5 ms·

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. When we moved away from paper voting with public ove

• numbsafari 9mo ago
  Porque no los dos?
• travisgriggs 9mo ago
  What if some level of efficiency (not necessarily internet) improves turnout and participation?
  • earleybird 9mo ago
    A question we all have to ask ourselves. What would I trade for efficiency?
  • deathanatos 9mo ago
    At least in the US, I think there are a number of suggestions that are made repeatedly each cycle here. Like "it should be a paid federal holiday", and not putting onerous requirements on voters. Automatic registration. The list goes on. But I what is written over and over is more on the lines of "I don't trust the process". I cannot blame anyone for not trusting Internet voting: I am a professional SWE, and it would be impossible for me to establish that any such system isn't pwned. Too much code to audit, hardware that's impossible to audit. But it's pretty trivial to demonstrate to the layperson how paper voting works, and how poll observers can prevent that process from being subverted.
  • bikelang 9mo ago
    We have mail voting as a default in Colorado. When you get your license you are registered to vote and opted in automatically. The one piece that might improve it further is if it came with a stamp to mail back. Otherwise you just drop it off at a drive-up ballot box. You can also vote in person if you want. Hardly anybody does it so there’s never a line. You get text messages each step of the process too. “Your ballot has been mailed”/“your ballot has been delivered”/“your ballot has been received”/“your ballot has been counted - thanks for voting”.
    • irishcoffee 9mo ago
      How do they prevent double voting?
      • bikelang 9mo ago
        When you vote in person they print out a label that has some internal identifier unique to you and place it in your ballot
      • jaydenmilne 9mo ago
        Other states that do this well don't start counting mail in ballots until after polls closed. They know if someone voted in person, so their mail in ballot is rejected before being opened and verified.
      • seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        The ballots envelopes (not the ballots themselves) are keyed to the voter's identity. When the ballot is removed (not until the signature is verified and not contested), the voter is counted as voted, so if they double vote, then the second vote will be rejected. Likewise if you try to vote by mail and then at the poll, you are flagged before you even try to vote.
  • mannykannot 9mo ago
    Improved turnout and participation is a good thing in itself, but not necessarily if it puts a weapon in the hands of those who do not like the outcome and are seeking to invalidate it without regard to whether it represents the electorate’s legitimate choice.
  • the_snooze 9mo ago
    There are non-internet ways to do that. States are really the "laboratories of democracy" on that front, with different states having affordances like long early-voting periods and mail-in voting. However, those are in the context of whatever political system they're in. No level of efficient election design is going to put a dent in the fact that California loves direct-elected downballot offices (e.g., treasurer, controller, insurance commissioner, state judges, local judges, etc.) and referenda, which all result in super long and complicated ballots with 50+ questions each.
  • nerdponx 9mo ago
    Efficiency for the voter and efficiency for the vote counting process are totally different things.
• dbcurtis 9mo ago
  Mostly agree, but we don’t have to give up the benefits of direct digital tabulation for quick results. I would like a paper audit trail. Print my ballot-as-cast for on a paper roll that scrolls by under a window. I can verify it before leaving the voting booth. Recounts and challenges can be a computer scan of the paper roll. None of this is hard. Costs a bit more, but buys trust in the system.
  • deathanatos 9mo ago
    Some paper jurisdictions have this, essentially. E.g., where I live: the ballot is a paper ballot. You vote by filling in a circle/bubble. (If you're familiar with a "scantron" … it's that.) It looks like a paper document intended for a human, and it certainly can be. A machine can also read it. (And does, prior to it being cast: the ballot is deposited into what honestly looks like a trashcan whose lid is a machine. It could presumably keep a tally, though IDK if it does. It does seem to validate the ballot, as it has false-negative rejected me before.) But now the "paper trail" is exactly what I submit; it's not a copy that I need to verify is actually a copy, what is submitted it my vote, directly.
  • tptacek 9mo ago
    That's how it works in Cook County and a lot of other places: it's touchscreen voting, using "ballot marking devices", which produce a paper ballot you hand to an EJ to submit.
  • jcrawfordor 9mo ago
    This is the system used in the majority of the United States. Direct-recording electronic voting systems were never that common, briefly peaked after the Help America Vote Act as the least expensive option to meet accessibility requirements, and have become less common since then as many election administrators have switched to either prectinct tabulators or direct-recording with voter-verified paper audit trail. In the 2026 election, only 1.3% of voters were registered in jurisdictions that use direct-recording electronic machines without a voter verifiable paper audit trail (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/voteEquip/mapType/ppEquip/year/2026 https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/voteE...). 67.8% of voters are registered in precincts that primarily use hand-marked ballots, and the balance mostly use BMDs to generate premarked ballots.
