We haven't managed such a thing for commerce and finances, though. Elections have far more consequences than money moving, as well, so failures are much worse and less tolerated.
In NYC recently I did some ecommerce. I paid for 5 delivery meals and 4 of them were stolen by the drivers. Amazon is full of fraudulent products. Banks in the US are full of loopholes, like ACH not providing sufficient auth. Trust in commerce and finances online are low. Systems fail frequently, and "only money" is lost by big corps usually, so it's not considered a big deal to the general public. I would not use that as a model for elections.
They're not really comparable. If someone steals your banking info, the bank can use their funds to restore your money, and that also means they're incentivized to prevent fraud. What happens if something goes wrong during voting? Are the incentives of the people running the system aligned with voters' interests?
Gerrymandering can exist with both systems. Voting machines have no benefits at all.
However, i-Voting does have the benefit of making it much harder to cause voter supression (assuming there's free ($) access to whatever provides access to voting).
The big difference is with commerce and finance, we want to keep track of who moved what where. With voting, we deliberately want to keep votes secret, so no one can figure out who voted for which candidate, and only know the total votes each candidate got. To minimize coercion, we also want to make sure that a voter can only prove they voted, but not which candidate they voted for. These constraints make electronic voting at least an order of magnitude harder.
One of the key components of voting is not being able to tell who voted for someone. That requirement doesn't exist in these other sectors that are online.
> Senator Ron Wyden, a leading Capitol Hill voice on election security, has persistently pushed legislation that would federally mandate paper ballots, among other security measures. The legislation has been blocked by the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
It's pretty clear what is happening. Given the obvious international attacks on US democracy in the last elections, it seems like a no-brainer that we'd have a bi-partisan effort to secure our elections. But we don't, and the side that doesn't want better election security is also the side that "won" the last election, while it was being hacked by foreign adversaries and while publicly asking the very same adversaries for assistance in hacking the Democrat's emails.
The beautiful thing with paper ballots is that the case is clear cut and strong enough without even dredging any of that up... it's just that partisan politics has become so entrenched that even mutually beneficial bills need to be passed with concessions to the less interested party.
I'm fine with a debate on the specifics but paperless voting machines have no place in the world. What you're giving up far outweighs the marginal benefits.
It absolutely is, while the winner may be influenced by the lack of a paper trail the real cost to society is the erosion of trust, there is a not insignificant portion of the country that currently believes our last election was no democratic[1]. If the Dems win in 2020 and the GOP similarly questions the legitimacy of the election - whether legitimately or not (say if Trump were to refuse to leave until a recount could be conducted) then that proportion will grow. There is a level that proportion of mistrust can reach where the US will devolve into anarchy, then everyone loses the game forever.
Just to note, please don't read politics into this, I've attached my own leanings clearly in case anyone thinks I favor one side or the other but I am trying to state this without it being partisan in nature.
1. And while I'm a progressive, I'm not in this camp.
I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about blockchain here... we need democratization of information. How can one trust the vote counters? Put it in a distributed ledger with checks and balances.
Is there a good solution that covers voter anonymity, guarantee of record, immutability and verification without exposing the voting process to vote stealing? I haven't seen one that seems to cover all the bases in terms of security and, while I adore computers, I think while we're on paper we can rely on societal pressure to cover up some of the more minor defects in our system while transitioning voting to blockchain opens us up to computer based attacks... to reword, we're sort of benefiting from security by obscurity simply by the volume of how many checks are currently on the system and how difficult it is to simultaneously break all those checks - my concern is that in an entirely electronic system executing a time sensitive attack where multiple actors need to be compromised in a co-ordinated manner before they can communicate their compromised state becomes much more do-able... if your attack relies on Sharon transferring the ballots to a secure van at the same time as Leonard in the next county over then it'll fail since people are unreliable, but computers are more predictable.
When the hackability of electronic voting machines first made national news during the Bush vs Kerry election of 2004, a lot of Democrats huffed and puffed and stomped their feet, vowing to get rid of electronic voting machines... until a few months passed and the news cycle rolled on to something else, after which all those outraged Democrats apparently didn't feel it was a pressing issue anymore, and up to the present day those electronic voting machines are still with us. This demonstrates that the Democrats as a whole don't care enough to make this a priority, and might even be complicit with the Republicans in undermining our democracy.
I do not agree with your conclusion that your story demonstrates that "Democrats as a whole" don't care, especially given that the events took place before many of the present Democrats were even politically active, elected Democrats.
Regardless, your whataboutism doesn't matter here. Presently, the Democrats "as a whole" are united on election security, and the Republicans "as a whole" are united against it.
The quicker he leaves office, the better off all Americans will be.
He is all about Republican Power at all costs. Nothing else matters to him. Nothing. He is pleased as poop that the current sitting nincompoop President is resetting the bar lower for what the average American will tolerate from an elected official.
There's a strong conservative distaste for federal control of the conduct of elections, which has been a power reserved to state and local governments. Your suggestion is not irrational at all, but it's far from "clear what is happening."
Electronic voting and vote counting machines pose one of the greatest threats to democracy.
We should really just go back to paper ballots, which are not perfect but are a lots less hackable at scale and are much more trackable than electronic machines are.
The really dumb problem with those is that the vote counts are stored in removable media - back in 2000 they were often referred to as "cartridges", and when mandated to do a recount, certain election officials choose to interpret it as just checking again what vote counts were reported by the cartridges. Or worse, just checking their Access database again that they put the vote count into, to re-read the vote totals there. This is some of what happened during the 2000 recounts. Ballots that were supposed to be recounted were never actually physically recounted.
Still, better than touchscreens, if you can mandate audits and that recounts actually mean counting the physical ballots themselves.
Which combines the best of both (speed and audit-ability).
But you'd need mandatory random audits, and a legal requirement to keep the paper originals for up to years.
There's been cases of the paper ballots being destroyed while legal action was ongoing, and a never audited system cannot be trusted (because there's implied trust, not tested trust).
Relying on randomness is not good enough, not for voting. A chance, no matter how small, of a different candidate than the one actually voted in by the people getting in to office is not worth the risk.
No matter how small? What about one in a million? One in ten million? This is literally what statistics is for - randomness is a powerful tool against fraud, not some weak cop-out.
I've never seen anyone advocate abolishing recounts for close races. Random audits all of the time is an addition to current procedures, not a replacement.
If the result is 49.999% vs. 50.001%, you cannot conclude anything meaningful about the will of the people. Maybe the weather was just slightly worse in a neighborhood supporting the losing candidate and it tipped the result slightly.
So even if the voting process is perfect, that close of a result is totally random for other reasons.
Most people don't seem to be capable of thinking about non-determinism like this, though. Witness the huge number of Americans who think the presidential election is illegitimate because Trump got 46% of the vote to Clinton's 48%, when honestly 46 vs. 48 is very little difference in terms of what they mean about the general will about Americans.
On the other end of the political spectrum, witness the amount of Brits who think a 52-48 vote to leave the EU is somehow relevant.
In calculus/analysis terms: this is why proportional representation parliamentary systems are better -- because the function from "how many people support which parties" to "what policies you end up with" is not discontinuous.
If the UK ran on a proportional system, they'd be getting some sort of very soft, Norway model Brexit. If the US did, a center-right Democrat like Clinton or Biden would be PM.
I'd argue we've ended up here exactly because people are impatient and won't wait for results. If you design a system that declares e.g. the presidency two days later, you're going to run into a lot of resistance.
It would be a way better feuilleton to get a trickle of the results during 48hrs.
More seriously, France has paper voting, yet results are published at 8:00:00pm, closing time of the last voting offices. How? Statistics. And only takes the night to confirm, when we’re on a 50,3% kind of results. And it’s already 60m voters; If it works for 60m people, it will work for 300m (especially if only 120m vote in USA).
In Russia we had cameras on approximately half of polling stations (about 45 000) and the video was streamed online (the site didn't allow saving videos, but activists managed to write scripts to do it in a short time). The total expenses for this were about $41M.
> But you'd need mandatory random audits, and a legal requirement to keep the paper originals for up to years
Or you publish all the marked ballots, so that anyone who wanted to could do their own count to verify the results.
You can also design this so that any individual voter can check to see that their ballot was included in the count, and counted correctly, without being able to prove to someone else that they voted for a particular candidate (so that vote buying schemes aren't enforceable).
See Scantegrity [1] for a specific system with these properties, which can be implemented on top of existing optical scan vote counting machines. For a more general look at securing voting, see end-to-end auditable voting systems [2].
Again referencing Minnesota, because I've been an election judge and we have the best system in the US...
Mandatory random audits are part of the system. We get automated counts from the Scantron machines, but those are unofficial, preliminary. On election night, there are random audits of some number of voting machines for hand-counts, to detect systematic fraud. And the total number of ballots in each machine is hand-counted to make sure it matches the totals given by the machine.
Going with a hybrid voting system (say filling out paper ballots but having a machine count them, or using a voting machine and having it print paper ballots) isn't getting the best of both worlds, it's getting the worst of both.
To use a metaphor, it's not having 2 locks on your front door, it's having 2 different keys that open the same lock.
Say you have a hybrid system, and the numbers come in and the electronic and paper counts disagree. Which one is used as the true vote?
If you take the paper, then what was the point of the electronic? If you take the electronic what was the point of the paper? If you throw out all votes where the paper and electronic disagree, you just enabled any "fraudster" the ability to disenfranchise any subset of votes by breaking either system.
You also can't exactly pick and choose which to accept per instance (could you imagine the abuse that could come from that!?), and methods of "averaging" them don't really solve the problem as much as they make it marginally harder to pull off (to sway 1% of votes in a 50%/50% weighted system, you'd only need to hack 2% of the electronic machines). And of course using a significant "disagreement" between paper and electronic to trigger re-doing an election isn't a solution either because if they hacked it the first time, chances are they can do it again. Not mention that having a second voting day because the first was taken over by fraud is going to be a logistical nightmare, it will change who can come out to vote, and it may even change who/what people will vote for.
If what you want is an audit or a second count, then call for more exit polls or an explicitly secondary system. But this whole dual-voting idea isn't really a good one when you really dive into the dirty details of how it would work.
It gives you grounds to annul the result and re-vote, after re-verifying the software. You do open the possibility of secondary effects (votes not on the annual election day typically get much lower turnout) and denial-of-service attacks.
I went to watch a count for the local elections in May in the UK (I was a candidate)
The papers were counted in front of me and dozens of other people from the various parties. I could see each one going into each pile of ten, each pile of ten being bundled as a pile of 100 and put into a basket, the ambiguous ones (blank, voting for multiple candidates, writing "WANK" next to all candidates but one (which had "NOT WANK" written next to it), went into a separate pile.
At the end of the counting the returning officer went through the ambiguous ones with the candidate or agent and explained if he would accept it or not.
This doesn't take long - it scales, and is fully repeatable by completely different people if needed. The problems that seem to occur are not in the count, but in the returning officers (who tend to be doddery old men) writing the wrong result down, and for some reason this result is final, but that's the same whatever the counting method.
Reminds me of the line from some American tv show where one character says "I don't vote, I just write down Jesus," and another says "we count that as a Republican vote."
Yup (although that wasn't at my count, or indeed election - there are rules about secrecy so I couldn't possibly comment on some of the actual comments)
Since a lot of the ways we do things in the states are pretty ridiculous, I feel the need to clarify for foreigners that this does not actually fly. As I recall, it was only a few election cycles ago someone in my state had been convicted of vote fraud for for filling in the republican candidate option on votes that were left blank on ballots which had otherwise voted republican on every other vote. This amounted to two modified ballots.
Are you talking about the ballot harvesting in North Carolina, or the fraud investigations in Georgia? If it's the latter, we don't have any good way to estimate the impact because the ruling party destroyed evidence and canned the investigations[0]
Here in Russia (and I assume in other countries too) we have rules where the mark can be put and where it cannot be, so if you write anything outside of the box, it won't be counted.
My understanding is that the ballot is more complicated in US elections. You are not voting for a single MP, you are voting for a Representative to the house, and one for the state house. You may be voting for a Senator and a state Governor. You will probably be voting for a host of local officials. In many (most?) states, there are ballot initiatives (sort of like referendums) on various issues. It gets complicated, fast.
That's just numbers. You're making say 5 votes rather than 1. In some places in the UK we can have MEP, MP, Borough Council, Local Council and Mayor all elected on the same day, as well as local referendums.
That's not complicated -- just post each vote in a different box (paper can be different colours) and count them separately. OK it may take a day or two to find out who your local parish councillor is. Whoopee.
Just numbers. But leaving aside ballot questions (of which there are usually around a half dozen in Massachusetts, more in some places like California), there were 13 state-level elected officials in 2018 plus whatever county-level or local officials there were on the town ballot. So you can be making 20-30 choices. That's a lot of paper shuffling.
You don't really. There's usually lots of news about most of the ballot questions and the top state level offices. You may or may not be familiar with your local Congressional race and the lower-level state offices.
You probably start to get fuzzy about your state rep/senator. And are pretty much clueless about the county Sheriff, Board of Selectmen, and Register of Deeds.
In practice, a lot of the positions lower down on the list are running unopposed or have been in their position and seemed to have done fine for a while. Of course, this being Massachusetts, a lot of these seats are pretty much Democrat locks anyway.
In Colorado, we often often have ~15 ballot initiatives, as well as city, county, and state elections. That's on top of the federal elections. Most of our domestic policy is dictated at the local level rather than the federal level, and it is this decentralized nature which flummoxes our European friends.
Local referendums rather than representative democracy is odd - don’t you pay your reps to research the options and make the beat descision. I wouldn’t have time to understand 15 options
We tend to have 5 or 6 layers of government too so I don’t see the problem there.
We do not have a federal sales tax (i.e. VAT). Europe hasn't had yearly GDP growth over 1% in 25 years, and Europe is issuing bonds at negative % rates. The U.S. subsidizes the European military defenses and pharmaceutical prices to boot.
I have no issue with European countries sovereign decisions, but when Europeans project their ideas on Americans I take great offense.
I'd go the other way -- use machines to mark ballots in a human-readable way, so that manual processes can be used to validate the machine processes be questioned.
The whole electronic voting movement started because people had difficulty with ballots in Florida; a _good_ UI would help alleviate this.
Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds.
You get the speed of automation with a paper trail in case you have to go back and audit.
EDIT for those replying that you feel voting should be anonymous. With anonymous voting, how do you stop the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" ala Broward County Florida every election? If you can't tie a ballot back to a voter, how do you know the ballot is legitimate?
What is a "strong voter ID"? This sounds like voter disenfranchisement or a poll tax, or both (and both are unconstitutional). Voters are not required to have ID, nor should they be. Not everyone has an ID, and many states have specifically passed laws to make it more expensive and more difficult for some people to get government-issued photo ID.
Without a massive outreach program intended to reach all voters and supply them with convenient, free of charge voter IDs, and a system that can continuously and quickly resolve errors, such a "strong voter ID" would be unconstitutional (for good reason).
It solves a problem that doesn’t exist in practice and is impossible to exploit at scale even in theory. It would be good, but it’s not terribly important.
It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. You can't even begin to analyze the problem so its laughable for you to assert such things.
It leaves a record that the somebody else cast a vote. This would be noticed rapidly if the real person then showed up to vote and was prevented because an impersonator got there first. If that doesn’t happen, you can ask them if they voted. For people you can’t ask and know that they couldn’t have voted (for example, the record is stale and they’ve moved or died) then you know that any record of them voting must be an impersonator.
How often do any of these things actually happen? It’s all public record. The data is there for analysis. And yet nobody can point to more than a handful of examples.
I love this argument because it exposes that voter legitimacy is not based on any sort of logic or evidence, but based on feeling more secure about it.
> It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence.
If it's happening at any significant rate, without perfect knowledge of which eligible voters won't vote (or have someone else try to steal their vote, which is just as bad for the prospective vote thief), it leaves quite tangible evidence in the form of people presenting themselves to vote under names that have already voted.
The absence of this occurring fairly strongly indicates that vote stealing by impersonation isn't a thing that happens at any meaningful rate.
Or people are smart and only pick names of people who haven't voted in quite some time. 2 out of 3 people don't vote. If you have ever volunteered at a precinct you would know that it's literally just an excel sheet of names and you're supposed to check someone off. It's very easy to check the wrong line and your failsafe is easily explained away as a mistake instead of raising any sort of alarm. There is no one investigating that people actually voted.
> Or people are smart and only pick names of people who haven't voted in quite some time.
If there was more than what vote theft operation in the same area, you'd still expect them to have collisions.
> 2 out of 3 people don't vote.
Wrong. A majority of the voting-eligible population votes in Presidential elections.
> If you have ever volunteered at a precinct you would know that it's literally just an excel sheet of names
A printed paper sheet, sure. Whether Excel is used in making it or not is immaterial (I assume it's generated straight from the voter database, which I hope isn't Excel.)
> and you're supposed to check someone off.
California state law requires the actual voter to sign in on the list; I would think that this is normal.
> It's very easy to check the wrong line
If it was a just a check off, maybe it would be easy.
> It's very easy to check the wrong line and your failsafe is easily explained away as a mistake instead of raising any sort of alarm.
Even if it was just a check box, you'd also need to have extremely lax procedures that all the poll workers and any observers were all in on for this basic integrity check to be routinely ignored.
Given the political factions interested in selling the idea of rampant voter fraud, you'd expect them to raise a ruckus if there were actual instances of this going on routinely.
You'd also have to either randomly mark off some non-voter (potentially creating a new instance of the problem) each time this happened or turn in a tally sheet where the count of marked voters didn't match the ballot count. The former would magnify the visibility of the casual disregard of integrity, the latter would definitely raise an alarm in counts.
