That's nice. You have fun with that. We'll keep our $300k and our paper ballots. No lines are expected as we've tried this before and know more or less how many will show up.
Congratulations!!! because you allowed USD$1,500 Voting Machines to exist, you are now stuck with a dictator for life. You can console yourself saying that the despot in charge usually gets 70+% votes (in spite of being universally despised).
This depends obviously on where you are in the political spectrum.
I would not like to make voting more complicated,to prevent people from voting, but the current majority in the US support making voting harder for many people. I assume you're one of those.
The most important feature of elections is that everyone in society can take part of the process, understand the process, and (locally) verify that the elections are fair.
Technology just introduces black boxes that citizens are somehow expected to trust, because something something cryptography something blockchain.
>Technology just introduces black boxes that citizens are somehow expected to trust
oh please. People trust the lock sign on HTTPS all day without understanding it. (or mastercard or the bridge they drive over or well anything).
Avoiding superior technological solutions just because the man on the street doesn't understand them is a bad approach. If society did that we'd still be in the 1800s.
> oh please. People trust the lock sign on HTTPS all day without understanding it
Yes, and the internet is an absolute cesspool when it comes to security. Do we really want to hold up the internet as a shining success that we should be applying to probably the most important institution we have?
People don't trust the lock sign on HTTPS. They don't know what it means. That's OK for some website, things work anyway.
If an election goes against you and you don't clearly understand and trust the voting mechanism, you're not going to vote next time because why bother? It's all rigged anyway.
And people are quite OK to trust these. In these cases there is a central authority from which trust can be established. Voting is the opposite. During voting the central authority is being changed by the man on the street. He therefore needs to understand how it works otherwise how is he in control?
The needs of a voting system are challenging - you need to identify voters so people don't vote multiple times (and aren't deceased Illinois residents...) yet you need to assure people that their vote is anonymous, so there aren't repercussions for voting for unpopular candidates/initiatives.
Blockchain helps with the first, but does not with the latter.
How so? What are the actual mechanics of how a blockchain would be used in this situation?
What is a "transaction" here -- what information would be stored? What would a node represent (and why does that data need to be part of a chain)? Who are the peers/clients -- how would the data be added to the chain?
Most importantly, what does the added complexity get us, over boxes of paper ballots?
> i.e. All those independent election monitors can set up their own node etc
Do you trust the OS? The silicon? The PCB layout? The firmware? What about the firmware in all those other components? Could you verify all that if you are concerned that something is weird?
Pencil and paper are trivial to verify for every layman (with basic literacy), computers are not.
That possibility of verification is kind of a big deal when it comes to deciding in huge groups, and the block chain (or any modern tech so far) doesn't improve anything about it.
People were freaking out over possible Russian influence in the last election - wait until they find out the voting machine company had the equipment made in China.
Currently, a conversation about voting machines with the government / a politician is likely to go something like this:
You: "I support electronic voting machines that uses <some foolproof blockchain system>."
Politician: "You will be happy to hear that I too support electronic voting and you will be happy to hear we will be buying some electronic voting machines that run proprietary software on Windows XP with Norton Anti-Virus! Thanks for your support!"
You: "That's not what I..."
Politician: "Thanks again!" <Ends discussion.>
I'm not confidence our current education level and political environment can navigate the subtle distinction between "verifiable blockchain system" and "proprietary software on Windows XP".
Or maybe they do use a fool proof system for several years. Everyone gets accustomed to trusting the trustworthy algorithm. Then they change things, they say "here's a new proprietary algorithm, it will save taxes and protect children". 99% of the population doesn't understand what's different, so they continue to support the new proprietary algorithm, because "the voting machines still look the same". The few who know better are ignored.
I'm super bearish on blockchain, but this is one place I'd like to see it.
The machine gives me a paper record of my vote to keep. Meanwhile, it appends my vote to the blockchain. I go home and use information from my paper printout to verify my vote is indeed counted and on the blockchain. If my vote isn't on the blockchain, I have a paper record of it that can be used to append it, should the machine "fail."
Interesting, and thank you for explaining how a blockchain would actually be used! But while there's value in allowing you to prove to yourself that your specific vote was counted, any such scheme also breaks the secrecy of your ballot and opens you to being forced to prove it for someone else.
The problem with individually verifiable votes is that of vote buying. Consider two scenarios, one where votes can be individually verified, and one where they cannot.
A) Person stands outside of polling station in swing state/district, offers $5 for a verified vote. Walk in, get your receipt/blockchain entry/doodad, show it to the vote buyer outside, get $5. Not at all a good situation, because it enables votes to be bought.
B) Person stands outside of polling station in swing state/district, offers $5 for a vote. Walk in, vote for whoever you want, then walk out and pocket the $5. Because the vote cannot be verified, they have no proof one way or the other.
Better to have an adversarial system, where any votes coming out of the ballot box are observed by representatives of all candidates. Each candidate has an incentive to ensure that the others do not tamper with the vote.
You joke but there's actually a nice application here.
Consider a voting scheme where each voter is given a unique key in some fashion, probably with the same ID requirements as voting today. It's then used to place a single vote on the blockchain.
This system could have these nice properties:
* Verifiable number of votes and correct counting
* Each voter could verify that their own vote was counted correctly and they can see what they voted for using independently developed tools
* More eco friendly
* Cheaper
Yes it's not perfect, most people will still just trust an electronic box, but there is an interesting application here.
Edit: Several comments on privacy. Yes voter anonymity is crucial and it might be possible here as well.
How do you prevent someone’s boss from saying “vote for my guy or you’re fired!”? Or someone revealing the keys and de-anonymizing everyone who voted for the loser?
In cryptocurrencies Monero and to some extent ZCash tries to make transactions anonymous but still verifiable for the owner. Global supply is also verifiable. Maybe there's a way to anonymize the voting scheme in some way as well.
Research in this area is still very new. Look up ZNARKs for example.
> transactions anonymous but still verifiable for the owner.
The problem is that "owner" here means "whoever holds the private key". If I can verify that my individual vote was cast correctly, then somebody looking over my shoulder can verify how I voted as well.
That’s not relevant to this problem: if your boss, union, the person who just bought your vote, etc. is in a position to check they can just ask you to show them.
A traditional ballot is immune to this as long as it’s not broadly possible to have someone follow you into the booth.
Where white people live it's easy to get ID, and white people are more likely to have it for other reasons. Where black people live it's harder to get ID, and black people are less likely to have it for other reasons. Both are minor differences.
Best case interpretation from my vantage point: bigotry of low expectations. Apparently some people believe that poor people or minorities in America find it harder than even the poorest Indians to go get identification.
Aadhaar isn't a beacon of hope, the reason the poorest Indians are getting Aadhaar at all is to survive as the government of India forces it down people's throats, denying their benefits and even existence as real people if they don't have Aadhaar. Lets not even touch the attempts at demonetization as of late, these policies haven't created a stable environment in India.
The poorest people in the US also need ID cards to just survive too, try to get any sort of government benefits without being able to prove who you are.
It's not bigotry if the numbers prove it out. Almost every politician who wants voter IDs is a Republican and almost every politician who opposes IDs is a Democrat. If it would have no effect on voter behaviour you would not expect such a clean divide of opinion amongst party members.
That interpretation only works if the infrastructure to obtain ID in India and the US is of somewhat similar quality.
Given America's love-hate relationship with well-maintained infrastructure ("my tax money may end up benefitting somebody else?!?"), and given how ID is optional for most aspects of American live, it wouldn't surprise me if India's system is significantly better organized (although people will certainly find enough to complain about, as always).
Even if the process is onerous having one is miles ahead for the purpose of identifying eligible voters compared to the American system which barely knows who exists within the country, much less where they live.
You can't have an id in USA because the current system doesn't have a list of people with their addresses? So the current system needs to be a system of all the people and their addresses, including citizens, with some sort of unique identifier for quick retrieval? You know, an id?
It's cyclic, yes, but only because we went off on a tangent. The US isn't prepared for that because they refuse to have a registry of their citizens. India has one (or two, currently).
Therefore "infrastructure to obtain ID in India and the US is of somewhat similar quality" is false.
Therefore "Apparently some people believe that poor people or minorities in America find it harder than even the poorest Indians to go get identification" is a false equivalence:
The poorest of all Indians still have a government that keeps track of the data required to vote (whatever fault it may have in other ways).
Americans do not and therefore have to work around the no-registration policy with an ad-hoc registration procedure every two years that might require significant hoop-jumping - which is easier when you have some extraneous time and/or money you can throw at the problem (that is, you're not poor).
The really poor in the US don't tend to have ID. They often can't afford to take the time off work to go through the process of obtaining it, especially if they don't drive. Additionally, it's an extra expense some people can't afford.
Also, voter fraud isn't much of an issue in the US, so it's a solution to a problem we don't really have.
Sometimes I wish those crying voter suppression would amend voter ID proposals to make getting ID free and easy and just put this whole issue to bed. Unfortunately with REAL ID, things are only going to get more difficult and expensive.
> it's a solution to a problem we don't really have
I would add that it's also used to deflect (or in some cases shout down) discussions of mass voter disenfranchisement, which actually exists and undermines US democracy in a meaningful way.
Try bringing up gerrymandering, voter purging, shortening of early voting and holiday/week-end voting, selective use of overwhelming police presence with a US reactionary and count the seconds before they make voter ID the center of the conversation.
Someone I know was complaining recently about getting the first driver's license for their kid. Apparently, the state was looking for proof of residence like utility bills that the kid obviously didn't have. Presumably it was all eventually resolved but it took a couple of trips and many hours--and this was for someone of a demographic one wouldn't expect to have any issues.
The "can't take time off work" excuse doesn't work either, since you need valid ID to work. One that says your a citizen, and one with your picture (or just your passport, since it's both).
I apologize if I didn't spell that out. To work in this country you need to provide more identification then you need to vote. At the very least, I think it should be equivalent. In reality, I think at the very least a government issued photo ID is required. We're talking about the integrity of an election after all.
Voter registration cards are on the identification document list in that link, they don't have pictures on them.
Either way the requirements to vote are currently less strict in many places than the requirements to get a photo ID that can then meet the requirements of voter ID laws.
That, all by itself, means it will affect some percentage of the voters in an area, and that means it can easily affect the outcome of an election, at the very least for a period of time that may span multiple election cycles.
And that is the real reason voter ID laws are constantly being proposed.
Constantly re-arguing the theoretical neutrality and easy availability of ID (which is generally neither free or easily available, in some cases deliberately) ignores the practical effect of voter ID laws, and the motivations of those pushing for voter ID laws.
>Constantly re-arguing the theoretical neutrality and easy availability of ID (which is generally neither free or easily available, in some cases deliberately) ignores the practical effect of voter ID laws, and the motivations of those pushing for voter ID laws.
I'm not sure why we wouldn't want to guarantee the integrity of our elections. That's what this whole thread is about after all. Voter ID is just one key component of that.
Identification is hard to acquire in many parts of the United States, especially for poor people. Enforcing some sort of voter ID would prevent many poor people from voting, who are disproportionately poc. In other countries, ID is not difficult to acquire, in some cases acquired at birth or at a very young age.
FWIW as a HN reader and user here to offer some (of course anecdotal) perspective: I am a resident of Texas and they make it a definite inconvenience to register to vote. It’s 2018 and I have to print something off and mail it to my county to register. That means I have to know who to mail it to, have stamps, know the correct form to print off and have a permanent mailing address to receive correspondence to be able to complete the process (on top of all the other identification requirements detailed elsewhere).
Now I know that isn’t a big deal to a lot of people here but there are a ton of people around where I live that it would be a significant enough barrier to entry to the point where they just wouldn’t bother.
Compare this to some other states that make it super easy (Oregon comes to mind) and look at their voter fraud rates vs TX and you start to wonder if there is some ulterior motive at play here.
Not American, but from my understanding it is because US citizens don't have mandatory ID documents. If getting documents necessary to vote is voluntary but requires time and money, going to an office in the next bigger town, bringing documents not everyone might have, ..., disadvantaged people have a harder time to obtain them and are less likely to have them.
If you get ID automatically or are required to hold it in other parts of life, it's less of a hurdle.
It's not hard but I wouldn't call it 'ridiculously easy'. In Michigan, you need to supply minimum four documents. One of which is for proof residency which can be really hard for a homeless person.
That's far from easy, and it's very easy to imagine scenarios where one lacks one or more of those. Proving residency can be hard, and is impossible for those who are homeless. The homeless have a right to vote.
This doesn't sound right. I got an NYC ID (Learner's Permit) without being a citizen and without presenting my birth certificate. I think I have had my Foreign (Ukrainian) Passport, employment authorization form (the form that goes with H1B visa), and a SSN card. I don't remember having to prove that I'm an NYC resident and I don't think I could have proved that -- I was living in a corporate housing back then.
