Hacker News Reader

If you're concerned about election integrity here in Georgia (and I think all voters in the state should be), you should consider supporting Fair Fight Action. They're the plaintiffs in several of the suits challenging these voting systems and overt voter suppression efforts by our state government. See https://fairfight.com/legal-action/

Sweet, thanks for the information!

It seems like a national voterID and integrity law is bipartisan? Why is only one party banging the drums for this on a national level?

I live in one of the wealthiest zipcodes in Georgia that tends to vote strongly Democrat.

The usual voting location was moved to the edge of the district to a building with limited parking despite a large Church being located next to the usual voting location. Due to undersupplying voting machines the waits were 2hours +

Average wait in traditional Republican areas was under 15 minutes.

The GOP controls the Voting committee.

I have every reason to believe that was intentional.

They’re a user experience improvement over things like butterfly ballots (where part of user experience is ability to understand who you’re casting a vote for.)

Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.

Of course, the right solution would be paper ballots that aren’t stupid.

Much like computer interfaces, it doesn't matter how much you dumb down the experience, there will always been dumber people.

I know that sounds harsh, but part of my job is building web sites for low-education people. There's a ton of research into this problem, much of it very interesting, and some of it just downright amazing.

For example, I follow a recommendation to use "Go" instead of "Search" for search submission buttons because more than one study has shown that a remarkable number of people with low education and poor computer skills will just click the Search button without typing anything in the search box because they believe the computer will actually read their mind and know what they want to search for. I shit you not.

The next time you're looking at your logs and you see clicks on search buttons with no text entered in the search field, it may not be a bot. It may just be someone struggling to understand your web page.

Another solution would be to instruct the user to type something in the search box, whenever the search button is clicked on an empty box.

The problem is that instructions are text. The sort of people who think the computer will magically know what they want are the kind who won't read or understand instructions.

Sure, you can't be successful with every user. If they refuse to type in search terms, I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.

Sure, you can't be successful with every user

For the types of web sites I build (healthcare), I don't get to just ignore a certain group of people because they're inconvenient, or don't fit into my assumptions about how people should work or behave.

I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.

The research shows it works. I'm going with the research, in large part because it involved actual testing on actual people and not just people in cubicles making presumptions.

They'll read single words, but not longer sentences.

I've experienced it as well, where the page literally says right there what to do, and I get calls from confused users not sure what to do.

I want to say "Did you read what it says 2 inches above where you clicked?" But I never do and am just polite to them.

> I don't see how substituting "Go" for "Search" improves anything.

You didn't see it in the studies you ran, or are you just thinking about through your perspective instead of that of the low-education, tech-illiterate users?

I don't doubt that, but the butterfly ballots were uniquely stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia... (There's probably a better link than generic Wikipedia, but it's all I have on hand at the moment.)

I'm not bringing up this specific instance for no reason—the 2000 election caused a lot of states to redo their voting systems in a relatively short amount of time, in order to make them understandable. In many (most?) cases, that meant moving to digital voting.

Something like a scantron ballot (which is digitally counted, but has a paper backup) is pretty darn good. Not perfect—some people will be confused—but if you put instructions at the the top with visual examples, it's pretty darn understandable.

A paper trail doesn't necessarily require paper ballets. Electronic voting machines can spit out a receipt to be reviewed by the voter in order to be counted in a potential audit while allowing the electronic tally to be used for initial results. With electronic machines with no paper trail, there is no way to recover from a failed or compromised machine.

> I have zero faith in GA election results.

I read one of Jimmy Carter's memoir and one of the times he covers was when he was running for some office in Georgia - must have been in the late 60s/early 70s. Carter mentions some flagrant tampering then. GA elections have been rotten for a long time

If they are like most BMDs they cannot be verified by the voter. They'll print out a paper with a barcode on it. In theory you could scan and decode the barcode but most voters won't know how to do that. In effect, the BMDs are not verifiable by the general voting public.

Based on my admittedly minimal research, these are supposed to be verifiable by the voter prior to scanning the BMD printout.

> There is literally no reason not to also have a paper trail.

There is one reason, which is that if you give the voter a paper record stating who they voted for, that voter can be shaken down upon leaving their polling place by goons hired by one political machine or another demanding to see that record. That sort of thing used to happen all the time back in the heyday of machine politics, as the dominant machine would very much want to know if you actually voted for their candidates or not -- particularly if they'd paid you before election day to do so.

Why would the voter remove the paper ballot or paper receipt from the polling place?

The paper would be kept by poll workers so the electronic count can be audited.

My state has paper ballots that are counted electronically. I feel this is a good compromise and allows much easier vote total auditing.

> My state has paper ballots that are counted electronically

This is really not much better.

Paper ballots counted electronically allows for a hand count. In case of close elections (as measured by the electronics) a hand count is usually required. You can (and some jurisdictions will) also do a hand count of some number of ballots to confirm the electronic count is at least plausible.

Given the number of questions voters are voting on (at least in CA and WA, there's usually 30-50 things to vote on), hand counting everything would be immensely time consuming.

He's not referring to giving you a receipt, he's talking about voting machines that produce a paper print out that the voter quickly confirms at the polling place, then deposits in a ballot box. If the custody these paper ballots is managed carefully, they can later be used to verify any apparent funny business in the results of the electronic vote counting system.

A paper trail doesn't mean giving people a receipt saying who they voted for. It means recording votes both digitally and physically so if there's concern about one, the other can be checked.