If there is an observer in the polling station, how are you going to throw ballots in a box without them noticing? You need to find people who would pretend that they are voters. It only works when nobody is watching (when nobody cares).
Also, here in Russia, voters put a signature in the voters registry when receiving a ballot.
You're almost there. "Fixing" that problem - and you'll find many folks who don't want the federal government to have ID information for everyone - is not simple. In the meantime, multifarious ID laws will empower discrimination and disenfranchisement.
What about the disenfranchisement of citizens who's will is overrun by people not eligible to vote? Are you really trying to convince me that we should make our elections insecure because some people want to vote in federal election while simultaneously not wanting the federal government to have their ID. You do realize you have to register to vote right? Why should we all make our election insecure for people who don't even trust the government themselves?
Because its a free country, because a federal ID disenfranchises those who will find it difficult or impossible to get such an ID, because not trusting the government is the whole point of the US constitution.
It is disenfranchisement. It can cost almost a hundred dollars just for the IDs to be issued some places. If you have lost some identity documents you may need to request records from other places to substantiate name changes. That is to say marriage licenses and divorce decrees. Gathering this additional documentation may require another hundred bucks easy.
The common reply to this is that you need these documents anyway to work, to drive etc. This is true but ignores all the peripheral people you don't see. People whose roles in their family are support or who themselves are in need of support because of illness. Not all of them drive or work and they are citizens too.
It seems to me that the easier solution is to make public records free. Let the taxes you already pay serve to pay the salary of the peon at the printer. Then the people clamoring for us to check ID's to keep the "illegals" from voting can be happy and those people can be enfranchised.
You're missing the point about IDs being incredibly easy to obtain. They are not in the US. Additionally, there's a long history of using voting requirements to disenfranchise voters.
I can't comment on the countries in the picture you've linked. I'll guess that most or all of them make it both easy and required to have a national ID card. That is not the case in the United States.
Consider a working class non-driver who has never travelled overseas. What is their ID?
Would you propose a new state or federal ID card? Great. How likely is it that the state or federal government will produce a system for issuing these that is easy to access, widely available, free, quick to issue IDs, etc? How likely do you think it is that politicians will attempt to modify the system for issuing these IDs so that their opponents' voters will find it more challenging to receive them?
If your answer is "likely" and "unlikely" respectively, you are naive to the history of voter disenfranchisement and vote-system-gaming in the United States. Much of it is based on race.
Your post is a logical fallacy - it assumes that other countries have the same history, laws, political structure and modern problems as the US does, which is a verifiably false assumption. Your list is also flat out wrong. Voters in Canada are not required to have ID.
Your list is also without sources and presenting an oversimplification of laws to the point of being presented in bad faith, with intentional misrepresentation of the original data. Your list is a lie of checkmarks, intended for propaganda and not to inform the reader.
I don't understand what you're saying at all. From your link, Option 3:
> Option 3: If you don't have ID
lays it out pretty clearly:
> You can still vote if you declare your identity and address in writing and have someone who knows you and who is assigned to your polling station vouch for you.
No ID needed, anywhere in Canada, ever, to vote. Period.
And I made no assumptions whatsoever in my post. It is your graphic that is full of false assumptions.
I really, really don't understand. Where did you get this information?? It is false - it is lies.
> That person needs ID to be assigned to their polling station to vouch for you.
That is absolutely not true. The site says,
> The voucher must be able to prove their identity and address. A person can vouch for only one person (except in long-term care institutions).
Nothing about ID. Just "prove their identity and address", which does not require ID.
> Canada very effectively requires ID to vote, sorry that offends you.
This is false. I am not offended by facts, or by your lies.
Canada does not require ID to vote. You are spreading lies by continuing to state that it does.
Have you ever lived there? Do you know anything about Canada from experience? You are lying and citing false information to claim falsehoods that are extremely dangerous.
I think lots of countries will stamp your wrist and check for a stamp before allowing a vote to happen. I could be mistaken, but something akin to this is possible.
In Russia you need to show an ID (internal passport) to receive a ballot and put a signature into the voters registry. So duplicate voting is possible only with the help of election staff (usually in such case a person has something in their passport, or says a code word that gives a hint that he should receive a ballot without checking his name against the registry).
Ok, and how do you verify that your vote was cast for X candidate (i.e. that the machine didn't count your vote for Y candidate)?
There's no way to do that without tying the voter to the vote somehow. Why not hash the voter ID + a secret of your choosing and store that with the vote? Then, even if counting by hand, you can verify your vote was indeed cast for X candidate.
That's a trivial problem, long solved. In order to vote, one must be registered. Registrations are printed on a paper book for that precinct. When you show up to vote, you have to sign your name in the registration book. Then they give you a ballot.
Not really. The odd vote here and there might be gamed, but enough votes to statistically affect most elections is extremely difficult. Think about it. You need a voter, physically present at the precinct, matched up to a registration. What does that mean?
Assume a million votes are cast in an election. To move the needle 1%, you need 10,000 votes. And let's assume a single fake voter can realistically cast ten votes in different precincts, considering vote time and travel time (they can't just keep coming to the same precinct, for fear of recognition).
So you need 10,000 fake registrations, that must match real addresses, and you need 1000 people working all day at fake voting. One voter out of every thousand would be working for this conspiracy.
Now, you need to do this in complete secrecy. Nobody can talk. Nobody can gather evidence. They can't go to the police, or the media. Even one leak is enough to not only ruin the scheme, but create a nationally known scandal. And if it can be connected in any way to a particular political party, that party's name would be dragged through the mud across the country.
It's insanity. No one could safely pull it off.
You know what can be pulled off, though? Voter suppression. Make it much more difficult for certain categories of voters to actually vote. Such as poor people who might not have ID (or might hesitate to use it). Then, convince a large swath of the public - people like you - that this is about security, not suppression. That form of election manipulation is now seen as patriotism, not corruption.
Most of that isn't true. When I lived in California, you simply asserted that your name was X, where X is someone on the list, and you got X's ballot. No need to know their address.
If they already voted? "Oops, I forgot."
If they haven't voted and come in later, so what? You're long gone.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we have two people cross checking each other to consult 3-ring binders of registered voters for the particular district they are assigned to vote in. Your name is check-marked as part of handing you a paper ballot.
This may sound laborious and slow but it should be enough to block repeat voting, IMHO.
Are paper votes in the US not anonymous? Like... with two envelopes and stuff? I don't see where it matters if persons or machines count which cross is marked on the ballot there tbh.
In Ohio, they scan your ID, then keep track of the ballot number they give you.
Thus, if they audit they can be sure the ballot was cast by a legitimate voter.
If you don't tie ballots to voters, you go full Florida where they just keep "finding" boxes of prefilled ballots.
You MUST tie a ballot to a voter if you want your elections to have any integrity at all. There is no other way to prevent double voting, voting out of precinct, etc.
>If you don't tie ballots to voters, you go full Florida where they just keep "finding" boxes of prefilled ballots.
Broward county, 2016 election. They found a box of filled out ballots at the airport return in a rental car trunk... never a word about it again. Same county, defying a judges orders, the police stopped anyone from entering/auditing the count under direction of then admin Brenda Snipes.
Guess who oversaw Bush / Gore recount? Brenda Snipes.
The Bush/Gore recount was 2000, 3 years before Snipes was appointed admin; that being said her entire history is a tale of general incompetence culminating in getting kicked out last year for bungling the 2018 election so you aren't that far off the mark
A machine that produces no paper record that can be verified at time of voting by the voter can trivially be changed by the machine.
A lock generally needs to be stronger than the motivation of a would be thief. In this case we are talking about controlling the disposition of trillions of dollars so there probably isn't a lock in the world that is good enough.
Based on prior stories many of the machines aren't merely not good enough they are quite laughable and indeed often so old that no parts can be sourced anywhere because they haven't been made in decades.
Paper ballots in the US are anonymous. But the blockchain-solves-everything crowd sees blockchain-identifiable ballots as key to solving the problem of not having blockchain in the election, so they invented "But I need to see that my ballot exists!" as a justification.
How do you know you have to go back and audit except by looking at the forgeable vote counting results? Those results could easily be hacked to not meet whatever the criteria are for an audit.
Hand counted paper ballots are the only way to be sure, and elections are important enough to be worth it.
"Found" boxes of ballots have had their chain of custody broken, and must be thrown out. All interested parties should be able to follow the votes. Put them on a open trailer, covered with a clear tarp if necessary in transport.
For some weird reason, Germany has been doing the impossible for decades now. Nobody "finds" boxes of ballots here, and all votes are cast anonymously. Several people in this thread have already explained how this magic trick works (registration book, each voter is ticked off, number of ballots from precincts are counted against ticked-off voters = can't find thousands of additional ballots).
Yep, there were several counties where they "found" extra ballots that they missed during the count in 2018 in the US.
It was across both parties in multiple states wherein the "found" votes were heavily favoring one party or the other (a few were well outside 3 standard deviations from the current votes, even in areas that were normally not heavily favoring one side).
So you are basically saying it doesn't work because people in the US just don't care if there is obvious bullshit going on. Okay, great (or not so great for the self-acclaimed forefront of democracy), but why should that change if the votes aren't anonymous anymore? Why should people suddenly start to care if the results actually make any basic sense and aren't obviously either manipulated or erroneous?
Any precinct reporting more votes than possible given the numbers of eligible voters is recounted. If the recounts can't manage to arrive at results that make any sense at all the entire precinct is ignored. Where's the problem?
As far as I know, the secret ballot is present in every state within the USA. Could you please cite your sources if you have different info (I've lived in 9 different states)?
Why is the "speed of automation" important? Just hire more people to count if it's too slow.
Voter ID is entirely orthogonal to this issue. Tying ballots to a voter is not desirable, since it opens the door for voter intimidation.
Edit to respond to the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" comment: anonymous voting means you don't know how someone voted, but whether or not they voted is still public record. The number of ballots counted still needs to match up with the number of votes cast.
I would also add automatic recounting of votes if the electronic count is >1% of exit polls prediction, as well as some statistical recounting of various precincts to check if everything comes up as it's supposed to.
Finally, the punishments need to be strong, swift, and decisive if something does come up as being wrong. You can't just be "oh well, mistakes were made with the hundreds of thousands of mis-counted votes/purged voters. What can you do?!"
No way. None of that. All the people responsible in such a situation should be investigated, and if found guilty punished. Otherwise, there will be no fear of trying to steal the elections, especially if the upside is big.
You have to make that ID national, free, and easily obtained with very little to no wait time. Otherwise, it's going to disenfranchise those without time and/or money.
...and except for the fact that the US Passport Card itself (DS-11) requires another ID card, so the same exact problems arise.
And those IDs usually require proof of residency and/or a copy of a US birth certificate, which can be problematic to acquire or prove in their own ways for the more vulnerable to disenfranchisement (such as the homeless) in our society.
Legislature may overcome that hurdle by amending the Passport Act, making the Passport Card free and internationally valid federal ID document on its own. And do not say that Birth Certificate is too costly.
Audit is separate from recount, though the capacity for the former is equivalent to the capacity for the latter. Audits can be done by third parties as a review without having the force of an official recount (for instance, this happened in Florida in 2000 after the official recount was ended.)
If an election method cannot be audited, it cannot be trusted.
It's the same thing. You can call the case where the counting is not official whatever you want, but the same bar exists. "Audit" requests get challenged in court.
Note I said nothing about whether recountability is a good thing. It's clearly a good thing. Hence we should stick with hand counted paper ballots since machine counting introduces trivial ways to game the vote.
You don't need to trace individual ballots. You just need to count the number of ballots received against the number of votes signed in the registration books. With that simple audit, your whole "we just found this box of ballots" scenario falls apart. That box of ballots would have to be traced back to a precinct, which traces back to a book full of signatures of individual voters, and to handling signoffs by multiple election judges.
Just because Florida is unwilling to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Under a proper federalized system, that shouldn't matter unless one lives in FL. Let them handle their local issues how their voters see fit; they have voter initiatives there. The only people that have issues with the way things are done in other states are people that want to use the federal government to impose their standards and values on people living 100s or 1,000s of miles away (I'm ~2,000 miles from D.C.).
Florida's electoral incompetence and corruption (probably) handed the 2000 presidential election to Bush. Because of that, we wound up with the Iraq war, and a mind-boggling amount of American blood and treasure (not to mention Iraqi lives) wasted on lies. Florida's inability to conduct free and fair elections has tangible consequences on me as a Minnesotan. So yes, I want to impose some standards and values on their elections, because their elections lead to MY president.
Pointing out that bullshit is bullshit is not "intolerant authoritarianism". It's simple honesty.
I'm not suggesting a federal takeover of elections. I am, however, pointing out that some states, like Florida, are running elections so badly that it harms other states.
Not only that, but paper ballots are a threat to the species, which IMO is a bigger threat than a threat to democracy.
I think we should be asking ourselves how to make electronic voting feasible and secure, NOT dismissing it blindly as not possible and refusing to even try.
just call your credit card company(ies)/banks and demand they stop sending you offers in the mail
this action alone will save an enormous amounts of paper, orders of magnitude more than is required for every democratic action you'll participate in with our super low tech future (paper ballots for all), and nicely reduces the amount of shipping/logistics etc. that your local mail delivery service has to do. massive win-win for the planet and democracy
The USPS has subsidized junk mail. I have a mail scale, 90% of the mail sent to me is complete junk. Non-market based entities have no incentive for efficiency.
This isn't the 70s anymore; all paper companies nowadays use tree plantations instead of random old growth, which means paper is now only about as damaging as regular food products.
> Nearly every demonstration of voting machine hacking has required unrestricted physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
For that to be any consolation, we’d have to unconditionally trust those who have physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.
A vote count given by an electronic machine has no such auditability.
> Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
“Hacking” a stack of paper, e.g. ballot stuffing or destroying ballots, is something people can see happen. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to do out in the open with security cameras and the public there to watch. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but you tend to make a much bigger mess doing it.
Also, today an observer can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet if something fishy is happening in the polling station, but nobody can see what happens inside a voting machine and whether it counts the votes properly. Electronic voting is a perfect tool for falsifying election results.
I appreciate your perspective, but these issues should be dealt with by citizens. It is not a global issue how the USA handles its elections. Foreigners weighing-in scare the shit out of our old people. That's how we get epithets like (((globalists))).
>Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.
That assumes they aren't replaced at some point. For a nation-level election this is probably too difficult to significantly influence an election but at even a state level it's relatively doable with a little coercion and/or carefully placed individuals even in 2019 in the United States.
You also have the option to do voter impersonation in states without voting ID laws, again this would mostly only work at a more local level.
Outside of the United States there are all sorts of examples, including standing out the polling places with force to let people know vote our way or we'll shoot you.
What you describe can be easily detected by an observer, who can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet. You cannot take a ballot from the box so that nobody notices. But with electronic voting, you can replace the firmware and nobody notices anything.
>What you describe can be easily detected by an observer,
Have you never heard of bribes or threats? It happens with juries, I imagine it happens with poling places, and I imagine some of those convictions involved exactly that.
If you've reached a point where you are willing to tamper with an election, greasing some palms or finding something to threaten key people with is not going to make you lose a single wink of sleep or have any mental reservations or other hesitations. People like money, like a lot, and if you haven't the funds to bribe them with the 21st century offers a horde easily discoverable information about people and those close to them.
Here in Russia, every candidate can assign up to 2 observers to every polling station (and also one person to the election committee). As the people are chosen by a candidate, we can assume that they are motivated and you cannot easily bribe them.
Also, with presidential elections in 2018, there were no prior notifications and the government didn't know who was going to become an observer before the voting day, which was nice.
Sadly, you cannot become an observer by yourself, I don't like that.
I haven't heard about bribes or threats, but there were cases when an observer was taken away by police for allegedly being too loud and obstructing the voting. In recent elections, independent observers used a Telegram chat for coordination, so that they could ask for consultation or ask someone else to come to the polling station if something happened.
In Russia fraud is usually committed by election staff who often are public school employees, social care or government workers, people who are paid by the government. And typically they prefer to falsify results when there is no observers, they don't want to appear in Youtube videos.
Of course, in other countries the situation may be different.
Also, here in Russia, people who are observers, are often opposition activists, who dislike the government and for example take part in illegal protests and get arrested for this. This is the type of people that would be most difficult to bribe.
Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place. Russia was always founded on liberty and is a living example of it forever. No "blood and soil" or eugenics garbage from the Russians...Yes, that's sarcasm.
The Russian Revolution established a control-freak government that hated freedom; Lenin was a self-annointed genius. The USSR failed because the incentives were misaligned.
My grandparents immigrated from Russia when their parents saw the pogroms in the 1890s. Using scapegoats, promising free stuff, and fear mongering is over 100 year tradition. Emotion and anecdotes over data.
I'm not saying that electoral system in Russia is perfect; it is constantly manipulated by authorities. They are very inventive and develop new techniques every time. Nobody can be trusted, because we saw how the head of central election committee was looking for excuses to justify banning opposition candidates that you mention and ignore their objections. The meetings were livestreamed and I watched hours of such videos trying to clear up everything for myself.
But this allows us to see what measures to ensure transparency work in such circumstances and what don't. We see that independent observers and paper voting at polling stations help to prevent fraud and electronic voting would be completely opaque and uncontrollable.
> Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place
Holy whataboutism. Yes Russia is a far cry from a healthy democracy but that has no bearing in any way on paper ballots. You seem to have just changed the subject entirely.