• liveoneggs 9mo ago
  Just do both like we do here in GA. You vote on a computer, it prints out a piece of paper, you walk the paper over to some kind of scanner, and then it is deposited into a giant trash can. (maybe they keep the paper records, idk) - these are the dominion systems. (memories..) When I lived in NYC there was a giant lever you got to use - it was pretty fun - but positioning the actual paper was kind of tricky. I think Georgia used to have Diebold machines where you would get a little receipt but I'm pretty sure they were very hackable. Anyway half of them were always broken.
  • Spooky23 9mo ago
    The New York mechanical machines by the 2000s were all worn out, there was a statistically higher occurrence of certain numbers (I believe 9) because the gearing was worn down.
  • velcrovan 9mo ago
    Minnesota has a better system. You fill in a paper ballot using a pen, and the paper ballot gets optically scanned. Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens, it makes it extremely cheap to stand up more polling places with more booths, since only one tabulator is needed; the booths themselves can just be little standing tables with privacy protectors.
    • autoexec 9mo ago
      This really is the best way to do it. Scantron gives fast results and you get a paper physical record which shows the actual ballot exactly as it was presented to the voter along with what their vote was.
      • dylan604 9mo ago
        <devilsAdvocate>How many people spend time making their selections on the computer, then compare every single selection on the print out? Deniers could say the computer randomly prints votes to skew in certain candidate/party direction knowing not everyone would catch it.</devilsAdvocate> all it would take is one person saying their printed ballot does not match their specific selection, and the whole thing would become chaos.
• maxerickson 9mo ago
  The US overwhelmingly uses paper voting (often paired with electronic tabulation). We can't "move back", it's where we are. Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper.
  • Brybry 9mo ago
    Yep, I believe Louisiana is the only US state that does electronic voting without a paper trail. [1] And not all paper systems are good either. I'm sure everyone remembers the disaster that was the punch card system used by Florida in the 2000 election... [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_equipment_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_equipment_by_state
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • firesteelrain 9mo ago
      Florida basically now uses scan tron technology. Color in a circle and when done you turn it over and the ballot is scanned right in front of you.
  • SV_BubbleTime 9mo ago
    >Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper. Do European and other first world countries favor electronic tabulation? Is it possible that introduction of all electronic factors reduce trust?
    • pa7ch 9mo ago
      Risk limiting audits are why this work. You physically sample ballots at random. The number you sample grows as the gap in the electronic tally shrinks to reach high confidence the election was tabulated correctly.
      • abdullahkhalids 9mo ago
• seattle_spring 9mo ago
  You're conflating "efficiency" with "disenfranchising voters." Mail-in voting enabled citizens who otherwise simply couldn't vote, to vote. Citizens who, more often than not, were from already disadvantaged backgrounds.
  • closewith 9mo ago
    Many countries with far higher participation rates do not allow mail-in voting, which definitely should be banned to prevent voter manipulation.
    • seattle_spring 9mo ago
      Ok, now compare other things they do to enable voting. Is voting day a holiday and/or do workers get guaranteed paid time to vote? Are the ballot boxes equally accessible for most people, and not strategically placed to disenfranchise certain voters?
• piou 9mo ago
  The majority of the U.S. votes on paper: https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/. Most of the rest of the country votes using Ballot Marking Devices that produce paper ballots; less than 5% of the population lives somewhere where the only or default choice is electronic voting.
  • robomartin 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • boredatoms 9mo ago
      We’re less worried about a low-scale low impact fraud my many people that is unlikely to alter results, than a systematic mass fraud by few people who can choose a result
      • robomartin 9mo ago
        That's the wrong perspective. The minute votes go into the mail system there is no way to know just how many mail-in votes might be subject to fraud. In other words, your characterization has no basis in evidence. Note that I am not asserting that massive fraud has been committed anywhere. That statement would be as impossible to support with evidence as yours. The only thing you can state with absolute certainty is that mail-in ballots can be subject to manipulation and that this manipulation can reach enough scale to affect results in elections where the margin is so narrow that a few hundred or a few thousand votes can determine who wins. Simple example: We receive eight ballots. There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing. There's also nothing to prevent bad actors from destroying ballots in large quantities. Again, do not mischaracterize my statements here. I am not asserting that any of this has happened. I am saying that mail-in ballots enable potentially serious manipulation and are insecure. This is like saying that short passwords are insecure. Lots of people use them safely and never get hacked. We all know they are unsafe. The fact that they might not be insecure enough for the general public to understand the issue (because you don't have news every day showing how many thousands of people are getting hurt) is immaterial. The truth of the matter is independent of the perceived consequences. Short passwords are insecure. Mail-in ballots are insecure.
