6 ms·

The US overwhelmingly uses paper voting (often paired with electronic tabulation). We can't "move back", it's where we are. Electronic tabulation introduces li

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
    The normal person has no knowledge of stats. I am a professional physicist, and I struggle with stats. The methods you suggest can convince a stats professional that the tally is correct. It cannot convince a normal person of the same.
    - creata 9mo ago
      > It cannot convince a normal person of the same. But you don't need everyone to be convinced of it first-hand. You just need everyone to trust someone who is convinced of it.
      - crote 9mo ago
        Election security should not hinge on a "trust me bro" - especially when people are being convinced the other way by Russian propaganda talking heads on social media. Manual counting requires zero trust. In my country anyone is welcome to observe the entire process from start to finish, if they wish to do so. A few years back a fringe far-right party tried importing the voting integrity distrust over here, and recruited people to watch their local polling stations to "expose the fraud". Which was totally fine because they were always allowed to do so, and it fizzled out because zero evidence of fraud was found, and that party still didn't get a significant number of votes.
        creata 9mo ago
        Don't these two situations (watching vote counts; understanding a complicated statistical argument that the vote is tamper-free) require the same kind of trust? 1. In both cases, everyone is theoretically capable of checking it themselves; they're theoretically zero-trust. In the former scenario, I'm theoretically capable of attending the vote count, and in the latter scenario, I'm theoretically capable of learning the statistics needed to verify the argument. 2. In both cases, most people cannot (or will not) practically check it themselves, and is trusting that someone they trust is doing the checking for them. I'm not saying they're the exact same situation, but they both ask for a large amount of trust from most of the voters.
- creata 9mo ago
  For their upper house elections (which can have giant ballots), Australia uses computers in its counting, but there are humans in the process. [Here's a video from the Austalian Electoral Commission.](https://youtu.be/9AqN-Y25qQo https://youtu.be/9AqN-Y25qQo)
- jcrawfordor 9mo ago
  Good data is hard to come by, but from a brief survey electronic precinct tabulation (the most common system in the US) is also in at least partial use in Canada, Mexico, India, the Phillipines, and Russia, and a laundry list of smaller countries. Now, you might contend that this is not a list of first-world countries exactly (but rather I sampled the largest countries). You must keep in mind that the use of electronic tabulation in the United States is mostly a response to the very limited budget on which elections are carried out; electronic tabulation is much less expensive than significantly increasing staffing. As a result, globally, electronic tabulation tends to be most common in poorer countries or countries with newer election systems, while hand tabulation is most common in wealthier countries with long-established election procedures. For this reason, the countries you might go to for comparison (like France and Germany) have largely manual election processes that have often seen few changes since the Second World War. The Help America Vote Act (2002) had a de facto effect of making the United States a country with much newer election processes, as HAVA requires strict accessibility measures that most European election systems do not meet (e.g. unassisted voting for blind and deaf people). Most US election systems didn't meet them either, in 2002, so almost the entire country had to design new election processes over a fairly short span of time and on a shoestring budget. Understandably, election administrators leaned on automation to make that possible. It's also important to understand that because of the US tradition of special-purpose mill levies and elected independent boards (like school boards), the average US ballot has significantly more questions than the average European ballot. This further increases the cost and complexity of hand tabulation, even ruling out entirely the "optimized" hand tabulation methods used in France and Ireland.
popalchemist 9mo ago
As we learned from Dominion... depends who manufactures the machine.
- RunningDroid 9mo ago
  > As we learned from Dominion... depends who manufactures the machine. Dominion, the company that doubled it's net worth by winning a defamation suit against Fox over claims their machines had been compromised? That Dominion?
fsckboy 9mo ago
>We can't "move back", it's where we are. vote by mail (and similar ballot harvesting, bulk ballot dropoffs with hazy chain-of-custody as from a nursing homes and immigrant communities) are new, based on paper, and open to abuse. It's not where we were. traditional absentee balloting was a small scale thing used by college students, military personnel, etc. and if it was messed up, it was not likely to change outcomes or a threat to counting accurately (no election is perfect)
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  So the question(s) to ask are: 1. why did absentee voting/vote by mail expand? What was the claimed intention and purpose? What has been the actual result (and based on what evidence) ? 2. who has an interest in underming confidence in vote by mail and why? What evidence do they offer that it actually is a problem?
  - fsckboy 9mo ago
    those are not questions I have, nor answers I feel that I am lacking, and it fits a familiar online debate technique of bogging down discussions when you don't like the direction they are going in, wasting the time of your interlocutor. are you really so unimaginative and out of touch that you don't know the answers to your questions? legitimately elected politicians cheat left and right all over the place, and there is every reason to rhink illegimate election is just as attractive to them as the fruits of the power they seek, it's human nature, it's in the bible, it's in the koran, it's why we have laws. I would prefer a voting system that was guaranteed as secure as we can because the power to vote them out of office is our best hope.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
      The reality is that in the USA there just isn't any evidence of widespread election fraud, and lots of evidence to support the claim that our voting systems, while not perfect, are secure enough to trust the results. So unless you believe there's a whole layer of election fraud that nobody - not the losing party, not pro publica, not the FBI, not state investigators, not reddit - has been able to even detect, there's just really nothing to talk about here.

