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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you want to have strong opinions about voting security, you should do as Matt Blaze recommends and sign up to be an election judge. I did it after my business partner 'lvh did, presumably at Blaze's urging, and he's right: you really can't comprehend fully what's going on in an election until you've worked on one firsthand. A lot of things you'd be inclined to think are major security problems probably aren't, and the converse is also true.

Wherever you are, it's probably easy to sign up (I did online) and they'll likely pay you to do it.

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Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping, but it really is true. If you're serious about election security, you'll learn a lot very quickly by immersing yourself in the process and the people who do it.

For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.

> This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof

I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?

Once you go online (not to be confused with electronic-in-person), you cant really hide your vote. Whoever is buying your vote can instead buy your credentials to vote.

Isn't that also a problem with in-person voting and fake IDs?

that's entirely a question of scale - I can imagine that it'll be trivial to scale 'online' voting fraud if you have credential access, whereas doing it in person naturally limits the total number of times you can do it.

Committing identity fraud in person, in locations likely to have an elevated police presence, is extremely risky and getting caught carries severe consequences.

More fun Cook County details: not only is there not an elevated police presence at our polling places, but the election judges are charged with making sure the local police are not hanging around within like a quarter city block, since the local police don't have any authority with respect to voting. We got to chase a cop away at our place.

(The Cook County Sheriffs police our vote, but there aren't that many of them, so if they're going to show up, it's because a judge called them out.)

To do that with in person voting you have to physically move around enough people with enough fake IDs to actually swing the election. The difficulty of doing that silently without anyone saying anything is a protection in and of itself. On top of that you have to get that many people on the voter rolls to start with.

Every poll site has a poll book of eligible voters (for that location). Voters present their ID, sign next to their name, are issued a ballot. In order for mass fraudulent voting, impersonators would have to choose IDs (of persons) they were very confident were not going to vote.

Not if you can re-establish credentials after selling them and cast a second vote that silently spoils whatever the buyer sends. Though that might count as electronic-in-person, as you'd need some unsellable credential (e.g. live video of you showing your ID and the date-time, sending a fingerprint, etc) which can take precedence over the one you sold (a username/password, an earlier-dated video/fingerprint/whatever, etc).

But then I guess the buyer just waits til the deadline, and buys the live video of you establishing credentials and casting your vote for them, so you can't fraud them... seems a lot more convoluted though.

This is true of all remote voting. The all-postal ballots in Washington and Oregon are certainly subject to this, and there is a certain rate of voter coercion that goes undetected, particularly within households.

For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. Democratic legitimacy can be very nuanced and delicate. A well-publicized example of voter coercion could destroy trust in the existing system, but then the well-publicized problems of lines and poor voting hours eroded trust in the previous system too.

> For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates.

It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious way to get the benefits of both: require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.

Australia has this and it gets turnout rates in the 90%+ range. In 2015, Obama threw out that maybe it was time for mandatory voting in the US: https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/19/politics/obama-mandatory-voti...

But the idea has never gotten very far. In general, the idea of a collectivist state that is underpinned by citizen responsibilities has been subsumed by the idea of the state as service supplier, and the citizen consumer.

I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option and if the majority votes for that then the election is a do-over and the candidates on that ballot are forbidden from running in the next election and possibly more.

> I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option

You could write in a name, or hand in an empty ballot. Mind, nothing will come of this even if it's the majority pick, but you're never actually forced to choose a candidate.

Yea, mandatory voting is more of an assurance that everyone is given an opportunity to vote without encumbrance than that they actually express an opinion. I haven't seen a mandatory voting system that requires you to vote for a candidate out of a chosen list, that seems very dangerous.

If voting is mandatory than any impediments to being able to vote (like not giving employees time off) is quite limited by the fact that such impediments are illegal, in the US voter suppression sort of skates by on BS and lots of talking heads explaining how unmotivated millennials are.

I suspect an even bigger problem is that there are powerful players who seem to have have an interest in the opposite - that is, reducing the number of potential voters who actually vote. I can't imagine them letting mandatory voting go without a real fight.

There is a whole alt-right idea of "Demographic shifting" as a tactic being used to suppress their opinion. Unfortunately Americans are really stupid and conspiracy theories have gotten a deep hold on society.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003606

> require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.

This is only feasible if employers are legally required to allow employees time off to vote. In many countries, election days are holidays, but attempts to follow suit in the US haven't gone anywhere.

You could also move voting to Saturday.

That would require a constitutional amendment.

Nope! You could easily require states to offer a full week of voting as a minimum, this would also cut down on the tactic of making long lines at voting stations to reduce turn out.

