now.
femto 9mo ago
> it just works The biggest reason "it just works" is that the Australian Electoral Commission, the organisation that sets electoral boundaries and runs the election, is independent of the government. Other reasons are compulsory voting and preferential voting. In my mind, it is these three things that keep Australia's democracy relatively healthy.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  And yet the people keep voting for some of the strictest internet surveillance laws in the world. "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" said a politician asked about his policy of making encryption illegal.
KurSix 9mo ago
Paper systems fail locally and noisily; internet systems fail silently and at scale
TiredOfLife 9mo ago
> it just works And the pieces of paper with votes for the wrong candidates are easy to dispose of. See, for example, russia.

by ggm 9mo ago

BurningFrog 9mo ago

Australia really uses erasable pencil markings to vote? I would feel much better if they required ink.

b112 9mo ago
It's pencil in Canada too. Pencil works. Ink pens stop working, and are far more expensive than pencil in bulk. Voting is old. Using fountain pens, and quills to vote, is far more annoying than pencil when it just works. The mark of vote being indelible or not is irrelevant. The monitoring and protection of the ballots is far more important. For example, representatives of all political parties are involved in the count, oversight by an agency, etc. If you had time to erase and re-mark ballots, you could swap out paper ballets too.
xmprt 9mo ago
If you're worried about someone taking away your vote by erasing your pencil marking, then you should be equally/more worried about someone spoiling your ballot by voting twice on the same ballot, thereby invalidating it. You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that.
- tacticus 9mo ago
  > You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that. Given the number of people involved in watching ballots the entire time it is happening this would require a lot of compromised people and a lot of compromised scrutineers.
hydrox24 9mo ago
Yes, and the reasons are outlined by the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body that runs Australian elections (see the first FAQ)[0]. There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts. If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?). Pen markings are perfectly valid however, so you can bring a pen to the booth to vote with if you'd like to do so. It's also true of course that erasers don't quite erase pencil. It would be fairly obvious that the paper was tampered with. [0]: https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm
- anon291 9mo ago
  > If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?). I mean the same is true in the United States. One of the key issues with the 2020 election was footage from several jurisdictions where the public was physically blocked from viewing the counting by election officials literally holding up giant white boards. The optics of that were extremely bad.
  - tacticus 9mo ago
    Unlike the US the elections aren't run by some local arsehat with local rules. they have consistent rules over the entire state or country (depending on election in question) Scrutineers are also not members of the public. They are declared and appointed by candidates and parties for polling oversight and have complete access to the counting and polling area. They're not allowed to touch ballots but they can challenge and bring them up to all the scrutineers in the location (and EC staff) and finally they can take it to the court afterwards Election officials are also not local council\elected people they're people working for the AEC\State Electoral commission. which is as mentioned above a non partisan organisation (which is highly different from bipartisan framing) You also have a large number of counting staff. who do the sorting and then counting with machine assistance (how many sheets are here in this stack do they match the tally the 2 people already made on that pile) Though the senate elections have a more complex voting software stack due to STV fun.
ben-schaaf 9mo ago
Someone needs to gain physical access to the ballot after voting in order to erase it. If they can do that they can just as well make it invalid using a pen, or they can just tear it up. On the other hand, disappearing ink has been around for a long time.
crote 9mo ago
The problem is that disappearing ink is a thing, and someone could swap out the source of ink (pen, stamp pad) in the voting booth. Erasing is indeed a possibility with pencil markings, but this can only happen during the counting process - which should be open to anyone to audit, and anyone messing around with an eraser during the counting process would stand out like a sore thumb.
- adrian_b 9mo ago
  Where I have seen stamp pads used for voting, you do not take them with you in the voting booth. You must press the stamp on the stamp pad at the official who gives you the stamp. Stamping is fast and convenient. While corrupted officials could apply additional stamps during the counting, to make the vote invalid, that should be prevented by witnesses belonging to the parties that compete in the election.

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

I've heard great things about the way that India votes. It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.

phanimahesh 9mo ago
Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby (<2km away from registered address). Including a monk who gets his own polling booth because he lives so far from everyone and everything else. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth-inside-a-forest-in-india-for-just-one-voter https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth... Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-gets-own-polling-station-indian-election-2024-05-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him. There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).
  - autoexec 9mo ago
    Yep. Physical voting places are great, but they're also an easy target for voter suppression. There should be a requirement that there be a nearby polling location, we should also have multiple days to vote there and employers should be required to give every one of their employees at least one of those days off.
    - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
      Georgia made sure African Americans had crowded long line voting locations with no access to water. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were doing that. The South is still pretty racist.

golem14 9mo ago

The problem, as I understand it, is that if you can prove to yourself that your vote was counted right, you can also prove it to the guy with the sledgehammer next to you saying "it would be a shame if something happened to your family, so prove how you voted"...

