How is this not getting more upvotes? It seems pretty critical to me.
I've worked as an election judge in Minnesota, which has model election law, and the highest turnout in the nation, election after election. One nit I'll pick with the author is that I believe spot checks work. In Minnesota, we use Scantron machines to count ballots. Spot checks are used to compare the machine count to the actual ballots. Discrepancies force a full manual count. A significant number of discrepancies in the spot checks would immediately be noticed. If there are no discrepancies, the count is forwarded to central election authorities.
Beyond the spot checking and ability to do a recount (and Minnesota has gone through two full recounts in recent memory - the famous Al Franken Senate race, and a governor's race a few years later), there are strict rules about the handling of physical ballots. All election judge ballot handling must be done with representatives of at least two different political parties present, and signed off by both. This makes it much harder to cheat the paper, especially at scale.
Paper-free electronic voting machines are just incredibly stupid, dangerous technology. It's a sad commentary on our society that they became fashionable in response to problems with Florida's "hanging chad" paper ballots.
It's a dupe, this discussion was much more popular. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022968 (210 points, 8 hours ago, 174 comments) You may want to repost your comment there.
2 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 12.9 ms ] threadI've worked as an election judge in Minnesota, which has model election law, and the highest turnout in the nation, election after election. One nit I'll pick with the author is that I believe spot checks work. In Minnesota, we use Scantron machines to count ballots. Spot checks are used to compare the machine count to the actual ballots. Discrepancies force a full manual count. A significant number of discrepancies in the spot checks would immediately be noticed. If there are no discrepancies, the count is forwarded to central election authorities.
Beyond the spot checking and ability to do a recount (and Minnesota has gone through two full recounts in recent memory - the famous Al Franken Senate race, and a governor's race a few years later), there are strict rules about the handling of physical ballots. All election judge ballot handling must be done with representatives of at least two different political parties present, and signed off by both. This makes it much harder to cheat the paper, especially at scale.
Paper-free electronic voting machines are just incredibly stupid, dangerous technology. It's a sad commentary on our society that they became fashionable in response to problems with Florida's "hanging chad" paper ballots.
It's a dupe, this discussion was much more popular. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022968 (210 points, 8 hours ago, 174 comments) You may want to repost your comment there.