Translate that concern into action. Volunteer to be an election official yourself and keep an eye on everyone else. Participate in how this thing works. It's really rewarding.
In Minnesota, the problem of individual untrustworthiness is handled by putting multiple people on every task - and those people must be from different political parties. So any time ballots are handled, marked or unmarked, members of at least two different parties are present.
Hack voting machines: trick or bribe an election worker to plug a USB drive into all the machines a week before the election.
Hack paper ballots: bribe the multiple people, including representatives from each party who cares to send one, to look the other way while you steal a box full of paper ballots and substitute your own.
It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder to mess with paper ballots at scale and much easier to secure them.
Electronic voting machines run proprietary code which, AFAIK, was never publicly audited (AFAIK, the manufacturers have resisted auditing efforts bitterly).
How can you trust that the machine will behave as you expect in a "real world" setting, when the results truly count?
IMHO, the biggest risk from electronic voting machines isn't some rando swinging the elections with their 1337 haxx0r skills: the biggest risk is that the machines basically come "pre-hacked" from the factory - either intentionally, or unintentionally (bugs happen).
Election commitee (or whatever it is called in different countries) has unlimited and uncontrolled physical access to those machines and their keys. What stops them from uploading a firmware that would count every N-th vote for candidate A no matter what was voter's choice? How do you detect that?
Unlike electronic voting, paper ballots are much more difficult to manipulate. If a voter has marked a box for candidate X, you cannot change it or ignore it if there are observers. An observer can verify that voting goes according to the rules and votes are counted properly. The most popular way to "hack" paper voting is to organise groups of people and ride them on a bus from one polling station to other so that they can vote multiple times, but it is more difficult to do, and easier to spot than simply replace the firmware in a voting machine.
In the case with an electronic machine, you cannot see what's happening inside.
In Canada, each person is assigned to a polling station, typically a school, church, or community center near their residence. You present ID at the door and your name is crossed off a paper list. Your name is not on the list at any other polling stations.
You have the option to mail in your vote or to vote in an advance poll, but these options close a week before the main poll, so if your name appears on the list at your polling station, they're pretty confident you haven't voted yet.
How does one “simply replace the firmware” is a way that isn’t trivial to spot by an observer?
Assuming there is no external IO such as USB or Ethernet, someone would have to disassemble the machine and solder a programming header in order to re-flash the device.
Both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly believing that elections are not fair, and it's far easier for people to believe conspiracies (true or not) when electronic voting machines are involved. At some point we will lose the ability to peacefully transition power.
A successful voting process both accurately counts the votes, and is trusted by the people. Computers can count, but they are not seen as trustworthy by the people. Paper is more understandable and trustworthy. Even as a computer programmer I'm not sure I can trust electronic voting.
Thus, even in the absence of any actual hacks or fraud, electronic voting is inferior at a primary objective of the voting system, being understandable and perceived as trustworthy.
>Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
No they arent. You need one guy with physical access to to a machine, at any time, to screw an election, with manual counting you need everyone in the room conspiring to rig the election during the voting hours. With the possibility to volunteer to count votes and publishing the voting numbers for each voting station, you just dont get those situations.
I know its an unpopular statement, but having a democratic election is not a new problem to solve. Most western countries do it just fine. This is not a problem with the concept of paper ballots but a absurdly broken system.
The problem with "open to the public" is it opens up an avenue of reprisal.
Let's say your parks department were headed by a libertarian guy who vehemently opposes using public funds to fill a landfill and turn it into a park and he finds out his deputy voted for the ordinance to spend the money on said park. He could retaliate.
Another hypothetical could involve your local councilman finding out which members of his district voted for him and which didn't, and using that knowledge to influence who's streets get priority when plowing snow this winter and which don't.
Any voting system, including those based on blockchain, should be designed in such a way that disclosure of someone's vote is entirely up to them.
vote harvesting is only an issue with mail-in or absentee ballots.
in-person paper voting doesn't suffer from that problem, because you walk into the voting area, write your vote on a piece of paper, then you yourself place it into the box, and you can then stand there and watch the ballot box with your own eyes until they are counted, at which point you can count along.
Luddite. Electronic voting is inevitable, and far superior if done in a transparent untamperable way (eg. utilizing a publicly verifiable blockchain). I don't know why you guys have so much faith in paper voting when there are many instances of it being tampered with in even first world countries.
Make it the responsibility of the Federal Election Commission to track down every last citizen and issue them a voting ID card. Then, I agree. Right now the laws are not intended to improve election fairness, but rather exactly the opposite.
Because the average activist has absolutely no way of forcing state legislatures to allocate funds and draw up plans for something they have no interest in. Voter ID laws do not currently solve a big problem, are not implemented in good faith, and fighting them is much more effective and realistic than asking for something that will not happen.
If we want voter ID laws, why not make it easier for everyone to get an ID first, and then enforce voter ID once that effort has succeeded?
Vote-faking is not a problem. Elderly people who have extreme difficulty obtaining an ID (that they otherwise do not need) is an actual, real life problem.
I find it odd you are so concerned about a non-problem but not concerned about the actual problem of eligible voters being actually disenfranchised.
So back to my first point: instead of making it easier for entities like the Russian government to subvert our Democracy, why not just make it easier for the Elderly to get IDs?
I also don't think that there are that many people that don't have IDs. I have seen absolutely no statistics on the topic, but I have seen multiple groups survey different parts of various cities and nobody had issues getting an ID. It's pretty much needed in almost any aspect of life.
You can't even get welfare or government assistance without some form of ID, so you can't tell me you can't get one to vote.
I don't know where to start. Your knowledge of these systems may not be broad enough to draw meaningful conclusions. For example, you can apply for and receive government services with only a Social Security card. A state-issued ID is not needed.
Millions of eligible voters do not have state-issued ID. Estimates put it at 10-20 million Americans. The primary utility of a state-issued ID is to drive on public roads and there are 10's of millions of Americans who do not drive on a regular basis.
The suggestion you make, that we should make it easier for people to get IDs, falls apart when we recognize that every state sets up their own system of issuing IDs. It would take a very strong federal law to bring states in line to the point where we could have confidence that every eligible voter in America could obtain an ID for free and regardless of individual circumstances.
As for Russia "subverting our Democracy", there is zero evidence that Russia or any other foreign entity used the lack of voter ID laws in some states to influence any elections.
Please read my comment again, I explained. There is a solution to make everyone happy, just make IDs universal first, and then once that is done, require ID for voting. There is no compelling reason to skip the first step, and many compelling reasons not to.
Bev Haris' grassroots watchdog movement Black Box Voting also has documented a lot of sketchy behavior as well, such as throwing away paper records of votes.
As an eastern european, I see the case a bit different. Corrupt governments and cheating locals were always able to "hack" voting. I would rather trust a blockchain based -fully transparent and real-time- voting system than the actual one.
a responsible citizens vote should not equal to a vote of a junkie. how about we take each vote and multiply it by the voters credit score and then count
Snarkyness aside, credit scores are un-auditable algorithms runs by private corporations. They do a bad job at measuring fiscal responsibility, and do not measure any other kind of responsibility.
They aren't even supposed to measure fiscal responsibility they actually measure how profitable you are to exploit by lending to you which we have hijacked to mean you are reliable.
Are you serious? That's a terrible idea. Every vote should counted equally as everyone should get to represent their own interests. This is the point of democracy. Taking rights away from those you view as "undesirables" is wrong.
Getting the right score for a person is an open problem.
But knowledge and intelligence should be incentivised.
The fact that most people voting don't read politicians programs should show how autistic our system is.
It has criminal consequences on humanity sustainability and well being.
On the surface I like the idea of the knowledgeable and intelligent having more say, but I do not think it would work in practice. It is misleading to frame it as there being a "correct" weighing out there and that we just need to find it. Any non-equal metric used for weighing an individual's vote will be gamed and exploited. And there is the possibility of creating a class divide of intellectuals if the metric is intelligence.
I believe a safer solution is to overhaul education. This way we get both the equality of democracy and the better decision making of an educated populace.
It's an open problem
It's nice to see this is at least recognized.
All the proposed solutions are an invitation to or an implementation of tyranny.
Such a categorical claim (universal Quantifier!) from someone that probably has zero background in voting theory and not enough in epistemology e.g cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
You make such a powerful claim but honestly, in all sincerity:
All the proposed solutions
How many alternatives are you aware? 1? Dictature ?
Two maybe ?
You don't know what you don't know and me neither but at least I know that I don't know what I don't know.
The best solution to me is the one I co-designed with my brother, it is not public and will only be when I'll have a mature software implementation.
But public solutions that are still an improvement would be for exemple an epistocracy semi-direct.
I can explain it to you if you're open to the possibility of changing your mind about "representative" democracy being the least worst governing system.
There's also ethical questions around whether solving the problem is even something any human is entitled to do.
No.
> But knowledge and intelligence should be incentivised.
They already are, though that can be improved by decreasing the role of heritable wealth and the disadvantages of poverty through better taxation and social support policies.
Voting is the wrong place to incentivize it, even if you could without first having improved the degree to which it is incentivized in the rest of society.
> The fact that most people voting don't read politicians programs should show how autistic our system is.
Using autistic as an insult here is inappropriate on multiple levels; also, I'd argue that it's perhaps jist rational, since politicians actions are only rarely usefully related to their written programs, and there are much more accessible ways of getting information that is much better at predicting their behavior in office.
Using autistic as an insult here is inappropriate on multiple levels;
It was not meant to be in the litteral sense, I was meaning retarded which indeed real autists are not.
Most insults/pejorative words are not understood literally usually but well you're probably right.
since politicians actions are only rarely usefully related to their written programs
This is just too excessive, hyperbolic.
If you want to quantify it, there you go:
https://trumptracker.github.io/much more accessible ways of getting information that is much better at predicting their behavior in office.
Enlighten me then, where is such a thing?
It is common to blame the poor for having trouble as if all their problems have to do with poor character. We start with the example that it's possible for A poor person to build themselves from nothing to wealth and success and somehow arrive at the thesis that everyone who is struggling is only doing so because they are lazy.
In reality people have a varied degree of talents and make varied choices in life. Those who start out stupid and lazy at the top of the ramp end up well off with good jobs at Daddy's friends business and those who start off with nothing often end up struggling despite working hard.
Your idea would systemically privilege morons over their betters who had an illness in their family. Furthermore it would privilege the already privilege by taking votes away from the poor and gifting them to the rich. Like a perverse Robin Hood stealing crumbs from the poor to give to the rich's dogs.
Our government already primarily serves the interests of the rich and white but cannot presently afford to sufficiently alienate the poor or black lest they turn up at the polls in sufficient numbers to tip the political table.
Your suggestion intended on its face to to disenfranchise a tiny number of bums seems designed to disenfranchise minorities and the poor. I will be charitable and suppose this isn't the purpose.
Instead of carrying the political day with 49% of the vote or even 40% which is possible with our current electoral college such a suggestion would allow 20% or 30% of the population to rule by decree with little concern for the desires of their poorer kin many of which are far to close to the social and financial edge already.
When the rich rearrange the nation to even better serve their needs and service their wealth millions will see their lives destroyed.
This is my long way of saying that this is a bad idea.
Of course but we are still left with the remarkable idea that you think the interests of Rich people aren't well enough represented in politics today. It's like you said you know what the contestants of the biggest losers really need! More fried chicken!
I've been working on this issue in North Carolina over the past several weeks.
North Carolina currently is facing two issues:
1) the state Board of Elections will vote on Thursday to increase the standards for certification which will hopefully lead to hand-marked paper ballots for all (except those with disabilities).
2) HB 19, which will delay decertification for insecure voting machines that roughly 1/3 North Carolinians use. This bill passed unanimously in the House.
If you live in North Carolina and care about this issue, please email Damon Circosta (damon.circosta.board@ncsbe.gov) with your viewpoints as he is the new, tie-braking vote on the board.
Additionally, call your state Senator and tell them to oppose HB 19. The bittersweet news is that it doesn't look like it will get taken up this year because of the budget standoff, but it's better to start fighting this battle now.
> Selling a paperless voting machine is like selling a car without brakes
This is comical FUD.
What makes people think paper is safer? The paper copy you have is worthless since you can counterfeit it, and the one in storage can be replaced or falsified just the same. A secure system can be designed regardless of the storage media - i.e. a digital one can be as safe or safer than paper. Brazil has used electronic voting for decades now, and despite accusations (by the winning party!) there has been no proof of tampering or exploitable security flaws.
Because it takes a lot more effort to massively influence the outcome if you have to falsify paper votes as opposed to electronic. The latter can be scripted.
How Minnesota does it: Blank ballots arrive in sealed packages. Ballots, whether blank or marked, sealed or unsealed, may only be handled in the presence of election judges from at least two different political parties. Counts are kept, by those groups. And ballots, either blank or marked, are generally kept under lock and key.
Attempts to insert extra ballots will be detected by the count. Attempts to substitute ballots would have to match counts exactly, and somehow be done without being seen in a room with multiple other judges and other people.
Is there any other technology in such widespread use with such universal condemnation from experts? Essentially every expert on computerized voting systems says, “don’t do this, it’s insane.” Imagine if every expert on aerospace engineering said that jet engines were too dangerous but everyone ignored them and kept finding more and more places to use jets.
> Is there any other technology in such widespread use with such universal condemnation from experts?
There are bound to be loads - Facebook comes to mind.
If you think of human rights and climate change the list of technologies is going to be long. Energy production and the arms industry are some standouts.
Not at all the same. Most people are pushing hard for TLS, with just some fringe elements resisting it.
If it was like voting machines, you’d have massive initiatives to run everything on plain HTTP and any suggestion that we should all use HTTPS is completely ignored.
Experts have been telling us to avoid Twitter/Facebook/social media for a while, not because they're easy to hack, but because they must prey on human behaviors and insecurities in order to thrive and exist.
In India, Electronic Voting Machines(EVM) have something called Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail(VVPAT) linked with them[1]. When you press the button, you get to see a slip which shows the symbol of the candidate you voted for. If there's a mismatch between both, you can report it to the election official.
It's not just the vote itself we need to worry about.
In the 2016 Presidential election, a lot of people in North Carolina had trouble due to problems with the electronic poll books they used to keep track of who registered and who already voted.
People would show up at their polling place and either be told, incorrectly, that they had never registered, or be told, incorrectly, that they had already voted.
Oddly, they only had trouble with these systems in Durham County, a heavily blue county, and these same devices in other states are known to have been targeted by foreign hackers--but it wasn't until this year that DHS finally agreed to actually do a proper forensic examination of the equipment to see if anything shady was going on [1].
Georgia also only had problems in heavily blue districts. They "forgot" power cables, left machines unused in warehouses, and rejected thousands of early votes due to "glitches".
There is nothing odd or mysterious about it. It's the logical conclusion of being a political minority clinging to power and it's been happening for decades both openly and less openly.
As a burned out election integrity activist, I've really struggled with the recurring incredulity.
My local newspaper called me a "sweaty paranoid kook", because I dared to explain how our jurisdiction's central count actually worked (per their procedures manual).
And all the risks we identified and tried to mitigate? It all happened. All of it. (Where's my parade?)
--
Some free, unsolicited, hard earned advice from a recovering activist:
Focus on "errors", instead of "fraud". Just because. The moment there's a hint of partisanship, the conversation is over. And really, at the end of the day, fraud is indistinguishable from errors. So just grit your teeth, for the greater good.
Focus on appropriations, aka follow the money. The very minor victories I've had were argued from a framing of good governance. Transparency, accountability, anti-waste, etc.
Thanks for your comment. This is good advice about keeping efforts to improve the system non-partisan - it's the only practical way to get people who disagree with each other to both agree to a fairer system.
As far as I could tell at the time, it's not that Georgia only had problems in heavily blue districts - they had problems everywhere. The mainstream media just only reported the problems which happened in heavily blue districts. Republican voters in red districts saw the same kinds of multi-hour waits as the folks in the district which was supposedly sabotaged via missing power cords (apparently that didn't even really delay voting), some of them even started theorizing that this was some kind of vote rigging attempt, the difference is that was treated as a nutso conspiracy theory whereas the idea that queues in blue districts might be vote rigging was regurgitated by AP and the rest of the press.
I believe you that it wasn't easy to tell that it was corruption instead of just incompetence. Here are some facts (not media opinions) to think about:
- Kemp controlled the election and was also a candidate[1]. He refused to recuse himself from his election duties. Why was that?
- Kemp purged more voters than anyone else in history[1]. His office then destroyed the evidence when an investigation was launched[2].
- A judge allowed an external audit of faulty voting systems used in 2018. The Republican Secretary of State objected[4].
1. Can you imagine a lawsuit being fair if the judge is the plaintiff? Or a football game being fair if the quarterback is also a referee? I don't trust any human to have that much honor and impartiality, especially if (in their mind) the lives of many unborn babies and the American way of life are at stake. Wouldn't someone like that think, "The ends justify the means?"
I certainly saw that justification a lot. The trouble is that Kemp didn't control those parts of the election - they were controlled and run by the counties using people they recruited directly.
I've seen conflicting information on who made what decisions. I can't prove it either way, of course.
At the very least, the voter purge and subsequent FBI investigation and lawsuit are not what you'd expect from someone who wants to help people vote, right?
We've also seen federal judges, including the Supreme Court, say that Republicans have been responsible for racial gerrymandering[1][2][3], unconstitutional ID laws to suppress the vote[4], and outright election fraud[5] all over the Southeast. Voter suppression by the minority party is logical and also a decades-old strategy, including a motivation for the war on drugs[1].
