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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never been to Russia and don’t know the Russian attitude towards tech or voting. But I’m confident that if the US had a system like this and made a reasonably usable phone app to be the front end, almost no one under the age of 60 would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again.

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>would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again

As someone living in a state with mail-in ballots, it still boggles my mind waiting in line for physical voting is a thing. Mail-in ballots seem to be the best of all worlds. It's easy. I have time to do the research for who I want to choose. It's all backed by USPS so it's pretty damn secure- as secure as everything else we trust in the mail.

You get the "I Voted" sticker to show off with.

Yeah. Washington state is all mail-in ballots, once you try it, other ways just seem stupid.

Aren't mail-in ballots too easy to falsify? You take a database of voters and send mail under their names.

They have proven not to be. Here you sign them and add phone number or email. An advanced state could copy my signature but they verify I am a voter so double voting would be detected.

Also paper ballots make it possible to recount or verify something if the race was really close.

Mail-in means you can be coerced to vote a certain way by someone in your household. It also means someone might be able to get a hold of your ballot papers and vote in your name (there are Austrian politicians who have been convicted for doing just this). The postal service might "lose" ballots depending on whether they come from minority neighborhoods or other characteristics (in Austria, mail-in ballots have the voter's name on the outside). This is different from normal mail since if the postal service regularly lost your mail you would notice and complain; can you tell of your mail-in vote has really arrived? Votes might also be "lost" after they arrive wherever they are meant to be counted; letters presumably need to be guarded for several days, as opposed to votes put in a ballot box and counted later that day (this was one of the factors in the Austrian constitutional court cancelling one round of the most 2016 presidential election).

There are certainly other failure modes. In the last Hungarian parliamentary election the ruling party got less than 50% of the votes overall but literally 99% of the postal vote. That seems rather fishy to me.

Anyway, if you have long lines, that means the people organizing your elections are not doing their job right. There need to be more polling places. Other civilized countries manage this, the US would only need to take their democracy seriously.

https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI

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