Proving identity is like trying to write an address validation algorithm: there’s a million one-off, real-world exceptions to any given rule that it makes it impossible.
Huh? The state I live in doesn't issue legal ID, nor do multiple other states surrounding us. You can get an ID card or drivers license, but they aren't federally recognized/usable.
I was pleasantly surprised when I managed to lose my driver's license somewhere in the 50 yards between the car and the airport door that I was actually able to fly. But they did really screen me. The hotel on the other end was more of a problem...
One aspect of the problem is that voting involves more stringent ID checks than you might normally encounter in everyday life.
You might think you have an ID that's good enough for driving or buying alcohol, but you can be turned away at the polls if it expired a few days ago and you haven't had a chance to take time off work to get it renewed. Or if you moved recently and the address on your ID doesn't match your voter registration. Or if your name changed when you got married, but your ID still shows your former name.
Yes, these problems are avoidable. But the process still disproportionately disenfranchises people who are less likely to be able to spend the time on getting them resolved before it's time to actually vote.
US Passport Card is an internal passport used to travel to dependencies of US, and more people than full passport holders have that. It is nationally issued.
The intent here is if you lost your ID, but I guess if you're willing to have additional screening and waste your time, go for it. It's also a risk that they can't confirm your identity.
"If we can confirm your identity, you’ll be cleared to go through security, and you may or may not have to go through some additional screening."
That's also just the TSA. You'll still have to convince the carrier to let you board without an ID.
Edit: Your link is 5 years old, and I don't think is up to date. Here's the current policy:
"Adult passengers 18 and over must show valid identification at the airport checkpoint in order to travel." They do so you "may" be able to travel if you forgot your ID.
I've personally dealt with this a couple years ago. My wallet was stolen while traveling. All that happened was they searched my bags harder. Lol, "randomly selected for additional screening". Sure, whatever.
Just because someone starts off asking you for an ID doesn't mean that they don't have a process for no ID.
How many people never fly anywhere because they can’t afford the flight or time off from work? How many don’t have an up-to-date drivers license because they don’t have the time to go to the dmv to get it reviewed? How many people don’t have a drivers license because they can’t drive because they are old or blind or otherwise disabled and unable or unwilling to drive?
Most people may have valid drivers licenses but voting must work for all people.
There is the additional complication that in some states they'll yank your license for unpaid traffic fines or for uninsured driving. It's fair that you can't drive but it isn't fair that traffic scofflaws can't go to the polls.
Easy access to getting ID. If you don't drive (many poorer people don't have access to either a car or education on how to drive one) getting an ID is surprisingly hard. If it was a mandatory law that all people are given a national ID card and it was made readily available, then I think much criticism would go away. But in the current state of laws, poor people struggle to get ID, minorities are poorer statistically, and more poor people are Democrats statistically. Hence why it becomes a partisan issue in a similar way of gerrymandering.
The second part of this is the obvious motivation - with voter fraud being so low as to be nonexistent (as shown with recent news about the "voter fraud" committee that has done and found absolutely nothing), what is the motivation for the laws given how many people it would negatively affect?
The subject is very polarizing, and posts which explicitly name political parties tend to rile things up.
I suggest talking about politically polarizing matters in terms of interests. For example, "Voter ID laws as implemented in the USA tend to result in diminished participation by poor people because [explanation]. Such laws tend to be favored by those who benefit from poor people voting less, and opposed by those who benefit from poor people voting more."
This depersonalizes the conflict a bit, and allows us to have the kind of insightful debates that HN is for.
Places where voter ID policies are unproblematic have ubiquitous national ID cards possessed by every citizen. The United States famously does not have a national ID card, and instead uses a patchwork of state level IDs which require different levels of effort and cost to acquire. Many citizens do not have a legal ID at all, and some citizens even lack the paperwork necessary to acquire them under current law. If every voter had an ID, or if the government went to great lengths to ensure that every citizen could get one, voter ID laws wouldn't be problem. But as it stands voter ID laws prevent hundreds of thousands of citizens from voting, and those citizens are disproportionately poor and racial minorities, meaning that voter ID requirements have deeply distortionary effects on the composition of the voting electorate.
So how do you know someone is who they say they are? If someone is born and never acquires a nationally issued ID, how can they even prove they are american and have the right to be there?
And I imagine if, as an adult, you don't have a birth certificate, aren't sure where you were born, and don't know your social security number, things can start to be difficult.
Yeah, my wife's mom changed her name twice as a baby without saving any docs about it, so her passport doesn't match her birth certificate. It's a horrifying pain in the ass.
I would have thought the passport would be the canonical document. I've had a passport since a very young age and have never needed my birth certificate though I think I could lay my hands on it.
Basically, even now the party in power makes it as hard as possible for the minority power to vote. Making elections on work days, registration required 6+ months before election day, understaffing polling places in certain districts, changing polling places, etc. This has a nasty history going back to the jim crow days.
That, mixed with the fact that in person polling fraud pretty much never happens, means we shouldn't want another tool in the hands of disenfranchisers.
It turns out that the history of these tactics goes back to the northern states using them to disenfranchise new immigrants in the second half of the 19th century (they didn’t want Irish, Italian, German, Polish, ... immigrants voting). Later white southerners who wanted to disenfranchise blacks were inspired by their example, and took voting suppression to new heights.
It’s just politics, trying to get brownie points. If you're poor you probably need a state ID moreso than richer folks. Any benefits need IDs, school you need ID, medicare/medicaid you need IDs, etc. Basically any state or federal benefits require an ID. Controlled goods like cigs and beer require ID.
All of the sibling comments mention that it's unfortunately difficult for some people, but from the other direction: voter ID requirements solve a problem (fraud) that doesn't exist.
If it didn’t suppress Democratic votes then you wouldn’t have Republican politicians nearly universally in favor and Democratic politicians nearly universally opposed. I take that as prima facie evidence.
We have the same debate with early voting, how long polling places are open, and where they are located.
For whatever reason, conservative voters tend to be more motivated to vote. So any friction in the voting process tends to disproportionately affect Democrats.
As an aside, there are structurally racist policies that suppress Democratic votes both historically and today. To give one example, most states do not allow exconvicts to vote.
As to why many Americans are opposed? Because for so long this country has tried to prevent anyone but white men from voting.
Besides that, voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. There’s just not a plausible way to commit large scale fraud at the polls. You’d have to round up bus loads of people willing to commit voter fraud, take them from polling place to place, then have them sign their names as some other voter on the rolls at that polling location and hope that the real voter hasn’t and won’t show up to vote. I lack the imagination to see how this could occur without detection.
In any case, what everyone should actually be concerned with is that the voting system accurately captures the will of the people. In which case, voter fraud at the polls, in America, is the least of our problems. Our attention should be focused on things gerrymandering, first past the post, and for presidential elections, the electoral college, among other issues.
>To give one example, most states do not allow exconvicts to vote
Almost all states do allow exconvicts to vote, but they may have to wait a certain period of time after release from custody/probation/parole.
“In 13 states felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon in order for voting rights to be restored, or face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) before voting rights can be restored” [0]
Personally, I’ll be allowed to vote again in 2021.
It seems obvious to me how to fix this: give everyone a federal ID (Estonia style maybe?) and require everyone to vote (maybe a nominal fine if they don't).
I understand changes like that would favor the Democrats more than Republicans. Maybe it could be phased in slowly enough to lessen the pain? Anyway, once it was in place I'm sure the balance of power would readjust and then they could solve some real problems instead of shady politicking.
There are reactionary groups in the US that take hard-line stances against any form of federal ID. Even though the mass misuse (and theft of) social security numbers is pretty much proof positive of a need existing for such documentation.
A lot of Americans are opposed to federal ID on principle, never mind the cost. Forcing states to require federal ID for voting might require a constitutional amendment. Fining people for not voting seems like it would be extremely unpopular, especially if nothing was done to make it more accessible. It would also certainly draw a Firat Amendment challenge. If burning a flag is speech, how is not voting not speech?
Supreme Court jurisprudence on voting is kind of incoherent: it's fundamental but not really, expressive except
when it isn't, etc. That only concerns whether someone has the right to vote. Opting not to vote is a political statement.
It’s only disenfranchisement for those who desire votes from illegal aliens, and individuals who illegally vote more than once (alive or dead).
The fact is anyone can vote on a provisional ballot, and if the verified ballots provided a close enough race, the provisional ballots are scrutinized and counted. This is presently happening in KS with 10k provisional ballots which could skew a 96 ballot spread amongst almost 300k.
Those whining about disenfranchisement simply want fraudulent votes.
So for one thing, which doesn't directly address the question, voter ID laws are being pushed for the most part from one side of the political spectrum, and some of those have acknowledged that they are doing it with a partisan goal [1]. So given that it's pushed by only one side, with no clear evidence that it's trying to solve a widespread problem, it smells to those on the other side that they are trying to win elections not by advancing the better argument, but by keeping their opponents away from the polls.
As to why it's seen as disenfranchising, there are no general requirements in the United States to have a form of ID to exist in daily life. Poorer people who live in cities are less likely to have the resources or need to own a car, and if you don't own a car, why would you have a driver's license, which requires spending potentially hours at the local motor vehicle department, getting access to documents like birth certificates (which may well be in another state), and paying a fee [2]. Some states have free state photo IDs, but many do not, and even those IDs take some time and effort to get. Estimates of how many people are deterred from the polls because of lack of ID are tricky, and while the numbers are fairly low, America was founded on the idea of liberty and justice for all.
Due to the necessity of personal automobile transportation in most US cities (poor public transit infrastructure), many Americans have state driver's licenses (~87%). We do not have a national ID card.
Consequently, many voter ID laws presume that all voters will have a driver's license as a form of ID (or even less likely forms, such as a passport or birth certificate).
While there are non-license forms of ID that can be obtained, all of these are bureaucratic processes.
Driver's license IDs are problematic for two reasons: (1) poorer and/or minority Americans are less likely to have a driver's than wealthy and/or white Americans (by ~5%) & (2) poorer and/or minority Americans are far more likely to have their driver's licenses taken (due to policing and economic inabilities to pay court fines or other charges).
Voter ID laws thus (1) create additional barriers for minority or poor Americans to vote, (2) are legal (in that aren't directly suppressing minority voting), (3) do not impact wealthy white voters.
> Can Americans explain why voter ID is seen to be disenfranchising or sometimes inarticulately simplified as "racist"?
It adds a barrier to voting. We don’t like having to trust our government to be benevolent—the track record of such populations is poor.
The risk of voter fraud (in the form of people who shouldn’t be voting, voting) is low. The ease of forging an ID is high. The risk of tyranny therefore dominates (I enter the massive corruption and security gaps in India’s Aadhar program as Exhibit A.)
It's not objectively racist, but contextually, it kind of is, because a) some parties have definitely used these kinds of things for voter suppression and b) systematically, all of these hurdles tend to favour concientious folks, i.e. 'small c conservative', who have a tendency to be more right wing. So it does tilt things a little bit even if it's entirely objective.
Having an ID is important for so many reasons, it'd be great if the US gov had a standard state/federal ID system that could facilitate so many things. Of course it would also be abused :)
I don't really ever see anyone say it's racist, so even just bringing that up isn't likely to lead to a productive discussion.
But what people do often say, rightly, is that of the population who would don't have ID's and thus wouldn't be able to vote if you enacted a voter ID law, they're disproportionally likely to vote democrat. You can take from that what you want, but it's almost entirely republicans who are for voter ID and almost entirely democrats who are against it. That's not a coincidence.
Combine that with the fact that voter ID doesn't actually solve any current problems we have (in-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent), it just seems like a distraction when what we should be having is a real conversation about the actual security of our election systems from hacking.
What method is used to check to see if voter fraud exists? I am reading here that there are 61,000 homeless people in New York City. How do they vote currently? If it's possible to verify their citizenship after they have voted, can't the same verification process be used to give them an ID? I see this "voter fraud is virtually non existent" argument frequently but I cannot understand the logistics of it.
Currently, in order to vote, you have to register to vote ahead of time.
If I show up at the polls and successfully impersonate Person A, they cross Person A off the list of pre-registered voters, and I vote as them. But then, if Person A showed up, they would say "we already crossed you off the list", and it would trigger what we would call an "instance of in-person voter fraud." How they found out which person voted fraudulently doesn't really matter for my point, because:
In a recent 14-year period, this has happened about thirty-one times across the whole US, according to wikipedia. (Source is here: [1])
Basically, it's easy to do, but also extremely easy to detect, so in practice nobody does it. It's not currently a significant factor in the security of our elections.
Okay but is there some kind of electronic system that checks for the same person showing up in two counties? In India we apply election ink on a voter's finger
> You'd have to be registered in both counties, which would be trivially easy to detect.
Is there a system that is doing this checking though?