Why would Georgia be different? If the election were completely fair, it would have been an exception rather than the rule, and the state govt would reflect the population (majority Democrat) instead of being 100% controlled by Republicans.
This type of system should be able to be challenged by the citizen. If I voted without my prior knowledge, then I want my record because I never voted.
This is pretty scary and I didn't know this occurred in other states.
The NC State Board of Elections is meeting THIS FRIDAY to vote on the certification of voting machines. They previously scheduled to hold a vote on July 28 and of the 15 individuals allowed to give public comment during that meeting, every single one of them urged the board in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. Fortunately, one of those speakers also had prior been in touch with one of the 5 board members and gave her language for a proposed amendment to the certification requirements, requiring that any voting machine produce a human-readable mark so that voters could verify their vote was tabulated correctly (no barcodes). There was a 3-2 vote in favor of considering the amendment, which required a new meeting to be scheduled in no fewer than 15 days. the very next morning one of the 3 voters said he changed his mind and said he didn't understand what he was voting for, and a new meeting was called for 2 days later to rescind the motion to consider the amendment, which basically meant the certification would proceed without the protections of human-readable paper ballots. To make things even crazier, the next day the chair of the board made an off-color joke at a convention of state election officials and resigned. And so the vote to rescind the amendment proposal failed at 2-2. A new chair has since been appointed by the NC Governor and on this Friday the vote to approve the amendment will proceed.
DemocracyNC.org has made it very easy to email the NC State Board of Elections officials with a message in support of this amendment to provide voters with the security of a human-readable ballot.
https://democracync.org/news/democracy-nc-ncsbe-decision-to-...
Simple solution: each voter is given a receipt of their choices and a unique signature for it, and an online website where they can check that their signature was taken into account in the final tally.
With that a fraudsters model have to deal with random checks by any voter.
How were you planning for the voter to check that the final tally actually takes their vote into account and doesn't include other imaginary votes?
Are you going to rely on the same system or perhaps another equally compromised system to "randomly" select votes for you to check and how do you propose to check them if you don't know how the person voted?
I would go so far to say that there exists mathematically no solution to this problem that doesn't violate voter anonymity.
This is a horrible idea that breaks the idea of secret ballot and opens up all sorts of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.
It's absolutely imperative that after you leave the ballot box, noone has the ability to verify what your particular vote was, and you don't have the ability to prove to someone else that you really voted that way, or that ability will be abused on scale, by local "influencers", employers, etc requiring the people to demonstrate that they voted "correctly". The mixing up of ballots in the ballot box is a very important feature for the elections.
It would be pretty hard to stop. Many elections come down to under 50k votes, which will lead to either candidates or their supporters buying votes for cash (with 30% of voters not even bothering to vote, $10 a vote would probably be plenty to entice people), or each side finding a handful of cases where this did happen and claiming it happened on a larger scale. It would call the whole election into doubt.
Those things are already generally felonies, however, it's not that good deterrant, because it's something that's hard to prove, and they're used in situations where the vulnerable party would have to openly challenge it to report it. I mean, these are not theoretical considerations, all these things have a historical background on how election manipulations have been attempted and implemented worldwide over the centuries. Underneath pretty much every tiny detail in the ballot process there's some particular exploit that has happened and been prevented in future by that detail.
> This is a horrible idea that breaks the idea of secret ballot and opens up all sorts of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.
Not at all; the parent said "taken into account in the final tally", not "see that their vote was counted as they intended".
This is very similar to the system for paper ballots, with a tear-off receipt. If you type in the ID number, you can verify that that ballot was counted. There is no association between identity, vote choice, or ballot ID.
I feel like if you can't verify your own vote was marked down correctly, and the overall data is not publicly auditable, then it is impossible to trust the election process...
In the traditional paper ballot process you can observe and verify that all the votes there are recorded correctly, you just can't tell which one of these was yours, they're indistinguishable. (The local practice is that if you mark your ballot to be distinguishable - e.g. that the observers could record that Bob voted that way - that invalidates it).
And it's not just a theoretical possibility to observe - I don't know how USA does it, but for my area the counting at each district is generally observed by multiple people, including (but not limited to) the representatives of all serious parties.
You say that, but this still relies on trust of the institution. If you can't verify that your recorded vote matches what you put in, how can you trust it? All the ballots could've been switched out, or something. You are choosing to trust the institution.
Everyone has different levels of trust, and I'm sure generally the chance of some grand voting conspiracy is very low; however, for me to fully trust the system I would need to be able to verify the count myself, and verify that my own vote was recorded correctly.
Personally this feels more important than some issue around buying votes etc. That is mostly illegal, and plenty of people find ways to indirectly achieve the same effect anyway...
We should be more worried about voter id. I still don't understand how you can vote without a legal id. I mean look at California, they require zero proof of your identity to vote according to Wikipedia. That's bonkers to me.
In my home country Bolivia, we are required to present a valid national ID to vote.
The US does not have a national ID due to privacy fears. Stealing an election by casting fraudulent ballots still requires forging documents and hundreds of conspirators willing to commit a felony even in the tightest races.
The reason is that we don't have any universal ID and some people think requiring an ID is a burden on exercising your rights.
Others like you worry that, without ID, there will be lots of fraud. I keep hearing that there is not very much fraud, but I don't know how they know without a baseline that's verified with ID.
I also don't know why voter ID is too much of a burden, but IDs for gun purchases are not. If they are both rights shouldn't they have similar standards for checking eligibility?
I don't know how you imagine voting works, but there are in fact records. You can't vote unless you are registered. The specifics varies wildly state-to-state, making it hard to discuss in detail. But the gist of it is that if you are not legally eligible to vote, it's difficult to do so. And the penalties are so extreme that casting a single fraudulent vote is absurdly risky, making it a very unappealing crime. Especially since virtually zero elections are decided by so few votes.
Elections are audited and fraud is found in only very, very rare cases, hence the widespread confidence that voter fraud is a minuscule issue. Other election issues are very real. By any metric, the number of eligible voters who are denied the right to vote dwarfs the number of people who cast ineligible votes.
Thankfully, recent lawsuits are at least forcing counties that notoriously have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens to clean up their voter registrations.
In the US elections are run by the states, and unfortunately a certain consistent set of them are well known for making it extremely difficult for certain groups of people to vote. Since voter ids would be given by the states, there is historical evidence to suggest those specific states can not be trusted to not use said ids as a way to discriminate against those they do not want to vote.
Sorry but this is complete and utter bullshit. Don't fall for the lies and propaganda put out by the social engineers within the democratic party. But of course me pointing this out to you will probably only make you harden your stance even more, because if you're in that party, the veil is firmly over your eyes. It's a cult built around feelings and imagination at this point, not logic and reality.
These corrupt politicians in the democratic party commit fraud on large scales, using your feelings to manipulate you. One example of many of their manipulative, fraudulent nature is attempting to rig the 2016 election for Hillary, pushing Sanders out. The reason they don't want a voter ID is so that they can commit election fraud, but they appeal to your emotions by saying disenfranchised people are the reason. This is painfully obvious to anyone with a logical brain who can recognize these patterns on large scales.
Sociopaths exist. They are driven by their desire to be at the top, lording over other people. Where might they find themselves in positions of said power? Could it be in politics? Within the party that prides itself on being very socially oriented? Seems like a good place to climb to the top if you're a good social engineer (a sociopath), does it not? Would they do and say anything to rise to the top? Most sociopaths certainly would. Why is it that the most corrupt, downtrodden cities are very blue? What happened to places like Baltimore? Where is all that money going?
For the record, I'm not saying any of these things out of hate. I'm saying these things out of love. I want every single person on this planet to thrive. But that can't happen as long as people remain useful idiots by supporting causes based on emotions instead of logic. People smarter than you can easily manipulate you through your emotions. It would be extremely naive to deny this possibility (reality).
Edit for the downvoters: How's that Russian collusion narrative going? You're being manipulated.
> It's a cult built around feelings and imagination at this point, not logic and reality.
Sounds like a cult that would use memes and social media to indoctrinate children, start crazy conspiracy theories about pizza, conspire with foreign governments, and suppress opponents votes though arbitrary requirements.
No one said the other side is innocent. There is corruption and manipulation on all sides. One side, however, is clearly more corrupt and manipulative than the other. (And of course I'm referring to the democratic party here.)
Here's a question for you: What's going with Epstein? Why is there a painting of Bill Clinton in a dress at Epstein's? Is this the same Bill Clinton who lied to the entire world and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"?
Again, you're being lied to and manipulated, as usual.
> suppress opponents votes though arbitrary requirements
If you think proof of citizenship is an arbitrary requirement to vote, you're a brainwashed tool used by people much smarter than you. Do you really think it would be okay for me to travel to another country and vote in their elections without me actually being a citizen of that country?
I'm being manipulated and the way you go about explaining this actually used the phase "Bill Clinton in a dress" and I'm just supposed to listen to you with a straight face?
If this particular sentence is what your brain focuses on to prevent it from seeing the truth and unraveling everything you think you know about the world, then you may be too far gone at this point.
For anyone interested in how elections are actually run, please volunteer to serve as a poll worker. It's a great way to serve your community and learn about actual challenges on the ground.
Why this stuff is even an issue is mind-boggling to me.
In Canada we vote completely anonymously on a piece of paper. ID is verified at the entrance to the voting area, but your identity is _in no way_ associated with the piece of paper you mark your vote on. The ballots are counted by hand with numerous bystanders/observers of whatever affiliation. It just works. We have no need for digital (aka hackable/tamperable/buggy) voting system.
It's complicated in the US because it's the states that administer elections and IDs. Everyone does it differently, with different equipment, ID requirements, and allocation of election resources.
Voter ID, for example, is contentious because a state can influence election turnout through decisions on where ID offices are located and when they're open.
Edit: I always find it ironic that the Republican party--the party of limited government--wants people to have to go to the bastion of efficiency known as the DMV (!!!) in order to vote.
Also some states have restricted early voting times and reduced the number of polling places open in some (typically poor non-white communities that vote more democrat) as a way of making it harder for certain minorities to vote. [0]
> The U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed a Republican bid to revive a strict North Carolina voter-identification law that a lower court found deliberately discriminated against black voters, handing a victory to Democrats and civil rights groups.
> The appeals court found that the law’s provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” concluding that the Republican-led legislature enacted it “with discriminatory intent.”
Passport for a regular person in my country costs 30$, for children, people under 20 or over 65 and disabled persons it is 15$, and it is valid for 10 years. You literally have 10 years to put down 0.25$ per month.
P.S. You must have a valid passport when you reach a certain age.
The US does not have a law requiring you to have an id. Requiring people to have one is making the assumption that every person in the US can afford the time and money to obtain one, as well as the physical ability to do so.
If you cannot make this assumption, then you are actively disenfranchising people.
Passport cards are $65. But the cost is somewhat a red herring. There's nothing to keep the US from issuing a free voter identification card but issues of appropriate identification and the effort involved exist outside of out-of-pocket cost. [ADDED: And, of course, concerns about slippery slopes to national IDs which Europeans in particular may consider silly but nonetheless we're all allowed our hangups.]
And god forbid if you need a passport in two months or less--then you're looking at spending $200 to expedite the process (and add to that USPS 1-2 day document delivery).
This is an internal passport (not for travelling abroad) and everyone has it because without it you cannot buy a train ticket, open a bank account, enter the college etc. Also there is a fine if you don't get it when you are 16 (or 18, I don't remember the exact age).
Also, young people cannot buy alcohol and cigarettes without it (to prove that they are adult) so some of them are motivated to get it as soon as possible.
Also I wanted to add that internal passport is valid for a long time and you have to change it only twice in a lifetime: you get it first time at 14, then get a new one at 20 and at 45 years and that last one is valid forever (of course if you don't happen to die). So although there is a fee to pay, it is not really expensive.
In the US there is no such a thing as a universal ID. The closest thing is the state drivers license, and statistically poor communities tend to drive less for various reasons, so for them it is an extra hassle to go get a driver license OR EQUIVALENT ID just for the purpose of voting. The policy is not racist on his face, but a minimal context awareness is enough to understand the ultimate purpose.
In addition, trying to source IDs tends to surface some historical issues that we usually don't think about. One big one is that everyone has a birth certificate -- yet, if you weren't born in a hospital, you may not have such a certificate.
As long as the process and cost is not punitive and targeted it's fine if something costs time and money. We have multiple constitutional rights that are burdened in that fashion. The right to petition the government, to have courts decide arguments, to own a gun, all cost time and money. (Not to mention that I have to have a photo ID and pass a criminal background check every time I buy a gun.)
As long as you acknowledge that you're implementing this explicitly to suppress American votes, sure, go ahead and try. I'm tired of the misdirection with election safety when anyone in the game knows what it's actually about.
Nice. Sweet use of the "All Republicans are Nazis and racists and complicit!" argument. One could just as easily assert that everyone against tightening up election security is in it simply to commit election fraud. But that would be uncharitable, and unfounded.
On the contrary, you've just put words in my mouth because you've done some logical leaps in your head that just took you away from reality.
In reality, if you want to make an assertion and have other people convinced of your argument, then your obligation is to provide all the facts. Given that, you cannot simply take the inverse hypothetical situation where election fraud is just assumed and use that to form your argument. We still have yet to establish that fraud is happening. So why would we want to suppress votes to prevent something that doesn't happen?
I've already been banned from reddit, please don't ban me from this site. How will I debate the merits of plastic making trans people gay, men's rights, programming languages that were created before 1990, startups that have clear business value but discussing how they don't have value to a small subset of society, overvalued IPOs, etc, etc etc.
It is not factual that fraud happens on a scale the warrants disenfranchising voters. If you advocate for disenfranchising voters without providing any sort of argument that legitimizes doing so, then yes, I absolutely am accusing you of wanting to disenfranchise voters for no reason other than to fear monger. You're the TSA of airport security. The WMDs of war. The daily weather of climate change. The fucking pizza of sex trafficking.
You should be banned from this site for spreading this fucking nonsense.
The opposing party (in the US) will make the offices where identification is offered difficult to get to. Times when the DMV or RMV is open will shrink, some states will require an extreme amount of paperwork in order to get identification. We might see some states close some DMV or RMV offices.
Keep in mind that DMV and RMV office _assume_ that people have vehicles. In the case of voters this is not the case.
It's like gerrymandering but in this case what's being manipulated is the ability of voters to get these cards. In many cases it is racist.
>The opposing party (in the US) will make the offices where identification is offered difficult to get to. Times when the DMV or RMV is open will shrink, some states will require an extreme amount of paperwork in order to get identification. We might see some states close some DMV or RMV offices.
Getting a photo ID is a infrequent event. That makes gaming the ID acquisition process a means of disenfranchising voters ineffective.
That is incorrect. In Massachusetts, for instance, you have to renew your license every two years. I believe you need a new photo (requiring a trip to the DMV) every four years.
Your next thought might be along the lines of accepting expired ID for voting purposes. That's an interesting idea but unlikely to be accepted. In Massachusetts, for instance, you can't buy even a six pack of beer if you cannot produce a valid driver's license. Expired licenses are as good as no license at all in that case.
We have ID cards in Massachusetts, you can get one of those without needing to take the driving exam. There is a "LiquorID" card that lasts five years, I can't find any information on the "MassID" card but it's probably good for five years as well.
Thank you for asking the question, I had assumed these cards lasted as long as a driver's license and that is not the case. :-)
You make a good point in that these voter ID cards might have a longer expiration then a driver's license. To my knowledge the expiration period of the ID isn't a part of the legislation. In that case we can probably expect to see the length of time vary from state to state. In that case I would suspect that state's with a shorter valid period might be trying to manipulate the number of legal voters.
It pains me to admit it, but you are correct. I was on my phone and misread the page.
Still, the life span of these cards could be managed for political gain. Perhaps if the majority part in the state house changes, the valid lifetime for only the ID cards could be shortened.
> Times when the DMV or RMV is open will shrink, some states will require an extreme amount of paperwork in order to get identification.
The U.S. sounds more and more like a dystopia to me. In Germany having an ID is a matter of fact, you get a new one every few years and they glue an updated adress on its backside when you change your main adress. The times when you can get it updated might be inconvenient but you are required to have a valid one, so you just have to spend a vacation day every few years on it - the horror.
> In many cases it is racist.
How about trying to improve on the current state of afairs instead of complaining while keeping the barndoor wide open so the racists can continue doing as they currently do?
The few government related times I had to use it since I have the current one: once to have the adress updated after changing my main residence, once to get a passport, three times when voting.
The last time I had to deal with the police they just asked for my drivers license. Evil dystopian government keeping track of people who drive past red lights. Even in the U.S. you can't escape that.
I was taking issue with the characterization that the US is dystopian based on voter id arguments. You don't need an id to live in the us, you don't need one to vote in many states, and the contexts in which you would need one make sense.
If you contrast that to a country that has government mandated ids just because, then that's clearly the more dystopic example.
In my opinion there is no real issue with requiring ID in the US, they are inexpensive and not hard to get. If someone doesn't want to spend $20-$30 and take the time to get an ID, they don't want to vote very much. Although I strongly believe in progressive taxation, this is such a small sum for such an important part of civic life it is a strange hill to die on.
I very much think the right does attempt to exclude certain voters, and does use Voter ID regulations as part of a larger strategy regarding voter disenfranchisement. But it is a relatively easy fix that could be calmly resolved with common sense regulations, like other commenters in this thread have mentioned regarding requirements for physical location and hours of operation for voter registration/id centers. So it sometimes appears people (in this case the left) would rather have something to cry about than just calmly fix the loophole the opposition is trying to exploit.