badestrand 9mo ago
By that logic we have to get rid of mail-in voting as well because there could always be a sledgehammer guy standing next to someone in their own home.
- zamadatix 9mo ago
  Some do think so, but there is also a material difference in needing to be intimidated at the time of the vote being cast vs any point in the future as well.
  - godelski 9mo ago
    I think the bigger concern is that mail in ballots lead to fake ballots being submitted. Though I've seen no convincing evidence of this happening at any meaningful scale and the arguments seem unconvincing since you don't get a ballot unless verified with a state ID and your ballot has a unique ID associated with your name, preventing a double spend. Personally, my concern is that with mail in ballots some nutjob that believes there's ballot stuffing can set fire to the ballotbox and even though they're caught it's a major inconvenience to get a replacement ballot and the websites that show your ballot is received take days to update. But I still love mail in voting. My state sends a candidate brochure with it and I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies. It takes me hours to actually fill out my ballot but that's a feature, not a bug (there's nothing preventing you from along party lines but frankly I'd be happier without parties)
    - usefulcat 9mo ago
      > I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies But you can already do that, regardless of mail in voting or not?

Tagbert 9mo ago

Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. the counting is done by simple photoelectronic tabulators and there is a built-in, human readable record that can be checked by hand. It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. i hate the idea of using internet voting. I also don’t trust the electronic voting booths where the whole action is virtual or the older mechanical systems with the chads. Just a pen and paper is sufficient.

schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. >It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams. Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem. Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
- crote 9mo ago
  > People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. Or more subtle: watching them vote, with the implicit threat of violence if they vote the "wrong" way. > The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. In my country it is mandatory to give time off to vote if necessary. But the booths are open from 07:30 to 21:00, are located in a bunch of convenient locations (schools, libraries, train stations, shopping malls), and have basically zero waiting time, so in practice rarely anyone needs to make use of it.

xp84 9mo ago

At this point the main problem here is one of trust either way. Most Americans, of any party affiliation, believe that one party’s officials are presiding over a vast conspiracy to steal every election. The Left thinks the GOP is intimidating real citizens who happen to be immigrants from voting by trying to pass laws for proof of identity, and the Right thinks Democrats are trucking in illegals to stuff the ballot box, or that some random voting machine company is systematically rigging every vote. All these positions are presented without evidence. Then both parties think that if their party’s guy isn’t in charge of the election itself, that the vote counting itself is being faked. Of course, these concerns only ever come out when their preferred party loses. Mix internet voting into this, and the average person’s utter cluelessness about computers, and no amount of fancy crypto, blockchain, etc. would ever convince any American that their party lost fair and square. “The new online voting system was rigged!”

slg 9mo ago
>All these positions are presented without evidence. What evidence do you need that making it more difficult to vote will result in fewer people voting? Isn't it common sense?
creata 9mo ago
There's plenty of evidence of voter suppression in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

themafia 9mo ago

> we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship Then my refusal to vote should be counted. If enough people refuse to vote then the entire election should be cancelled and new candidates found. Otherwise this is a ridiculous catch 22 of state bullying to no actual purpose. Who would even think to create such a law?

crote 9mo ago
Which country doesn't count spoiled or blank votes? And the whole "cancel the election and find new candidates" is pretty pointless when anyone can start a political party of their own and participate in the election.
- themafia 9mo ago
  > Which country doesn't count spoiled or blank votes? The USA. We have districts where turnout is as low as 25% of eligible voters. > anyone can start a political party of their own and participate in the election. You don't get federal funding and the FCC doesn't force networks to cover your party or include you in debates until you win 5% on a national platform. Have fun actually doing this. Which was the only reason I voted for Nader. I wanted the greens to have a standing in the US. It's never even come close to happening since. > "cancel the election and find new candidates" Then your political parties will engage in a race to the bottom with you. You don't sense this already happening?
Nursie 9mo ago
You can pay the fine or spoil your paper. If significant numbers do this, it will be reported publicly. As it is though, people tend to vote for one of the parties on offer, of which there are many. And as it's also preference voting, Australia is not stuck in the trap of "better vote for A or B will get in" either. You can vote for C, with a fallback to D, E and F before putting in A as a back-stop.
- themafia 9mo ago

joshcsimmons 9mo ago

That seems common sense. It’s wild that this is an extremist position in the US now.

femto 9mo ago

> it just works The biggest reason "it just works" is that the Australian Electoral Commission, the organisation that sets electoral boundaries and runs the election, is independent of the government. Other reasons are compulsory voting and preferential voting. In my mind, it is these three things that keep Australia's democracy relatively healthy.

direwolf20 9mo ago
And yet the people keep voting for some of the strictest internet surveillance laws in the world. "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" said a politician asked about his policy of making encryption illegal.

KurSix 9mo ago

Paper systems fail locally and noisily; internet systems fail silently and at scale

TiredOfLife 9mo ago

> it just works And the pieces of paper with votes for the wrong candidates are easy to dispose of. See, for example, russia.