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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

This.

Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.

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The UK, and in particular the north east are well worth looking into here. All paper ballots, no counting machinery, 30,000 voters (smaller than Iowa but of a similar order of magnitude), voting from across the constituency (no cramming into halls), pretty much zero fraud. Accurate results within two hours of the polls closing.

The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact.

No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.

To elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.

The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.

Sorry could you expand on that a bit more? You only vote on one thing at a time?

Typically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election.

Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.

UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.

So you do not personally vote on (as an example) how much money goes to schools? Your representative does that voting for you. Is that correct?

The UK is a representative democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy).

So is the United States.

You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.

> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative

That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.

It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.

Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.

Apps could be a valuable tool if we were willing to really change how we vote: put candidates in order of preference. Doing that on paper is not intuitive. The problem is, established politicians and politicos know and prefer the complex game that they know: one vote + electoral college.

It's not?

Putting numbers 1-5 in boxes isn't intuitive?

No, unfortunately not. You will get people who will put all 1s or a 6 here and there.

Ranked choice voting is already used by multiple countries with no problem

Australia manages to do it... Hell, not saying its great, but in the last election you could vote 1-6 "above the line", or IIRC 1-105 below the line https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_vote/practice/practice-...

You’d be surprised. The UK had a referendum on this in 2011, where the scheme was rejected without controversy, and the “no” argument I remember from the time was that this is too complicated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternat...

And yes, I am aware this system is already used in many places.

The issue is that, if one cannot reasonably trust a voting process, the vote is null in effect.

Humans cannot trust what they cannot understand and cannot verify.

A paper-based voting procedure, and counting procedure provide these guarantees: understanding and verification, through real-time, peer-based counting & review.

Any other automatic system cannot bring, at this point, the same guarantees, where you have to trust: 1) the people/system that built the system, 2) the process they used that ensures against any wrong-doing.

It is low-tech. And that's a good thing. No high-tech alternative provides the same value & the same guarantees at the same time.

I don’t know how “non intuitive “ it is, Mate — Australia’s been doing it for over a century.

Personal smartphones running iOS/Android are such a huge security risk that I don't see this happening...

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