In brief, the real issue is that actual attempts to cooperate and govern have died, to be replaced by grandstanding (when not in power) and scorched earth practices (when in power). I blame first past the post systems, and think this is an inevitable result. I would welcome the existential requirement for political parties to cooperate which comes with a larger spectrum of parties in power, as a natural effect of more effective proportional representation.
This seems like something that could be mitigated by legislating where voter registration offices are located (based on census data perhaps) and their hours of operation and documentation requirements, including an appeals process.
I agree. I think the fact that these aren't discussion points is important. Steps could be taken to ensure that everyone entitled to a card gets one but I suspect there is a significant cost associated with that. So far cost hasn't really been a big part of the discussion.
As an aside, in the US, there's a history of not needing papers to get around or prove who you are. My grandfather fought in World War II and this was an important issue for him. There likely are people in the US opposed to a national ID card for similar reasons, fear that police will start demanding you carry your card at all times. I have no idea if they might be numerous or not.
The welfare state was much smaller in the 40s. Things have changed, and people need to be "means tested" in order to implement these government programs.
If there was already a universal ID everyone has, it wouldn't be racist to require it in connection with voting, but there isn't a universal ID everyone already has.
It's easy to forget that about one in seven or eight adult americans don't have a driver's license.
Even the libertarian wing of the Republican party doesn't really believe that anyone can live without an ID nowadays.
I'm not an American and while I rarely have to produce an ID, going without one entirely would be impossible. Also illegal here in Poland but this law is not enforced because it's hugely impractical long before you run into any legal issues.
>I always find it ironic that the Republican party--the party of limited government--wants people to have to go to the bastion of efficiency known as the DMV (!!!) in order to vote.
Even worse is that there is wide bi-partisan support to require people to go through the DMV for the ability to drive on public roads, something that impacts a person's day to day life far more than voting. This is especially true of the poor who cannot afford to uber and those located in areas without public transport.
I'm pretty libertarian. And, admittedly, the "licensing" requirements associated with driver's licenses in the US are fairly minimal. But are you suggesting that literally anyone ought to be able to hop in a car and drive it around public streets?
I had my license suspended once and at the time I lived in a city with mild public transit. To go get it renewed was a 6 hour ordeal that I can't imagine having to do if I were living paycheck to paycheck. Spend an entire day not making money so you can spend another days earnings so that you can go vote, all because of a political agenda, not any real issue.
Right, I was making the assumption in this case that a driver's license would be sufficient for voter identification and that if someone didn't have a driver's license, then obtaining one or an equivalent is a burden that many poor people cannot afford.
My point is that any argument about the DMV being a bad place to get a voter id applies even stronger to the (arguably) more important action of getting a driver's license.
If one accepts the argument with regards to a voter id, then why would they reject it with regard to a license?
I always find it ironic that the Republican party--the party of limited government--wants people to have to go to the bastion of efficiency known as the DMV (!!!) in order to vote.
Is it ironic? Republicans aren't calling for the abolishment of the DMV for driver's licenses. Requiring ID to vote is inline with requiring ID to drive.
I find it interesting the Democrats seem to idolize European governance, except for the part where requiring ID to vote is the norm.
edit: fixed typo - requiring id to vote is inline with requiring id to drive
Dems problem with requiring ID is that it just so happens that those proposals are always alongside attempts to make it more difficult for poor people to get IDs in the first place. Dems would have no issue requiring ID if republicans would agree to give every US citizen an ID for free.
Voter ID laws are simply an attempt to keep poor people and minorities from voting and honestly it's sickening.
They are also an attempt to keep ineligible people from voting. There are positives to the argument that you can only ignore if you want to vilify the person making it.
Preventing ineligible voting is red herring for suppressing legitimate voters, by creating extra hoops to jump through for certain classes of citizens.
I vilify the argument that voter fraud of the kind which would be addressed by voter ID exists at any meaningful scale in the US. It is putrid. Used as an justification for mass disenfranchisement, it is repugnant.
Well, this exactly should be the Democrats proposal - but for some resaon it isn't. It would be an easy way to pull wind out of the sails of republicans.
The democrats are never going to call it a poll tax though because once you start calling statutory requirements to jump through non-free hoops to exercise rights "poll taxes" you've just paved the way to overturning a whole lot of gun control stuff.
Poll taxes are expressly forbidden by the 24th Amendment. I'm sure people will try and make arguments based on the 2nd Amendment, but they're really not comparable.
A photo ID is not a poll tax though. Just like requiring people to go to a polling place is not a poll tax. Just like people having to take time off of work is not a poll tax.
And what are the consequences if you don't get this now mandatory (federal?) ID? Presumably some sort of passport card like thing that doesn't actually let you travel across borders. What if you don't have the documentation you need? What if you don't have the time to go to the offices that provide these IDs?
For a lot of people, the cost of getting the Equivalent ID to a driver's license isn't the big issue. All the other things are.
But it is an easy fix. I agree that there should be universal voter registration, and see no reason why we can't issue voter registration cards with a photo on them, which then serve as a valid form of identification for whatever information we choose to make publicly available on them.
There's a scaling difference between the US and Europe. In the US, you might live a 4 hour drive from the nearest city large enough for a DMV. If you don't own a car, getting there and back can be a major obstacle.
The reason should be obvious, people without ID are likely poor, and likely to vote for Democrats. Voter fraud is just misdirection on the part of Republicans.
Voter ID is required to register. At which time it is verified and eligibility is adjudicated.
Identity is confirmed when a ballot is issued. For postal balloting, which is not opposed by Republicans, your address is proxy for identity. One exception is North Dakota; no ID is required, because presumably poll workers know their neighbors.
The issue is what forms of ID are required to be issued a ballot.
Pro democracy persons who support enfranchising their fellow citizens are content to accept many forms of official ID to confirm identity.
Anti democratic persons who openly advocate wide spread disenfranchisement demand restoring unconstitutional poll taxes.
That is not necessarily true in the US. If I vote in person on election day in my town (I usually vote by mail or earlier at town hall) I give my address but do not have to present an ID.
You replied: "That is not necessarily true in the US."
Yes, yes, yes. There are always exceptions in the USA. No one person can know them all.
Because every jurisdiction is a snowflake. And everything keeps changing. Causing us all to talk past each other. No small part of the challenge talking about this stuff rationally.
For your jurisdiction, the powers that be determined that your signature was sufficient verification, which can be compared against the signature on file (your registration), just like with postal ballots.
I live in what is almost certainly a perfectly typical town in the Northeast US. And it's fully compliant with Massachusetts law.
Which is just one state as you say. But, if you follow the news, requiring ID is a very contentious topic that's often associated with disenfranchising voters so I assume it's not the norm.
Left unsaid in the kabuki over voter ID is The Correct Answer:
Universal automatic voter registration. Like every other mature democracy.
We now have a handful of complete rosters. Of everyone living and dead. Updated in near real-time.
We know with complete certainty if someone is eligible to vote.
We could just use any of our existing national demographic databases (NSA, Planitir, Facebook, LexisNexus, ChoicePoint, etc) for good governance. Instead of 50+ mutually incompatible chaotic mutant voter registration databases.
(Related: Just do a query, instead of walking around with clipboards every 10 years and doing a partial head count.)
Why don't we use the resources we already have to moot this issue?
> Universal automatic voter registration. Like every other mature democracy.
Exactly this. Every citizen should be automatically able to vote without any effort on their 18th birthday. I personally think it shouldn’t even require being 18, but should be permitted if elections are happening during your 18th year, but you haven’t hit your birthday yet—nobody turning 18 in 2020 should be unable to vote for the next president just because their birthday is after Election Day. We should be doing all we can, on the public dime, to the point of begging and dragging people to the nearest booth to participate in their government.
I think post offices are the perfect first place to look to for handling this. Far more citizens live in close proximity to a post office than a dmv. And as needs require and areas permit, we can look to libraries, state universities, and community colleges as additional points where one can handle voting needs—even casting ballots.
> Requiring ID to vote is inline with requiring ID to drive.
One of those things is an inherent right of citizenship. The other is a privilege that requires proving one has allegedly mastered the skills and knowledge required to safely practice it.
If the federal government was serious about these voter ID cards and the goal truly was more reliable elections then we would be seeing real conversations about cost and a deployment strategy. The very fact that they are trying to do this nearly for free is, to my mind, proof positive that they have the same goals as the politicians who are agressively gerrymandering: fewer people voting.
What is the overlap between people who drive and people who can vote? How were the location of DMV and RMV offices chosen, were they selected to be accessible to every citizen? Who trains people at the voting locations to validate ID cards? Is there a physical device that scans and helps validate these ID cards? What does that cost?
Post offices make much more sense, they tend to be accessible by nearly everyone. But there has been no talk of providing these cards through post offices. Partly because of cost, training and the increased workload on the post office. Partly because the goal is to prevent voters from lawfully voting.
Even if you feel that the DMV or RMV is a reasonable place to issue these cards, where is the pushback from states who have to staff up in order to provide these cards? How long will these cards last before expiration? In MA, a driver's license only lasts two years, ID cards last five.
The whole thing, in my opinion, is an obvious sham.
> In MA, a driver's license only lasts two years, ID cards last five.
"Your Massachusetts driver’s license is valid for five years, unless it is your first license
which expires on your fifth birthday after the date of issue, or until the end of your
authorized stay in the U.S. (whichever comes first)."
This is a systemic thing, not the work of a single villain with a face. Getting an ID is inherently more difficult for lower-income individuals for a variety of reasons. It doesn't have to be a specific GOP politician stopping people for it to be discriminatory.
Assuming that people can't get IDs based on their demographic is also a form of discrimination. Weak ID requirements disenfranchise voters of all backgrounds by enabling the possibility of diluting their votes with fraudulent registrations and ballots. Los Angeles County had more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens and recently were forced by lawsuit to purge 5 million invalid registrations from their rolls.
> Assuming that people can't get IDs based on their demographic is also a form of discrimination.
Assuming it based on no evidence would be a form of prejudice.
Concluding that such a disadvantage exists bases on ample empirical evidence plus occasional statements of policy makers cheering themselves for preserving or advancing that disadvantage is not.
You don't have to make it explicit that you're targeting a specific group. If there is a correlation between groups that tend to drive less, and the groups that you don't want to vote, all you have to do is to require a driver license and that imposes an extra burden on the people that you don't want to vote, whereas populations that tend to drive, they already have a driver license and need no farther work to exercise their right to vote. It's so happens that poor people, communities of color, and the elderly tend to drive less.
In Spain everybody has a mandatory ID, and it is very easy and cheap or even free to get it. In that context it makes sense to require an ID. In the US, for cultural reasons, there is a lot of reluctance toward a national ID.
Voter Impersonation is also not a problem in the U.S., so the whole Voter ID is a red herring to make it harder to vote for certain people who have the right to.
While a driver’s license is the most common form of ID in the state, Bentley said anyone without a driver’s license can go to any county register’s office and have a photo ID made and the closing of the DMV offices will not change that fact.
Bentley also pointed out that every probate judge in the state has the authority to renew driver’s licenses and the closing of the DMV offices will not change that fact.
Bentley said not only is the state not engaged in any effort to curtail voting, it is doing all it can to make sure anyone who wants to vote will be able to register to vote.
“We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” said Bentley. “We’re not ever going to do anything to keep people in the state of Alabama from voting. And for them to jump to a conclusion like that, that is politics at its worst.”
Anyone saying that ID verification is a big issue is using it as a red herring, to create more hoops to jump through for citizens who have a right to vote.
For damn good reasons too. They're intentionally used to target minority voters that vote democratic in most cases under the guise of preventing a problem that doesn't actually exist. It's bad enough the courts decided that representatives can choose their voters through gerrymandering but allowing them to lock some voters out by requiring IDs without making it significantly easier to get IDs reeks of Jim Crow style poll taxes and literacy tests.
For a very long time, I'd show up to vote, say my full name, and they'd ask for a street name or house number, and I'd tell them, and they'd strike out my name and hand me a ballot to go vote. That was the identification process.
Now, same state, I get the ballot mailed to me, it has my name on it, it's bar coded, I vote, put it in an envelope, mail it back or drop it at a collection box for this purpose, and I get an email telling me I've voted. That kind of tracking gives me a frowny face. I don't know that they have a way to associated my vote with me, but they know whether or not I've voted, same as before.
Anyway, other states are different, where they have onerous ID requirements, including government issued photo ID, because the like that sort of thing. There's not much to be done about it.
The point of the policy isn’t to ID voter fraud (extremely rare) it’s to restrict voter access so the republicans pushing voter ID laws aren’t going to implement things to fix the ID availability problem.
They're opposed to ID verification laws that act as a poll tax. Not all voter ID laws carry the same burden. 11% of Americans do not have any form of government ID, yet they have a right to vote.
1.3 Billion votes on electronic machine that's proven multiple times it's hackable. Yet the Parties use that to showcase that they are advanced despite many people asking for Paper Ballot votes. It's quite ironic that a country that usually copies / adopts Western world isn't concerned about the fact how democracy is better handled in the west. Hope Canada stays strong with its democracy
In the Ontario provincial elections we used a hybrid system. They ballots are paper following the same process you described, but they're first inserted into a machine that tallies the counts electronically and the paper record stored in case of discrepancies that might call for a hand count.
Such scanning machines save the time of people counting votes (it takes at least several hours), but you cannot know if the machine hasn't been tampered with. To require re-couting the paper ballots you will need some kind of proof that the results are invalid.
that's how it had worked in LA county for as long as i've lived here, but i've heard that they're changing the voting machines for the upcoming election cycle, so we'll see how it goes.
it's angering to realize that some people will accept election fraud if it benefits them (while simultaneously decrying other unsubstantiated election fraud), regardless of moral or ethical concerns.
cheating to win is losing in my book. hopefully the long arc of the moral universe corrects the harms eventually, if not soon.
A big difference between Canada and the US is that in the US the "vote" is practically never for a single question, but for a much larger set of questions. You could still count by hand, but it takes longer.
There are also more people in the US (around ten times more). You could still count votes by hand in US, but it would take more people or time to do it.
I feel like nobody is bringing up one of the core challenges that the U.S. has that many countries don't. You just vote for way too much fucking stuff at once. In Canada, our ballots are literally just a list of candidates for a single seat. Very occasionally, there will be a single referendum question attached to it. That's it. I've never voted and been asked for more than two choices except for municipal elections. I searched for "sample 2016" ballot and the first result (Sumter County, Florida) had--I shit you not--26 separate votes on it.
I bring this up not to criticize, but to put those who think that paper ballets are impractical in a bit of context. Of course you'll be begging for electronic systems when all of your voting is done on a single day and you vote for who gets to be the janitor.
10 years ago when I was in school, we took standardized tests using Scantron forms (https://www.scantron.com/). It's basically a piece of paper that can be run through a machine so the results of the test can be measured.
Something like this would still retain the benefits of an electronic system, while also leaving behind a paper receipt that can be stored separately from the electronic results in case votes need to be audited / recounted, etc.
Paper ballots (with electronic tallying) is also not susceptible to things like power outages, networking issues, software bugs, etc, since you'd always be able to fallback to the paper ballots if a component of the electronic system fails.
Side note: if I had to guess, the biggest risk with paperless machines is the possibility of software bugs that skew the results in unexpected ways. I would love to know what kind of quality checks + testing goes in to voting machine software... can't imagine how to test a system that's only used at full capacity on 1 day every 4 years.
Couldn't the software behind a voting machine simply be public? It should even be readable by anyone who has taken even a basic CS class. Besides the function that verifies the user hasn't voted yet and is registered to vote, the actual counting of the votes should be trivial.
For as long as I can remember, I have been able to get a receipt from every fuel pump that tells me where I was, how much fuel I purchased, what kind of fuel, what pump I was on, how much I was charged, how much tax was added and the time of day. This has been the case throughout every part of the U.S. I have driven. The fuel companies can also verify everything that is on the receipt.
I am not suggesting we vote on fuel pumps. I am simply pointing out that this appears to be an artificially created problem and not a technical problem.
Giving a comfirmation that person has voted for a specific candidate simplifies buying votes. Also, an employer might require employees to bring such a confirmation to prove that they support corporate values.
With 30% of the population not even bothering to vote (regardless of who runs), votes would likely be eerily cheap to buy. And in many states even just getting a couple percent more to vote your way will flip the state.
I'm already not a fan of allowing places to do freebies for people who have an "I voted" sticker. If it takes a freebie for you to go out and vote, I really don't think you should be voting. And it's incredibly likely they'd just vote blindly for whoever is advertising more in the area.
While these are problems, maybe the trade off is worth it for people to know there vote counted. There may also be a solution that allows a person to know but allows them to alter it for anyone else wanting to view it.
The point isn't to get a receipt that I personally voted. The receipt analogy isn't that exact. The point is create a verifiable paper trail for the event that some registered voter voted a certain way. Paper ballots do that. He's just pointing out how ridiculous it is to argue that it's somehow too expensive or onerous to create a paper trail when every parking lot, every coffee shop, every store is able to create a more extensive paper trail even for the most inconsequential transactions.
"I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the the donut. I don't need a receipt for the donut. I give you money and you give me the donut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I can't imagine a scenario that I would have to prove that I bought a donut." - Mitch Hedberg
Unlike donuts, I can imagine a situation where I would like to prove that my vote happened. We print out receipts for donuts, coffee, parking, all kinds of inconsequential things, ten times a day. But when it comes to voting - one of the most important transaction I'm going to do in a given year - suddenly, people are pushing hard for no receipt, no paper trail. It's transparent bullshit, obviously in bad faith, and when people start making bad faith arguments I start questioning motives.
