As they go into, it's not easy to explain to the public or other election officials how this happened, or even what happened at all.
I believe low tech is preferable, but I don't think this is the reason, unless I'm misunderstanding something.
The internal handling of votes should be harden as you explain, but helping more people to vote should be the goal. The reverse is also an attack on democracy, and we already see this at so many scales.
Like setting voting stations at places easier to access for a specific portion of the population (right next to churches on sundays, next to police stations, hard to reach by public transport places, etc.). Reliable online voting would alleviate these kind of issues.
Not saying it’s easy, but we should at least try.
That's how it is done in Belgium.
Think of it. If your choice is ether vote or risk a fine, you'd rather go and vote. If you go and vote, you'll learn at least a bit about the choices you have to make in the ballot.
P.S. While Belgium got mandatory voting right, it completely messed up electronic voting. I remember being an assessor in a polling station with electronic voting.
People voted, then the head of the voting station took 3 1⁄2-inch floppy disks out of the machine, put them in an envelope and drove away to the district polling committee. There was not counting, no protocol to sign. Nothing. I was appalled.
This is ABSOLUTELY not what I want. I for one want voting to be extremely accessible. Everyone that wants to vote can. The goal isn't to make everyone vote but rather that everyone has the ability to vote. That you don't have to take time off to vote. That it is easy.
Universally accessible, not universally mandated.
On the other hand, casting a vote doesn't mean CHOOSING a candidate. It means that you can cast a BLANK vote. And that, in and of itself is an extremely important thing. It shows that you are NOT okay with either candidates, and forces them to actually adjust their agendas to suit the "public will", instead of falling back to what I believe is commonly called in the US as "ratfucking", aggressive districting, and voter disenfranchisement, which means they literally only care about getting enough voters to pass.
As for the doability, it's already done in Australia. Pretty successful, and basically and national holiday celebrated like 4th of july in the US.
That's the pesky thing about democracy, you see. If you want "informed voters" then you actually have to work to have an informed populace, not gripe about people's right to participate in the society they're a part of.
Not everybody has to be your idea of an intellectual to be a part of a democracy. And not only is that okay, it's precisely the point of it being a "democracy".
Yes, and the solution to this is not mandating that they vote. If they are uninformed forcing them to vote doesn't cause them to be informed. It makes the system more vulnerable to populism.
The idea behind freedom is not absolute freedom. It is a balance of the contract with society vs individual freedom. You want to maximize individual freedom, but for everyone (not a singular person). Clearly things like the "freedom" to murder someone doesn't outweigh that person's individual freedom to live and thus we make laws (and ways to enforce them). Mandating voting decreases individual freedom and has a potential for reduced societal freedom (while little to no real potential for increase. Much prone to populist candidates). So why mandate? Don't solve problems that aren't problems. If someone doesn't want to vote, how does that harm you?
In general, people don't trust elections because they don't trust their representatives to actually represent their interests, or they don't trust the rest of the political system to actually allow any meaningful change. These are very valid and correct criticisms, confirmed by many sociological studies (in the US at least, the opinions of the bottom 50% of the electorate by wealth have almost no influence on their representatives' agendas).
Voter suppression and vote buying/bullying are much more common, but those have little to do with the voting system (though India has an interesting and complex voting system designed to combat a history of systematic retaliation against entire groups of voters, such as de-funding entire regions that had voted the with the losing party).
But actual voter fraud is rare in most democracies. It's extremely common in authoritarian regimes that are mascarading as democracies, but an online system would make those cases especially trivial.
For example every election in Washington ballots are mailed out to every address on file, it’s very easy to print a ballot online if you didn’t get it in the mail, and until recently there have been no supposed issues with mailing ballots (postage is prepaid), plus there are dedicated dropoff boxes as well. And even with all that convenience turnout was 65% in 2016, though it is expected to be higher this year.
Reliable on-line secret ballots do not exist for us yet and may never.
More easy-to-access polling stations does.
IME, high tech voting makes changing one vote a little harder, but it makes changing the outcome much easier.