If I am an illegal immigrant I can go to that Equifax website leak for example, pick up a name and social security number, get some documents together, start a life for myself. Over time I could even get an ID to register for voting.
There are supposedly 16 million known cases of identity theft in the USA per year - many of which are caught because money went missing.
Is there a system that checks for voting in the same way.
Granted it would be trivial, but does this checking take place?
Surprised nobody's mentioned this yet: The most common form of ID in the US is a driver's license. To get one you need to meet a bunch of requirements and then take a driving test at a local branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). If you are ever looking for a great example of government inefficiency it's the DMV offices [1]. All of them run horribly, most have massive wait times for simple procedures, and the employees have a reputation for not giving a shit. Not to say all of them run like this, but in California it's so bad that the government officials have their own secret DMV office to avoid waits [2].
If you were a poor person who really only has the value of their physical labor to feed your family you might not want to waste spend hours and hours of your incredibly (relatively) valuable time for something you can make do without. Since these poor people are often minorities voter ID laws disproportionately affect them.
The question of racism being a factor for supporters of voter ID is kinda muddied. Voter ID laws seem to make a ton of sense on the surface, but a little bit of knowledge about the American election system makes it clear that voter fraud is really not a big problem. There's no doubt that racists would support voter ID laws as they do suppress the election turnout of the poor, but I haven't seen any evidence that racial factors contribute to the majority of people's support for voter ID laws. Like every topic in US politics, it has become hyper-polarized to the point where both sides talk past each other to try to demonize their opponents.
> The most common form of ID in the US is a driver's license.
It's the most common, but not the only one. You can just show up and ask for a plain ID, and avoid all that. And I kinda have to wonder how people get their I-9 filled out without any form of ID. You generally need an ID just to work in this country.
I've never seen a requirement that specifically listed "must have utility bill". There are usually a list of valid documents, and in someone's worst case, if they're disabled, they're going to be collecting disability and will have official correspondence from the state with their name and address on it that would qualify.
ID is also required to receive welfare or exercise the 2nd amendment or 1st amendment right to peaceful assembly (many municipalities require a permit for that, which will not be issued to a person without an ID).
It's interesting that requiring an ID to vote is "disenfranchisement" yet thousands of other things where ID is required (including the exercise of some constitutional rights) are not "disenfranchisement".
It's controversial because people without ID overwhelmingly vote for one party. If having an ID were uncorrelated with party affiliation, we wouldn't be having this stupid conversation.
What's funny is any argument against voter ID should be blown out of the water by just making IDs totally free (yes, I know, paid by taxpayers).
But I've had this discussion with people before, including people who actually believe that it's racist to have any form of ID to be required anywhere. Yes, these people do exist. The conversation always goes down the road of "well what about the mountain people who live 200 miles from the DMV, don't work, don't have an address, don't have a car, and can't take a bus?"
It's the most immature form of "debate" to hunt and peck for extreme edge cases and pretend that they are silver bullets. Aha! It doesn't work for the minority who won't hop on a bike and become a part of civilization, therefore those who are pro voter ID hate the poor. Yeeeup.
Personally, I don't really care about this issue as I think voting is a waste of time and I don't do it anymore. But it's hilarious just how far extremists will take the argument.
Not all DMVs are inefficient, and some move quite smoothly.
A huge hurdle has been the more stringent ID requirements for drivers licences, mostly imposed by airlines which rely on these now as security documents. For the economically marginalised, it's all too easy to become uncredentialed, and then difficult or impossible to re-establish identity.
This affects not just voting (if there is an ID requirement), but virtually all aspects of life: housing, employment, medical coverage, banking, and of course, mobility.
I don't have experiences with DMVs outside of California, but Californians love to complain about DMVs just like other things they chose to expose themselves to like traffic, heat, and relatively mild winters.
My experiences with the DMV have always been pretty smooth, and I've been to multiple offices. Yes, there's often a line, but people will stand in line just as long or longer for a 3 minute ride at Disneyland. Waiting at the DMV isn't fun, but you rarely ever have to go. Still, the line can be avoided almost entirely just by showing up early. Most people are lazy and show up hours after opening without an appointment. If you can't get an appointment(which already solves a ton of problems) show up 45 minutes before opening, be one of the first in line, eat a snack, hand over the papers you already filled out at home, and you're done. Yes, it's really hard to get up at 6am when you normally get up at 8. Life really, really sucks.
Let's say that other DMVs are worse, which I imagine they are. People don't have to renew their IDs for years. Waiting at the DMV once in a great while is a very, very small penalty.
> Waiting at the DMV once in a great while is a very, very small penalty.
> People just complain too much, in my opinion.
Spot on.
I’ve had to wait in line for hours in India - and even the poorest in India can do it without major complaint.
I mean yes you try and avoid it... but if it’s a 5 hour wait once every 10 years you just suck it up.
In reality the Democrats know there are a bunch of people who don’t care about politics and know nothing about the candidates or policies but can be cajoled into voting for team blue.
> but a little bit of knowledge about the American election system makes it clear that voter fraud is really not a big problem.
There are ~ 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA according to some government studies. How does the process measure whether or not they voted, in order to come to the above conclusion? Can't the same process be used to authenticate the citizenship of whoever comes to the voting booth?
Also I have just learned that voters' fingers are not inked when they vote. How is double voting prevented?
Hardly anyone does it because the reward is small and the penalty is huge. Voter fraud is a federal crime. That's 2+ years in a federal pen (the ones they make scary movies about) with a minimum 85% sentence served. There is no early, good behavior release. Imagine knowingly robbing a bank where the maximum haul is $1. That is kind sort of what knowingly.
Authentication happens at registration. Once your registered they have your name on a checklist at the polling location which they check off. It also prevents double voting.
Now, how do they verify all these votes are actually correct? Well polling data is really damn accurate. Each party kind of knows in advance where they will win so it comes down to running a statistical models to find anomalies.
In short, to commit real voting fraud it would have to be a coordinated system wide event. Not something that can be done by individual voters. But now with electronic voting it takes very little to run a SQL update query and change a million votes.
> Once your registered they have your name on a checklist at the polling location which they check off
From what I understand its common for many in the US population to move residences frequently so it's quite likely that people are registered to vote in multiple states. Wouldn't it be possible for someone to simply vote as you in the other state(s) where you are registered? I suspect there are a considerable number of people registered in more than one state. It seems like political parties can theoretically conduct coordinated voter fraud of this nature without triggering any kind of alarm through methods like this.
I think that used to simply get you a deportation. Now of course Trump et al. is incarcerating illegal border crossers.
See also:
For the first improper entry offense, the person can be fined (as a criminal or civil penalty), or imprisoned for up to six months, or both. This is considered a misdemeanor under federal law (18 U.S.C.A. § 3559).
For a subsequent offense, or a reentry (or attempted reentry) after exclusion or deportation, the person can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years, or both. (See 8 U.S.C. Section 1325, 1326, I.N.A. Section 275, 276.) This is considered a low-level felony under federal law (18 U.S.C.A. § 3559).
How does authentication happen at registration time? Can people use a passport? Do they need something that has their address on it? What about homeless people?
I saw a post recently on Reddit claiming that a taxi (or uber or lyft or whatever) driver's car became a registration station. That doesn't seem to be too "secure".
I’m not sure what the current procedure is as I registered 15 years ago at the polling station. I brought my driver license and a few bills with my address. Since then I update my address regular. I also moved abroad and have to absentee ballot as well.
The homeless can register and use the shelter address as their address. Most don’t and aren’t told they have that right.
I suspect there is a lot of it but it’s probably not coordinated enough to swing an election.
> because the reward is small and the penalty is huge.
I’d argue the reward is major and the chance of getting caught and prosecuted is almost nil.
For example voting illegally for dems could get amnesty on the table.
And the threat of penalty? Well my local liquor store got robbed for about $600 cash last month. The guy who did it is multiple orders of magnitude more likely to get caught than an illegal voter. Yet the jail time didn’t stop him.
At least here in California, every voter is assigned a location where they vote. The voting location has a list of everyone assigned there and checks your name (and address) off their list when you show up. If you're not on the list or if your name is already checked off you can't vote.
Good question. I've always given them my ID to verify, but I'm not sure if that's actually required. I assume that it's not required and if they mark your name off the list, then someone else gives the same name/address they know there's a fraud situation and then there's some kind of followup.
Do you need to show ID if you're young to buy alcohol? What do the people who don't drive use?
In Australia, I don't drive and so don't have a drivers license, so I get a 'Photo Card' instead. I was actually able to trade in my expired learners drivers license for free to get a Photo Card (well, I could have if I didn't have an outstanding fine from... not voting)
Requiring an ID is a barrier to voting. Maybe not a particularly burdensome one, but it's still a burden that can prevent people from participating in elections.
Better to err on the side of expanding access to the democratic process, instead of restricting it. Particularly since voter fraud is not a very enticing crime, or a very common one.
The 'racist' angle comes from various court rulings that have stated that certain laws intended to restrict voting rights disproportionately impacted people of color. One particular ruling in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Texas state law which banned student IDs as acceptable voter ID was racially discriminating against people of color.
I don't buy this argument at all. Maybe 75 years ago, but today, without an ID your quality of life is going to be extremely low.
Plus, the number of people who are might be affected is most likely dwarfed by the number of fraudulent votes that happen every single election, but that some people would rather not try to prevent.
Some precincts will hand you a ballot by only providing a name of a registered voter, no proof required. How do you audit something like this to even know something went wrong?
If you're referring to provisional ballots, those precincts generally require the person to return to the board of elections within 10 days and provide some form of ID.
If you're referring to a normal ballot, I've not seen anywhere that doesn't require some proof of residence and identity, like a very recent bank statement matching the registered address for that voter.
For that to be an issue, someone would have to:
1) Obtain a recent bank statement for a registered voter
2) Show up, in person, at the correct polling location
3) Commit a felony by lying to the poll workers and voting illegally
4) Hope nobody who knows the real person hears them claim to be that person
5) Hope the person doesn't show up and try to vote
As shown there, California, DC, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wyoming do not require or request that the voter provide written proof of residence, identity, or eligibility to vote.
The specific process for those states differs, but in general, it's all based on self-attestation. Some states require you to provide a signature that is compared against another source, but nothing like a bank statement is required.
This is also how voting works in the U.K. without issue. I suppose your question is how you’d (a) know that fraud happened and (b) find who is responsible.
For (a) I suppose someone would come to vote only to find their name crossed off. For (b) I don’t know. Perhaps there would be cameras. Note that to commit fraud like this you still need one appearance at a polling station per fraudulent vote so it’s hard to have much effect.
A second issue to consider is that the list of those who are eligible is made by sending letters to houses asking who lives there and is eligible to vote. There isn’t really any checking of the eligibility.
> Plus, the number of people who are might be affected is most likely dwarfed by the number of fraudulent votes that happen every single election, but that some people would rather not try to prevent.
This is the exact opposite of reality, and the opposite of basically every attempt[1] to investigate the prevalence of voter fraud.
The number of actual fraudulent votes is somewhere in the single to low double digits, it makes the news when it happens because it's extraordinarily rare. And it's a felony with virtually no real benefit for the person committing it.
And even some of those few cases were people who simply weren't supposed to vote, like the woman in Texas that was just sent to prison for it, not people who didn't have identification. Texas has a voter ID law.
The hyper-focus on one very specific kind of potential voter fraud, with virtually no evidence that it's even a problem, is suspicious on its face.
That voter ID proponents keep ignoring simple facts about the actual incidence of voter ID fraud, while dismissing all other concerns, strongly suggests they're arguing in bad faith.
It goes back to Civil Rights era activities and the Voters Rights Act. It's been slow ratchet effect of constantly changing requirements.
First they require ID even if you are a registered voter. On the surface this isn't so bad. Then they only accept certain forms of ID. The accepted forms of ID are only available from certain departmental offices, like the DMV. Those offices have their own ID requirements to get their acceptable ID. They also are understaffed with limited office hours (10-4PM and 2 hours lunch). Due to budget cuts they also have fewer offices that can create your ID.
So the simple act of voting becomes a catch-22 of needing ID but not being able to even get ID.
This is a good question, but you should realize that it's a very contentious issue in the US. Most people will assume that you are "trolling" even though you are likely asking genuinely.
Explaining from scratch, the US has two approximately equally dominant political parties. It is presumed (by both sides, and probably correctly) that reducing the ID requirements will primarily benefit the more urban Democratic Party, and that making the requirements more stringent will benefit the more rural Republican party.
Possibly motivated by self-interest, the result is that about half the population believes that requiring greater voter ID is "obviously" a good thing, and about half believes that it is equally "obviously" a bad thing. The side in favor ID expresses this with concerns about fraudulent voting, and the side against ID talks about disenfranchisement.