Or maybe its just so obvious to technical people because we know how vulnerable and unreliable software can be. This XKCD cartoon sums it up pretty well:
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadIn NYC recently I did some ecommerce. I paid for 5 delivery meals and 4 of them were stolen by the drivers. Amazon is full of fraudulent products. Banks in the US are full of loopholes, like ACH not providing sufficient auth. Trust in commerce and finances online are low. Systems fail frequently, and "only money" is lost by big corps usually, so it's not considered a big deal to the general public. I would not use that as a model for elections.
However, i-Voting does have the benefit of making it much harder to cause voter supression (assuming there's free ($) access to whatever provides access to voting).
I'm not sure electronic voting convenience is worth the privacy implications of having a full public ledger of who everyone voted for.
It's pretty clear what is happening. Given the obvious international attacks on US democracy in the last elections, it seems like a no-brainer that we'd have a bi-partisan effort to secure our elections. But we don't, and the side that doesn't want better election security is also the side that "won" the last election, while it was being hacked by foreign adversaries and while publicly asking the very same adversaries for assistance in hacking the Democrat's emails.
It's beyond suspicious.
I'm fine with a debate on the specifics but paperless voting machines have no place in the world. What you're giving up far outweighs the marginal benefits.
Just to note, please don't read politics into this, I've attached my own leanings clearly in case anyone thinks I favor one side or the other but I am trying to state this without it being partisan in nature.
1. And while I'm a progressive, I'm not in this camp.
Regardless, your whataboutism doesn't matter here. Presently, the Democrats "as a whole" are united on election security, and the Republicans "as a whole" are united against it.
The quicker he leaves office, the better off all Americans will be.
He is all about Republican Power at all costs. Nothing else matters to him. Nothing. He is pleased as poop that the current sitting nincompoop President is resetting the bar lower for what the average American will tolerate from an elected official.
Oh, wait. That's not how Congress works. There must be someone else blocking that bill?
[0] https://gabbard.house.gov/sites/gabbard.house.gov/files/Secu...
We should really just go back to paper ballots, which are not perfect but are a lots less hackable at scale and are much more trackable than electronic machines are.
Still, better than touchscreens, if you can mandate audits and that recounts actually mean counting the physical ballots themselves.
This is not a vote of confidence for this particular method.
But you'd need mandatory random audits, and a legal requirement to keep the paper originals for up to years.
There's been cases of the paper ballots being destroyed while legal action was ongoing, and a never audited system cannot be trusted (because there's implied trust, not tested trust).
Routine double counting all votes would be controversial due to the high cost.
If the result is 49.999% vs. 50.001%, you cannot conclude anything meaningful about the will of the people. Maybe the weather was just slightly worse in a neighborhood supporting the losing candidate and it tipped the result slightly.
So even if the voting process is perfect, that close of a result is totally random for other reasons.
Most people don't seem to be capable of thinking about non-determinism like this, though. Witness the huge number of Americans who think the presidential election is illegitimate because Trump got 46% of the vote to Clinton's 48%, when honestly 46 vs. 48 is very little difference in terms of what they mean about the general will about Americans.
On the other end of the political spectrum, witness the amount of Brits who think a 52-48 vote to leave the EU is somehow relevant.
In calculus/analysis terms: this is why proportional representation parliamentary systems are better -- because the function from "how many people support which parties" to "what policies you end up with" is not discontinuous.
If the UK ran on a proportional system, they'd be getting some sort of very soft, Norway model Brexit. If the US did, a center-right Democrat like Clinton or Biden would be PM.
Paper ballots that are hand counted. Ideally, streamed live.
More seriously, France has paper voting, yet results are published at 8:00:00pm, closing time of the last voting offices. How? Statistics. And only takes the night to confirm, when we’re on a 50,3% kind of results. And it’s already 60m voters; If it works for 60m people, it will work for 300m (especially if only 120m vote in USA).
Or you publish all the marked ballots, so that anyone who wanted to could do their own count to verify the results.
You can also design this so that any individual voter can check to see that their ballot was included in the count, and counted correctly, without being able to prove to someone else that they voted for a particular candidate (so that vote buying schemes aren't enforceable).
See Scantegrity [1] for a specific system with these properties, which can be implemented on top of existing optical scan vote counting machines. For a more general look at securing voting, see end-to-end auditable voting systems [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
Mandatory random audits are part of the system. We get automated counts from the Scantron machines, but those are unofficial, preliminary. On election night, there are random audits of some number of voting machines for hand-counts, to detect systematic fraud. And the total number of ballots in each machine is hand-counted to make sure it matches the totals given by the machine.
To use a metaphor, it's not having 2 locks on your front door, it's having 2 different keys that open the same lock.
Say you have a hybrid system, and the numbers come in and the electronic and paper counts disagree. Which one is used as the true vote?
If you take the paper, then what was the point of the electronic? If you take the electronic what was the point of the paper? If you throw out all votes where the paper and electronic disagree, you just enabled any "fraudster" the ability to disenfranchise any subset of votes by breaking either system.
You also can't exactly pick and choose which to accept per instance (could you imagine the abuse that could come from that!?), and methods of "averaging" them don't really solve the problem as much as they make it marginally harder to pull off (to sway 1% of votes in a 50%/50% weighted system, you'd only need to hack 2% of the electronic machines). And of course using a significant "disagreement" between paper and electronic to trigger re-doing an election isn't a solution either because if they hacked it the first time, chances are they can do it again. Not mention that having a second voting day because the first was taken over by fraud is going to be a logistical nightmare, it will change who can come out to vote, and it may even change who/what people will vote for.
If what you want is an audit or a second count, then call for more exit polls or an explicitly secondary system. But this whole dual-voting idea isn't really a good one when you really dive into the dirty details of how it would work.
I went to watch a count for the local elections in May in the UK (I was a candidate)
The papers were counted in front of me and dozens of other people from the various parties. I could see each one going into each pile of ten, each pile of ten being bundled as a pile of 100 and put into a basket, the ambiguous ones (blank, voting for multiple candidates, writing "WANK" next to all candidates but one (which had "NOT WANK" written next to it), went into a separate pile.
At the end of the counting the returning officer went through the ambiguous ones with the candidate or agent and explained if he would accept it or not.
This doesn't take long - it scales, and is fully repeatable by completely different people if needed. The problems that seem to occur are not in the count, but in the returning officers (who tend to be doddery old men) writing the wrong result down, and for some reason this result is final, but that's the same whatever the counting method.
Reminds me of the line from some American tv show where one character says "I don't vote, I just write down Jesus," and another says "we count that as a Republican vote."
https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-bal...
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/26/poli...
That's not complicated -- just post each vote in a different box (paper can be different colours) and count them separately. OK it may take a day or two to find out who your local parish councillor is. Whoopee.
You probably start to get fuzzy about your state rep/senator. And are pretty much clueless about the county Sheriff, Board of Selectmen, and Register of Deeds.
In practice, a lot of the positions lower down on the list are running unopposed or have been in their position and seemed to have done fine for a while. Of course, this being Massachusetts, a lot of these seats are pretty much Democrat locks anyway.
We tend to have 5 or 6 layers of government too so I don’t see the problem there.
I have no issue with European countries sovereign decisions, but when Europeans project their ideas on Americans I take great offense.
The whole electronic voting movement started because people had difficulty with ballots in Florida; a _good_ UI would help alleviate this.
You get the speed of automation with a paper trail in case you have to go back and audit.
EDIT for those replying that you feel voting should be anonymous. With anonymous voting, how do you stop the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" ala Broward County Florida every election? If you can't tie a ballot back to a voter, how do you know the ballot is legitimate?
Without a massive outreach program intended to reach all voters and supply them with convenient, free of charge voter IDs, and a system that can continuously and quickly resolve errors, such a "strong voter ID" would be unconstitutional (for good reason).
It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence. You can't even begin to analyze the problem so its laughable for you to assert such things.
How often do any of these things actually happen? It’s all public record. The data is there for analysis. And yet nobody can point to more than a handful of examples.
It's especially ironic.
If it's happening at any significant rate, without perfect knowledge of which eligible voters won't vote (or have someone else try to steal their vote, which is just as bad for the prospective vote thief), it leaves quite tangible evidence in the form of people presenting themselves to vote under names that have already voted.
The absence of this occurring fairly strongly indicates that vote stealing by impersonation isn't a thing that happens at any meaningful rate.
If there was more than what vote theft operation in the same area, you'd still expect them to have collisions.
> 2 out of 3 people don't vote.
Wrong. A majority of the voting-eligible population votes in Presidential elections.
> If you have ever volunteered at a precinct you would know that it's literally just an excel sheet of names
A printed paper sheet, sure. Whether Excel is used in making it or not is immaterial (I assume it's generated straight from the voter database, which I hope isn't Excel.)
> and you're supposed to check someone off.
California state law requires the actual voter to sign in on the list; I would think that this is normal.
> It's very easy to check the wrong line
If it was a just a check off, maybe it would be easy.
> It's very easy to check the wrong line and your failsafe is easily explained away as a mistake instead of raising any sort of alarm.
Even if it was just a check box, you'd also need to have extremely lax procedures that all the poll workers and any observers were all in on for this basic integrity check to be routinely ignored.
Given the political factions interested in selling the idea of rampant voter fraud, you'd expect them to raise a ruckus if there were actual instances of this going on routinely.
You'd also have to either randomly mark off some non-voter (potentially creating a new instance of the problem) each time this happened or turn in a tally sheet where the count of marked voters didn't match the ballot count. The former would magnify the visibility of the casual disregard of integrity, the latter would definitely raise an alarm in counts.
Also, here in Russia, voters put a signature in the voters registry when receiving a ballot.
The common reply to this is that you need these documents anyway to work, to drive etc. This is true but ignores all the peripheral people you don't see. People whose roles in their family are support or who themselves are in need of support because of illness. Not all of them drive or work and they are citizens too.
It seems to me that the easier solution is to make public records free. Let the taxes you already pay serve to pay the salary of the peon at the printer. Then the people clamoring for us to check ID's to keep the "illegals" from voting can be happy and those people can be enfranchised.
https://bluntforcetruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/voter...
edit: ok, I don't get the hate... weird.
I can't comment on the countries in the picture you've linked. I'll guess that most or all of them make it both easy and required to have a national ID card. That is not the case in the United States.
Consider a working class non-driver who has never travelled overseas. What is their ID?
Would you propose a new state or federal ID card? Great. How likely is it that the state or federal government will produce a system for issuing these that is easy to access, widely available, free, quick to issue IDs, etc? How likely do you think it is that politicians will attempt to modify the system for issuing these IDs so that their opponents' voters will find it more challenging to receive them?
If your answer is "likely" and "unlikely" respectively, you are naive to the history of voter disenfranchisement and vote-system-gaming in the United States. Much of it is based on race.
ID is required in some places like Northern Ireland. Iirc, the UK poll card isn't 'typically' or ID required in England, Whales, Scottland)
But as of 2018 that's changing when some districts required ID for the first time. Although last I heard, laws suits on that were still going on.
Your list is also without sources and presenting an oversimplification of laws to the point of being presented in bad faith, with intentional misrepresentation of the original data. Your list is a lie of checkmarks, intended for propaganda and not to inform the reader.
Tell me more about Canada, this implies you may be mistaken. https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...
> Option 3: If you don't have ID
lays it out pretty clearly:
> You can still vote if you declare your identity and address in writing and have someone who knows you and who is assigned to your polling station vouch for you.
No ID needed, anywhere in Canada, ever, to vote. Period.
And I made no assumptions whatsoever in my post. It is your graphic that is full of false assumptions.
Canada very effectively requires ID to vote, sorry that offends you.
> That person needs ID to be assigned to their polling station to vouch for you.
That is absolutely not true. The site says,
> The voucher must be able to prove their identity and address. A person can vouch for only one person (except in long-term care institutions).
Nothing about ID. Just "prove their identity and address", which does not require ID.
> Canada very effectively requires ID to vote, sorry that offends you.
This is false. I am not offended by facts, or by your lies.
Canada does not require ID to vote. You are spreading lies by continuing to state that it does.
Have you ever lived there? Do you know anything about Canada from experience? You are lying and citing false information to claim falsehoods that are extremely dangerous.
Canada does not require ID to vote. Period.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You don't need to show ID to vote at a polling place in Australia. And you don't need ID to enrol to vote.
There's no way to do that without tying the voter to the vote somehow. Why not hash the voter ID + a secret of your choosing and store that with the vote? Then, even if counting by hand, you can verify your vote was indeed cast for X candidate.
I would rather be able to verify that my vote was cast to the desired candidate than to have a strictly anonymous (but unverifiable) voting system.
EDIT: Mail in voting is skimmed with little to no risk. Oops, lost 1% of that zip code...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
Assume a million votes are cast in an election. To move the needle 1%, you need 10,000 votes. And let's assume a single fake voter can realistically cast ten votes in different precincts, considering vote time and travel time (they can't just keep coming to the same precinct, for fear of recognition).
So you need 10,000 fake registrations, that must match real addresses, and you need 1000 people working all day at fake voting. One voter out of every thousand would be working for this conspiracy.
Now, you need to do this in complete secrecy. Nobody can talk. Nobody can gather evidence. They can't go to the police, or the media. Even one leak is enough to not only ruin the scheme, but create a nationally known scandal. And if it can be connected in any way to a particular political party, that party's name would be dragged through the mud across the country.
It's insanity. No one could safely pull it off.
You know what can be pulled off, though? Voter suppression. Make it much more difficult for certain categories of voters to actually vote. Such as poor people who might not have ID (or might hesitate to use it). Then, convince a large swath of the public - people like you - that this is about security, not suppression. That form of election manipulation is now seen as patriotism, not corruption.
I can see that happening maybe a few times, but it seems ineffective on a large scale.
If they already voted? "Oops, I forgot."
If they haven't voted and come in later, so what? You're long gone.
This may sound laborious and slow but it should be enough to block repeat voting, IMHO.
Edit: thanks for all these clarifications!
Thus, if they audit they can be sure the ballot was cast by a legitimate voter.
If you don't tie ballots to voters, you go full Florida where they just keep "finding" boxes of prefilled ballots.
You MUST tie a ballot to a voter if you want your elections to have any integrity at all. There is no other way to prevent double voting, voting out of precinct, etc.
Broward county, 2016 election. They found a box of filled out ballots at the airport return in a rental car trunk... never a word about it again. Same county, defying a judges orders, the police stopped anyone from entering/auditing the count under direction of then admin Brenda Snipes.
Guess who oversaw Bush / Gore recount? Brenda Snipes.
What is the definition of insanity again?
A lock generally needs to be stronger than the motivation of a would be thief. In this case we are talking about controlling the disposition of trillions of dollars so there probably isn't a lock in the world that is good enough.
Based on prior stories many of the machines aren't merely not good enough they are quite laughable and indeed often so old that no parts can be sourced anywhere because they haven't been made in decades.
Hand counted paper ballots are the only way to be sure, and elections are important enough to be worth it.
Nope. Ballots need to be anonymous. Otherwise you can be coerced into voting a particular way.
With anonymous ballots, you can just "Find a box of ballots" and have no way to authenticate that they came from actual voters vs fraudsters.
It continues to be implausible and easily prevented without de-anonymizing the vote or resorting to strong voter ID.
We regularly get precincts reporting more votes than are even possible given their total number of eligible voters.
Fraud in anonymous voting states is rampant here.
It was across both parties in multiple states wherein the "found" votes were heavily favoring one party or the other (a few were well outside 3 standard deviations from the current votes, even in areas that were normally not heavily favoring one side).
Any precinct reporting more votes than possible given the numbers of eligible voters is recounted. If the recounts can't manage to arrive at results that make any sense at all the entire precinct is ignored. Where's the problem?
Voter ID is entirely orthogonal to this issue. Tying ballots to a voter is not desirable, since it opens the door for voter intimidation.
Edit to respond to the "hey we just found this box of filled in ballots" comment: anonymous voting means you don't know how someone voted, but whether or not they voted is still public record. The number of ballots counted still needs to match up with the number of votes cast.
> Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds.
Finally, the punishments need to be strong, swift, and decisive if something does come up as being wrong. You can't just be "oh well, mistakes were made with the hundreds of thousands of mis-counted votes/purged voters. What can you do?!"
No way. None of that. All the people responsible in such a situation should be investigated, and if found guilty punished. Otherwise, there will be no fear of trying to steal the elections, especially if the upside is big.
And those IDs usually require proof of residency and/or a copy of a US birth certificate, which can be problematic to acquire or prove in their own ways for the more vulnerable to disenfranchisement (such as the homeless) in our society.
If an election method cannot be audited, it cannot be trusted.
Note I said nothing about whether recountability is a good thing. It's clearly a good thing. Hence we should stick with hand counted paper ballots since machine counting introduces trivial ways to game the vote.
Just because Florida is unwilling to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
To be fair, I believe that is not the case across the state, just certain areas (i.e. county level).
Florida's electoral incompetence and corruption (probably) handed the 2000 presidential election to Bush. Because of that, we wound up with the Iraq war, and a mind-boggling amount of American blood and treasure (not to mention Iraqi lives) wasted on lies. Florida's inability to conduct free and fair elections has tangible consequences on me as a Minnesotan. So yes, I want to impose some standards and values on their elections, because their elections lead to MY president.
I'm not suggesting a federal takeover of elections. I am, however, pointing out that some states, like Florida, are running elections so badly that it harms other states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-India-not-use-ballot-papers-f...
Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
I think we should be asking ourselves how to make electronic voting feasible and secure, NOT dismissing it blindly as not possible and refusing to even try.
What? How?
this action alone will save an enormous amounts of paper, orders of magnitude more than is required for every democratic action you'll participate in with our super low tech future (paper ballots for all), and nicely reduces the amount of shipping/logistics etc. that your local mail delivery service has to do. massive win-win for the planet and democracy
Yes, I already did that. Everyone should too as well.
For that to be any consolation, we’d have to unconditionally trust those who have physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.
A vote count given by an electronic machine has no such auditability.
> Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
“Hacking” a stack of paper, e.g. ballot stuffing or destroying ballots, is something people can see happen. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to do out in the open with security cameras and the public there to watch. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but you tend to make a much bigger mess doing it.
That assumes they aren't replaced at some point. For a nation-level election this is probably too difficult to significantly influence an election but at even a state level it's relatively doable with a little coercion and/or carefully placed individuals even in 2019 in the United States.
You also have the option to do voter impersonation in states without voting ID laws, again this would mostly only work at a more local level.
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud documents 1052 CONVICTIONS of voter fraud in the United States with 1,216 proven instances.
Outside of the United States there are all sorts of examples, including standing out the polling places with force to let people know vote our way or we'll shoot you.
Have you never heard of bribes or threats? It happens with juries, I imagine it happens with poling places, and I imagine some of those convictions involved exactly that.
If you've reached a point where you are willing to tamper with an election, greasing some palms or finding something to threaten key people with is not going to make you lose a single wink of sleep or have any mental reservations or other hesitations. People like money, like a lot, and if you haven't the funds to bribe them with the 21st century offers a horde easily discoverable information about people and those close to them.
Also, with presidential elections in 2018, there were no prior notifications and the government didn't know who was going to become an observer before the voting day, which was nice.
Sadly, you cannot become an observer by yourself, I don't like that.
I haven't heard about bribes or threats, but there were cases when an observer was taken away by police for allegedly being too loud and obstructing the voting. In recent elections, independent observers used a Telegram chat for coordination, so that they could ask for consultation or ask someone else to come to the polling station if something happened.
In Russia fraud is usually committed by election staff who often are public school employees, social care or government workers, people who are paid by the government. And typically they prefer to falsify results when there is no observers, they don't want to appear in Youtube videos.
Of course, in other countries the situation may be different.
The Russian Revolution established a control-freak government that hated freedom; Lenin was a self-annointed genius. The USSR failed because the incentives were misaligned.
My grandparents immigrated from Russia when their parents saw the pogroms in the 1890s. Using scapegoats, promising free stuff, and fear mongering is over 100 year tradition. Emotion and anecdotes over data.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/world/europe/moscow-prote...
But this allows us to see what measures to ensure transparency work in such circumstances and what don't. We see that independent observers and paper voting at polling stations help to prevent fraud and electronic voting would be completely opaque and uncontrollable.
I'm sorry to report that I feel your government is at war with my country.
Holy whataboutism. Yes Russia is a far cry from a healthy democracy but that has no bearing in any way on paper ballots. You seem to have just changed the subject entirely.
So simple, so effective.
Hack paper ballots: bribe the multiple people, including representatives from each party who cares to send one, to look the other way while you steal a box full of paper ballots and substitute your own.
It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder to mess with paper ballots at scale and much easier to secure them.
How can you trust that the machine will behave as you expect in a "real world" setting, when the results truly count?
IMHO, the biggest risk from electronic voting machines isn't some rando swinging the elections with their 1337 haxx0r skills: the biggest risk is that the machines basically come "pre-hacked" from the factory - either intentionally, or unintentionally (bugs happen).
Unlike electronic voting, paper ballots are much more difficult to manipulate. If a voter has marked a box for candidate X, you cannot change it or ignore it if there are observers. An observer can verify that voting goes according to the rules and votes are counted properly. The most popular way to "hack" paper voting is to organise groups of people and ride them on a bus from one polling station to other so that they can vote multiple times, but it is more difficult to do, and easier to spot than simply replace the firmware in a voting machine.
In the case with an electronic machine, you cannot see what's happening inside.
You have the option to mail in your vote or to vote in an advance poll, but these options close a week before the main poll, so if your name appears on the list at your polling station, they're pretty confident you haven't voted yet.
Assuming there is no external IO such as USB or Ethernet, someone would have to disassemble the machine and solder a programming header in order to re-flash the device.
> to disassemble the machine
Is it that difficult?
A successful voting process both accurately counts the votes, and is trusted by the people. Computers can count, but they are not seen as trustworthy by the people. Paper is more understandable and trustworthy. Even as a computer programmer I'm not sure I can trust electronic voting.
Thus, even in the absence of any actual hacks or fraud, electronic voting is inferior at a primary objective of the voting system, being understandable and perceived as trustworthy.
No they arent. You need one guy with physical access to to a machine, at any time, to screw an election, with manual counting you need everyone in the room conspiring to rig the election during the voting hours. With the possibility to volunteer to count votes and publishing the voting numbers for each voting station, you just dont get those situations.
I know its an unpopular statement, but having a democratic election is not a new problem to solve. Most western countries do it just fine. This is not a problem with the concept of paper ballots but a absurdly broken system.
Let's say your parks department were headed by a libertarian guy who vehemently opposes using public funds to fill a landfill and turn it into a park and he finds out his deputy voted for the ordinance to spend the money on said park. He could retaliate.
Another hypothetical could involve your local councilman finding out which members of his district voted for him and which didn't, and using that knowledge to influence who's streets get priority when plowing snow this winter and which don't.
Any voting system, including those based on blockchain, should be designed in such a way that disclosure of someone's vote is entirely up to them.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
in-person paper voting doesn't suffer from that problem, because you walk into the voting area, write your vote on a piece of paper, then you yourself place it into the box, and you can then stand there and watch the ballot box with your own eyes until they are counted, at which point you can count along.
If we want voter ID laws, why not make it easier for everyone to get an ID first, and then enforce voter ID once that effort has succeeded?
Why would anyone be for this if not to subvert our Democracy?
I find it odd you are so concerned about a non-problem but not concerned about the actual problem of eligible voters being actually disenfranchised.
I also don't think that there are that many people that don't have IDs. I have seen absolutely no statistics on the topic, but I have seen multiple groups survey different parts of various cities and nobody had issues getting an ID. It's pretty much needed in almost any aspect of life.
You can't even get welfare or government assistance without some form of ID, so you can't tell me you can't get one to vote.
My point still stands.
Millions of eligible voters do not have state-issued ID. Estimates put it at 10-20 million Americans. The primary utility of a state-issued ID is to drive on public roads and there are 10's of millions of Americans who do not drive on a regular basis.
The suggestion you make, that we should make it easier for people to get IDs, falls apart when we recognize that every state sets up their own system of issuing IDs. It would take a very strong federal law to bring states in line to the point where we could have confidence that every eligible voter in America could obtain an ID for free and regardless of individual circumstances.
As for Russia "subverting our Democracy", there is zero evidence that Russia or any other foreign entity used the lack of voter ID laws in some states to influence any elections.
https://www.theroot.com/exclusive-thousands-of-black-votes-i...
Or how about a federal district court ruling?
https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/georgia-dre-d...
https://blackboxvoting.org/
Snarkyness aside, credit scores are un-auditable algorithms runs by private corporations. They do a bad job at measuring fiscal responsibility, and do not measure any other kind of responsibility.
I believe a safer solution is to overhaul education. This way we get both the equality of democracy and the better decision making of an educated populace.
There's also ethical questions around whether solving the problem is even something any human is entitled to do.
All the proposed solutions are an invitation to or an implementation of tyranny. Such a categorical claim (universal Quantifier!) from someone that probably has zero background in voting theory and not enough in epistemology e.g cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
You make such a powerful claim but honestly, in all sincerity: All the proposed solutions How many alternatives are you aware? 1? Dictature ? Two maybe ?
You don't know what you don't know and me neither but at least I know that I don't know what I don't know. The best solution to me is the one I co-designed with my brother, it is not public and will only be when I'll have a mature software implementation. But public solutions that are still an improvement would be for exemple an epistocracy semi-direct. I can explain it to you if you're open to the possibility of changing your mind about "representative" democracy being the least worst governing system.
There's also ethical questions around whether solving the problem is even something any human is entitled to do. No.
> There's also ethical questions around whether solving the problem is even something any human is entitled to do. No.
I'm more interested in hearing you explain this.
They already are, though that can be improved by decreasing the role of heritable wealth and the disadvantages of poverty through better taxation and social support policies.
Voting is the wrong place to incentivize it, even if you could without first having improved the degree to which it is incentivized in the rest of society.
> The fact that most people voting don't read politicians programs should show how autistic our system is.
Using autistic as an insult here is inappropriate on multiple levels; also, I'd argue that it's perhaps jist rational, since politicians actions are only rarely usefully related to their written programs, and there are much more accessible ways of getting information that is much better at predicting their behavior in office.
since politicians actions are only rarely usefully related to their written programs This is just too excessive, hyperbolic. If you want to quantify it, there you go: https://trumptracker.github.io/ much more accessible ways of getting information that is much better at predicting their behavior in office. Enlighten me then, where is such a thing?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most...
It is common to blame the poor for having trouble as if all their problems have to do with poor character. We start with the example that it's possible for A poor person to build themselves from nothing to wealth and success and somehow arrive at the thesis that everyone who is struggling is only doing so because they are lazy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/18/poor-...
In reality people have a varied degree of talents and make varied choices in life. Those who start out stupid and lazy at the top of the ramp end up well off with good jobs at Daddy's friends business and those who start off with nothing often end up struggling despite working hard.
Your idea would systemically privilege morons over their betters who had an illness in their family. Furthermore it would privilege the already privilege by taking votes away from the poor and gifting them to the rich. Like a perverse Robin Hood stealing crumbs from the poor to give to the rich's dogs.
Our government already primarily serves the interests of the rich and white but cannot presently afford to sufficiently alienate the poor or black lest they turn up at the polls in sufficient numbers to tip the political table.
Your suggestion intended on its face to to disenfranchise a tiny number of bums seems designed to disenfranchise minorities and the poor. I will be charitable and suppose this isn't the purpose.
Instead of carrying the political day with 49% of the vote or even 40% which is possible with our current electoral college such a suggestion would allow 20% or 30% of the population to rule by decree with little concern for the desires of their poorer kin many of which are far to close to the social and financial edge already.
When the rich rearrange the nation to even better serve their needs and service their wealth millions will see their lives destroyed.
This is my long way of saying that this is a bad idea.
North Carolina currently is facing two issues:
1) the state Board of Elections will vote on Thursday to increase the standards for certification which will hopefully lead to hand-marked paper ballots for all (except those with disabilities).
2) HB 19, which will delay decertification for insecure voting machines that roughly 1/3 North Carolinians use. This bill passed unanimously in the House.
If you live in North Carolina and care about this issue, please email Damon Circosta (damon.circosta.board@ncsbe.gov) with your viewpoints as he is the new, tie-braking vote on the board.
Additionally, call your state Senator and tell them to oppose HB 19. The bittersweet news is that it doesn't look like it will get taken up this year because of the budget standoff, but it's better to start fighting this battle now.
https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI
This is comical FUD.
What makes people think paper is safer? The paper copy you have is worthless since you can counterfeit it, and the one in storage can be replaced or falsified just the same. A secure system can be designed regardless of the storage media - i.e. a digital one can be as safe or safer than paper. Brazil has used electronic voting for decades now, and despite accusations (by the winning party!) there has been no proof of tampering or exploitable security flaws.
Attempts to insert extra ballots will be detected by the count. Attempts to substitute ballots would have to match counts exactly, and somehow be done without being seen in a room with multiple other judges and other people.
There are bound to be loads - Facebook comes to mind. If you think of human rights and climate change the list of technologies is going to be long. Energy production and the arms industry are some standouts.
If it was like voting machines, you’d have massive initiatives to run everything on plain HTTP and any suggestion that we should all use HTTPS is completely ignored.
1. https://jagranjosh.com/current-affairs/what-is-vvpat-machine...
In the 2016 Presidential election, a lot of people in North Carolina had trouble due to problems with the electronic poll books they used to keep track of who registered and who already voted.
People would show up at their polling place and either be told, incorrectly, that they had never registered, or be told, incorrectly, that they had already voted.
Oddly, they only had trouble with these systems in Durham County, a heavily blue county, and these same devices in other states are known to have been targeted by foreign hackers--but it wasn't until this year that DHS finally agreed to actually do a proper forensic examination of the equipment to see if anything shady was going on [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/729920147/federal-government-...
There is nothing odd or mysterious about it. It's the logical conclusion of being a political minority clinging to power and it's been happening for decades both openly and less openly.
As Andrew Gumbel wrote in Steal This Vote [2005], America experiences recurring amnesia.
https://www.amazon.com/Steal-This-Vote-Elections-Democracy/d...
As a burned out election integrity activist, I've really struggled with the recurring incredulity.
My local newspaper called me a "sweaty paranoid kook", because I dared to explain how our jurisdiction's central count actually worked (per their procedures manual).
And all the risks we identified and tried to mitigate? It all happened. All of it. (Where's my parade?)
--
Some free, unsolicited, hard earned advice from a recovering activist:
Focus on "errors", instead of "fraud". Just because. The moment there's a hint of partisanship, the conversation is over. And really, at the end of the day, fraud is indistinguishable from errors. So just grit your teeth, for the greater good.
Focus on appropriations, aka follow the money. The very minor victories I've had were argued from a framing of good governance. Transparency, accountability, anti-waste, etc.
- Kemp controlled the election and was also a candidate[1]. He refused to recuse himself from his election duties. Why was that?
- Kemp purged more voters than anyone else in history[1]. His office then destroyed the evidence when an investigation was launched[2].
- A judge allowed an external audit of faulty voting systems used in 2018. The Republican Secretary of State objected[4].
1. Can you imagine a lawsuit being fair if the judge is the plaintiff? Or a football game being fair if the quarterback is also a referee? I don't trust any human to have that much honor and impartiality, especially if (in their mind) the lives of many unborn babies and the American way of life are at stake. Wouldn't someone like that think, "The ends justify the means?"
2. https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/vote...
3. https://www.apnews.com/877ee1015f1c43f1965f63538b035d3f
4. https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/judg...
At the very least, the voter purge and subsequent FBI investigation and lawsuit are not what you'd expect from someone who wants to help people vote, right?
We've also seen federal judges, including the Supreme Court, say that Republicans have been responsible for racial gerrymandering[1][2][3], unconstitutional ID laws to suppress the vote[4], and outright election fraud[5] all over the Southeast. Voter suppression by the minority party is logical and also a decades-old strategy, including a motivation for the war on drugs[1].
Why would Georgia be different? If the election were completely fair, it would have been an exception rather than the rule, and the state govt would reflect the population (majority Democrat) instead of being 100% controlled by Republicans.
1. VA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-c...
2. NC: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/north-c...
3. TX: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-rules-texas-di...
4. NC: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/north-c...
5. https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-dr...
This is also the state in which the ruling party committed election fraud in the last cycle, and got caught.
Nothing that is possible is out of the realm of possibility at this point.
This is pretty scary and I didn't know this occurred in other states.
DemocracyNC.org has made it very easy to email the NC State Board of Elections officials with a message in support of this amendment to provide voters with the security of a human-readable ballot. https://democracync.org/news/democracy-nc-ncsbe-decision-to-...
For excellent reporting on election security follow https://twitter.com/jennycohn1
With that a fraudsters model have to deal with random checks by any voter.
Are you going to rely on the same system or perhaps another equally compromised system to "randomly" select votes for you to check and how do you propose to check them if you don't know how the person voted?
I would go so far to say that there exists mathematically no solution to this problem that doesn't violate voter anonymity.
It's absolutely imperative that after you leave the ballot box, noone has the ability to verify what your particular vote was, and you don't have the ability to prove to someone else that you really voted that way, or that ability will be abused on scale, by local "influencers", employers, etc requiring the people to demonstrate that they voted "correctly". The mixing up of ballots in the ballot box is a very important feature for the elections.
Not at all; the parent said "taken into account in the final tally", not "see that their vote was counted as they intended".
This is very similar to the system for paper ballots, with a tear-off receipt. If you type in the ID number, you can verify that that ballot was counted. There is no association between identity, vote choice, or ballot ID.
And it's not just a theoretical possibility to observe - I don't know how USA does it, but for my area the counting at each district is generally observed by multiple people, including (but not limited to) the representatives of all serious parties.
Everyone has different levels of trust, and I'm sure generally the chance of some grand voting conspiracy is very low; however, for me to fully trust the system I would need to be able to verify the count myself, and verify that my own vote was recorded correctly.
Personally this feels more important than some issue around buying votes etc. That is mostly illegal, and plenty of people find ways to indirectly achieve the same effect anyway...
In my home country Bolivia, we are required to present a valid national ID to vote.
Others like you worry that, without ID, there will be lots of fraud. I keep hearing that there is not very much fraud, but I don't know how they know without a baseline that's verified with ID.
I also don't know why voter ID is too much of a burden, but IDs for gun purchases are not. If they are both rights shouldn't they have similar standards for checking eligibility?
Elections are audited and fraud is found in only very, very rare cases, hence the widespread confidence that voter fraud is a minuscule issue. Other election issues are very real. By any metric, the number of eligible voters who are denied the right to vote dwarfs the number of people who cast ineligible votes.
And how do they verify citizenship, or other elligibility requirements? Can you just specify a bugus address so they don't catch you?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...
