Removing all videos claiming that election fraud happened/happens seems like it would further reinforce to believers of the idea, that there is a cover-up.
Asking people to trust the election process by banning anyone who critiques it?
They are not criticism, they are outright lies. Not everything negative about X is criticism.
It might not be affecting your main point, but it is still an important point. Bad right wing actors are always talked about with euphemisms and given excessive benefit of doubt. Let's call what they do by right names.
this is like saying we have to engage with denialists about historical atrocities because otherwise it will make it seem like there is a conspiracy to push a narrative that the atrocity happened. this is a losing proposition because denialists (of any kind) aren't interested in truth or uncovering factual evidence, they're interested in using the strategy of Just Asking Questions as a cudgel for ulterior aims. we don't need to give airtime to the fantasies of election conspiracists for the same reason we don't need to teach creationism in science class
> this is like saying we have to engage with denialists about historical atrocities because otherwise it will make it seem like there is a conspiracy to push a narrative that the atrocity happened.
That's exactly what people say we should do, instead of censoring and deplatforming them. Give them as big a platform as possible to aggressively spread their disinformation without interference, then politely ask for an opportunity to debate. And when they refuse, ignore you, mock you or just smother you in bad faith bullshit, all you can do is shrug and hope for the best.
You can critize the process either on the meta level as in first past the post creates a two party system etc. Or you can criticize the execution -- for example, report on the amount of touchscreen machines not working in New Mexico during the election of the younger Bush, etc.
I would not equate these factual problems with a completely unfounded, call-for-a-coup outright lies though. Problem is the well documented behavior of YouTube algorithm of feeding similar videos to someone, radicalizing them. Not having any at all is a good way to completely avoid the problem. We do not need to raise more domestic terrorists, there are plenty already.
I don't remember Youtube spamming me frinche videos in the extreme direction of what I watch, earlier. Somewhere they messed up their recommendation algorithm. Spotify does not recommend me semi-white power music, even though they got plenty.
so is the idea that YouTube can take a list of rules, e.g. "don't say the election was stolen," and automatically flag all the videos that break that rule?
of course, it'd have to be nuanced enough to distinguish between people debunking claims the election was stolen. even if they play clips from people claiming otherwise. and of course, it shouldn't flag irony.. but it should flag meta-irony like 4chan.
this is basically AGI. in the age of LLMs, this might be possible (if not now then soon), but that's terrifying. YouTube can then write rules, in English, and accurately filter/boost/limit ideologies. and wait until other countries start pressuring YouTube to add rules for them - no claiming Taiwan is a country, or criticizing the Saudi royal family.
and if the tech isn't that frighteningly sophisticated, anything remotely edgy gets wiped. a childproofed internet, engineered for the lowest common denominator of human.
I'm quite progressive politically, but I've seen this kind of narrative control gone quite badly (e.g. early days of covid.) no thank you.
So Youtube admits it plays a role in legitimating the winning party or not, depending on how fast videos are censored and how long the censorship lasts. If they wanted to play a role in the next election, they would allow videos about vote fraud exactly now, just in case.
The people who think the 2020 and 2022 elections were fraudulent do not care about truth or facts. No amount of new facts about the event will convince them. They are using numerology and QAnon baking techniques to try and make sense of the election, not rational logic.
Trust is the wrong word. Trust is earned and is based on evidence, exposure, and time. I have trust in the election system because I have read the legal challenges, I understand what parts of the election system are networked, I have entertained the possibility of some of the 2020 fraud claims, I volunteered in the 2022 election as a poll worker, and I have looked at the reputation/trustworthiness of the people bringing challenges to the election.
What these people have is faith that the election was fraudulent — faith is the conviction in something unseen. They are convinced they are victims without being able to show anything except hypotheticals.
I might agree with your statement if the same group of people who supposedly perpetrated the fraud were the ones who removed the videos. Eg. Police officers who refuse to take written complaints about police violence within their department. But YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are not part of the election system. Those companies are allowed to treat their property how they like; the YouTube ToS has nothing to do with trustworthiness of an election run in 50 states across 3300 counties.
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - ["Detecting Anomalies in the 2020 US Presidential Election Votes with Benford’s Law" (2020)](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626)
The most startling finding, according to the graphs, was that Democrat candidates in swing states have slightly more vote counts whose leading digit was a 4 and slightly fewer starting with a 5 than the null hypothesis distribution...
Check the paper and references first before blindly submitting by title alone.
A principal reference to that paper is [1] which strongly states:
The proliferation of elections in even those states that are arguably anything but democratic has given rise to a focused interest on developing methods for detecting fraud in the official statistics of a state's election returns.
Among these efforts are those that employ Benford's Law, with the most common application being an attempt to proclaim some election or another fraud free or replete with fraud.
Despite its apparent utility in looking at other phenomena, Benford's Law is problematical at best as a forensic tool when applied to elections.
Looking at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations, were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from Benford's Law follow no pattern.
It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its “success rate” either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst.
Yes - that is a paper that applys Benfords Law to US Election results to see how that turns out .. but NO that paper dos not prove any fraud took place .. it jut reports what happens if Benfords Law is used.
It's not just carrying ballots off into rooms for machine counting, but this happening days and even weeks after the election, with random arrivals of large numbers of ballots long after polls have closed.
It's notable that people thinking an election is unfair, and an election being unfair, have the exact same social outcome. And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever is absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.
> And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever
There is no reasonable doubt. To the extent that any doubt remains, it is only in the mind of people who wouldn’t be swayed by facts.