I see nothing inherently secure about physical paper as the voting medium. Whatever is written on that paper or how it's handled better also be provably secure somehow.
Probably, but it would probably be so complex that only a small subset of the population is able to understand how it works. For a vote that’s accepted by the general population you want a process that’s as simple as possible. Everyone understands how paper works.
> Whatever is written on that paper or how it's handled better also be provably secure somehow.
Here that’s largely solved by having lots of volunteers that do the counting. It should be pretty hard to compromise that.
The volunteers bit and generally very human process of counting votes actually seems like a huge attack surface for anyone to 'miscount' votes they don't like. Theoretically everyone's work can be double checked, but does this actually happen outside a recount? It's a huge amount of work in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't the resources for it.
What I'll give in-person voting is the human autonomy bit. In principle someone is physically looking at me and my ID, and I go into the booth alone. Even mail-in doesn't accomplish this one.
The ballot has a removable serial number on it which is detached before returning the envelope. I can use this to look up the status of my ballot online and see that it was counted.
What part of this process is not secure?
A goal there is to have absolute plausible deniability - that even if you absolutely wanted to show to someone that you voted for A, then we need to ensure that you could do that show even while actually voting for B. If you want to fill out a paper ballot and put it in a tamper evident envelope, then it's important to ensure that nobody can watch (current solutions include in-person voting, and for people who physically can't come, my local elections include an election committee visiting these pre-arranged houses and collecting ballots while ensuring secrecy, i.e. that it can't be filled by a family member). If you want to take a picture of a filled ballot, then we need to ensure that either you can very easily take a picture of a ballot filled differently than you actually voted, or that you can't take such a picture. In systems where you have multiple ballot sheets (e.g. one for each party) and put the one you choose in the ballot box, and the others (for whom you didn't vote) stay outside, then you need to ensure that either everyone can easily and anonymously leave with a set of ballots as if they voted for someone else, or either noone can leave with these ballots.
This is a problem with digital voting. For example, there are various schemes of digital voting you can verify that your vote was counted properly while still remaining anonymous without your cooperation. But it needs to ensure that the vote remains anonymous even if your cooperation can be forced or bought.
It says you should bring in your mail-in ballot to the polling place, and if you don't then you can cast a provisional ballot "which will be counted after your county elections official has confirmed you are registered to vote in that county and did not vote more than once in that election." Based on that wording it sounds like if you already submitted a vote-by-mail ballot, then you would have already voted and your provisional ballot won't be counted.
Sure, as long as you're fine with whatever retribution the guy you sold your vote to chooses to take.
Or even the part where I offer $10 per ballot.
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-vot... [1] https://newjerseyglobe.com/local/postal-service-finds-some-p...
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/three-tubs-of-ballot...
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...!
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/us/politics/wisconsin-ele...
[4] https://noqreport.com/2020/06/28/caught-on-camera-postal-wor...
For those unfamiliar with the story, in the 2004 election for governor of Washington, the Republican candidate (Dino Rossi) won the initial count by a very narrow margin (261 votes), triggering a legally-mandated recount. The recount closed the gap to Rossi only winning by 42 votes. A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots; in arguments before the left-leaning state supreme court, the court rejected requests for applying the same recount methodologies in all counties (in opposition to Washington state law) and the "found" votes, mostly from D-leaning counties, put Gregoire into the lead. The Democrats in the state then successfully argued in court against any further recounts, and Rossi conceded without taking his complaint to the state supreme court. Gregoire took office shortly thereafter.
I don't know who should have won that election, but to an outsider it sure LOOKED like some fraud was occurring, especially since the "found" ballots didn't match the statistical distribution of the rest of the votes in the counties, and leaned D significantly more heavily than the counties' original ballots.
So THAT is why I oppose mail in voting. Mail in ballots introduce custody, integrity and identity issues, as well as enable vote-buying and selective vote harvesting, and so are amenable to fraud. We have seen all of these things happen; they aren't theoretical.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...