The problem is that anything that changes the number of voters is going to change election outcomes, and both sides think they know in advance the direction of the change. Thus rather than making it a "non-issue", any movement toward or away from universal ID is correctly perceived to have disparate partisan impact. This doesn't mean it's impossible, but makes it much more likely to be opposed by side who thinks it will hurt them politically.
A change to the situation will likely involve either one side getting sufficiently far ahead to be able to change the rules further toward their advantage, or will involve a change in the perception such that both sides think that the same change will be to their side's benefit. But since these decisions are made on a state-by-state basis, any change will likely be incremental rather than all at once.
Yes, it seems like it would make sense for the Democratic party to sponsor efforts to get more voter ID's for more potential voters in states where such laws exist or are likely to exist.
No, I'm not really aware of any major efforts concentrated on helping people get appropriate ID. Voter registration drives are common, but the ones I've noticed put the emphasis on registering otherwise eligible voters rather than increasing the pool of eligible voters.
I wonder how cost effective a "free driver's license" charity would be at creating eligible voters. It wouldn't even have to be directly supported by a political party, but by targeting a particular demographic it would likely be quite effective in creating new voters of a particular type. And unlike straight voter registration drives, getting a driver's license gives other direct benefits to the recipient.
Because you cannot commit voter fraud nearly as easily with Voter ID, and a disturbing portion of the nation and establishment media (and their purse holders) will tell you literally anything that can stick to the wall in an attempt to continue to hijack the nation.
It is horrendously racist to claim that any race is "incapable" to be able to get an ID, and the math doesn't work out in its favor anyway. But it's the current argument du jour that allows the power to be removed from the people, so it continues to play.
Anything else discussed in this thread with respect to the lack of American voter ID is just avoiding these facts. If the people want to take this nation back, they must pass voter ID and vote out (if they possibly can) those who oppose it.
Pencils are safer than pens. I really like the British voting process, not just because I grew up with it but because we can point to what about it makes so much sense.
There is absolutely no need to have electronic voting machines. Votes happen months before one needs to take office. Counting of paper ballots is an easy and solved problem. No need to try to optimize speed of counting for elections. It's not a big enough issue. Paper ballots are also decentralized and thus, much harder to manipulate.
The downside risk of electronic voting is very high. It invariably leads to centralization, meaning allows risk of amplified manipulation in presence of hacks.
"Why can we have electronic banking, but not electronic voting, vowelless?”
For one, elections cannot be insured like your bank transactions can. Loosing money can be devastating, but the Republican system with democratic voting is much more important than the banking system.
While I agree with you that the risks are not worth it, there is the counterargument that votes are expensive. If votes were made less expensive it might be feasible to put more things out for popular vote
Edit: typo. Stupid autocorrect set for the wrong language
A counter argument to expanding popular votes, the reason for a representative democracy is so we _don’t_ have to vote on everything. If we’re electing representatives that we distrust so much we want to directly vote on more of the laws I think we should fix the election of representatives.
You're arguing there should be fewer public votes in a democracy?
If you don't trust the public to make decisions like Brexit, why trust them to elect representatives? Note that some of the most shameless brexiteers were publically elected MPs.
1. It seems like the tories have been at civil war since the referendum so the number can't be that small. Corbyn doesn't seem too unhappy about the idea either, although for different reasons than, say, David Davies.
2. Germany may ban them in its constitution, but it seems to work for Switzerland. Again, if you don't trust people to handle referendums maturely and responsibly, why trust people to elect representatives that will handle the same issues maturely and responsibly?
Totally agreed, but there's a variation on electronic voting I've heard proposed that I think would be very, very helpful. Long story short, the machine doesn't record the vote, it just produces the ballot.
You enter all your choices on the machine, then the machine spits out a piece of paper, and the paper itself is your voting record. You verify that it is correct before it goes into the ballot box.
Nothing's perfect, but this doesn't seem to have any weaknesses that existing paper ballots don't, and it gets rid of a few. It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle", and real errors like overvoting. Software shenanigans are almost pointless, because the piece of paper is the vote record, and the voter checks it.*
Machines can also be more usable for people with input/output difficulties (poor eyesight, motor control, whatever).
---
*I say "almost" because we all know that plenty of people won't check it. Vision problems are also a concern here, but not any more so than with plain paper.
Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day and any issues will lead to people having to wait longer or not being able to vote at all.
Which you can already see happening in areas where voting machines are used. This is especially problematic if specific regions with known political majorities can be targeted and sabotaged.
There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher or an overhauled ballot design.
Even just keeping the problems that exist with paper ballots beats any risk that introducing electronics in the process pose.
I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve.
If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them.
A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.
> If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote
No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.
Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.
Look at the last Russian election, there were a lot of districts where busy hands produced a lot more votes than the number of real people that actually showed up to vote. (Russian voting stations have live video feeds, and Polish journalists sat down to count the number of people who voted, and then compare that to the officially reported votes.)
Or the counts could have been simply altered as they were reported. Complaining, reporting would get people an unwanted visit, so why bother?
I guess my main concern from an election perspective is where no one is sure if the election is legitimate. There's not much you can do for this perspective when people know the election isn't legitimate, but are forced to accept the results for other sociopolitical reasons.
What kinds of scenarios can you imagine when enough people call an election's legitimacy into question and somehow machines (and the log files or other data) could resolve it?
> If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this.
Maybe. But keep in mind that they know how many people voted at a given venue. So it's not sufficient to simply add a bunch of ballots, you also have to remove and destroy the same number of legitimate ballots. Maybe the ballots will be timestamped/marked in some way that can't easily be faked? Then you have to use an actual machine, and space out the ballots so it doesn't look suspicious.
> A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.
That's certainly a concern, especially if the ballots are marked as I mentioned above.
"Congratulations, you have invented the most expansive pencil"
In France we don't actually write anything. When we enter the room we're given one paper per candidate with the name and logo printed clearly. Once in the voting booth we put one or none in the enveloppe.
That's it. Problem solved.
How do you verify your vote is counted correctly and not made up? Having the voting ledger would be cool - you could verify with the "transaction id" and how it's recorded.
There is no way to implement verifiable voting which is not vulnerable to voter coercion. If you can verify your vote, so can the person threatening you.
The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.
I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand elections are monitored by the Electoral Commission who employ people to watch every step of the process. In addition every political party is entitled to send scrutineers to polling places and the count. The boxes are shown to the scrutineers who verify it to be empty, then sealed. The boxes are never taken out of sight. Every step of the process is under multiple eyes.
This seems to work well. It's possible to double vote by visiting multiple stations but in practice this is rare. It does happen but the electoral commission do analysis on the votes to ensure it didn't affect the outcome. Those responsible are prosecuted.
For example at the last presidential election last year there were 11 candidates, so there was a table with (simplifying) a pile of envelopes, 11 piles of papers (one for each candidate). Generally people don't take the whole 12 items with them. You would pick randomly between 2 or 11 papers (depending on your sense of theatrics) and the papers you're left with after the voting booth, in my case I crumble them and throw them in a bin. Crumbled paper can't be counted. Some people keep them in their pockets until they get home.
In Spain is the same. But political parties send you also a copy and an envelope. So you can bring your ballot from home.
If the envelope contains more than one vote, but all are the same, it counts as one. If the envelop contains more than one vote but they are different it does not count.
In the voting school there are randomly chosen citizens and party representatives that identify the voters, all adults must have a national ID, and count the votes.
It works, and it will need a massive amount of people to change a significant amount of votes.
> It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle"
Should people who screw up their votes that much even get their votes counted? Maybe these problems are filtering out people whose votes shouldn't be counted in the first place. If they don't understand the (very simple) mechanics of the voting process, I can't imagine how they can understand politics enough to make an intelligent vote.
Also, by the same logic, they could botch what they touch on the screen anyway, and the output of the machine wouldn't give us any insight into what happened during that process.
Sure, we can come up with all sorts of reasons why various groups' votes "shouldn't be counted". Or we could live in a pluralistic democracy where the right to vote is fundamental enough that we expend some effort making sure it works for everyone.
The fact is, in any election, you only get a few people marking papers like this. At the final local counts, the total spoiled, unmarked, etc. ballot counts are read out as separate totals. Very rarely is this total a number that has any affect on the overall outcome. Average rejection rate of ballot papers is around 0.28%. In those rare instances where it's that close to matter, there would be recounts & additional checks against those spoiled ballots.
As a side note, it baffles me that any country would ever not have simple paper ballots with pens/pencils. Pens are safest IMO & pencils should probably be discouraged, I don't personally agree with the (generally historic) reasons for pencils being preferred.
We have a great compromise in New York. Paper ballot. Electronic (optical) tabulation. The efficiencies of digitisation with the robustness of a paper trail.
The number of people available to count ballots scales pretty close to linearly with the number of ballots cast. So what issue is the tabulating machine addressing?
Except the numbers of human counters increases linearly with the number of ballots cast. And the counting generally happens in a room with several people from multiple counting the same subtotals.
So no, not the same as human ballot counters at all.
I'm not talking in hypotheticals. This is happening since holding sham elections became a fashion among dictatorships. Most of the human ballot counters there are compromised and cooperate on the ground.
Doesn't matter. In places like those the same people could simply fake vote with the perfect-counting machines. (Or the machines can be simply replaced with identical looking, but hacked ones.)
> "Why can we have electronic banking, but not electronic voting, vowelless?”
Secure transactions with your bank are doable, because there is no need to ensure anonymity from your bank (quite the opposite: your bank needs to know your identity).
Secure transactions while keeping the secret ballot is very very difficult to do. And secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
This. Additionally, there's another very important factor to consider: If it is doable (it probably is), the result would be unnecessarily complex. Not only should such a system track votes in an anonymized fashion, it must also be reviewable by the public (how do you know the central server didn't just throw away your vote?).
An important part in reviewability is simplicity: If you come up with an algorithm that provides all those properties but requires a PhD in mathematics to be properly understood, guess where Average Joe tells you to stick it. It's very hard to build trust with a screen that essentially just tells you "We did everything correctly! Honest!".
> An important part in reviewability is simplicity: If you come up with an algorithm that provides all those properties but requires a PhD in mathematics to be properly understood, guess where Average Joe tells you to stick it.
That's the reason for the highest German court to declare voting machines unusable here.
you can make an electronic system safe, safer than even paper ballots which can get lost and even altered.
Simple have the machine print two reports. the copy given to the voter clearly states there vote and produces a bar code type mark at the bottom and top of the form. at the back sealed is a another copy of all bar codes printed.
when an election is contested the roll of bar codes recorded can be compared to the electronic reports. a voter can also use their phone or scanner at any government office to verify their vote again and verify it was counted.
however we still need some form of picture id that can be issued and encoded into the vote so that both sides are satisfied.
Paper ballots are safe only if everything else around the election is safe. It's very easy to stuff fake ballot papers into the ballot box or take out ballots you don't like by unsealing the box. If you don't like the way a constituency has voted, it's very easy to fire ballot box and burn the papers. It takes time and manpower to secure ballot boxes for a long time required for manual counting and to secure and transport ballot papers before that. You need to have multiple supervisors witnessing counting of each vote to prevent the counter from manipulating the count which takes time and slows down counting. All this and more has happened in the history of paper ballot elections in India - which is partly why India moved to electronic voting which is a lot harder to tamper with. Paper ballot works only in a utopian world where you assume simple thuggery doesn't happen
I gather you've never seen an Australian senate vote.
There are so many candidates, we have hit the limit of the printing presses (a ballot paper 1.2m or so wide). No doubt that width seem reasonable at the time at it is wider than the ballot boxes - so you get a ballot paper can't actually lie flat.
Sadly that wasn't enough to fix the problem, so that had to shrink the font used. In fact that shrank it so much people could no longer read it, so they issued a magnifying glass with each paper.
Just so you have the picture clear in your mind: the ballot paper is so big it won't fit in the ballot box, ad the writing on it so small they issues magnifying glasses. Seeing all candidates names is literally impossible. http://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332
Now onto the next step. The voting system is so complex, the outcome it's known for at least a month. As this is Australia they do use computers but someone has to accurately enter all those marks on a paper that has to be read with a magnifying glass.
So while electronic voting may not make much sense where you live, there are places in the work where it is the only sane option.
Yes, and the only way to break the paper ballot method is fake ballots introduced physically into election sites. However, I predict this is much harder stunt to get away with the rise of social media. If anything, going with paper ballots reduces the attack vectors and the speed at which it's executed on a legitimate process.
Plus, if you want to intrude physically into election sites, which can and has happened in the U.S., at least you have to have a lot of people involved in order to do it on a large scale (increasing the chances of getting caught). Electronic voting machines could potentially be compromised in many places by a relatively small group of people, some of whom might not even be in the country.
Not only should we not use electronic voting machines, we should not use electronic vote counting machines.
Paper ballots counted by electronic means should be just as suspect, as whoever hacks the counting machine could set vote totals to be just shy of the limit required to initiate a manual recount.
Hand counting is another source of error or corruption though.