> Nope! You could easily require states to offer a full week of voting as a minimum, this would also cut down on the tactic of making long lines at voting stations to reduce turn out.

How can you do that without an amendment? As I understand it, states are free to choose the methods for elections (which is why there is such variety in the US).

From the whitehouse.gov site:

> Federal elections are administered by state and local governments, although the specifics of how elections are conducted differ between the states. The Constitution and laws of the United States grant the states wide latitude in how they administer elections.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/elections-v...

In Vermont there is a state holiday for "town hall day" it's statutory so everyone either is out of work or getting paid holiday overtime and it's meant to encourage people to participate in their local town's politics - it is awesome and everywhere in America should have it.

Nope, at least, this won't work in Cook County: even if you've mailed in a ballot, you can vote provisionally, and if you have your mail-in ballot in hand, you can spoil it on-site and vote normally. You could therefore "sell" your vote and still override it to vote differently on election day.

Of course it would work. A real world "attack" is more like a regressively patriarchal household where everyone "votes" at the dinner table. Yes, an 18 year old around that table could later make their way to a ballot station, but they'll run into their neighbors along the way, and if their swamp-creature of a father finds out, it won't go well for them.

I should be more precise. The voting system we have in Cook County accounts for the possibility that someone observed your vote, and that you might later want to rescind that vote. It does so imperfectly, as you note.

I will say that the system we have goes to some annoying lengths to try to maintain this particular kind of integrity. For instance, if you have vision problems and want your husband to help you read the ballot, we need triplicate signatures confirming that the assistance wasn't coercive. We had to stop people from helping family members, as if they were doing something wrong, which felt weird.

I've monitored elections in Ireland and the Netherlands which both have an interesting problem. They each use Proportional Representation and ranked voting. Voters filling in their ballots mark each candidate with a number indicating their preference.

There are routinely 10+ candidates in each constituency. That makes it easy to encode a highly-likely to be unique voter signature in the lower order numbers, which would make it possible to sell your vote.

To combat this, when the votes are unfurled from the ballot boxes in public, tallymen (independent checkers of the vote) are expected to record only the first preferences, and if you start marking any more, you can expect a conversation with the returning officer. They are keeping an eye out.

If you are a scrutinizer of potentially invalid ballots, which I've done a few times, you're also not allowed to bring or take any notes.

That's a fascinating degree of prevention.

It absolutely is undermined by any sort of voting outside a polling station. If we’re being intellectually honest, all election systems present trade-offs. Polling stations have nice security benefits, but remote voting increase accessibility. That’s basically what you come to appreciate if you immerse yourself in these systems (and build a healthy skepticism for anyone who proposes seemingly simple solutions).

In some jurisdictions, it's possible to vote in person after voting absentee (the absentee ballot is then destroyed without being counted).

Any system will have trade-offs, though—since ballot access (getting time off from work, childcare, transportation) appears to be a much more pervasive problem than coercion, it seems like the sacrifice would be worth it.

I believe it is that you could replace the sealed envelope that your ballot comes in. Once the envelopes are opened, they are separated from the ballots inside them.

The best mechanism for that is old fashioned investigative work, e.g. in the North Carolina 9th district election.

The worry is that, if everything works this way, some of the indicators used to discover this sort of thing are diluted. E.g. the first indicators in the NC 9th case were that one county in this district had a lot more absentee ballots than elsewhere, and the absentee ballots favored one candidate by an implausible margin. If all ballots are absentee, the former measure becomes useless and the latter becomes a much weaker signal.

Tabulating ballots as they are received eliminates the secret ballot. Ballots should be sorted into precincts beforehand.

Many larger jurisdictions use high speed image scanners for their postal ballots and adjudicate voter intent electronically (no paper record).

Election integrity types consider postal balloting and touchscreens roughly equivalent.

The gold standard is poll sites where the ballots are tabulated onsite immediately after the polls close. Anything else compromises public voting, private counting, or both, in some way. Though sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile, eg enfranchising voters.

   Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping,...

I don't think it is gatekeeping to suggest people learn something about a subject before developing & propogating strong opinions on it. Obviously this is one of the best ways to learn some of the ins and outs.

How do I do that in the Bay Area?

https://sfelections.sfgov.org/serve-poll-worker

It's fairly straightforward to google this for the specific elections. Depending on the country, you can even do so as a foreign national, sometimes on the day of.

I think the Non-US-citizen thing is statewide. The state page is a bit vaguer, the SF one says you also have to be a LPR.

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