As someone who have spent the Trump years learning about epistemology (how we come to believe the things we do), I have realized that motivated reasoning will always blind humans to the truth. The truth is that elections require some amount of trust. It’s not possible to allow every voter the ability to see and verify each of the 162million ballots and no election would work if that was a requirement.
Bitcoin the most secure public ledger in the world proves that every participant in the blockchain can verify and see billion+ valid transactions. Trust in fully decentralized and transparent elections is not a technical issue!
The BTC ledger is pretty good, but it is fallible —- mostly because a human has to control the keys and the UI apps that make using the wallet for transactions are far less secure than the core BTC protocol. Good luck teaching a 90 year old person who hates computers how to vote using their BTC wallet.
Also, the security of BTC isn’t infallible. Once someone finds a weakness in the system, they will quietly abuse it as a 0-day for a while before anyone notices it. Elections should be robust against any single point of failure, and they are. The BTC wallet is until it isn’t.
Bitcoin sustains about 7 transactions per second. In 2022 there were roughly 168 million registered voters in the United States. It would take 24 million seconds to publish 1 transaction (vote) per voter using a bitcoin style blockchain. The math doesn't work. Bitcoin is not a solution to this problem.
Throughput isn’t fixed across all blockchain implementations. It’s possible to fork/side chain BTC to accommodate far more transactions per block, thus drastically increasing throughput.
I still think _ergonomics_ of making sure every eligible voter can use the system is far more important that making it {immutable, distributed, transparent}.
Also, the immutability property is a double edged sword as someone losing control of their wallet secret key would lead to a leak of everyone they voted for. Or worse yet, if voter ID is tied to wallet ID instead of government-issued ID, one organization could go around stealing private keys in order to steal those ballets.
Ballot verifiability is not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. A person fills out a ballot, that ballot is [optically] scanned and then automatically parsed a la scantron. Both the ballot and the resultant scan are published side by side.
Optionally, add an ID on each ballot and people can not only look at all 162 million ballots, but even verify that their ballot properly scanned, published, and counted. The only argument against this is that ballot verifiability is a bad thing, because it might enable e.g. vote buying or whatever. Yet somehow people were perfectly fine with there being more than 26,000,000 votes made by mail in 2020 in which such threats are dramatically greater.
The nice thing about this solution is also that there's no 'classified' data. The complete transparency of it all would make any sort of stuffing or vote manipulation effectively impossible, which means there's no need for ultra-sophisticated systems. Plain old 1990s tech of digital scanners and scantron would work just fine. Ballot observers would need to do little more than count the number of people coming into a station and ensure that matches the total number of ballots eventually published by that station.
What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?
Spoken like someone who has never actually looked at how an election works in a county in the USA, doesn’t care about the actual legal requirements, seems to ignore all concerns for accessibility (eg. Scantrons are terrible for old people with bad/no eyesight, have motor control issues with hands, etc), doesn’t know what scantrons actually did with the scan results, hasn’t thought through the complexity of ID in the USA (we don’t have a single ID number and the alternative is to store photo ID cards for everyone to see and collect) and doesn’t have a plan for absentee voters or military deployed voters. And that doesn’t even address any of the human factors (eg. people lose their ID, they lose their ballot, ballots get crumpled by voters and stuck in the scanners, electricity isn’t up 99.999% of the time, etc).
Elections are hard for a reason — the requirements are complex. Everyone wants 160million+ votes to be collected, counted, and results published by 9p on election day. Everyone wants the registry to work perfectly and wants the convenience of not having to travel far to a polling place. In practice, these create a huge number of hurdles that election officials must navigate, plan for contingencies (eg. the hurricane immediately before the election in Florida 2022).
Maybe my best advice to you is the snide “don’t reinvent the wheel in Hacker News comments, but rather get involved as a polling place volunteer next year, then see all of the edge cases in action”. Then don’t propose your MVP v2 to me, propose it to your county election board. Only you will be ignored because elections in the US have 250 years of learning from the previous errors, but you seem quite content to ignore all of those hard-earned lessons.
Let me point one thing out here - and don't take it the wrong way. Instead of finding any meaningful flaw with the idea you pointed to one edge case, which is a problem in even the current system and then moved onto a mixture of ad hominem and appeal to authority. I only mention this because you may well not even realize you're behaving (or thinking) this way.
But back to the issue, nothing you offered is a meaningful hurdle or a new problem introduced by "my" rather obvious solution. The issues would generally be handled using the exact same workarounds, because they're also issues in the current system. For instance if somebody is blind, enfeebled, or otherwise unable to vote without assistance, then assistance can be rendered in a fashion similar to the current status quo. They can bring a family member to assist, and if that's not possible then aid can be rendered with an assistant from each 'side' helping simultaneously. And so on.
This is precisely why I said "What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?" You get a system that improves the status quo exponentially, and introduces no new downsides. Basically America is obviously becoming far more divided. Our politicians and "political figures" in general are, if not simply becoming even more unethical, then having their lies and deceptions exposed in a far more realtime and active fashion. This is understandably sending trust to some value approaching zero. You simply cannot have systems where trust in a large component in its operation, and expect people to simply have faith in the results.
The "Has my ballot been counted?", which you are solving here, is not really a problem or not the entire problem of verifiability. The problem is "Has every counted ballot been cast by a person who: has the right to vote, and has not voted elsewhere?", I don't see how this can be easily solved in a secret ballot.