I like the idea of optical scanning with random audits. That is you'll scan them, then keep them locked up together with subtotals for each box. You can audit that the subtotals add up, and then randomly pick boxes to hand count. You can then verify that the votes in the box match the subtotals for that box.
UK election counting is done by hand, double checked, overseen by the candidates and there’s tv cameras in just about every counting room, especially in tight races or cabinet seats.
> Hand counting is another source of error or corruption though.
Hand counting, in public, at the voting site, puts the count in view of all interested parties. Any errors or corruption are the results of the collected views of those present. Electronic counting, in any form, adds to that the views of whomever builds, delivers, and collects the electronic count.
After the Bush vs. Gore election problems in 2000, I recall a paper here on HN of a study of different voting mechanisms. I think it was an MIT study - if anybody knows the paper, please post.
Anyway the conclusion was that all systems have some non-zero error rate, but the most reliable was paper ballots with optical readers. Ability to audit was important too.
So this paper was discussed here and I thought it might make some impact on the voting systems in the US. After all, I thought, here we had a credible study, the merits were being discussed, and so on.
Of course what happened was that my state (PA) adopted all electronic systems, with poor audit trail, etc. I don't think any legislature anywhere made a good faith effort to weigh the possible options in a rational way. I think the vendors came in, gave a presentation, and the everybody went with their gut feel.
well if anything it shows that you cannot trust paper ballots or that in a close contest no one will. electronic voting will work provided you can take a record of your vote, say a bar code, and scan it and verify your vote was recorded properly. so give them a paper copy with their votes printed out and a code they can scan either at home, their phone, any government facility, that says - yeah it counted.
when it comes to bulk counting the electronic version is used or a printout of every single bar code value is mass scanned back in.
how else can you have a paper ballot that cannot be altered?
Votes being edited isn’t a fear here. We write with pencils in fear of disappearing ink but the whole counting process is monitored by the candidates, with no claims of vote editing.
> how else can you have a paper ballot that cannot be altered?
With simple, boring techniques requiring the presence of multiple scrutineers appointed by different candidates. The process relies on mutual suspicion to detect problems at every step.
In an Australian election, all ballot boxes are numbered. The seals are also numbered. When a ballot box is assembled, the seal numbers and box number are logged, signed by the senior Electoral Officer present and countersigned by at least two scrutineers appointed by different candidates.
Ballots are not numbered, but are counted as they are dispensed. Each is initialled by the official who hands it to the voter. This process is observable by scrutineers.
When time comes to count, the box numbers are cross-checked with the logs, again under scrutineers. When the ballots are hand-counted, it happens with scrutineers watching. When the tallies are made, it happens with scrutineers present.
When any of the scrutineers disagrees with some aspect of the process, they can appeal to the electoral commission. If they're dissatisfied, the matter can be taken to the Court of Disputed Returns.
So far as I am aware, only once, in over a century of Australian elections, have ballot boxes been lost. That election was voided and rerun from scratch.
Paper works. You just need to see how other people are already using it successfully.
Paper ballots might work best in the west, but in some developing countries ballot stuffing remains a big problem. In these countries I feel VVPAT is a better solution.
CMV: I think we should be able to vote electronically with the same convenience that we do online shopping not to make it easier to count the votes but rather to increase turnout numbers. 50-60% - is that better for representative democracy or 90%? The counterpoint of decentralization - there is a single point where final counts happen. So who is to say that final single point isn't manipulatable?
Voting from home would be very dangerous as it would undermine the secrecy of the vote. It would become much easier for people with power (employers, religious authorities, abusive family members, etc) to coerce others to vote for a chosen candidate.
The way it works in Mexico, every political party has a representative in each voting site. Once the site officials (not government employees, but citizes selected at random) finish the ballot counting, they fill-in an act that is signed by every representative. So, each party has an unofficial report for each office, and their only restriction to know if there was a fraud is how faster they can double check official government figures.
And yes, we do take elections pretty seriously around here. After the "System blackout" of 1988, it is not possible to have any sort of legitimacy without a robust election process with heavy involvement from the public. It is also one of the most expensive systems around the world, but at least we can be reasonably certain that the rascals that rule us are indeed the rascals the majority did choose.
Echoing the other comment about Sweden: The last Australian election had 91% turnout, which was the lowest since 1926. It is possible to have high turnout without computers.
You could, for instance, not have elections on a weekday as a start.
How about 99.99%? The Soviet Union managed that in 1984. If your elections aren't secret, you may as well not bother. And it's impossible to have secret electronic elections.
> The counterpoint of decentralization - there is a single point where final counts happen.
You should really research the electoral college instead of just assuming it's unfair. There is a reason for it. You may disagree, but it's not just an obvious flaw or oversight. It was intentional.
Edit: to the downvoters, your downvotes won't magically and retroactively count as votes in the 2016 election. Why not participate in the discussion instead of the incivility? Or, you know, hypocritically participate in the HN equivalent of the Electoral College, those with downvoting ability.
I'd be interested to hear what you say what the original reason is, as I've heard several. Not one of them is at all useful in the modern day.
1) To appease slave-owning states, by allowing slaves to be counted toward the allocation of representatives and electoral votes. No longer relevant after Civil War.
2) To prevent demagogues from gaining popular support. Assumes that electors will meet and decide on a candidate when the electoral college votes, rather than being bound ahead of time. Clearly, did not do this job in 2016.
3) To keep small states from being overwhelmed by large states. Assumes that loyalty and identity are primarily to a state (e.g Virginian) rather than to the country (American). Furthermore, causes undo emphasis on swing states, which are primarily based on how much urban/rural area falls within the state borders.
I have not heard any reasons to dissuade me from the belief that the electoral college is a vestigial organization that no longer serves any purpose.
Edit: Also, your entire comment is a form of personal attack that does not give any argument. At most, you imply that an argument for the existence of the electoral college exists, but give no support for its existence. If you are going to say that a reason exists, at least give a one sentence description, or a link to what you believe that reason to be. As it is, you are disingenuously setting yourself up to say, in effect, "Well, none of those reasons are the one that I was thinking of. I'm keeping the real reason for myself, but feel free to continue guessing while I act like I have the superior position."
It's 3) To keep small states from being overwhelmed by large states. Assumes that loyalty and identity are primarily to a state (e.g Virginian) rather than to the country (American). Furthermore, causes undo emphasis on swing states, which are primarily based on how much urban/rural area falls within the state borders.
It's similar to the idea that each that each state gets the same number of senators. There's a balance between state governance and federal governance, such that you can live in a state more attuned to your preferences. Regardless of your political ideals, this plays out in your favor (I guarantee it, unless you're oddly attracted to the simultaneously bland and chaotic politics of the federal).
As for the claim of undue emphasis on swing states, I'd say then it's working as expected by even allowing swing states to have a chance against California. So I guess we come to our fundamental disagreement: should the majority always be able to railroad all dissenters? The Founding Fathers thought about the same question and figured, no, the majority is not always to be trusted.
To give just a bit more context still, I'm vehemently opposed to Trump for a number of reasons, but by no means see the Democratic party as putting up many good candidates. I just can't stand by their platform on many things. But my point is that while I would have liked, say, Rubio as president, the majority of Republicans selected Trump. The majority did something I really disliked.
The Electoral College is there to have some kind of counterbalance to oppressive majority. Whether it's truly effective is a matter for another, more detailed debate. All I asked in my original comment is that people not dismiss it as ill-thought-out, unfair or archaic without giving it some thought.
Edit in response to your edit: obviously I'm not disingenuously writing some alternative argument. I wrote this before your edit.
Do you think the framers of the Constitution intended the House to have one representative for every 750,000 people?
You didn't simply ask people to give it some thought. You implied the person you were addressing hadn't. Then you reacted to the resulting downvotes by calling them uncivil and hypocritical and snarking about the 2016 election. You went on to imply that your opponent wants "to railroad all dissenters", which is hardly a charitable interpretation.
Change My Mind: Washington State's vote by mail is the best system in the world.
Ballots and guides are mailed out 2 to 4 weeks before voting day. All voters need to do is fill out their ballot at their leisure and put it in a mailbox or ballot drop box before the end of election day.
I see no compelling reason to prefer any other system in existence.
It allows vote coercion, I can threaten you to vote a certain way and watch you drop off the ballot, and there's no way for you to change your vote later.
Having monitored physical polling stations where people vote in secret removes this opportunity, because I can only see that you voted, but not what you voted for.
That's a theoretical problem. And one that doesn't scale. You wouldn't be able to realistically intimidate 10,000 people and watch each one drop their ballot into a box.
In practice I don't think there are even fringe accusations of it being a problem.
> Having monitored physical polling stations where people vote in secret removes this opportunity
> You wouldn't be able to realistically intimidate 10,000 people and watch each one drop their ballot into a box.
Your fanatical followers and/or henchman can do that. You can also use photos/videos to watch "your" voters more scalably. Another option is to pay them rather than intimidating.
Bribery and coercion have been reduced to practice many times throughout human history. Voting by mail also facilitates misdirecting or tampering with ballots. People have used all four approaches to sway elections with absentee ballots. Often they've been caught because the mailed ballots showed unusual trends or there were unusually many of them.
The risks should be weighed against the benefits of greater turnout, but countries and even US states have found ways to improve turnout while keeping the safeguards of the secret ballot.
Before 1932, the vote in Brazil was not secret. It resulted in widespread voter coercion and bribery, a system we used to call "halter voting". The "colonel" (powerful landowner or authority figure) would use the threat of violence to force those in his electoral "corral" to vote as he pleased.
Why is any technology of any kind required? Surely all that is needed is for the voters to make indelible marks on pieces of paper and for another person to tally those marks.
Ultimately if the people in power do not respect the democratic process, they can and will hack the voting and vote count process.
In addition to that modern democracies suffer from selection bias. The persons you can vote for are often a hand or self selected group of people which will not threaten the existing oligarchy.
The only voting system I know that would be free of all these problems is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition . Because the greek understood already 2500 years ago:
"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)
Why not have both as an audit system? Electronic voting for instant tabulation. It prints out a voter verifiable ballot receipt that goes into a ballot box. If the electronic count and the paper count don’t match, some error or fraudulent activity has occurred.
283 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadDue to the cost, we will be able to deploy two machines at a single voting site in your county.
Please ensure you arrive with enough time, as lines are expected.
My point: cost is always a consideration. And in voting, has a direct correlation to such issues as deployment and voter ability to... well, vote.
I would not like to make voting more complicated,to prevent people from voting, but the current majority in the US support making voting harder for many people. I assume you're one of those.
The whole cryptocurrency stuff seems pretty shady but there are select applications where blockchain is ideally suited & this seems like one of them.
i.e. All those independent election monitors can set up their own node etc
The most important feature of elections is that everyone in society can take part of the process, understand the process, and (locally) verify that the elections are fair.
Technology just introduces black boxes that citizens are somehow expected to trust, because something something cryptography something blockchain.
No, that's not good enough.
oh please. People trust the lock sign on HTTPS all day without understanding it. (or mastercard or the bridge they drive over or well anything).
Avoiding superior technological solutions just because the man on the street doesn't understand them is a bad approach. If society did that we'd still be in the 1800s.
Yes, and the internet is an absolute cesspool when it comes to security. Do we really want to hold up the internet as a shining success that we should be applying to probably the most important institution we have?
> The most important feature of elections
If an election goes against you and you don't clearly understand and trust the voting mechanism, you're not going to vote next time because why bother? It's all rigged anyway.
Blockchain helps with the first, but does not with the latter.
How so? What are the actual mechanics of how a blockchain would be used in this situation?
What is a "transaction" here -- what information would be stored? What would a node represent (and why does that data need to be part of a chain)? Who are the peers/clients -- how would the data be added to the chain?
Most importantly, what does the added complexity get us, over boxes of paper ballots?
Do you trust the OS? The silicon? The PCB layout? The firmware? What about the firmware in all those other components? Could you verify all that if you are concerned that something is weird?
Pencil and paper are trivial to verify for every layman (with basic literacy), computers are not.
That possibility of verification is kind of a big deal when it comes to deciding in huge groups, and the block chain (or any modern tech so far) doesn't improve anything about it.
You: "I support electronic voting machines that uses <some foolproof blockchain system>."
Politician: "You will be happy to hear that I too support electronic voting and you will be happy to hear we will be buying some electronic voting machines that run proprietary software on Windows XP with Norton Anti-Virus! Thanks for your support!"
You: "That's not what I..."
Politician: "Thanks again!" <Ends discussion.>
I'm not confidence our current education level and political environment can navigate the subtle distinction between "verifiable blockchain system" and "proprietary software on Windows XP".
Or maybe they do use a fool proof system for several years. Everyone gets accustomed to trusting the trustworthy algorithm. Then they change things, they say "here's a new proprietary algorithm, it will save taxes and protect children". 99% of the population doesn't understand what's different, so they continue to support the new proprietary algorithm, because "the voting machines still look the same". The few who know better are ignored.
