Or if we do use machines, we should use hand-marked paper ballots for the act of voting and just use machines to count up the results.

Why does America have problems counting?

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.

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.

How on earth do you spend time to adequately research so many decisions without overload?

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.

Five votes is very low. 15-20 is common.

Was not wank counted as a vote?

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)

https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-bal...

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.

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]

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/26/poli...

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).

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.

We do not need speed for results. We can wait 1-2 days for security.

Paper ballots that are hand counted. Ideally, streamed live.

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.

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.

Use the stats to do it. Oregon does. Results come in fairly timely, and finals can take a couple weeks, depending.

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).

> 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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

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.

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.

That chance always exists. Your choices are to minimize it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but there’s no way to actually eliminate it.

Why?

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 was talking about random audits on top of targeted audits if suspicious activity exists just to be clear.

Routine double counting all votes would be controversial due to the high cost.

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.

We already have an 11% failure rate for the presidency, and it has nothing to do with recording votes accurately.

I'm also okay with a recipe based system, where a snazzy machine UI is used to produce a paper record of the vote.

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.

This is how I've always voted in Florida.

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.

> in Florida

This is not a vote of confidence for this particular method.

This is how New York does it.

Maybe yes. But in a populous country like India there were lot of issues when we used to vote with ballot paper:

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-India-not-use-ballot-papers-f...

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.

Nearly every demonstration of voting machine hacking has required unrestricted physical access to the machine and tools/keys.

Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.

> 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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/world/europe/moscow-prote...

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.

You banned so much stuff, you created the most powerful black market in the world: The Russian Mob.

I'm sorry to report that I feel your government is at war with my country.

> 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.

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.

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.

Replace the firwmare (or even the whole motherboard) long before election day when there are no observers yet.

> to disassemble the machine

Is it that difficult?

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.

>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.

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).

My concern is with the officials themselves. Everyone should be treated as untrustworthy.

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.

So simple, so effective.

That's how it works in the 9 states I've lived in personally.

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.

> paper ballots are a threat to the species

What? How?

He likely is worried about the printed paper and tree cut down. I don’t agree that should be a worry here but I think that is what he is getting at.

A few billion sheets of paper?

Paper is a renewable resource. Trees are replanted when we cut them down to make paper.

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.

Intensive agriculture is very damaging.

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

> just call your credit card company(ies)/banks and demand they stop sending you offers in the mail

Yes, I already did that. Everyone should too as well.

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.

Paper and mail-in ballots aren't without their problems too - vote harvesting comes to mind.

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.

Pretty sure this would be a good application for blockchain technology, which would work better than pen and paper and open to the public!

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.

Additionally, disclosure of one's vote can't be provable, or the failure to prove you voted "correctly" can itself invite retaliation.

Is this satire?

https://xkcd.com/2030/

I hope it's satire. Anyone who thinks that paperless voting machines are acceptable for non-trivial elections should first see https://www.xkcd.com/2030/ , and then look at https://www.verifiedvoting.org/

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?

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.

>Just because Florida is

To be fair, I believe that is not the case across the state, just certain areas (i.e. county level).

Eh. If state law were clear, county-by-county shenanigans would be impossible. Florida's whole system is a mess.

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.).

Bullshit.

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.

Very civil. I love reading HN so I can read "Bullshit." More intolerant authoritarianism is not the answer to your issues.

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.

I don't want anyone to be able to look at my vote and know who did it. That's a powerful tool for thugs and tyrants.

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.

Edit: thanks for all these clarifications!

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.

They are anonymous, and I'm saying I like that. I'm only responding to the "ballot tied to a voter" aspect of the comment to which I replied.

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.

What is the definition of insanity again?

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.

How do you prevent duplicate voting, then (i.e. me casting 100 votes for Trump)?

Keep a record that I voted. Don't attach it to my vote.

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.

Such verification would enable a market for selling votes.

Just make vote selling illegal then? Or just make verification onerous, so that you can only do it during a recount, not on-demand via the internet.

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.

Paper.

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.

Easily gamed without strong (physical presense) voter ID requirements.

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

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.

Seems difficult to do. You'd need to know the name and address of the voter, and be sure that that haven't voted yet, and won't try to vote after you.

I can see that happening maybe a few times, but it seems ineffective on a large scale.

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.

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.

Just mark it down on a list. Whether someone has voted is not a secret.

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).

Then you could wash off the stamp and vote again

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.

Voter ID does not tie the ballot to a voter.

The comment to which I was responding advocated it:

> Paper ballot tied to a voter via a strong voter ID + electronic counting is the best of both worlds.

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.

>Paper ballot tied to a voter

Nope. Ballots need to be anonymous. Otherwise you can be coerced into voting a particular way.

You can't do anonymous ballots.

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.

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).

Unfortunately that doesn't work in the United States.

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.

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)?

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).

"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.

You keep posting the "find a box of ballots" theory.

It continues to be implausible and easily prevented without de-anonymizing the vote or resorting to strong voter ID.

None of the replies mention that a secret ballot is a concept that goes back to ancient Greece.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

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.

US Passport Card has all the features you want except for the "free"-ness thing.

...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.

You don't want to tie it to a voter. You can tie it to a voting group so you can audit the votes for the whole group instead of a single voter.

"audit" is a euphemism for recount. Recounts get challenged in court and are not guaranteed to happen.

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.

Depends on what you mean by voter ID.

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.

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).

Then we need to fix the problem of people not getting ID instead of using it as an excuse not to secure out elections

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 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.

"that doesn’t exist in practice"

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'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.

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 especially ironic.

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.

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.

That list seems false in at least one case.

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.

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.

That list is wrong. I'm in the UK, we don't need ID to register or vote here.

That's not exactly correct.

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.

Very well. In the vast majority of the UK, you don't need ID. That checkmark on your list remains misleading at best.

What is this supposed to prove?

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 didn’t say a single one of those things. You just made some big assumptions.

Tell me more about Canada, this implies you may be mistaken. https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...

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.

That person needs ID to be assigned to their polling station to vouch for you. You’re being very stubborn.

Canada very effectively requires ID to vote, sorry that offends you.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, and please don't use HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do those things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Canada does not require ID to vote. Period.

Please don't start posting like this again. We don't want to have to ban you again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html