This has been solved pretty easily in literally every other developed country in the world. You show up to the ballot office, present some form of recognized identification, and your name is scratched off a list. If you want to be fancy, you can centralize the list. Having some basic form of identification is a prerequisite to being an at all involved member of society.
Australia's relatively unique in that they have compulsory voting. This helps remove some of the threat vectors, like voter impersonation. You can't just find an inactive voter and turn in papers on his behalf. But in spite of this built in protection they also have numerous other safeguards. You read about them here [1]. They include, but are not limited to:
- Needing to request a ballot, and including a security question/answer. The security answer will be cross referenced when returned to avoid somebody filling out a mail-in ballot that was not their own.
- One must already be enrolled to vote (which implies ID verification) when requesting a ballot, and the ballot request also requires knowledge of the address used to register to vote, though the ballot itself can be sent to another address for e.g. expats or whatever.
- When filling out the ballot, you are also required to have a witness sign it, affirming that it was you who filled it out. And that witness must be on the electoral roll.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's vastly better than what we have. And targeting some reasonable fears like impersonation, harvesting, and so on. And I think that effort to target these fears is, in reality, just as important as whether or not it even does, or if those fears are even justified. Because, again it's all about perception. Anything they can be done to help increase the perception of transparency and security in elections, without meaningfully encumbering the process, should be done.
Indeed, the Australian system is pretty good, and would be nice to have even without compulsory voting. But I am extremely skeptical we will ever get voter IDs in the US, least verifying voter registrations. One party is extremely opposed to any ballot security measures. Makes one wonder why is it so...
Except to compare other developed countries to the USA, you have to remember that most other sane countries run elections from the nation level, whereas the US runs them primarily at the county level. We have 3300+ different jurisdictions all testing slightly different methods and policies with mostly the same aim. And states get to pass statutes to decide things like mail-in, dropboxes, identity requirements, etc. so counties can't homogenize their policies unless states do. Lots of small counties run their elections exactly as you described.
But we also have more requirements than other countries.[1] We support voting for out-of-country citizens and active-duty military. These are treated like mail-ins and have been for decades.
Some states support same day registration (including for people who move counties/states in the weeks before election day).
We support provisional ballots (there are lots of edge cases including recent name changes, citizens being removed from registry without the approval of the voter, ballot misprints, the paper was destroyed, the ballot print does not conform to the scanner, mail-in ballot was never delivered, etc). All of these types are reviewed by the county election officials with signature verification before they are counted as valid ballots.
"Having some basic form of identification is a prerequisite to being an at all involved member of society." So complain to legislators. In California, the right to vote supersedes the ability to get a valid government-issued ID or "being an at all member of society".[1] It's also worth pointing out that the right to vote is a constitutional right, whereas the ability to obtain a government-issued ID is both cumbersome and very expensive for some people. Think along the lines of people whose documents were all destroyed in a fire, people who are homeless, and people who are released from prison but whom have not paid the massive fines associated with prison in many states. It's not my fault that you value the right to vote differently than legislators.
Can you list a single country we have more requirements than? You'll find voter ID is ubiquitous in the rest of the world. Incidentally it's also overwhelmingly supported in the US (by 80% [1]) which obviously goes well beyond any partisan divide.
Also, voting is not a constitutional right. There were some constitutional amendments added later (in other words, not in the Bill of Rights) that prevented states from restricting voters based on things like race or sex, but states have relatively few limitations on who they allow or prevent from voting. This is why states can do things like prevent convicted felons from voting.
> Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly
Quit spreading lies. US law allows all vote tallying to be inspected by a limited number of observers, including at least one from each candidate/party on the ballot.
Elections in the US are run by each of the 3300+ counties, many of which use pure paper ballots and tallying, still. The more populated counties have a much larger logistics challenge, so they tend to be the ones that use tallying machines. But they don’t trust those machines anymore than you do - so they also do audits using random sampling to verify that the tallying machines exactly match hand-tallying results.
I assume you mean the losing party. As a longtime watcher of US politics I don't recall a situation where it's been this extreme. Even in 2000 where the complaints were about the electoral college system as opposed to outright fraud.
> I don't recall a situation where it's been this extreme
There was no outright fraud. There has been a massive amount of time, money, investigation, and litigation that all points in the same direction.
So why do so many people believe there was election fraud in 2020?
There are too many people with financial incentives to make people outraged now:
- Social media platforms,
- new media companies,
- hybrid entertainment-journalism companies,
- fake media companies,
- wealthy idiots dipping into politics (Patrick Byrne, Mike Liddell, Ginny Thomas, etc),
- campaigns raising huge money on "stop the steal" claims (Donny Trump, Kari Lake)
- a cottage industry of charlatan lawyers litigating "Stop The Steal" without any evidence (Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Lin Wood)
I don't think it's a stretch to say that these people don't care about the truth. They are in it for the power and/or money. And after the 2008 SCOTUS decision that unleashed unlimited money in politics, elections have become the cheaper alternative to having to compete in the marketplace.
Also worth pointing out that Trump re-engaged many voters who were disillusioned by politics before him (and thus, completely ignorant about policies). He turned political rallies into WWE wrasslin' shows -- I with I could unread all of the articles which mentioned "heel" and "kayfabe". Sadly the target audience of WWE isn't exactly media literate and probably can't tell the differences between fact, opinion, hyperbole, and completely fabricated gossip.