The machine gives me a paper record of my vote to keep. Meanwhile, it appends my vote to the blockchain. I go home and use information from my paper printout to verify my vote is indeed counted and on the blockchain. If my vote isn't on the blockchain, I have a paper record of it that can be used to append it, should the machine "fail."
A) Person stands outside of polling station in swing state/district, offers $5 for a verified vote. Walk in, get your receipt/blockchain entry/doodad, show it to the vote buyer outside, get $5. Not at all a good situation, because it enables votes to be bought.
B) Person stands outside of polling station in swing state/district, offers $5 for a vote. Walk in, vote for whoever you want, then walk out and pocket the $5. Because the vote cannot be verified, they have no proof one way or the other.
Better to have an adversarial system, where any votes coming out of the ballot box are observed by representatives of all candidates. Each candidate has an incentive to ensure that the others do not tamper with the vote.
Scenario A could still happen, but seeing as it's explicitly illegal, the likelihood of it causing widespread voter fraud is unlikely.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
[1] http://www.lrc.ky.gov/Statutes/statute.aspx?id=27347
Consider a voting scheme where each voter is given a unique key in some fashion, probably with the same ID requirements as voting today. It's then used to place a single vote on the blockchain.
This system could have these nice properties:
* Verifiable number of votes and correct counting
* Each voter could verify that their own vote was counted correctly and they can see what they voted for using independently developed tools
* More eco friendly
* Cheaper
Yes it's not perfect, most people will still just trust an electronic box, but there is an interesting application here.
Edit: Several comments on privacy. Yes voter anonymity is crucial and it might be possible here as well.
Research in this area is still very new. Look up ZNARKs for example.
The problem is that "owner" here means "whoever holds the private key". If I can verify that my individual vote was cast correctly, then somebody looking over my shoulder can verify how I voted as well.
A traditional ballot is immune to this as long as it’s not broadly possible to have someone follow you into the booth.
Still no better than a paper vote.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/mendel/status/914602521989193728
Voter ID is mandatory in so many parts of the world. What are the rest of us missing?
Edit: Not that it matters, but I live in India, so "poor people can't get ID" confuses me even further.
https://m.rediff.com/news/column/the-giant-mess-called-aadha...
Given America's love-hate relationship with well-maintained infrastructure ("my tax money may end up benefitting somebody else?!?"), and given how ID is optional for most aspects of American live, it wouldn't surprise me if India's system is significantly better organized (although people will certainly find enough to complain about, as always).
You can't have an id in USA because the current system doesn't have a list of people with their addresses? So the current system needs to be a system of all the people and their addresses, including citizens, with some sort of unique identifier for quick retrieval? You know, an id?
Therefore "infrastructure to obtain ID in India and the US is of somewhat similar quality" is false. Therefore "Apparently some people believe that poor people or minorities in America find it harder than even the poorest Indians to go get identification" is a false equivalence:
The poorest of all Indians still have a government that keeps track of the data required to vote (whatever fault it may have in other ways).
Americans do not and therefore have to work around the no-registration policy with an ad-hoc registration procedure every two years that might require significant hoop-jumping - which is easier when you have some extraneous time and/or money you can throw at the problem (that is, you're not poor).
Also, voter fraud isn't much of an issue in the US, so it's a solution to a problem we don't really have.
Sometimes I wish those crying voter suppression would amend voter ID proposals to make getting ID free and easy and just put this whole issue to bed. Unfortunately with REAL ID, things are only going to get more difficult and expensive.
I would add that it's also used to deflect (or in some cases shout down) discussions of mass voter disenfranchisement, which actually exists and undermines US democracy in a meaningful way.
Try bringing up gerrymandering, voter purging, shortening of early voting and holiday/week-end voting, selective use of overwhelming police presence with a US reactionary and count the seconds before they make voter ID the center of the conversation.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...
I apologize if I didn't spell that out. To work in this country you need to provide more identification then you need to vote. At the very least, I think it should be equivalent. In reality, I think at the very least a government issued photo ID is required. We're talking about the integrity of an election after all.
Either way the requirements to vote are currently less strict in many places than the requirements to get a photo ID that can then meet the requirements of voter ID laws.
That, all by itself, means it will affect some percentage of the voters in an area, and that means it can easily affect the outcome of an election, at the very least for a period of time that may span multiple election cycles.
And that is the real reason voter ID laws are constantly being proposed.
Constantly re-arguing the theoretical neutrality and easy availability of ID (which is generally neither free or easily available, in some cases deliberately) ignores the practical effect of voter ID laws, and the motivations of those pushing for voter ID laws.
I'm not sure why we wouldn't want to guarantee the integrity of our elections. That's what this whole thread is about after all. Voter ID is just one key component of that.
Now I know that isn’t a big deal to a lot of people here but there are a ton of people around where I live that it would be a significant enough barrier to entry to the point where they just wouldn’t bother.
Compare this to some other states that make it super easy (Oregon comes to mind) and look at their voter fraud rates vs TX and you start to wonder if there is some ulterior motive at play here.
If you get ID automatically or are required to hold it in other parts of life, it's less of a hurdle.
To apply for a photo ID card, you must:
Be a citizen or a legal resident of the U.S.
Be a resident of New York State.
Have your original birth certificate.
Have your Social Security card.
Be able to provide enough documents to verify your identity.
https://www.dmv.org/ny-new-york/id-cards.php
That's far from easy, and it's very easy to imagine scenarios where one lacks one or more of those. Proving residency can be hard, and is impossible for those who are homeless. The homeless have a right to vote.
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
The TSA will let you fly without ID if you answer a few questions to confirm your identity: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
I was pleasantly surprised when I managed to lose my driver's license somewhere in the 50 yards between the car and the airport door that I was actually able to fly. But they did really screen me. The hotel on the other end was more of a problem...
What does this mean? Do you mean RealID? States run elections so I’m not sure why this matters.
You might think you have an ID that's good enough for driving or buying alcohol, but you can be turned away at the polls if it expired a few days ago and you haven't had a chance to take time off work to get it renewed. Or if you moved recently and the address on your ID doesn't match your voter registration. Or if your name changed when you got married, but your ID still shows your former name.
Yes, these problems are avoidable. But the process still disproportionately disenfranchises people who are less likely to be able to spend the time on getting them resolved before it's time to actually vote.
It can't be valid if it has already expired, can it?
Voter ID laws would be great if the politicians proposing them didn't also underfund the ability to get the IDs.
Anyway, the downsides of not having a mandatory ID system was already mentioned repeatedly here.
https://www.dhs.gov/real-id
Edit: It's not completely enforced yet (the REAL ID aspect). Some states are still working toward compliant. You still need an ID though.
https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2013/04/09/tsa-travel-tips-tuesday-...
"If we can confirm your identity, you’ll be cleared to go through security, and you may or may not have to go through some additional screening."
That's also just the TSA. You'll still have to convince the carrier to let you board without an ID.
Edit: Your link is 5 years old, and I don't think is up to date. Here's the current policy:
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
"Adult passengers 18 and over must show valid identification at the airport checkpoint in order to travel." They do so you "may" be able to travel if you forgot your ID.
Just because someone starts off asking you for an ID doesn't mean that they don't have a process for no ID.
Most people may have valid drivers licenses but voting must work for all people.
There is the additional complication that in some states they'll yank your license for unpaid traffic fines or for uninsured driving. It's fair that you can't drive but it isn't fair that traffic scofflaws can't go to the polls.
The second part of this is the obvious motivation - with voter fraud being so low as to be nonexistent (as shown with recent news about the "voter fraud" committee that has done and found absolutely nothing), what is the motivation for the laws given how many people it would negatively affect?
I suggest talking about politically polarizing matters in terms of interests. For example, "Voter ID laws as implemented in the USA tend to result in diminished participation by poor people because [explanation]. Such laws tend to be favored by those who benefit from poor people voting less, and opposed by those who benefit from poor people voting more."
This depersonalizes the conflict a bit, and allows us to have the kind of insightful debates that HN is for.
If your birth was never registered? That can be a problem. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/invisible-girl/
And I imagine if, as an adult, you don't have a birth certificate, aren't sure where you were born, and don't know your social security number, things can start to be difficult.
That, mixed with the fact that in person polling fraud pretty much never happens, means we shouldn't want another tool in the hands of disenfranchisers.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/todays-voter-suppressi...
We have the same debate with early voting, how long polling places are open, and where they are located.
For whatever reason, conservative voters tend to be more motivated to vote. So any friction in the voting process tends to disproportionately affect Democrats.
As an aside, there are structurally racist policies that suppress Democratic votes both historically and today. To give one example, most states do not allow exconvicts to vote.
As to why many Americans are opposed? Because for so long this country has tried to prevent anyone but white men from voting.
Besides that, voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. There’s just not a plausible way to commit large scale fraud at the polls. You’d have to round up bus loads of people willing to commit voter fraud, take them from polling place to place, then have them sign their names as some other voter on the rolls at that polling location and hope that the real voter hasn’t and won’t show up to vote. I lack the imagination to see how this could occur without detection.
In any case, what everyone should actually be concerned with is that the voting system accurately captures the will of the people. In which case, voter fraud at the polls, in America, is the least of our problems. Our attention should be focused on things gerrymandering, first past the post, and for presidential elections, the electoral college, among other issues.
Almost all states do allow exconvicts to vote, but they may have to wait a certain period of time after release from custody/probation/parole.
“In 13 states felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon in order for voting rights to be restored, or face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) before voting rights can be restored” [0]
Personally, I’ll be allowed to vote again in 2021.
[0] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...
I understand changes like that would favor the Democrats more than Republicans. Maybe it could be phased in slowly enough to lessen the pain? Anyway, once it was in place I'm sure the balance of power would readjust and then they could solve some real problems instead of shady politicking.
The fact is anyone can vote on a provisional ballot, and if the verified ballots provided a close enough race, the provisional ballots are scrutinized and counted. This is presently happening in KS with 10k provisional ballots which could skew a 96 ballot spread amongst almost 300k.
Those whining about disenfranchisement simply want fraudulent votes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot
As to why it's seen as disenfranchising, there are no general requirements in the United States to have a form of ID to exist in daily life. Poorer people who live in cities are less likely to have the resources or need to own a car, and if you don't own a car, why would you have a driver's license, which requires spending potentially hours at the local motor vehicle department, getting access to documents like birth certificates (which may well be in another state), and paying a fee [2]. Some states have free state photo IDs, but many do not, and even those IDs take some time and effort to get. Estimates of how many people are deterred from the polls because of lack of ID are tricky, and while the numbers are fairly low, America was founded on the idea of liberty and justice for all.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Consequently, many voter ID laws presume that all voters will have a driver's license as a form of ID (or even less likely forms, such as a passport or birth certificate).
While there are non-license forms of ID that can be obtained, all of these are bureaucratic processes.
Driver's license IDs are problematic for two reasons: (1) poorer and/or minority Americans are less likely to have a driver's than wealthy and/or white Americans (by ~5%) & (2) poorer and/or minority Americans are far more likely to have their driver's licenses taken (due to policing and economic inabilities to pay court fines or other charges).
Voter ID laws thus (1) create additional barriers for minority or poor Americans to vote, (2) are legal (in that aren't directly suppressing minority voting), (3) do not impact wealthy white voters.
It adds a barrier to voting. We don’t like having to trust our government to be benevolent—the track record of such populations is poor.
The risk of voter fraud (in the form of people who shouldn’t be voting, voting) is low. The ease of forging an ID is high. The risk of tyranny therefore dominates (I enter the massive corruption and security gaps in India’s Aadhar program as Exhibit A.)
Having an ID is important for so many reasons, it'd be great if the US gov had a standard state/federal ID system that could facilitate so many things. Of course it would also be abused :)
But what people do often say, rightly, is that of the population who would don't have ID's and thus wouldn't be able to vote if you enacted a voter ID law, they're disproportionally likely to vote democrat. You can take from that what you want, but it's almost entirely republicans who are for voter ID and almost entirely democrats who are against it. That's not a coincidence.
Combine that with the fact that voter ID doesn't actually solve any current problems we have (in-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent), it just seems like a distraction when what we should be having is a real conversation about the actual security of our election systems from hacking.
(EDIT: s/democrats/likely to vote democrat/;)
If I show up at the polls and successfully impersonate Person A, they cross Person A off the list of pre-registered voters, and I vote as them. But then, if Person A showed up, they would say "we already crossed you off the list", and it would trigger what we would call an "instance of in-person voter fraud." How they found out which person voted fraudulently doesn't really matter for my point, because:
In a recent 14-year period, this has happened about thirty-one times across the whole US, according to wikipedia. (Source is here: [1])
Basically, it's easy to do, but also extremely easy to detect, so in practice nobody does it. It's not currently a significant factor in the security of our elections.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/13/th...
