Hacker News Reader

> First and foremost, paper ballots everywhere. No touchscreens.

> Second, from printing time onward, all handling of ballots, whether marked or unmarked, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties.

Australia does this at all levels of government, up to national elections. The people nominated by candidates are called "scrutineers" and every candidate may nominate at least one for every polling station and several for every counting room.

The count is done manually, thrice, again with scrutineer oversight.

Here's a photo of a close count occurring under scrutiny: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-06/counting-resumes-in-se...

At the last Federal election, 3 boxes of Senate ballots in Western Australia were lost. The matter wound up in the High Court. Because there was a very slight but non-zero mathematical possibility that those ballots could have changed the outcome, the election was voided and run again from scratch.

This stuff isn't rocket science. You just have to pretend that it's important.

They call those "poll watchers" in Minnesota. And yes, every party is allowed to place poll watchers at any/all precincts. Poll watchers are also allowed to challenge the registrations of any individuals coming to vote. I don't remember the exact details around it, but they aren't powerless.

I remember one election in particular where I was working a mixed-race, poor neighborhood precinct in Minneapolis. The Democratic poll-watcher was convinced the Republican one was going to challenge every single voter and paralyze the precinct, preventing hundreds from voting. The Republican poll watcher was convinced that Democrats were going to bus in thousands of paid illegal black voters from Wisconsin. Of course, neither of these things happened.

One important consequence of this is that, as long as you can control the integrity of the paper ballots, then cheating the software of the voting machines does not matter. It will simply get caught, and replaced with a manual count.

Such incredibly simple steps.

Who thought it was a good idea to "disrupt" voting by going electronic?

The same kind of guys who scrapped William Binneys working multimillion dollar thinthread project for a multibillion dollar project that didn't work...

Eg, the oligarchs and good Ole boys

It's not just electronic voting. Let's look at a real attempt to subvert elections - Voter ID laws. Voter ID is presented as a solution to a problem that actually does not exist, given this system.

In Minnesota, you show up at the polling place, say your name and address, they find you on the registration list, check you off, and hand you a ballot. No need to prove you are who you say you are. If someone pretends to be you before you vote, then it's immediately and obviously brought to the attention of the judges (and we aren't seeing a massive wave of fakery now). If someone pretended to be you after you vote, they'd get caught.

Of course, someone could fake it, with someone's registration that they know won't vote. But if they repeated it at a single precinct, the odds of being recognized as a repeat voter by the election judges goes up. So they would have to move from precinct to precinct, with a list of viable registered non-voters to use.

Now, consider scale. A statewide Minnesota election is about 1.5M voters. To move the outcome 1% requires 15,000 votes. If one person can manage to vote illegally ten times in a day, it would require 1500 people in a conspiracy. Plus data management, tight enough for no errors. And NO leaks while these 1500 people are trained (and probably paid, if you want that many).

With that in mind, the idea of actually manipulating the election with votes that could be prevented with Voter ID is absurd. But! If we put ID laws in place, we could well reduce the number of voters by 1%, and that result would be biased toward people who are poor or otherwise not fully integrated into mainstream society.

Election manipulation, completely legal, and more effective than the mechanism it purports to prevent. Ugh.

And hey, if voters are dumb enough to fall for that, maybe we can get them excited for touchscreen machines!

Rather than these attempts at selling electronic voting systems - couldn't there just be a company that establishes 'tried and true' paper ballot voting based on the best existing systems for fairness/anti-cheating.

It seems like you should be able to do things more easily, less expensively, and with lower risk in a repeatable way in every state.

Yes but why pay more for it if not technology?

>And hey, if voters are dumb enough to fall for that, maybe we can get them excited for touchscreen machines!

People are partisan and will buy any story that explains why they lose. A non-trivial portion of Democrats think the Russian advertisements on Facebook changed the election to Trump's favor.

This comment has put me firmly in the anti-Voter-ID column. I've always been on the fence regarding Voter ID.