Bernie's ideas were wildly popular in 2016, some of them across party lines. The DNC's superdelegate (rigging) system meant that he wouldn't get the ticket and even though he would win every county in West Virginia, he somehow lost West Virginia. Instead the DNC selected a candidate intensely disliked by a large portion of the population. So unpopular that she was bested by a game show host. Basically, the DNC overrode the people's will and threw the election.
Hillary had to blame something and it certainly wasn't going to be herself or her party. Maybe the reason was:
- Russia
- Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots
- sexism
- too much bad press about things like her emails
- Wikileaks
- Bernie was too mean
- Comey
etc.
Oh, and her base, not understanding error bars, went on a statistician witch hunt.
Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than the talk show host - more votes than any losing candidate in history - and the margin between them was split almost exactly 50/50. The narrative that she lost because she was "intensely disliked" or unpopular (except among the right, who were never going to vote for her anyway) is simply incorrect.
>too much bad press about things like her emails.
>Comey
Wikileaks and Comey reopening the email inquiry did obvious damage to her campaign, I don't know why you would imply that's not a legitimate complaint on her part. You could say she didn't do damage control well enough, sure, but there's a reason the only thing anyone remembers about her campaign comes from conspiracy theories about her emails and the DNC hack, and nothing to do with her actual platform.
>Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots
What? She said that about a subset of Trump voters who would never vote for Obama. And time has proven her correct.
In Australia we do paper ballots, no voter ID, you just say your name and it's crossed off a list. Afterwards, if the same name was crossed off two lists, the amount of double votes are counted and if it is enough to change the result then the result of that electorate is invalidated. This has not ever happened.
Australia has compulsory voting, which must change that dynamic a bit. Someone voting as multiple other people in different places is going to double up with the actual people, since they have to vote, so the incentive will be lower.
That said, NZ has a similar system without compulsory voting, and I've never heard of any significant voter fraud. We have decent voter turnout.
Yeah, compulsory voting is what makes it a viable way to detect fraud.
I was also mistaken somewhat when I said "paper ballots". There is certainly electronic voting in Australia, but the "authentication" aspect of just saying a name is still the same. It's essentially "trust but verify"
We don't know in the sense that we can't know anything for sure that is not the fruit of a controlled experience but we are very confident in the fact that it was all about a rich childish prick who cannot accept defeat or being denied something he wants and making sure to fleece his supporters one last time. There was no evidence of any real fraud. If there's no evidence it's either a conspiracy to hide it, or that there was no such thing.
Thing is, conspiracies are hard to pull off and we end up knowing about them (and nobody really cares and we forget about them, they're called "scandals")
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but with all due respect, there are ways to discuss the politics and their relevant merits (or lack thereof) without immediately devolving into partisanship.
Look, I am not an US citizen and I don't support the Democrats either. On the spectrum of political ideas, I even fail to see how Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton (or Blair or Schroeder, that kind) counts as "The Left".
In most of the world, the Left has been historically defined as people trying to at least get a form of betterment for the working class. I don't think the aforementioned Democrats even ever attempted that. Before Trump's rise, I kind of saw both the Republicans and the Democrats as the mostly the same.
So you see in the end, this is not about partisanship, I am just defending my self-enforced sovereign right to call out a rich childish prick who's never had to work a day in his pampered life when he is behaving like one. It's a crazy world where you can't call someone crazy because he's got the crazies' support.
That being said, I am against millonnaires even where they are not sociopaths.
Tampering with electronic voting can be made impossible too - by allowing people to validate their vote.
This solution is often rejected because it could theoretically lead to vote buying but in practice vote buying is ridiculously susceptible even to very halfhearted sting operations.
Historically it has been a problem because it was tolerated, but literally as soon as it was cracked down upon it dried up completely. It only worked when it was de facto decriminalized.
Paper is still better but IMHO I'd be happy with electronic voting with cryptographic after-election vote validation.
What if it's an anonymous website that offers to pay anybody (via difficult to trace cryptocurrency) who uploads proof that they voted for a particular candidate/party?
If you did it on a small scale you'd probably end up like Ross Ulbricht and if you did it on a large scale you'd definitely end up like Ross Ulbricht.
That something is theorerically plausible and possible on a small scale doesnt make it practical on a large scale.
In an unrelated note I can't understand why anonymous crypto hasnt been banned yet. Illegal money transfers are pretty much the only practical use case. Owning bitcoin is like owning shares in the underground economy.
That sounds good, but let’s face it, the threat of prison only seems to be a deterrent for people who are unlikely to intentionally commit a crime in the first place.
Like Texas / Florida did with mail-in voting, limiting ballot locations, etc? You don't need to literally go in and change someone's ballot, and only some voting districts are contentious. TX has also given its executive the authority to invalidate local election results.
I think that even if electronic voting devices are not guaranteed to be failsafe today it does not mean that they can't get there.
Paper ballots are not an optimal democratic way of conducting voting. The whole process is time and resource consuming and disenfranchises the less privileged.
If there would be a cheap and safe way to cast electronic ballots from one's own phone I bet engagement with democracy would be a lot higher, not only on big issues like presidential elections, but on smaller stuff that one would vote at a local level.
By "democratic", do you mean "make it possible for someone else to force you or pay you to vote a certain way"? That wouldn't even be "allowing more people to vote", but rather fewer people, each of whom effectively gets more than one vote.
I'm saying things under the assumption that this type of electronic voting is at least as secure as mail in ballots. I have ideas about how pay/force can be prevented, but nothing super definite.
The the worry is coercion, those actors could force you to vote on paper in their presence. The phone isn't a variable.