Is there a system that is doing this checking though?
If I am an illegal immigrant I can go to that Equifax website leak for example, pick up a name and social security number, get some documents together, start a life for myself. Over time I could even get an ID to register for voting.
There are supposedly 16 million known cases of identity theft in the USA per year - many of which are caught because money went missing.
Is there a system that checks for voting in the same way.
Granted it would be trivial, but does this checking take place?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Voter_Registratio...
50%+ of the US population right there?
If you were a poor person who really only has the value of their physical labor to feed your family you might not want to waste spend hours and hours of your incredibly (relatively) valuable time for something you can make do without. Since these poor people are often minorities voter ID laws disproportionately affect them.
The question of racism being a factor for supporters of voter ID is kinda muddied. Voter ID laws seem to make a ton of sense on the surface, but a little bit of knowledge about the American election system makes it clear that voter fraud is really not a big problem. There's no doubt that racists would support voter ID laws as they do suppress the election turnout of the poor, but I haven't seen any evidence that racial factors contribute to the majority of people's support for voter ID laws. Like every topic in US politics, it has become hyper-polarized to the point where both sides talk past each other to try to demonize their opponents.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-DMV-so-slow
[2]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...
It's the most common, but not the only one. You can just show up and ask for a plain ID, and avoid all that. And I kinda have to wonder how people get their I-9 filled out without any form of ID. You generally need an ID just to work in this country.
It's interesting that requiring an ID to vote is "disenfranchisement" yet thousands of other things where ID is required (including the exercise of some constitutional rights) are not "disenfranchisement".
What's funny is any argument against voter ID should be blown out of the water by just making IDs totally free (yes, I know, paid by taxpayers).
But I've had this discussion with people before, including people who actually believe that it's racist to have any form of ID to be required anywhere. Yes, these people do exist. The conversation always goes down the road of "well what about the mountain people who live 200 miles from the DMV, don't work, don't have an address, don't have a car, and can't take a bus?"
It's the most immature form of "debate" to hunt and peck for extreme edge cases and pretend that they are silver bullets. Aha! It doesn't work for the minority who won't hop on a bike and become a part of civilization, therefore those who are pro voter ID hate the poor. Yeeeup.
Personally, I don't really care about this issue as I think voting is a waste of time and I don't do it anymore. But it's hilarious just how far extremists will take the argument.
A huge hurdle has been the more stringent ID requirements for drivers licences, mostly imposed by airlines which rely on these now as security documents. For the economically marginalised, it's all too easy to become uncredentialed, and then difficult or impossible to re-establish identity.
This affects not just voting (if there is an ID requirement), but virtually all aspects of life: housing, employment, medical coverage, banking, and of course, mobility.
My experiences with the DMV have always been pretty smooth, and I've been to multiple offices. Yes, there's often a line, but people will stand in line just as long or longer for a 3 minute ride at Disneyland. Waiting at the DMV isn't fun, but you rarely ever have to go. Still, the line can be avoided almost entirely just by showing up early. Most people are lazy and show up hours after opening without an appointment. If you can't get an appointment(which already solves a ton of problems) show up 45 minutes before opening, be one of the first in line, eat a snack, hand over the papers you already filled out at home, and you're done. Yes, it's really hard to get up at 6am when you normally get up at 8. Life really, really sucks.
Let's say that other DMVs are worse, which I imagine they are. People don't have to renew their IDs for years. Waiting at the DMV once in a great while is a very, very small penalty.
People just complain too much, in my opinion.
> People just complain too much, in my opinion.
Spot on.
I’ve had to wait in line for hours in India - and even the poorest in India can do it without major complaint.
I mean yes you try and avoid it... but if it’s a 5 hour wait once every 10 years you just suck it up.
In reality the Democrats know there are a bunch of people who don’t care about politics and know nothing about the candidates or policies but can be cajoled into voting for team blue.
There are ~ 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA according to some government studies. How does the process measure whether or not they voted, in order to come to the above conclusion? Can't the same process be used to authenticate the citizenship of whoever comes to the voting booth?
Also I have just learned that voters' fingers are not inked when they vote. How is double voting prevented?
Authentication happens at registration. Once your registered they have your name on a checklist at the polling location which they check off. It also prevents double voting.
Now, how do they verify all these votes are actually correct? Well polling data is really damn accurate. Each party kind of knows in advance where they will win so it comes down to running a statistical models to find anomalies.
In short, to commit real voting fraud it would have to be a coordinated system wide event. Not something that can be done by individual voters. But now with electronic voting it takes very little to run a SQL update query and change a million votes.
From what I understand its common for many in the US population to move residences frequently so it's quite likely that people are registered to vote in multiple states. Wouldn't it be possible for someone to simply vote as you in the other state(s) where you are registered? I suspect there are a considerable number of people registered in more than one state. It seems like political parties can theoretically conduct coordinated voter fraud of this nature without triggering any kind of alarm through methods like this.
See also:
For the first improper entry offense, the person can be fined (as a criminal or civil penalty), or imprisoned for up to six months, or both. This is considered a misdemeanor under federal law (18 U.S.C.A. § 3559).
For a subsequent offense, or a reentry (or attempted reentry) after exclusion or deportation, the person can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years, or both. (See 8 U.S.C. Section 1325, 1326, I.N.A. Section 275, 276.) This is considered a low-level felony under federal law (18 U.S.C.A. § 3559).
I saw a post recently on Reddit claiming that a taxi (or uber or lyft or whatever) driver's car became a registration station. That doesn't seem to be too "secure".
The homeless can register and use the shelter address as their address. Most don’t and aren’t told they have that right.
I suspect there is a lot of it but it’s probably not coordinated enough to swing an election.
> because the reward is small and the penalty is huge.
I’d argue the reward is major and the chance of getting caught and prosecuted is almost nil.
For example voting illegally for dems could get amnesty on the table.
And the threat of penalty? Well my local liquor store got robbed for about $600 cash last month. The guy who did it is multiple orders of magnitude more likely to get caught than an illegal voter. Yet the jail time didn’t stop him.
But when you go to the polling place, those speaking Spanish don’t seem to have an ID.
In Australia, I don't drive and so don't have a drivers license, so I get a 'Photo Card' instead. I was actually able to trade in my expired learners drivers license for free to get a Photo Card (well, I could have if I didn't have an outstanding fine from... not voting)
If it's racist, well...
Better to err on the side of expanding access to the democratic process, instead of restricting it. Particularly since voter fraud is not a very enticing crime, or a very common one.
The 'racist' angle comes from various court rulings that have stated that certain laws intended to restrict voting rights disproportionately impacted people of color. One particular ruling in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Texas state law which banned student IDs as acceptable voter ID was racially discriminating against people of color.
Plus, the number of people who are might be affected is most likely dwarfed by the number of fraudulent votes that happen every single election, but that some people would rather not try to prevent.
Evidence suggests that the number of fraudulent votes is very low in the US (although the number of legitimate votes is also low)
If you're referring to a normal ballot, I've not seen anywhere that doesn't require some proof of residence and identity, like a very recent bank statement matching the registered address for that voter.
For that to be an issue, someone would have to:
1) Obtain a recent bank statement for a registered voter
2) Show up, in person, at the correct polling location
3) Commit a felony by lying to the poll workers and voting illegally
4) Hope nobody who knows the real person hears them claim to be that person
5) Hope the person doesn't show up and try to vote
Likely you are correct for the places where you have voted, but there is a lot of variation across the US. This page has a map of what states require (or do not require) ID: http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-i....
As shown there, California, DC, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wyoming do not require or request that the voter provide written proof of residence, identity, or eligibility to vote.
The specific process for those states differs, but in general, it's all based on self-attestation. Some states require you to provide a signature that is compared against another source, but nothing like a bank statement is required.
For (a) I suppose someone would come to vote only to find their name crossed off. For (b) I don’t know. Perhaps there would be cameras. Note that to commit fraud like this you still need one appearance at a polling station per fraudulent vote so it’s hard to have much effect.
A second issue to consider is that the list of those who are eligible is made by sending letters to houses asking who lives there and is eligible to vote. There isn’t really any checking of the eligibility.
This is the exact opposite of reality, and the opposite of basically every attempt[1] to investigate the prevalence of voter fraud.
The number of actual fraudulent votes is somewhere in the single to low double digits, it makes the news when it happens because it's extraordinarily rare. And it's a felony with virtually no real benefit for the person committing it.
And even some of those few cases were people who simply weren't supposed to vote, like the woman in Texas that was just sent to prison for it, not people who didn't have identification. Texas has a voter ID law.
The hyper-focus on one very specific kind of potential voter fraud, with virtually no evidence that it's even a problem, is suspicious on its face.
That voter ID proponents keep ignoring simple facts about the actual incidence of voter ID fraud, while dismissing all other concerns, strongly suggests they're arguing in bad faith.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
Yes, some Americans have an extremely low quality of life. Some literally live on the streets. That doesn't mean they should be ineligible to vote.
First they require ID even if you are a registered voter. On the surface this isn't so bad. Then they only accept certain forms of ID. The accepted forms of ID are only available from certain departmental offices, like the DMV. Those offices have their own ID requirements to get their acceptable ID. They also are understaffed with limited office hours (10-4PM and 2 hours lunch). Due to budget cuts they also have fewer offices that can create your ID.
So the simple act of voting becomes a catch-22 of needing ID but not being able to even get ID.
Explaining from scratch, the US has two approximately equally dominant political parties. It is presumed (by both sides, and probably correctly) that reducing the ID requirements will primarily benefit the more urban Democratic Party, and that making the requirements more stringent will benefit the more rural Republican party.
Possibly motivated by self-interest, the result is that about half the population believes that requiring greater voter ID is "obviously" a good thing, and about half believes that it is equally "obviously" a bad thing. The side in favor ID expresses this with concerns about fraudulent voting, and the side against ID talks about disenfranchisement.
Is there some sort of proactive movement that tries to make this a non-issue by making people get usable IDs?
A change to the situation will likely involve either one side getting sufficiently far ahead to be able to change the rules further toward their advantage, or will involve a change in the perception such that both sides think that the same change will be to their side's benefit. But since these decisions are made on a state-by-state basis, any change will likely be incremental rather than all at once.
No, I'm not really aware of any major efforts concentrated on helping people get appropriate ID. Voter registration drives are common, but the ones I've noticed put the emphasis on registering otherwise eligible voters rather than increasing the pool of eligible voters.
I wonder how cost effective a "free driver's license" charity would be at creating eligible voters. It wouldn't even have to be directly supported by a political party, but by targeting a particular demographic it would likely be quite effective in creating new voters of a particular type. And unlike straight voter registration drives, getting a driver's license gives other direct benefits to the recipient.
It is horrendously racist to claim that any race is "incapable" to be able to get an ID, and the math doesn't work out in its favor anyway. But it's the current argument du jour that allows the power to be removed from the people, so it continues to play.
Anything else discussed in this thread with respect to the lack of American voter ID is just avoiding these facts. If the people want to take this nation back, they must pass voter ID and vote out (if they possibly can) those who oppose it.
For voter fraud paper ballots are of course more difficult, but nevertheless doable. See the study about the recent turkish elections.
The downside risk of electronic voting is very high. It invariably leads to centralization, meaning allows risk of amplified manipulation in presence of hacks.
"Why can we have electronic banking, but not electronic voting, vowelless?”
For one, elections cannot be insured like your bank transactions can. Loosing money can be devastating, but the Republican system with democratic voting is much more important than the banking system.
Edit: typo. Stupid autocorrect set for the wrong language
If you don't trust the public to make decisions like Brexit, why trust them to elect representatives? Note that some of the most shameless brexiteers were publically elected MPs.
2 Yes I am saying there should be no referendums in an elected democracy its a terrible idea - Germany even outrights bans them in its constitution.
2. Germany may ban them in its constitution, but it seems to work for Switzerland. Again, if you don't trust people to handle referendums maturely and responsibly, why trust people to elect representatives that will handle the same issues maturely and responsibly?
You enter all your choices on the machine, then the machine spits out a piece of paper, and the paper itself is your voting record. You verify that it is correct before it goes into the ballot box.
Nothing's perfect, but this doesn't seem to have any weaknesses that existing paper ballots don't, and it gets rid of a few. It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle", and real errors like overvoting. Software shenanigans are almost pointless, because the piece of paper is the vote record, and the voter checks it.*
Machines can also be more usable for people with input/output difficulties (poor eyesight, motor control, whatever).
---
*I say "almost" because we all know that plenty of people won't check it. Vision problems are also a concern here, but not any more so than with plain paper.
Which you can already see happening in areas where voting machines are used. This is especially problematic if specific regions with known political majorities can be targeted and sabotaged.
There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher or an overhauled ballot design.