• xmprt 9mo ago
  > We should move back to paper voting. We already use paper voting. If you mean go back to a time before voting machines, then I fear that would actually reduce trust because the amount of tabulation errors, data entry, and spoilt ballots would skyrocket. The only people who are increasing doubt in voting machine are the same people who are trying to disenfranchise voters and not accepting the results of past elections. The last presidential election where doing a paper recount might have helped was in 2000 and believe it or not, the same party that's calling for abolishing voting machine today was the one who sued to avoid a paper recount then.
  • plagiarist 9mo ago
    They did start a recount! IIRC SCOTUS, at that time already taken over by partisans, illegally ruled to force the original results on us instead of correctly ruling for all FL districts to use the same methodology when performing the tallies.
    • cael450 9mo ago
      Yeah. The Republicans blatantly sabotaged the recount and everyone shrugged and moved on.
• voxl 9mo ago
  yeah, trust is real important. Wait, what's that. Stop the count? Don't count all the votes because it's taking too long? Where have I heard that before... What political, totally not fascist, group of people have supported a politician saying that before...
• seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  > The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. If efficiency is low enough to significantly affect turn out, you cannot trust the results. > We should move back to paper voting. Nowhere in the US is electronic voting used from what I know of. Estonia is the only country I know of that does internet voting, but my info could be out of date.
• dstroot 9mo ago
  I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, auditable voting system. Do I believe any of the current vendors have done that? NO. But I believe it could be done.
  • bwestergard 9mo ago
    People of limited technical ability can understand the checks and balances of a paper voting system, which legitimizes outcomes. No digital voting system I'm aware of has this characteristic.
    • charcircuit 9mo ago
      They can't understand the cybersecurity of a banking app either yet they use those.
  • reactordev 9mo ago
    We have ID.gov and we have blockchain. If we can ensure that the person submitting the vote is indeed that person, would it matter whether it was online, in a booth, or by mail?
    • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 9mo ago
      I'm told people of color have a hard time getting IDs.
  • closewith 9mo ago
    How do you solve the issue of manipulated voting? That's solved by in-person ID-authenticated voting, but can never be solved by online voting.
  • dfadsadsf 9mo ago
• pfisch 9mo ago
  The only thing seriously reducing trust in elections is anti-democratic politicians who will ALWAYS find a convenient reason to claim the election is rigged, and many of their followers will believe and propagate that lie to create distrust in the election. There is really nothing we can do to satisfy these people except create some kind of structure they demand which will somehow be made to heavily lean in their favor. That is what will satisfy them. Nothing else will.
• s1artibartfast 9mo ago
  it seems like encoded receipts are a simple solution for electronic auditability. Voter registry is used to generate traceable but anonymous keys Used when voting Votes are electronically counted. Voters can check their votes against the count Third parties can check vote counts against the anonymized registry
  • autoexec 9mo ago
    It depends on what "Voters can check their votes" means since you have to make sure that nobody can take a receipt to see which way someone (including themselves) voted. You're also still stuck trusting that what your receipt said matches what actually got counted. The best paper record is the actual ballot you yourself marked and turned in. It shows exactly what the ballot said and it shows what your selection was. Counting of those ballots can take place in public, on camera to make sure that each vote gets counted correctly. No internet or computers needed.
    • s1artibartfast 9mo ago
      I think there's nothing wrong with giving people a way to check that their vote was counted for the party or person they intended.
      • autoexec 9mo ago
        It means that some people will be able to force others to vote a certain way, punish them if they don't vote a certain way, or even pay them for their votes. Those schemes are a lot less effective when you can't prove how someone voted. People can try to bribe you, or even intimidate you, but once you're in the voting booth you have the freedom to vote however you want and nobody can find out later which way you actually voted. That freedom is very important and worth keeping. You already know which way you voted, no one else needs to be able to check.
• tdb7893 9mo ago
  Are there places that don't do paper voting in the US? Ballots are still paper everywhere I've voted (mail in ballots, electronic ballots with printouts, filling in bubbles, etc. It's always been paper). Also, even with paper ballots hand counted people aren't suddenly going to trust elections, at least not some people I know. I had someone say that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants voted in the last election. That obviously didn't happen and there's already controls to stop that from happening but that didn't stop them from believing it. It's one of the issues with the conspiratorial thinking, it's durable even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
  • nonethewiser 9mo ago
    Isn't it effectively computers everywhere? Sure, you may write on a piece of paper but there is a computer scanning and reporting it. I dont see a practical difference between that and submitting a form directly on a computer.