One one hand, I can see the effect that it would have on the makeup of the voters: older, richer, more established.

On the other hand, I couldn't shake the idea that voting is too sacred to not enforce some level of identity verification.

You just swept away my "on the other hand". Thanks.

So I still think we should have Voter-ID, but I don't think we're ready for it yet.

My arguments for:

First, don't people have to register to vote in most places? I don't see how bundling your Voter-ID acquisition with registering to vote would be bad.

Second, a valid state ID should be enough to vote even with Voter-ID. This DRASTICALLY reduces the number of IDs we need to handle.

My main argument against not doing it right now:

We'd need proper funding that we're not going to get in the current political climate. A half-assed solution would be BAD.

> I don't see how bundling your Voter-ID acquisition with registering to vote would be bad.

How many times have you forgotten to bring some random item you need for something you're doing? Why stop someone from voting because of a mistake virtually anyone could make?

I don't think forgetfulness has a political bias

I has a time based pro-wealth bias that becomes much larger when you combine it with your second argument, as you're less likely to forget something you take every day.

It's not about whether we can. It's about whether we should.

This is a freedom-based problem. First, what problem is voter id supposed to solve? Well, people cheating by voting illegally. Is this an actual, demonstrable problem? No. Despite grandiose claims by FOX News and Donald Trump, there is no evidence of widespread voting fraud. So we've established that this is a solution to a problem that does not actually exist.

Second, does it impact our freedom? Voting is both our right and responsibility as citizens. Should we be required to carry and show id just to prove that we are citizens? "Do you have your papers, citizen?" used to be a joke we made about the shortcomings of totalitarian communist dictatorships. So yes, it does impact our freedom, as we should be free to go about our day without carrying government id at all times, and I believe that would include the act of voting.

Limiting our freedom to solve fake problems sounds un-American to me.

We're already not free to walk around without papers for certain activities. Entering a bar, buying restricted substances (including some medication!), driving a car, leaving and entering the country, etc. None of that means we're in some totalitarian dictatorship.

I've seen plenty of elections come down to 100s of votes. To me this seems like an attack vector we shouldn't ignore.

Besides, we already have the concept of provisional ballots if people end up not having or forgetting their ID.

But again, I don't think we're ready for all this. A half-assed solution would be very bad, and I don't trust the current system to handle this in a partisan way.

In Seattle (which has mail-in voting) all ballot envelopes and ballots are digitally photographed as they enter the elections facility. This sets a baseline count before any ballots are tallied making the process of adding/removing ballots as well as changing votes much more difficult.

This sounds like an outstanding model. Other states have complained that such process would be too expensive. How has Minnesota resisted being "too cheap" on election?

And in general I'm impressed by Minnesota's governance. Maybe the answer is a deeper look at Minnesota's government structure.

It's not any more expensive than any other state. Minnesota doesn't use an unusually high number of election judges - the usual collection of old ladies who do election judge work can handle this.

States that let individuals handle ballots and stuff are either incompetent or malicious. There's no excuse for not solving easily solved problems with simple, proven solutions, when our democracy is at stake.

In King County in Washington state, they stream on the internet the entire processing of the ballots, and there is a tracker that tells you if your vote has been officially counted.

https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security...

> The ballots themselves are Scantron, fill in the dots with ink. The state provides standardized pens for this.

I wonder if they have considered augmenting that. Add this [1] to it and it would still work pretty much the same as far as voters are concerned when they are in the voting both--the ballots would be printed a little differently and the pens would be different, but it would still be rub the dot with the pen.

Afterwards, though, when the results are released individual voters can verify that their vote was counted and that it went toward the correct candidate. There are other advantages discussed in the link below.

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

I think several states do it this way. Oregon is much the same way. Boxes, not scantron bubbles, but conceptually the same. And vote-by-mail, not in-person. But as you say, always representatives from both large political parties, etc.