If there is no coercion, the voter can go wherever they feel safe (even a polling place) to do their voting (whether on paper, on phone or whatever other method).
I think our society already places enough pressure on people to have phones or be excluded from certain activities, that having a mobile device or access to a web browser with an internet connection is a safe assumption to make.
The way I think about this electronic voting is not limited to just mobile applications or through the web, voting booths/stations can still be employed (which theoretically will have also less friction, due to lower usage). The purpose is to decrease friction of voting in the demographics where participation is not great currently. Young people usually don't vote, maybe having the option at their finger tips would improve that, what do you think?
I suspect that even in North America there are less privileged demographics outside your circle of interaction with many people lacking access to a smart phone.
I have no issue with the notion of expanding voting options to include a well thought out smart phone option but I have real concerns that limiting voting to only that would disenfranchise people outside your ken.
Recall that a number of indigenous americans have had their right to vote restricted simply by living on a tribal reservations with no conventional fixed address.
Sure, they might have a phone .. but I offer that as an example of the "oops, didn't think of that" consequence of assuming everyone has an address.
The assumption that everyone has internet access is no different.
My plans, if I may call them that, are definitely not suitable for the USA, because the foremost prerequisite of making the whole thing remotely safe is the existence of a national id with cryptographic signature support, similar to how Estonia, or other European countries have/plan to have.
As far as I remember some parts of the US were against requiring ID for voting, so make of that what you will.
It doesn't seem to really matter if you use paper or electronic so long as you allow for mail in voting. I don't know if electronic voting is responsible or susceptible to fraud, but mailing your ballot in I think certainly is. Before we get rid of electronic voting, we should reform how people vote.
> Paper ballots are not an optimal democratic way of conducting voting. The whole process is time and resource consuming and disenfranchises the less privileged.
That really depends on how it's implemented. Living in Switzerland I get to vote a lot.
About a month before an election or referendum I get the voting slips in an envelope that can be reused to send them back, postage paid.
The slips are placed in a sealed envelope and a signature has to be provided on a slip. The same slip I need to provide at the polling station should I chose to vote in person.
Results are in in a couple of hours after polling closes, except for more complex elections (usually election of parliament, which has a few idiosyncrasies). But even there, results are in the same evening.
The actual procedure may slightly differ by Canton.
It may be resource intensive, but election integrity and speed has a price, which I think is worth it.
And nobody is disenfranchised since you pop your vote into the next letterbox for free.
Honestly the model of electronic ballots that I have in my head is very close to the Swiss system. Instead of mailing paper, it's a system where you do it all over the web. If this communication can be brought to a similar level of security and trust as the mailed paper ballots, I'll consider it a success. :D
> You should always use paper ballots and people from different parties should be on the table.
It is easy to tamper paper ballots the way the US uses them, i.e. by having to manually tick the candidate box.
I think that, for some elections, using different ballots for each party and/or candidate, should be the way. This is done in many other countries and it works consistently better.
You also want an electronic trail, just because there are certain places where you cannot trust that the manual count would be accurate.
I think most people do not trust voting machines because they do not understand the security preconditions they have to comply with. In many ways, they are way more reliable than paper and manual counting.
From the article
> Now, it's decided to take the easy way out by giving people like Donald Trump and his enablers free rein to continue to lie without consequence
I don't understand this argument. How is youtube censoring a consequence? Why would someone think youtube should be responsible for handing out consequences anyway?
And why wouldn’t there be consequences? I do think most people agree that various forms of bad faith speech should be discourage have consequences
They're not fools.
They know it will be their preferred party (as indicated by employee, corporate, and in-kind donations) making those claims next cycle, just as happened after their chosen candidate lost in 2016.
My philosophy on anything like this, whether it happens to align with my beliefs or not, is that the truth shouldn't fear scrutiny. If a company, government, or person decides to show how right they are by banning dissent then it should be a red flag even if you agree with them on the actual issue. I'm all for self moderation tools so people don't have to see anything they don't want to but I don't need anyone deciding what opinions are 'correct' enough for me to see.
My philosophy after years of this is that there is no such thing as truth, or at least it's sort of like a mathematical construct; it may exist in some sort of theory of reality, but not in actual reality. Basically we all get to determine what's true for ourselves.
I realize that I am committing the fatal flaw by engaging in politics on HN (other than right-leaning dog whistles, of course)...
But we're all just going to ignore Ken Paxton, in a video interview, admitting to voter suppression that would've swung Texas in the opposite direction. Right? Yeah?
I'm a bit tired of the argument that everything must be subjected to critique, thus even baseless claims should be allowed. This is akin to inviting quack to TV to counterpoint actual professionals, or to publish unfounded rebuttals to established science in proper scientific journals.
Have not learnt yet, that debating with certain people is not only pointless, but counterproductive? Many people would rather believe to professional polemists and politics dilettantes, than engage in a honest conversation.
And YouTube would happily undermine democracy for the extra $100M they will get by allowing these quacks back in their platform. It is not about freedom of speech, but money.
92 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadAsking people to trust the election process by banning anyone who critiques it?
It might not be affecting your main point, but it is still an important point. Bad right wing actors are always talked about with euphemisms and given excessive benefit of doubt. Let's call what they do by right names.
That's exactly what people say we should do, instead of censoring and deplatforming them. Give them as big a platform as possible to aggressively spread their disinformation without interference, then politely ask for an opportunity to debate. And when they refuse, ignore you, mock you or just smother you in bad faith bullshit, all you can do is shrug and hope for the best.