    • tdb7893 9mo ago
      With paper ballots you can do hand recounts physically with the paper and it's much harder to change values than digitally (obviously), which is a huge difference. You could switch to hand counting by default for everything but the conspiracy theories are really durable for process changes like that so my experience is it won't make a difference. To expand on that a bit: I've only found their preferred candidate winning to be a long term convincing argument to them (and even then they still will be suspicious). The scenarios I've heard aren't even possible in the current system but they don't trust the election system as a whole so there's no control they would be satisfied with. Even if they personally counted the paper ballots themselves they would just say the ballots were switched out before they got them. Obviously not everyone who doesn't trust elections is like this but I know a lot of people like this.
• teleforce 9mo ago
  One of the main aims of voting system (physical or online) is to increase the participation of the voters, since the average turnout of global voters are less than 70% (filter by continents for simpler aggregated average) [1]. For example even in country with pervasive internet connectivity (99%) like in Netherland the voter turnout in 2024 is only 77%. Security technology of trust management in the centralized voting system and architecture has already been solved and well understood, and now we are even moving into zero trust with multi-factor authentications. All this while the venerable Kerberos has been around for decades with its secure derivatives, and its secure alternatives are numerous. For the more challenging fully distributed arguably has already been solved recently by blockchain, immutable data, etc. This is the classic example is not that you can't (as claimed by the the article), but you won't. This is what political will is all about and since this is on political voting this lame attitude is kind of expected. [1] Voter turnout of registered voters, 2024: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/voter-turnout-of-registered-voters https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/voter-turnout-of-register...
• Alupis 9mo ago
  > The most important feature of public elections is trust. Agreed. However, in some states, such as California, mail-in voting has become the default. What's used to verify identity and integrity? Your signature from your voter's affidavit of registration, a signature from any past voter form, or literally an "X"[1]. Your signature doesn't even need to match, it just must have "similar characteristics". You can print your name or sign in cursive, you can even just use initials. They're all accepted. We're firmly on the "honor system". Pair that with lack of voter ID laws, and we have a system that's designed to be untrustworthy. Yes, I agree, a state issued ID should be free... [1] https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/elections-code/elec-sect-3019/ https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/elections-code/elec-sect-3019/
  • andyferris 9mo ago
    Do you not have in-person early voting? In Australia you can postal vote if necessary, but "prepoll" voting is much more popular (I believe 37.5% of registered voters, 90% of which actually voted, in 2025). It's just so convenient, with the same crowd of volunteers and officials as actual polling day.
    • Alupis 9mo ago
      In 2020's national election, nearly 87% of California votes were by mail[1]. California offers day-of in-person voting, and has ballot-drop boxes (unmonitored) and drop-off (monitored) locations for at least several weeks (I believe it was a full month in the past election). [1] https://abc7.com/post/election-2024-21-californias-registered-voters-have-already-cast-mail-ballots/15481913/ https://abc7.com/post/election-2024-21-californias-registere...
  • anon291 9mo ago
    I volunteered at Fairview development center in Costa Mesa CA, which is a place where dozens of disabled residents lived. These people could not talk, move, etc. They were essentially quadriplegics; mentally completely not there; etc. I was a high school student helping move residents to Sunday service and back and doing activities with them (volunteer hours). I clearly remember seeing nurses and others mark ballots of residents that were in no fit state to vote (unable to communicate at all; those who could were often not mentally competent enough to make their own medical decisions, let alone decide who to vote for). I don't think anyone cares to be totally honest. I was shocked the residents even got absentee ballots. Of course, competent adults should be able to vote, but at the point where you're essentially a child mentally? I mean ... how can anyone possibly figure it out. I did lodge a complaint, but nothing came of it.
• ronbenton 9mo ago
  Drives me nuts how many people don’t understand we are already using paper ballots. Electronically tabulated using risk-limiting audits. Why are so many people convinced we don’t use paper ballots? Disinformation?
  • dfedbeef 9mo ago
    Yes
• PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  > The most important feature of public elections is trust. I think that perhaps you meant to say that the easiest thing about public elections to undermine is trust. You don't need to actually hack the ballots, send in fake electors, or any other actively nefarious stuff. Just undermine people's "trust" in elections (ironically by talking about how important that "trust" is), and voila, you've done much more harm to an election process than anything we have actual evidence for.
• energy123 9mo ago
  Yes, and this isn't a tech problem. It's a civics problem. Being secure is necessary but insufficient. We need to be maximally impervious to false allegations of insecurity. Having an election process that's comprehensible and transparent is part of that.
• KurSix 9mo ago
  One thing I'd add is that paper voting's strength isn't nostalgia, it's public verifiability