> invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes

That seems to just introduce a new vulnerability where you could intentionally get caught cheating in precincts that leaned contrary to your beliefs to invalidate everyone there who voted legitimately.

No. Any attempts at cheating caught live just invalidate that bulletin (and said cheater is brought to the police). With a well organised setup (having a record of who already voted, having a transparent ballot box that is only open for a moment when your identity has been verified, multiple assessors watching for the extremely obvious "hey there's multiple envelopes that fell in there"), cheating is already extremely hard, for almost no gain. Maybe you can stuff two votes instead of one, but at what cost, potentially invalidating hundreds for your candidate ? And since voter counts are recorded and compared to bulletin counts, even a difference of one will start an inquiry and potentially invalidate.

If you multiply the voting places, where instead of having a single place which will tally over 10k votes, have 15 places that tally 700 votes each, you have now made both cheating much harder, and less worth it in the scenario you propose.

> Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right

The story is literally about ballot stuffing at precincts where there weren’t observers like that watching. Which makes the electronic voting part a complete red herring

And 100% of the votes from those precincts without observers should’ve been discarded. The real problem is that we don’t fund elections properly. This sort of thing isn’t a problem in other developed democracies. It’s only one here by design.

What you’re proposing is that the official in charge of running elections can cut funding to precincts that usually vote for his opponent, and then later invalidate all ballots cast there?

I thought that they were simultaneously suggesting that funding be increased in a concrete and not easily reverse way. But I do see your point

I can register as an assessor for free (both for me and my city). The cases where cities have to pay for some is extremely rare. If you live in a city with even a hundred inhabitants, the chances to find at least one that is interested in their democratic process is already high.

That's an incredibly uncharitable read of my comment.

I wasn't trying to be uncharitable. You said that we should have retroactively discarded 100% of votes from specific precincts, so I pointed out why allowing selective invalidation like that is a really bad idea.

No, you uncharitably ignored the majority of my comment in your haste to make a sarcastic response.

I ignored the part where you called for mundane improvements, and zeroed in on the small bit where you called for blatant voter disenfranchisement

Other than speeding up voting calculations, reducing paper usage, enabling arbitrary language use at the booth, and other things.

If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems.

Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be.

(Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot has not. First past the post voting is possibly the worst system to use short of flipping a coin.)

Access to polling places has also been solved, including India where officials carry voting machines through the jungle for or only a handful of voters.

And first past the goal post works, or rather can work. It is aggressive Gerrymandering, allocating senators by state and not population and the electoral college that screw it up in the US.

FPTP is a disaster. Even if you have perfectly representative elections, FPTP essentially disallows anything but 2 parties. This makes both parties more easily corruptible (less people to bribe if you're paying for specific result or legislation).

Multiple parties makes gaming elections much harder for moneyed interests.

France has FPTP, and it works for a lot more than two parties. Admittedly, France has a second round run off in case no candidate has more than 50% of votes in the first round so.

Having two rounds is by definition not first past the post. And in fact that is the difference that makes it possible in France for third and fourth parties to get non-trivial support in the first round.

> France has FPTP

For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).

Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic.

Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes), France's system does not.

>For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).

Uh, no. The Fifth has has two round legislative elections since its beginning. The entire reason for it was that the Fourth and Third showed what an overly powerful parliament caused, as well as the relative instability of having only a single round to elect députés.

Hence, the Fifth was started by a former general who thought that putting immense amounts of power in the president was a good idea. Because clearly counter powers are overrated.

Additionally, french legislative elections can have a very peculiar situation where the second round has three candidates, but that requires a specific amount of votes and to all be extremely close. I believe there's 10 of them planned this year according to polls, over 577 circonscriptions.

I stand corrected. Apparently proportional representation only happened in the 1986 elections when Mitterrand made that change for that single election [1]. Amusing reading back on what happened vs. what I heard about from others.

Regarding the 3 candidates in 2nd round - yes that's only possible because France allows 3 & 4 candidates to go into 2nd round if they have over 12.5%. This is usually not the case, so 3-rounds are very limited but as you indicate they do present a plurality win possibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_French_legislative_electi...

You are correct.

>Other than speeding up voting calculations

Hilarious to read that as the US presidential elections take over a week to tally results, when french elections have 90% of the results at 10PM on the same evening (most voting places close at 7PM)

> Voting has been solved centuries ago.

Yes, but then we threw in a huge wrench when we decided that votes needed to be secret, too.

No. Voting has been secret also for centuries. Paper ballots allow secrecy of the vote _and_ verification of voters. Something that electronic ballots will never be able to do.

As has been stated repeatedly in this thread, paper ballots wouldn’t have prevented this case