I would not equate these factual problems with a completely unfounded, call-for-a-coup outright lies though. Problem is the well documented behavior of YouTube algorithm of feeding similar videos to someone, radicalizing them. Not having any at all is a good way to completely avoid the problem. We do not need to raise more domestic terrorists, there are plenty already.
of course, it'd have to be nuanced enough to distinguish between people debunking claims the election was stolen. even if they play clips from people claiming otherwise. and of course, it shouldn't flag irony.. but it should flag meta-irony like 4chan.
this is basically AGI. in the age of LLMs, this might be possible (if not now then soon), but that's terrifying. YouTube can then write rules, in English, and accurately filter/boost/limit ideologies. and wait until other countries start pressuring YouTube to add rules for them - no claiming Taiwan is a country, or criticizing the Saudi royal family.
and if the tech isn't that frighteningly sophisticated, anything remotely edgy gets wiped. a childproofed internet, engineered for the lowest common denominator of human.
I'm quite progressive politically, but I've seen this kind of narrative control gone quite badly (e.g. early days of covid.) no thank you.
It is very grave.
Trust is the wrong word. Trust is earned and is based on evidence, exposure, and time. I have trust in the election system because I have read the legal challenges, I understand what parts of the election system are networked, I have entertained the possibility of some of the 2020 fraud claims, I volunteered in the 2022 election as a poll worker, and I have looked at the reputation/trustworthiness of the people bringing challenges to the election.
What these people have is faith that the election was fraudulent — faith is the conviction in something unseen. They are convinced they are victims without being able to show anything except hypotheticals.
I might agree with your statement if the same group of people who supposedly perpetrated the fraud were the ones who removed the videos. Eg. Police officers who refuse to take written complaints about police violence within their department. But YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are not part of the election system. Those companies are allowed to treat their property how they like; the YouTube ToS has nothing to do with trustworthiness of an election run in 50 states across 3300 counties.
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - ["Detecting Anomalies in the 2020 US Presidential Election Votes with Benford’s Law" (2020)](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626)
It's fixed, I tell you!
[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-benford-idUSKBN...
[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25072280
Check the paper and references first before blindly submitting by title alone.
A principal reference to that paper is [1] which strongly states:
Yes - that is a paper that applys Benfords Law to US Election results to see how that turns out .. but NO that paper dos not prove any fraud took place .. it jut reports what happens if Benfords Law is used.[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...
I have been a vote counter in France, any citizen can keep an eye on his ballot in the transparent box until it’s counted.
Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly, is exactly what Putin would have done.
It's notable that people thinking an election is unfair, and an election being unfair, have the exact same social outcome. And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever is absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.
There is no reasonable doubt. To the extent that any doubt remains, it is only in the mind of people who wouldn’t be swayed by facts.
As someone who have spent the Trump years learning about epistemology (how we come to believe the things we do), I have realized that motivated reasoning will always blind humans to the truth. The truth is that elections require some amount of trust. It’s not possible to allow every voter the ability to see and verify each of the 162million ballots and no election would work if that was a requirement.
The BTC ledger is pretty good, but it is fallible —- mostly because a human has to control the keys and the UI apps that make using the wallet for transactions are far less secure than the core BTC protocol. Good luck teaching a 90 year old person who hates computers how to vote using their BTC wallet.
Also, the security of BTC isn’t infallible. Once someone finds a weakness in the system, they will quietly abuse it as a 0-day for a while before anyone notices it. Elections should be robust against any single point of failure, and they are. The BTC wallet is until it isn’t.
I still think _ergonomics_ of making sure every eligible voter can use the system is far more important that making it {immutable, distributed, transparent}.
Also, the immutability property is a double edged sword as someone losing control of their wallet secret key would lead to a leak of everyone they voted for. Or worse yet, if voter ID is tied to wallet ID instead of government-issued ID, one organization could go around stealing private keys in order to steal those ballets.
Optionally, add an ID on each ballot and people can not only look at all 162 million ballots, but even verify that their ballot properly scanned, published, and counted. The only argument against this is that ballot verifiability is a bad thing, because it might enable e.g. vote buying or whatever. Yet somehow people were perfectly fine with there being more than 26,000,000 votes made by mail in 2020 in which such threats are dramatically greater.
The nice thing about this solution is also that there's no 'classified' data. The complete transparency of it all would make any sort of stuffing or vote manipulation effectively impossible, which means there's no need for ultra-sophisticated systems. Plain old 1990s tech of digital scanners and scantron would work just fine. Ballot observers would need to do little more than count the number of people coming into a station and ensure that matches the total number of ballots eventually published by that station.
What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?
Elections are hard for a reason — the requirements are complex. Everyone wants 160million+ votes to be collected, counted, and results published by 9p on election day. Everyone wants the registry to work perfectly and wants the convenience of not having to travel far to a polling place. In practice, these create a huge number of hurdles that election officials must navigate, plan for contingencies (eg. the hurricane immediately before the election in Florida 2022).
Maybe my best advice to you is the snide “don’t reinvent the wheel in Hacker News comments, but rather get involved as a polling place volunteer next year, then see all of the edge cases in action”. Then don’t propose your MVP v2 to me, propose it to your county election board. Only you will be ignored because elections in the US have 250 years of learning from the previous errors, but you seem quite content to ignore all of those hard-earned lessons.