A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots
I'm not sure how this relates to mail in voting though? If there was fraud and D ballots were being hidden where was that happening? Wouldn't it be during counting, not transportation? Would voting in person have changed this or made it impossible?
The found ballots were absentee ballots, which were the only form of mail-in balloting available at the time.
Do you have any answers for my 3 sourced statements other than naked assertions?
[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/more-than-20-000-dea...
Probably need the equivalent of poll watchers to pick them up from the drop box and deliver to the monitored counting center. I'll believe the tamper-evident nature of the envelopes when I understand the solvent or process required to remove the adhesive without tearing the cover.
The serial numbers are also tied to my address and name so you'd have to both decode the system used for generating the numbers and know the number the state assigned to me.
And a root of trust here is state IT systems. In addition to state actors (the nation-state type), we have the classic insider threats driven by both elected and career officials. Need to assume a higher level of competence at least than election commissions have deserved in the past.
The poll watchers are interesting. Do they watch each box from the time it's placed on the curb until the time its contents are entered into the counting system? (What's the overnight security like on them?, what's the transit security?)
Yes I sound like I'm trying to find problems...
Edit: fixed URL
Huh?
I stopped reading after the first sentence but did a quick search. The words "tamper" and "mail" don't appear in the article.
This FUD will be what leads to unrest, please stop spreading it.
Putting your head in the sand won’t make it go away. Mail-in is a bad fucking idea. Trump suggested a way for his supporters to make sure their vote was counted and Twitter took the tweets down as “election manipulation”. Umm, what? So do mail-in ballots allow double voting or not? Twitter has also said they will remove any Tweets by trump if he claims victory “too early”. So that’s where we are now, huh? If Democrats were so damn confident they could win fair and square, why introduce this wild card?
Changing to mail-in at the 13th hour is not the same as continuing a 30-year tradition. Besides, as others have pointed out, it has led to nakedly corrupt elections in other states (Washington state in 2004). Whenever you introduce the possibility of people being able to ballot harvest or “lose ballots” and those same people are taught that they are stopping literally Hitler it’s no surprise they do what they do. This whole last-minute rush for mail-in ballots stinks to high heaven and even if you think your side will benefit from it, we all lose when trust in our democracy is undermined.
So no, I won’t just kindly shut up and let Democrats steal the election. Or Republicans for that matter. We should all be observing the ballot counting process but this god damn mail-in process means we can’t audit the process. That should scare you. If it doesn’t, you are way too naive.
How many of these sorts of cases are you OK with? Less than 1% of the total votes? 10%? 50%?
Hell, just look at the article. It acknowledges the high costs of mail-in voting. Then engages in classic double-think to defend it:
>“Trump has repeatedly baselessly claimed mail-in voting will lead to a “rigged” election—despite mail-in voter fraud being extremely rare—and decried the fact that the vote could take longer to count, saying the nation “must know election results on the night of the election.” >Facebook blocked videos of Trump encouraging North Carolina voters to vote twice—which election officials warned would be a felony—Thursday, but has not taken action on the president’s Facebook post making similar comments.“
Well which is it? Does mail-in lead to fraud or not? Trump’s allegations are apparently “baseless” but at the same time he got muzzled when he suggested his voters make sure their vote was counted. This is a fucking circus.
> In Germany all voting places are wheelchair accessible.
There are accessibility concerns beyond just wheelchairs you know...
A person doesn't have to be able to get to a post office themselves to cast an absentee ballot. They just have to be able to fill out the ballot and sign it. Someone else can mail it for them.
Right, so they have to be able to reliably receive mail at a location fixed at least a little time in advance, and either send mail or give it to someone to send mail, and then it needs to reliably get to its destination.
Not all of those things are always easy for all people's situations.
As a practical example - see the difficulty that homeless people have voting in many cases.
Voting online as an option would possibly solve them for some people.
Where does this antiquated mindset of "omg, I need my votes counted by hand!" but "please transfer $1,000,000 using as many electronics as possible"
I trust SSL more than I trust human counting?...
Because that's a feature. You want something that's simple to understand and cannot be easily tampered with at a larger scale.