Even just keeping the problems that exist with paper ballots beats any risk that introducing electronics in the process pose.
That's fair, but if that happens, we have a very gentle fallback to just manually marking the ballots again.
> There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher
I direct your attention to the state of Florida, November 2000.
If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them.
A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.
Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different?
> If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote
No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.
Yeah, they definitely are. People mark them all sorts of ways.
Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.
Look at the last Russian election, there were a lot of districts where busy hands produced a lot more votes than the number of real people that actually showed up to vote. (Russian voting stations have live video feeds, and Polish journalists sat down to count the number of people who voted, and then compare that to the officially reported votes.)
Or the counts could have been simply altered as they were reported. Complaining, reporting would get people an unwanted visit, so why bother?
Maybe. But keep in mind that they know how many people voted at a given venue. So it's not sufficient to simply add a bunch of ballots, you also have to remove and destroy the same number of legitimate ballots. Maybe the ballots will be timestamped/marked in some way that can't easily be faked? Then you have to use an actual machine, and space out the ballots so it doesn't look suspicious.
> A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.
That's certainly a concern, especially if the ballots are marked as I mentioned above.
In France we don't actually write anything. When we enter the room we're given one paper per candidate with the name and logo printed clearly. Once in the voting booth we put one or none in the enveloppe. That's it. Problem solved.
The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.
I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand elections are monitored by the Electoral Commission who employ people to watch every step of the process. In addition every political party is entitled to send scrutineers to polling places and the count. The boxes are shown to the scrutineers who verify it to be empty, then sealed. The boxes are never taken out of sight. Every step of the process is under multiple eyes.
This seems to work well. It's possible to double vote by visiting multiple stations but in practice this is rare. It does happen but the electoral commission do analysis on the votes to ensure it didn't affect the outcome. Those responsible are prosecuted.
And if you think about it, you actually don't want to check that _your_ vote has been counted.
*reasonable exceptions exists
If the envelope contains more than one vote, but all are the same, it counts as one. If the envelop contains more than one vote but they are different it does not count.
In the voting school there are randomly chosen citizens and party representatives that identify the voters, all adults must have a national ID, and count the votes.
It works, and it will need a massive amount of people to change a significant amount of votes.
Should people who screw up their votes that much even get their votes counted? Maybe these problems are filtering out people whose votes shouldn't be counted in the first place. If they don't understand the (very simple) mechanics of the voting process, I can't imagine how they can understand politics enough to make an intelligent vote.
Also, by the same logic, they could botch what they touch on the screen anyway, and the output of the machine wouldn't give us any insight into what happened during that process.
The fact is, in any election, you only get a few people marking papers like this. At the final local counts, the total spoiled, unmarked, etc. ballot counts are read out as separate totals. Very rarely is this total a number that has any affect on the overall outcome. Average rejection rate of ballot papers is around 0.28%. In those rare instances where it's that close to matter, there would be recounts & additional checks against those spoiled ballots.
As a side note, it baffles me that any country would ever not have simple paper ballots with pens/pencils. Pens are safest IMO & pencils should probably be discouraged, I don't personally agree with the (generally historic) reasons for pencils being preferred.
The number of people available to count ballots scales pretty close to linearly with the number of ballots cast. So what issue is the tabulating machine addressing?
So no, not the same as human ballot counters at all.
Secure transactions with your bank are doable, because there is no need to ensure anonymity from your bank (quite the opposite: your bank needs to know your identity).
Secure transactions while keeping the secret ballot is very very difficult to do. And secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
An important part in reviewability is simplicity: If you come up with an algorithm that provides all those properties but requires a PhD in mathematics to be properly understood, guess where Average Joe tells you to stick it. It's very hard to build trust with a screen that essentially just tells you "We did everything correctly! Honest!".
That's the reason for the highest German court to declare voting machines unusable here.
In your country, perhaps, but in my country (Denmark), it's usually two weeks. But still manage to count our paper ballots. Usually within 2 days.
Not always. There are jurisdictions voting is done just a week before takeover.
Simple have the machine print two reports. the copy given to the voter clearly states there vote and produces a bar code type mark at the bottom and top of the form. at the back sealed is a another copy of all bar codes printed.
when an election is contested the roll of bar codes recorded can be compared to the electronic reports. a voter can also use their phone or scanner at any government office to verify their vote again and verify it was counted.
however we still need some form of picture id that can be issued and encoded into the vote so that both sides are satisfied.
Nope nope nope. This is highly undesirable because it allows votes to be sold/forced out of people.
There are so many candidates, we have hit the limit of the printing presses (a ballot paper 1.2m or so wide). No doubt that width seem reasonable at the time at it is wider than the ballot boxes - so you get a ballot paper can't actually lie flat.
Sadly that wasn't enough to fix the problem, so that had to shrink the font used. In fact that shrank it so much people could no longer read it, so they issued a magnifying glass with each paper.
Just so you have the picture clear in your mind: the ballot paper is so big it won't fit in the ballot box, ad the writing on it so small they issues magnifying glasses. Seeing all candidates names is literally impossible. http://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332
Now onto the next step. The voting system is so complex, the outcome it's known for at least a month. As this is Australia they do use computers but someone has to accurately enter all those marks on a paper that has to be read with a magnifying glass.
So while electronic voting may not make much sense where you live, there are places in the work where it is the only sane option.
Paper ballots counted by electronic means should be just as suspect, as whoever hacks the counting machine could set vote totals to be just shy of the limit required to initiate a manual recount.
All votes should be counted by hand.
I like the idea of optical scanning with random audits. That is you'll scan them, then keep them locked up together with subtotals for each box. You can audit that the subtotals add up, and then randomly pick boxes to hand count. You can then verify that the votes in the box match the subtotals for that box.
Hand counting, in public, at the voting site, puts the count in view of all interested parties. Any errors or corruption are the results of the collected views of those present. Electronic counting, in any form, adds to that the views of whomever builds, delivers, and collects the electronic count.
Joseph Stalin
Anyway the conclusion was that all systems have some non-zero error rate, but the most reliable was paper ballots with optical readers. Ability to audit was important too.
So this paper was discussed here and I thought it might make some impact on the voting systems in the US. After all, I thought, here we had a credible study, the merits were being discussed, and so on.
Of course what happened was that my state (PA) adopted all electronic systems, with poor audit trail, etc. I don't think any legislature anywhere made a good faith effort to weigh the possible options in a rational way. I think the vendors came in, gave a presentation, and the everybody went with their gut feel.
when it comes to bulk counting the electronic version is used or a printout of every single bar code value is mass scanned back in.
how else can you have a paper ballot that cannot be altered?
Votes being edited isn’t a fear here. We write with pencils in fear of disappearing ink but the whole counting process is monitored by the candidates, with no claims of vote editing.
With simple, boring techniques requiring the presence of multiple scrutineers appointed by different candidates. The process relies on mutual suspicion to detect problems at every step.
In an Australian election, all ballot boxes are numbered. The seals are also numbered. When a ballot box is assembled, the seal numbers and box number are logged, signed by the senior Electoral Officer present and countersigned by at least two scrutineers appointed by different candidates.
Ballots are not numbered, but are counted as they are dispensed. Each is initialled by the official who hands it to the voter. This process is observable by scrutineers.
When time comes to count, the box numbers are cross-checked with the logs, again under scrutineers. When the ballots are hand-counted, it happens with scrutineers watching. When the tallies are made, it happens with scrutineers present.
When any of the scrutineers disagrees with some aspect of the process, they can appeal to the electoral commission. If they're dissatisfied, the matter can be taken to the Court of Disputed Returns.
So far as I am aware, only once, in over a century of Australian elections, have ballot boxes been lost. That election was voided and rerun from scratch.
Paper works. You just need to see how other people are already using it successfully.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter-verified_paper_audit_t...
And yes, we do take elections pretty seriously around here. After the "System blackout" of 1988, it is not possible to have any sort of legitimacy without a robust election process with heavy involvement from the public. It is also one of the most expensive systems around the world, but at least we can be reasonably certain that the rascals that rule us are indeed the rascals the majority did choose.
You could, for instance, not have elections on a weekday as a start.
> The counterpoint of decentralization - there is a single point where final counts happen.
What voting system are you talking about?
1) Secret
2) Unique: one vote per citizen and all votes are worth the same.
3) Universal: no citizens should be prevented from voting.
-
The US doesn't consistently follow these:
- A citizen from state A is worth more than a citizen from state B because of the electoral college.
- A citizen can register to vote in multiple states.
- DNC superdelegates are worth more votes in primaries.
- Right to take time off to vote.
- Geographic location of polling places.
... and a large list of irregularities.
Edit: to the downvoters, your downvotes won't magically and retroactively count as votes in the 2016 election. Why not participate in the discussion instead of the incivility? Or, you know, hypocritically participate in the HN equivalent of the Electoral College, those with downvoting ability.
1) To appease slave-owning states, by allowing slaves to be counted toward the allocation of representatives and electoral votes. No longer relevant after Civil War.
2) To prevent demagogues from gaining popular support. Assumes that electors will meet and decide on a candidate when the electoral college votes, rather than being bound ahead of time. Clearly, did not do this job in 2016.
3) To keep small states from being overwhelmed by large states. Assumes that loyalty and identity are primarily to a state (e.g Virginian) rather than to the country (American). Furthermore, causes undo emphasis on swing states, which are primarily based on how much urban/rural area falls within the state borders.
I have not heard any reasons to dissuade me from the belief that the electoral college is a vestigial organization that no longer serves any purpose.
Edit: Also, your entire comment is a form of personal attack that does not give any argument. At most, you imply that an argument for the existence of the electoral college exists, but give no support for its existence. If you are going to say that a reason exists, at least give a one sentence description, or a link to what you believe that reason to be. As it is, you are disingenuously setting yourself up to say, in effect, "Well, none of those reasons are the one that I was thinking of. I'm keeping the real reason for myself, but feel free to continue guessing while I act like I have the superior position."
It's similar to the idea that each that each state gets the same number of senators. There's a balance between state governance and federal governance, such that you can live in a state more attuned to your preferences. Regardless of your political ideals, this plays out in your favor (I guarantee it, unless you're oddly attracted to the simultaneously bland and chaotic politics of the federal).
As for the claim of undue emphasis on swing states, I'd say then it's working as expected by even allowing swing states to have a chance against California. So I guess we come to our fundamental disagreement: should the majority always be able to railroad all dissenters? The Founding Fathers thought about the same question and figured, no, the majority is not always to be trusted.
To give just a bit more context still, I'm vehemently opposed to Trump for a number of reasons, but by no means see the Democratic party as putting up many good candidates. I just can't stand by their platform on many things. But my point is that while I would have liked, say, Rubio as president, the majority of Republicans selected Trump. The majority did something I really disliked.
The Electoral College is there to have some kind of counterbalance to oppressive majority. Whether it's truly effective is a matter for another, more detailed debate. All I asked in my original comment is that people not dismiss it as ill-thought-out, unfair or archaic without giving it some thought.
Edit in response to your edit: obviously I'm not disingenuously writing some alternative argument. I wrote this before your edit.
You didn't simply ask people to give it some thought. You implied the person you were addressing hadn't. Then you reacted to the resulting downvotes by calling them uncivil and hypocritical and snarking about the 2016 election. You went on to imply that your opponent wants "to railroad all dissenters", which is hardly a charitable interpretation.
Ballots and guides are mailed out 2 to 4 weeks before voting day. All voters need to do is fill out their ballot at their leisure and put it in a mailbox or ballot drop box before the end of election day.
I see no compelling reason to prefer any other system in existence.
Having monitored physical polling stations where people vote in secret removes this opportunity, because I can only see that you voted, but not what you voted for.
In practice I don't think there are even fringe accusations of it being a problem.
> Having monitored physical polling stations where people vote in secret removes this opportunity
It reduces, but does not remove, the opportunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_...
Currently.
> You wouldn't be able to realistically intimidate 10,000 people and watch each one drop their ballot into a box.
Your fanatical followers and/or henchman can do that. You can also use photos/videos to watch "your" voters more scalably. Another option is to pay them rather than intimidating.
The risks should be weighed against the benefits of greater turnout, but countries and even US states have found ways to improve turnout while keeping the safeguards of the secret ballot.
Before 1932, the vote in Brazil was not secret. It resulted in widespread voter coercion and bribery, a system we used to call "halter voting". The "colonel" (powerful landowner or authority figure) would use the threat of violence to force those in his electoral "corral" to vote as he pleased.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
Russia:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_instances_of_ballot_bo...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
Ultimately if the people in power do not respect the democratic process, they can and will hack the voting and vote count process.
In addition to that modern democracies suffer from selection bias. The persons you can vote for are often a hand or self selected group of people which will not threaten the existing oligarchy.
The only voting system I know that would be free of all these problems is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition . Because the greek understood already 2500 years ago:
"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)