These corrupt politicians in the democratic party commit fraud on large scales, using your feelings to manipulate you. One example of many of their manipulative, fraudulent nature is attempting to rig the 2016 election for Hillary, pushing Sanders out. The reason they don't want a voter ID is so that they can commit election fraud, but they appeal to your emotions by saying disenfranchised people are the reason. This is painfully obvious to anyone with a logical brain who can recognize these patterns on large scales.
Sociopaths exist. They are driven by their desire to be at the top, lording over other people. Where might they find themselves in positions of said power? Could it be in politics? Within the party that prides itself on being very socially oriented? Seems like a good place to climb to the top if you're a good social engineer (a sociopath), does it not? Would they do and say anything to rise to the top? Most sociopaths certainly would. Why is it that the most corrupt, downtrodden cities are very blue? What happened to places like Baltimore? Where is all that money going?
https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-ci-school-audit...
For the record, I'm not saying any of these things out of hate. I'm saying these things out of love. I want every single person on this planet to thrive. But that can't happen as long as people remain useful idiots by supporting causes based on emotions instead of logic. People smarter than you can easily manipulate you through your emotions. It would be extremely naive to deny this possibility (reality).
Edit for the downvoters: How's that Russian collusion narrative going? You're being manipulated.
Sounds like a cult that would use memes and social media to indoctrinate children, start crazy conspiracy theories about pizza, conspire with foreign governments, and suppress opponents votes though arbitrary requirements.
Here's a question for you: What's going with Epstein? Why is there a painting of Bill Clinton in a dress at Epstein's? Is this the same Bill Clinton who lied to the entire world and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBe_guezGGc
Again, you're being lied to and manipulated, as usual.
> suppress opponents votes though arbitrary requirements
If you think proof of citizenship is an arbitrary requirement to vote, you're a brainwashed tool used by people much smarter than you. Do you really think it would be okay for me to travel to another country and vote in their elections without me actually being a citizen of that country?
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/08/16/painting-of-bill...
If this particular sentence is what your brain focuses on to prevent it from seeing the truth and unraveling everything you think you know about the world, then you may be too far gone at this point.
How about these flight logs?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/14/bill-clinto...
I'm sorry: that's you.
I've provided more than enough evidence of my claims in this thread, from sources which you won't be able to say "right wing propaganda" about.
In Canada we vote completely anonymously on a piece of paper. ID is verified at the entrance to the voting area, but your identity is _in no way_ associated with the piece of paper you mark your vote on. The ballots are counted by hand with numerous bystanders/observers of whatever affiliation. It just works. We have no need for digital (aka hackable/tamperable/buggy) voting system.
Global News has a decent article outlining why the system is so impervious to abuse: https://globalnews.ca/news/4049932/canada-2019-election-hack...
Voter ID, for example, is contentious because a state can influence election turnout through decisions on where ID offices are located and when they're open.
Edit: I always find it ironic that the Republican party--the party of limited government--wants people to have to go to the bastion of efficiency known as the DMV (!!!) in order to vote.
> The U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed a Republican bid to revive a strict North Carolina voter-identification law that a lower court found deliberately discriminated against black voters, handing a victory to Democrats and civil rights groups.
> The appeals court found that the law’s provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” concluding that the Republican-led legislature enacted it “with discriminatory intent.”
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/
P.S. You must have a valid passport when you reach a certain age.
If you cannot make this assumption, then you are actively disenfranchising people.
You can achieve the same result by not requiring an id to vote.
Also, young people cannot buy alcohol and cigarettes without it (to prove that they are adult) so some of them are motivated to get it as soon as possible.
Here is a Wikipedia link in case if someone didn't hear about "internal passports": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_passport
As long as the process and cost is not punitive and targeted it's fine if something costs time and money. We have multiple constitutional rights that are burdened in that fashion. The right to petition the government, to have courts decide arguments, to own a gun, all cost time and money. (Not to mention that I have to have a photo ID and pass a criminal background check every time I buy a gun.)
In reality, if you want to make an assertion and have other people convinced of your argument, then your obligation is to provide all the facts. Given that, you cannot simply take the inverse hypothetical situation where election fraud is just assumed and use that to form your argument. We still have yet to establish that fraud is happening. So why would we want to suppress votes to prevent something that doesn't happen?
It is however factual that fraud happens. People go to jail every election cycle.
It is not factual that fraud happens on a scale the warrants disenfranchising voters. If you advocate for disenfranchising voters without providing any sort of argument that legitimizes doing so, then yes, I absolutely am accusing you of wanting to disenfranchise voters for no reason other than to fear monger. You're the TSA of airport security. The WMDs of war. The daily weather of climate change. The fucking pizza of sex trafficking.
You should be banned from this site for spreading this fucking nonsense.
Keep in mind that DMV and RMV office _assume_ that people have vehicles. In the case of voters this is not the case.
It's like gerrymandering but in this case what's being manipulated is the ability of voters to get these cards. In many cases it is racist.
Getting a photo ID is a infrequent event. That makes gaming the ID acquisition process a means of disenfranchising voters ineffective.
Your next thought might be along the lines of accepting expired ID for voting purposes. That's an interesting idea but unlikely to be accepted. In Massachusetts, for instance, you can't buy even a six pack of beer if you cannot produce a valid driver's license. Expired licenses are as good as no license at all in that case.
Thank you for asking the question, I had assumed these cards lasted as long as a driver's license and that is not the case. :-)
You make a good point in that these voter ID cards might have a longer expiration then a driver's license. To my knowledge the expiration period of the ID isn't a part of the legislation. In that case we can probably expect to see the length of time vary from state to state. In that case I would suspect that state's with a shorter valid period might be trying to manipulate the number of legal voters.
https://blog.massdrive.com/2012/03/26/renewing-your-license-...
Still, the life span of these cards could be managed for political gain. Perhaps if the majority part in the state house changes, the valid lifetime for only the ID cards could be shortened.
The U.S. sounds more and more like a dystopia to me. In Germany having an ID is a matter of fact, you get a new one every few years and they glue an updated adress on its backside when you change your main adress. The times when you can get it updated might be inconvenient but you are required to have a valid one, so you just have to spend a vacation day every few years on it - the horror.
> In many cases it is racist.
How about trying to improve on the current state of afairs instead of complaining while keeping the barndoor wide open so the racists can continue doing as they currently do?
> Germany having an ID is a matter of fact
Having an id as a matter of fact sounds more dystopian than a country where you aren't required to identify yourself at any given time.
The last time I had to deal with the police they just asked for my drivers license. Evil dystopian government keeping track of people who drive past red lights. Even in the U.S. you can't escape that.
If you contrast that to a country that has government mandated ids just because, then that's clearly the more dystopic example.
I very much think the right does attempt to exclude certain voters, and does use Voter ID regulations as part of a larger strategy regarding voter disenfranchisement. But it is a relatively easy fix that could be calmly resolved with common sense regulations, like other commenters in this thread have mentioned regarding requirements for physical location and hours of operation for voter registration/id centers. So it sometimes appears people (in this case the left) would rather have something to cry about than just calmly fix the loophole the opposition is trying to exploit.
In brief, the real issue is that actual attempts to cooperate and govern have died, to be replaced by grandstanding (when not in power) and scorched earth practices (when in power). I blame first past the post systems, and think this is an inevitable result. I would welcome the existential requirement for political parties to cooperate which comes with a larger spectrum of parties in power, as a natural effect of more effective proportional representation.
As an aside, in the US, there's a history of not needing papers to get around or prove who you are. My grandfather fought in World War II and this was an important issue for him. There likely are people in the US opposed to a national ID card for similar reasons, fear that police will start demanding you carry your card at all times. I have no idea if they might be numerous or not.
It's easy to forget that about one in seven or eight adult americans don't have a driver's license.
I'm not an American and while I rarely have to produce an ID, going without one entirely would be impossible. Also illegal here in Poland but this law is not enforced because it's hugely impractical long before you run into any legal issues.
Even worse is that there is wide bi-partisan support to require people to go through the DMV for the ability to drive on public roads, something that impacts a person's day to day life far more than voting. This is especially true of the poor who cannot afford to uber and those located in areas without public transport.
I actually agree that requiring an ID that may require significant effort to obtain for voting is not reasonable.
If one accepts the argument with regards to a voter id, then why would they reject it with regard to a license?
Is it ironic? Republicans aren't calling for the abolishment of the DMV for driver's licenses. Requiring ID to vote is inline with requiring ID to drive.
I find it interesting the Democrats seem to idolize European governance, except for the part where requiring ID to vote is the norm.
edit: fixed typo - requiring id to vote is inline with requiring id to drive
Voter ID laws are simply an attempt to keep poor people and minorities from voting and honestly it's sickening.
Which is not a problem. There were less than 100 cases of voter fraud in the last twenty years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/13/th...
Preventing ineligible voting is red herring for suppressing legitimate voters, by creating extra hoops to jump through for certain classes of citizens.
Republicans aren't calling for the abolishment of the DMV for driver's licenses. Requiring ID to vote is inline with requiring ID to drive.
Until then, IDs are a poll tax — and to put it mildly, that's a problem.
Sure.
>and mandatory for all citizens
And what are the consequences if you don't get this now mandatory (federal?) ID? Presumably some sort of passport card like thing that doesn't actually let you travel across borders. What if you don't have the documentation you need? What if you don't have the time to go to the offices that provide these IDs?
For a lot of people, the cost of getting the Equivalent ID to a driver's license isn't the big issue. All the other things are.
The reason should be obvious, people without ID are likely poor, and likely to vote for Democrats. Voter fraud is just misdirection on the part of Republicans.
Voter ID is required to register. At which time it is verified and eligibility is adjudicated.
Identity is confirmed when a ballot is issued. For postal balloting, which is not opposed by Republicans, your address is proxy for identity. One exception is North Dakota; no ID is required, because presumably poll workers know their neighbors.
The issue is what forms of ID are required to be issued a ballot.
Pro democracy persons who support enfranchising their fellow citizens are content to accept many forms of official ID to confirm identity.
Anti democratic persons who openly advocate wide spread disenfranchisement demand restoring unconstitutional poll taxes.
That is not necessarily true in the US. If I vote in person on election day in my town (I usually vote by mail or earlier at town hall) I give my address but do not have to present an ID.
You replied: "That is not necessarily true in the US."
Yes, yes, yes. There are always exceptions in the USA. No one person can know them all.
Because every jurisdiction is a snowflake. And everything keeps changing. Causing us all to talk past each other. No small part of the challenge talking about this stuff rationally.
For your jurisdiction, the powers that be determined that your signature was sufficient verification, which can be compared against the signature on file (your registration), just like with postal ballots.
Satisfied?
Which is just one state as you say. But, if you follow the news, requiring ID is a very contentious topic that's often associated with disenfranchising voters so I assume it's not the norm.
Universal automatic voter registration. Like every other mature democracy.
We now have a handful of complete rosters. Of everyone living and dead. Updated in near real-time.
We know with complete certainty if someone is eligible to vote.
We could just use any of our existing national demographic databases (NSA, Planitir, Facebook, LexisNexus, ChoicePoint, etc) for good governance. Instead of 50+ mutually incompatible chaotic mutant voter registration databases.
(Related: Just do a query, instead of walking around with clipboards every 10 years and doing a partial head count.)
Why don't we use the resources we already have to moot this issue?
Discuss.
Exactly this. Every citizen should be automatically able to vote without any effort on their 18th birthday. I personally think it shouldn’t even require being 18, but should be permitted if elections are happening during your 18th year, but you haven’t hit your birthday yet—nobody turning 18 in 2020 should be unable to vote for the next president just because their birthday is after Election Day. We should be doing all we can, on the public dime, to the point of begging and dragging people to the nearest booth to participate in their government.
I think post offices are the perfect first place to look to for handling this. Far more citizens live in close proximity to a post office than a dmv. And as needs require and areas permit, we can look to libraries, state universities, and community colleges as additional points where one can handle voting needs—even casting ballots.
One of those things is an inherent right of citizenship. The other is a privilege that requires proving one has allegedly mastered the skills and knowledge required to safely practice it.
What is the overlap between people who drive and people who can vote? How were the location of DMV and RMV offices chosen, were they selected to be accessible to every citizen? Who trains people at the voting locations to validate ID cards? Is there a physical device that scans and helps validate these ID cards? What does that cost?
Post offices make much more sense, they tend to be accessible by nearly everyone. But there has been no talk of providing these cards through post offices. Partly because of cost, training and the increased workload on the post office. Partly because the goal is to prevent voters from lawfully voting.
Even if you feel that the DMV or RMV is a reasonable place to issue these cards, where is the pushback from states who have to staff up in order to provide these cards? How long will these cards last before expiration? In MA, a driver's license only lasts two years, ID cards last five.
The whole thing, in my opinion, is an obvious sham.
"Your Massachusetts driver’s license is valid for five years, unless it is your first license which expires on your fifth birthday after the date of issue, or until the end of your authorized stay in the U.S. (whichever comes first)."
https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2019/04/02/chapter_1.pd...
Also the verification process itself can be often biased or outright discriminatory (ie, registration polls being inaccurate).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...
Assuming it based on no evidence would be a form of prejudice.
Concluding that such a disadvantage exists bases on ample empirical evidence plus occasional statements of policy makers cheering themselves for preserving or advancing that disadvantage is not.
In Spain everybody has a mandatory ID, and it is very easy and cheap or even free to get it. In that context it makes sense to require an ID. In the US, for cultural reasons, there is a lot of reluctance toward a national ID.
Getting an ID is prohibitive for certain classes of people, classes who correlate with voting for the Democratic party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
Voter Impersonation is also not a problem in the U.S., so the whole Voter ID is a red herring to make it harder to vote for certain people who have the right to.
While a driver’s license is the most common form of ID in the state, Bentley said anyone without a driver’s license can go to any county register’s office and have a photo ID made and the closing of the DMV offices will not change that fact.
Bentley also pointed out that every probate judge in the state has the authority to renew driver’s licenses and the closing of the DMV offices will not change that fact.
Bentley said not only is the state not engaged in any effort to curtail voting, it is doing all it can to make sure anyone who wants to vote will be able to register to vote.
“We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” said Bentley. “We’re not ever going to do anything to keep people in the state of Alabama from voting. And for them to jump to a conclusion like that, that is politics at its worst.”
No it is not.
There have been less than a hundred voter impersonation cases in the last two decades: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/13/th...
Anyone saying that ID verification is a big issue is using it as a red herring, to create more hoops to jump through for citizens who have a right to vote.
In Canada, you don't actually even need an ID to vote. [0]
Two pieces of paper like your voting information card (that is mailed directly to you) and a utility bill with your name and address will suffice.
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...
Now, same state, I get the ballot mailed to me, it has my name on it, it's bar coded, I vote, put it in an envelope, mail it back or drop it at a collection box for this purpose, and I get an email telling me I've voted. That kind of tracking gives me a frowny face. I don't know that they have a way to associated my vote with me, but they know whether or not I've voted, same as before.
Anyway, other states are different, where they have onerous ID requirements, including government issued photo ID, because the like that sort of thing. There's not much to be done about it.
are discrepancies between exit polls and election result valid reason?
A better option is human-readable paper ballots, as you can manually compile results from batches of ballots and run stop-loss audits on them.
https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security...
it's angering to realize that some people will accept election fraud if it benefits them (while simultaneously decrying other unsubstantiated election fraud), regardless of moral or ethical concerns.
cheating to win is losing in my book. hopefully the long arc of the moral universe corrects the harms eventually, if not soon.
There are also more people in the US (around ten times more). You could still count votes by hand in US, but it would take more people or time to do it.
[0] https://electionsbcca.blob.core.windows.net/electionsbcca/re...
I bring this up not to criticize, but to put those who think that paper ballets are impractical in a bit of context. Of course you'll be begging for electronic systems when all of your voting is done on a single day and you vote for who gets to be the janitor.
Too much to vote on doesn't seem to be a thing.
10 years ago when I was in school, we took standardized tests using Scantron forms (https://www.scantron.com/). It's basically a piece of paper that can be run through a machine so the results of the test can be measured.
Something like this would still retain the benefits of an electronic system, while also leaving behind a paper receipt that can be stored separately from the electronic results in case votes need to be audited / recounted, etc.
Paper ballots (with electronic tallying) is also not susceptible to things like power outages, networking issues, software bugs, etc, since you'd always be able to fallback to the paper ballots if a component of the electronic system fails.
Side note: if I had to guess, the biggest risk with paperless machines is the possibility of software bugs that skew the results in unexpected ways. I would love to know what kind of quality checks + testing goes in to voting machine software... can't imagine how to test a system that's only used at full capacity on 1 day every 4 years.
Average Joe can understand, easy to audit. It seems like the best way to do it.
I am not suggesting we vote on fuel pumps. I am simply pointing out that this appears to be an artificially created problem and not a technical problem.
I'm already not a fan of allowing places to do freebies for people who have an "I voted" sticker. If it takes a freebie for you to go out and vote, I really don't think you should be voting. And it's incredibly likely they'd just vote blindly for whoever is advertising more in the area.
Unlike donuts, I can imagine a situation where I would like to prove that my vote happened. We print out receipts for donuts, coffee, parking, all kinds of inconsequential things, ten times a day. But when it comes to voting - one of the most important transaction I'm going to do in a given year - suddenly, people are pushing hard for no receipt, no paper trail. It's transparent bullshit, obviously in bad faith, and when people start making bad faith arguments I start questioning motives.
Or maybe its just so obvious to technical people because we know how vulnerable and unreliable software can be. This XKCD cartoon sums it up pretty well:
https://xkcd.com/2030/