But back to the issue, nothing you offered is a meaningful hurdle or a new problem introduced by "my" rather obvious solution. The issues would generally be handled using the exact same workarounds, because they're also issues in the current system. For instance if somebody is blind, enfeebled, or otherwise unable to vote without assistance, then assistance can be rendered in a fashion similar to the current status quo. They can bring a family member to assist, and if that's not possible then aid can be rendered with an assistant from each 'side' helping simultaneously. And so on.
This is precisely why I said "What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?" You get a system that improves the status quo exponentially, and introduces no new downsides. Basically America is obviously becoming far more divided. Our politicians and "political figures" in general are, if not simply becoming even more unethical, then having their lies and deceptions exposed in a far more realtime and active fashion. This is understandably sending trust to some value approaching zero. You simply cannot have systems where trust in a large component in its operation, and expect people to simply have faith in the results.
- Needing to request a ballot, and including a security question/answer. The security answer will be cross referenced when returned to avoid somebody filling out a mail-in ballot that was not their own.
- One must already be enrolled to vote (which implies ID verification) when requesting a ballot, and the ballot request also requires knowledge of the address used to register to vote, though the ballot itself can be sent to another address for e.g. expats or whatever.
- When filling out the ballot, you are also required to have a witness sign it, affirming that it was you who filled it out. And that witness must be on the electoral roll.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's vastly better than what we have. And targeting some reasonable fears like impersonation, harvesting, and so on. And I think that effort to target these fears is, in reality, just as important as whether or not it even does, or if those fears are even justified. Because, again it's all about perception. Anything they can be done to help increase the perception of transparency and security in elections, without meaningfully encumbering the process, should be done.
[1] - https://www.aec.gov.au/about_aec/Publications/easy-read/file...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/04/trumps-as...
Except to compare other developed countries to the USA, you have to remember that most other sane countries run elections from the nation level, whereas the US runs them primarily at the county level. We have 3300+ different jurisdictions all testing slightly different methods and policies with mostly the same aim. And states get to pass statutes to decide things like mail-in, dropboxes, identity requirements, etc. so counties can't homogenize their policies unless states do. Lots of small counties run their elections exactly as you described.
But we also have more requirements than other countries.[1] We support voting for out-of-country citizens and active-duty military. These are treated like mail-ins and have been for decades.
Some states support same day registration (including for people who move counties/states in the weeks before election day).
We support provisional ballots (there are lots of edge cases including recent name changes, citizens being removed from registry without the approval of the voter, ballot misprints, the paper was destroyed, the ballot print does not conform to the scanner, mail-in ballot was never delivered, etc). All of these types are reviewed by the county election officials with signature verification before they are counted as valid ballots.
"Having some basic form of identification is a prerequisite to being an at all involved member of society." So complain to legislators. In California, the right to vote supersedes the ability to get a valid government-issued ID or "being an at all member of society".[1] It's also worth pointing out that the right to vote is a constitutional right, whereas the ability to obtain a government-issued ID is both cumbersome and very expensive for some people. Think along the lines of people whose documents were all destroyed in a fire, people who are homeless, and people who are released from prison but whom have not paid the massive fines associated with prison in many states. It's not my fault that you value the right to vote differently than legislators.
[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-bill-rights/
Also, voting is not a constitutional right. There were some constitutional amendments added later (in other words, not in the Bill of Rights) that prevented states from restricting voters based on things like race or sex, but states have relatively few limitations on who they allow or prevent from voting. This is why states can do things like prevent convicted felons from voting.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-supp...
Quit spreading lies. US law allows all vote tallying to be inspected by a limited number of observers, including at least one from each candidate/party on the ballot.
Elections in the US are run by each of the 3300+ counties, many of which use pure paper ballots and tallying, still. The more populated counties have a much larger logistics challenge, so they tend to be the ones that use tallying machines. But they don’t trust those machines anymore than you do - so they also do audits using random sampling to verify that the tallying machines exactly match hand-tallying results.
There was no outright fraud. There has been a massive amount of time, money, investigation, and litigation that all points in the same direction.
So why do so many people believe there was election fraud in 2020?
There are too many people with financial incentives to make people outraged now:
I don't think it's a stretch to say that these people don't care about the truth. They are in it for the power and/or money. And after the 2008 SCOTUS decision that unleashed unlimited money in politics, elections have become the cheaper alternative to having to compete in the marketplace.Also worth pointing out that Trump re-engaged many voters who were disillusioned by politics before him (and thus, completely ignorant about policies). He turned political rallies into WWE wrasslin' shows -- I with I could unread all of the articles which mentioned "heel" and "kayfabe". Sadly the target audience of WWE isn't exactly media literate and probably can't tell the differences between fact, opinion, hyperbole, and completely fabricated gossip.
2000 → Florida
2004 → Whatever the "don't taze me bro" guy claimed
2008 → All sorts of crazy Tea Party shit
2012 → ??? (Nobody actually liked Romney)
2016 → Russia
2020 → Whatever Trump claimed
- Providing money for campaign
- Using data from Cambridge analítica with target voters. - Hacking democrats trying to get advantage / dark secrets.
This broke several privacy issues and campaign finance laws but as far as I remember not the voting machines themselves.
That said. Voting with paper makes everybody more confident of the result.
Hillary had to blame something and it certainly wasn't going to be herself or her party. Maybe the reason was:
- Russia
- Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots
- sexism
- too much bad press about things like her emails
- Wikileaks
- Bernie was too mean
- Comey
etc.
Oh, and her base, not understanding error bars, went on a statistician witch hunt.
>too much bad press about things like her emails.