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
  The normal person has no knowledge of stats. I am a professional physicist, and I struggle with stats. The methods you suggest can convince a stats professional that the tally is correct. It cannot convince a normal person of the same.
  - creata 9mo ago
    > It cannot convince a normal person of the same. But you don't need everyone to be convinced of it first-hand. You just need everyone to trust someone who is convinced of it.
    - crote 9mo ago
      Election security should not hinge on a "trust me bro" - especially when people are being convinced the other way by Russian propaganda talking heads on social media. Manual counting requires zero trust. In my country anyone is welcome to observe the entire process from start to finish, if they wish to do so. A few years back a fringe far-right party tried importing the voting integrity distrust over here, and recruited people to watch their local polling stations to "expose the fraud". Which was totally fine because they were always allowed to do so, and it fizzled out because zero evidence of fraud was found, and that party still didn't get a significant number of votes.
      - creata 9mo ago
        Don't these two situations (watching vote counts; understanding a complicated statistical argument that the vote is tamper-free) require the same kind of trust? 1. In both cases, everyone is theoretically capable of checking it themselves; they're theoretically zero-trust. In the former scenario, I'm theoretically capable of attending the vote count, and in the latter scenario, I'm theoretically capable of learning the statistics needed to verify the argument. 2. In both cases, most people cannot (or will not) practically check it themselves, and is trusting that someone they trust is doing the checking for them. I'm not saying they're the exact same situation, but they both ask for a large amount of trust from most of the voters.
creata 9mo ago
For their upper house elections (which can have giant ballots), Australia uses computers in its counting, but there are humans in the process. [Here's a video from the Austalian Electoral Commission.](https://youtu.be/9AqN-Y25qQo https://youtu.be/9AqN-Y25qQo)
jcrawfordor 9mo ago
Good data is hard to come by, but from a brief survey electronic precinct tabulation (the most common system in the US) is also in at least partial use in Canada, Mexico, India, the Phillipines, and Russia, and a laundry list of smaller countries. Now, you might contend that this is not a list of first-world countries exactly (but rather I sampled the largest countries). You must keep in mind that the use of electronic tabulation in the United States is mostly a response to the very limited budget on which elections are carried out; electronic tabulation is much less expensive than significantly increasing staffing. As a result, globally, electronic tabulation tends to be most common in poorer countries or countries with newer election systems, while hand tabulation is most common in wealthier countries with long-established election procedures. For this reason, the countries you might go to for comparison (like France and Germany) have largely manual election processes that have often seen few changes since the Second World War. The Help America Vote Act (2002) had a de facto effect of making the United States a country with much newer election processes, as HAVA requires strict accessibility measures that most European election systems do not meet (e.g. unassisted voting for blind and deaf people). Most US election systems didn't meet them either, in 2002, so almost the entire country had to design new election processes over a fairly short span of time and on a shoestring budget. Understandably, election administrators leaned on automation to make that possible. It's also important to understand that because of the US tradition of special-purpose mill levies and elected independent boards (like school boards), the average US ballot has significantly more questions than the average European ballot. This further increases the cost and complexity of hand tabulation, even ruling out entirely the "optimized" hand tabulation methods used in France and Ireland.

popalchemist 9mo ago

As we learned from Dominion... depends who manufactures the machine.

RunningDroid 9mo ago
> As we learned from Dominion... depends who manufactures the machine. Dominion, the company that doubled it's net worth by winning a defamation suit against Fox over claims their machines had been compromised? That Dominion?

fsckboy 9mo ago

>We can't "move back", it's where we are. vote by mail (and similar ballot harvesting, bulk ballot dropoffs with hazy chain-of-custody as from a nursing homes and immigrant communities) are new, based on paper, and open to abuse. It's not where we were. traditional absentee balloting was a small scale thing used by college students, military personnel, etc. and if it was messed up, it was not likely to change outcomes or a threat to counting accurately (no election is perfect)

PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
So the question(s) to ask are: 1. why did absentee voting/vote by mail expand? What was the claimed intention and purpose? What has been the actual result (and based on what evidence) ? 2. who has an interest in underming confidence in vote by mail and why? What evidence do they offer that it actually is a problem?
- fsckboy 9mo ago
  those are not questions I have, nor answers I feel that I am lacking, and it fits a familiar online debate technique of bogging down discussions when you don't like the direction they are going in, wasting the time of your interlocutor. are you really so unimaginative and out of touch that you don't know the answers to your questions? legitimately elected politicians cheat left and right all over the place, and there is every reason to rhink illegimate election is just as attractive to them as the fruits of the power they seek, it's human nature, it's in the bible, it's in the koran, it's why we have laws. I would prefer a voting system that was guaranteed as secure as we can because the power to vote them out of office is our best hope.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    The reality is that in the USA there just isn't any evidence of widespread election fraud, and lots of evidence to support the claim that our voting systems, while not perfect, are secure enough to trust the results. So unless you believe there's a whole layer of election fraud that nobody - not the losing party, not pro publica, not the FBI, not state investigators, not reddit - has been able to even detect, there's just really nothing to talk about here.