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No, it is not possible for your vote to be "wiped out." If you cast a ballot it will be counted. It's frankly a bit dangerous to imply otherwise.

As it says in the bit of article you quoted, states can use these systems to find people who are "eligible to be purged from the rolls." This is bad. Especially when it disproportionately affects certain populations of people.

But if you show up on election day and you've been purged from the rolls, election officials are required by law to provide you with a provisional ballot.

I could see a system that would prevent you from getting a ballot in multiple locations. Since the vote is supposedly anonymous, I'm not sure how they'd purge a cast ballot.

You can't prevent anyone from casting a provisional ballot.

At least in New York, if you aren't on the voter list you cast an affidavit ballot. This is reviewed for accuracy. If it passes, the envelope is opened and the vote counted. If it fails, the vote is discarded (a letter is also supposed to be sent).

If you are on the voter rolls and vote, your vote is counted. If you aren't, it's tougher to be as certain.

You're right, I misread that. It would prevent people from being on the 'electoral rolls' which could prevent them from voting. Not removing people's votes retroactively.

Interesting. I'm registered in 3 states (I always kinda assumed registering in a new state unregistered you in another) and my wife is registered in 2. I wonder if my name is on that list. Damn even the criteria they use doesn't technically have to be unique; it's possible to have the same name, DOB and last 4 digits of a SSN (though that's likely incredibly rare but still the possibility is theoretically there).

I feel as if our entire election and voting process needs a `re-write`.

Yeah, that's nuts, there are 20 other people with my name just living in the bay area. That system could wipe out some non-zero percent of the Irish vote.

Merely last name and DOB brings up a fairly unique value. This is what Walgreens, and others, now use instead of SSN.

There was an earlier HN item about how DOB, gender, and Zip identifies 87% of the US population uniquely. No SSN needed in either case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967

I would argue that 87% is an unacceptable margin of error given that we are talking about the presidential election.

That margin of error is across the whole country. Vote checking would run over a much smaller area.

It doesn't matter if it's across the whole country because the identification incorporates zipcodes. All ambiguities are local to a single town.

agreed and upvoted.

This would be to find those multi-registered voters. Considering the current system is merely first + lastname, I think either approach above would be superior and without leaking SSN's to yet another government database.

> I feel as if our entire election and voting process needs a `re-write`.

I'm not American, but in my opinion this should have been the the major issue in this election. All the tripe about email servers and orange-tinted buffoons seems designed purely to prevent people considering this.

May I humbly suggest two things: first, you swap the right to bear arms for the right to hold citizen's initiated referendums. As I understand it, the second amendment was designed to prevent government tyranny, but it's obviously not working and causes a LOT of collateral damage.

Second, somehow beef up your fourth estate. Citizens need reliable information that is not tainted by political or corporate agendas. I have no idea how to do this, but you are a resourceful people.

>I'm not American, but in my opinion this should have been >the the major issue in this election.

It won't be a major issue unless it negatively effects the establishment candidate (whomever that happens to be).

> May I humbly suggest two things: first, you swap the right to bear arms for the right to hold citizen's initiated referendums.

Most states have them, and they're pretty terrible. Get 51% of those of your fellow citizens who bother to show up to support it, and a referendum can rewrite any law — worse, an amendment can write anything into the state constitution.

Our problem at the moment is that we're too much a democracy and too little a republic.

> Second, somehow beef up your fourth estate.

I think that the media — particularly their coverage of the primaries — bear a great deal of the blame for today. Making them stronger would exacerbate that.

Every time someone brings up a national ID card (unique key), everyone gets really upset, unfortunately.

As a software developer who has had to answer the tough question of "how do we identify our users?", a tiny part of me wishes every human had a UUID tattooed on.

Our DNA is actually one heck of a unique fingerprint, but it's currently still quite hard to read... when that changes things will get interesting.

There are also cases where DNA fails, notably twins and chimerae.

Yeah honestly I don't get the outrage. A national ID would solve a ton of issues. Individual states could add information to and remove from the ID and it could link up everything. Even people who are for voting IDs it could be used for that as long as it didn't cost anything.

Yeah I know it can help "track" you. Look, you're already being tracked far more without the damn thing. In my opinion a national ID would be well worth it.

I'll hold my breath.

> So if a person votes with the same first/last name as another person in another state, it's possible that vote could be wiped out. It was even matching names even though there were differences in middle names or had Jr/Sr at the end.

Funny how this exact same problem was a non-issue for the left when it came to "No-fly, No-Buy."

No-fly is a republican-president's policy. And not surprisingly, it's 100% worthless for security.

(But you're right about the no-buy thing. Dems are willing to burn the constitution to limit guns to some people.)

Absolutely. I'm not trying to say this hypocrisy only exists on the left, and I should have framed it that way.

(No fly was ruled unconstitutional in 2014, by the way. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/2... )

I wonder if blockchain technology could some how be used to improve the voting system?

Not really (or at least you would lose privacy part), one reason why voting is anonymous is to prevent 1) intimidation 2) paying people to vote in favor of specific issues.

If block chain would be used it would be easy for someone buying votes to verify that the people who got paid voted in certain way.

It's possible. But yeah, like you said, if your identity was linked to your address or hash you'd lose anonymity.

You'd have to really trust whoever was keeping the records to have a secure db which we know is basically impossible and could allow for coercion if a malicious actor got hold of it.

However if this problem was solved, it would allow for cryptographically provable elections.

I only mentioned it because I saw a post on HN the other day that mentioned zcash which is suppose to add anonymity to what bitcoin does.

We get a lot of people claiming the machine switched their vote etc. Over the years, there have been stories of people forging paper ballots etc.

I just wanted to raise the issue for discussion, why all the down votes?

I don't understand why you were downvoted. Your question is valid and relevant. There are problems with the current election process, that were evident in the primary elections. There are many manufacturers of e-voting machines, but these are opaque, proprietary and possibly hackable (as has been demonstrated in past years by security researchers). With current wave of interst in blockchain technology, there are several new ventures that are exploring blockchain as an immutable, authoritative record or log that cannot be hacked. The problem is that it is too transparent (people may see who you voted for, not just that you voted). But I think this problem can be solved, and will likely be solved. It may take a few years.

Here's an answer from Quora that I found helpful: https://www.quora.com/Can-blockchain-technology-be-used-in-s...

> why all the down votes?

Because "blockchain" is the new "rewrite". There's always someone who suggests it, whether or not it's applicable - which it almost never is.