>Comey
Wikileaks and Comey reopening the email inquiry did obvious damage to her campaign, I don't know why you would imply that's not a legitimate complaint on her part. You could say she didn't do damage control well enough, sure, but there's a reason the only thing anyone remembers about her campaign comes from conspiracy theories about her emails and the DNC hack, and nothing to do with her actual platform.
>Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots
What? She said that about a subset of Trump voters who would never vote for Obama. And time has proven her correct.
You should always use paper ballots and people from different parties should be on the table.
Like with Kanban quality control, you want simplicity and robustness, and paper is great for that.
We create and programs machines for a living and nobody can warrantee that they have not been tampered.
That said, NZ has a similar system without compulsory voting, and I've never heard of any significant voter fraud. We have decent voter turnout.
I was also mistaken somewhat when I said "paper ballots". There is certainly electronic voting in Australia, but the "authentication" aspect of just saying a name is still the same. It's essentially "trust but verify"
I do find myself agreeing on voting machines though.The Last Week Tonight on voting machines was quite something to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0
https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but with all due respect, there are ways to discuss the politics and their relevant merits (or lack thereof) without immediately devolving into partisanship.
So you see in the end, this is not about partisanship, I am just defending my self-enforced sovereign right to call out a rich childish prick who's never had to work a day in his pampered life when he is behaving like one. It's a crazy world where you can't call someone crazy because he's got the crazies' support. That being said, I am against millonnaires even where they are not sociopaths.
This solution is often rejected because it could theoretically lead to vote buying but in practice vote buying is ridiculously susceptible even to very halfhearted sting operations.
Historically it has been a problem because it was tolerated, but literally as soon as it was cracked down upon it dried up completely. It only worked when it was de facto decriminalized.
Paper is still better but IMHO I'd be happy with electronic voting with cryptographic after-election vote validation.
But what would you do after you detect it? Go back to paper elections?
If it's impossible to achieve on a meaningful scale without wearing an orange jumpsuit people won't try.
That something is theorerically plausible and possible on a small scale doesnt make it practical on a large scale.
In an unrelated note I can't understand why anonymous crypto hasnt been banned yet. Illegal money transfers are pretty much the only practical use case. Owning bitcoin is like owning shares in the underground economy.
I think that even if electronic voting devices are not guaranteed to be failsafe today it does not mean that they can't get there.
Paper ballots are not an optimal democratic way of conducting voting. The whole process is time and resource consuming and disenfranchises the less privileged.
If there would be a cheap and safe way to cast electronic ballots from one's own phone I bet engagement with democracy would be a lot higher, not only on big issues like presidential elections, but on smaller stuff that one would vote at a local level.
The the worry is coercion, those actors could force you to vote on paper in their presence. The phone isn't a variable.
If there is no coercion, the voter can go wherever they feel safe (even a polling place) to do their voting (whether on paper, on phone or whatever other method).
O.....kay.
The way I think about this electronic voting is not limited to just mobile applications or through the web, voting booths/stations can still be employed (which theoretically will have also less friction, due to lower usage). The purpose is to decrease friction of voting in the demographics where participation is not great currently. Young people usually don't vote, maybe having the option at their finger tips would improve that, what do you think?
I have no issue with the notion of expanding voting options to include a well thought out smart phone option but I have real concerns that limiting voting to only that would disenfranchise people outside your ken.
Recall that a number of indigenous americans have had their right to vote restricted simply by living on a tribal reservations with no conventional fixed address.
Sure, they might have a phone .. but I offer that as an example of the "oops, didn't think of that" consequence of assuming everyone has an address.
The assumption that everyone has internet access is no different.
As far as I remember some parts of the US were against requiring ID for voting, so make of that what you will.
That really depends on how it's implemented. Living in Switzerland I get to vote a lot.
About a month before an election or referendum I get the voting slips in an envelope that can be reused to send them back, postage paid.
The slips are placed in a sealed envelope and a signature has to be provided on a slip. The same slip I need to provide at the polling station should I chose to vote in person.
Results are in in a couple of hours after polling closes, except for more complex elections (usually election of parliament, which has a few idiosyncrasies). But even there, results are in the same evening.
The actual procedure may slightly differ by Canton.
It may be resource intensive, but election integrity and speed has a price, which I think is worth it.
And nobody is disenfranchised since you pop your vote into the next letterbox for free.
It is easy to tamper paper ballots the way the US uses them, i.e. by having to manually tick the candidate box.
I think that, for some elections, using different ballots for each party and/or candidate, should be the way. This is done in many other countries and it works consistently better.
You also want an electronic trail, just because there are certain places where you cannot trust that the manual count would be accurate.
I think most people do not trust voting machines because they do not understand the security preconditions they have to comply with. In many ways, they are way more reliable than paper and manual counting.
I don't understand this argument. How is youtube censoring a consequence? Why would someone think youtube should be responsible for handing out consequences anyway?
And why wouldn’t there be consequences? I do think most people agree that various forms of bad faith speech should be discourage have consequences
Thus, the kid gloves go back on.
But we're all just going to ignore Ken Paxton, in a video interview, admitting to voter suppression that would've swung Texas in the opposite direction. Right? Yeah?
Granted, YT is not a news site. But does it want to be “post videos without nude sexuality” site and nothing more stringent?
Have not learnt yet, that debating with certain people is not only pointless, but counterproductive? Many people would rather believe to professional polemists and politics dilettantes, than engage in a honest conversation.
And YouTube would happily undermine democracy for the extra $100M they will get by allowing these quacks back in their platform. It is not about freedom of speech, but money.