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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting?

Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.

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Sorry for tooting the horn again, but this is really a solved problem. You go with paper ballots and vote-counting machines. The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand.

This is how it's supposed to work: https://youtu.be/ViK9pe9Pv_s?t=27

That's never been how caucuses work, so it's not quite a solution to this problem.

the solution is to modernize and stop having ridiculously archaic caucuses

Caucuses are great. High information voters who have to publicly stand by their candidate, and persuade other members of their community to support their candidate. More on the “democracy” side of the equation than the “republic” side.

That is not what happened.

The OP wasn't being metaphorical in any sense, they were literally describing how caucuses work. If your first choice doesn't meet a qualifying threshold in your precinct, then you can switch your vote in the second round, and supporters of other candidates can literally try to convince you before that round. It all happens in the open with people literally crossing to different parts of the room to caucus for different candidates. The app -- and its failure -- didn't change any part of this process.

But the Iowa caucuses also has a delegate apportionment system that privileges rural voters over those in large cities, similar to the electoral college. It strains meaning to describe something designed to produce an undemocratic outcome as being more democratic than republican.

That's a real issue -- and one that seems like it's going to have an actual effect this time around, giving Buttigieg slightly more delegates than Sanders even though Sanders actually has slightly more support. I think the Iowa Caucus worked as designed, despite the collapse of the app, but just like the Electoral College, that doesn't mean the actual design is good!

What about the Iowa Caucuses makes you believe these are "high information" voters? They often have nonsensical positions and ranked choices. They're committed voters, but that is not at all the same thing.

This [0] was my favorite "high information voter" story so far.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mayor-pete-buttigieg-gay-iowa-c...

That's the obvious and vivid example, but more broadly and tellingly are people's stated preferences and the outcomes of realignments, where people are oscillating between progressive and moderate candidates. I see no evidence that Iowa voters are "high-information"; I think most of them see participatory politics as a sport, just like voters in every other state.

That's begging the question though. The problem is not that caucuses are old—caucuses were just fine before this app-driven craze to change them.

We don't know that they were fine. Until Sanders campaign urged them to make a change in transparency, only the final delegate count was reported. So it could've been a dumpster fire every other time and they just obscured the discrepancies with "final delegate count"

> The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand.

Good old progressive enhancement. Not sure why people want to rip out the old functionality (paper) until the new functionality (e-voting) has a solid track record on it's own.

Doesn't matter the track record, everything can be hacked, and will be hacked if the prize is high enough.

I admittedly dont know the specifics of this process, but to break it down very abstractly, there seems to be a challenge and a misconception.

The challenge is: is the person submitting the results who they say they are, and are they authorized to submit results for said precinct, did their data submission transform on transit. The misconception seems to be that any of the data is private.

Issuing 1700 instagram accounts and having each precinct post and tag a photograph would have been both more secure, and instantly verifiable. Anybody could go back later and go "yep thats the photo I posted." "Yep that is the account that we expected the photo to come from." "Yep, the account wasn't improperly accessed."

Everyone in the public can see the live results real time, and hand verify the summarization. A worst case scenario would be someone doctoring one of the Math Sheets, printing out a near perfect duplicate, and creating confusion over which document is the "real" one. Breaking into a physically secure area with a fake piece of paper may cause a situation with an unverifiable truth. Having a public, timestamped photograph minimizes counterfeiting and forgery.

Providing a csv/xlsx file, and having a whitelisted list of senders would have worked, along with a bot ingesting the files as they came. A onedrive with 1700 shared spreadsheets would have worked, each precinct manager would have just needed a copy of mobile excel. The technology that generates my fantasy football cheat sheets seems more advanced.

The goal here should be to get a definitive answer posted into the public record, timestamped and proven to be the appropriate sender.

The "pin" nonsense is the scary part of all this. Did anybody who shouldnt have download the app, and submit the wrong results?

>he had to sign in with an email and password, provide a two-factor authentication, and enter a one-time password generated by the Google Authenticator app.

What is the point of 2fa/authenticator, if the person is registering for the first time the night of the primary? Wouldnt 2fa be for preventing access to the account youve already made, not to prevent someone from creating your account? Unless somehow the phone numbers were already on file, and a sanity check took place before the 2fa step, which I doubt. Is 2fa anything more than security theater in this application?

Where I live we use paper ballots that are both scanned and tallied on sight by a machine when submitted, then hand counted by volunteers at a central location that anyone can observe.

I'm pretty comfortable with that.

This is a caucus not an election. The democrats have never used paper ballots (as far as I know - my history is short though). The republicans still use hand counted ballots.

Either way in a caucus you are NOT electing a president, you are just choosing a delegate who goes on to the national convention where the president is chosen. There are rules so that the caucus results feed who is supported at the national convention, but there are ways around those rules if you want to go to the national convention and then support someone who wasn't even running in the first place - though you pretty well better be assured of a win before you think about trying those tricks as the media will go nuts. (the same rules exist in primary states, technically there is a caucus somewhere that chooses the delegate to the national convention who can then vote for someone else)

Last election cycle, the Bernie Sanders campaign insisted that the Iowa caucus should be changed so that more data was reported. Back then only the final number of delegates were reported. So it is entirely possible that the caucus always was a mess but that it only got discovered this year.

and that's being spun into "he got what he asked for" now.

yes, the general public now understands how bobo this operation is!

Don't worry, we've solved it with blockchain.

I don't know. I feel this may be a great application of blockchain and public ledger tech. Of course it would need to be open source... And... You know.. Obviously written in Rust.

https://votecoin.site

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Um hand counting in primary elections - you think the Blackadder episode where they try to get Baldric elected to a rotten borough is a good idea.

This isn't a primary. There are no ballots.

The Republicans do ballots - on paper, but the democrats don't have a ballot at all.

And elections had more integrity before electronics?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal

With strong voter ID. Paper ballots do you no good if you can't verify that they were cast by a real person that was eligible to vote in that area, and that they only voted once.

This is, in reality, a virtually nonexistent problem. It's often used as a rationale for voter suppression, though.

False: not having voter ID is used as a rationale for voter ressurection though: https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...

Courts found that the North Carolina voter ID laws were designed to be discriminatory[1]. Same in Texas[2]. So it's definitely true in at least two cases that voter ID laws were provably designed for voter suppression.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/north-c... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/20/texas-voter-...

Not only provably, but explicitly. Voter suppression was the primary intent.

Something being provably true is a higher bar than it being explicitly stated (because an explicit statement isn't enough to prove something to be true). I agree that voter suppression was the primary intent, but the legislation wasn't called "The Illegal Voter Suppression Act 2013".

> a virtually nonexistent problem

Watch Broward County FL this November. Whole boxes of filled out ballots will be "found" mysteriously. Just like every election.

That is election fraud, perpetrated by the people running the elections themselves, not voter fraud. If you can't trust the people running the elections, then no amount of voter ID is going to matter.

In 2016 there were only four confirmed cases where people voted who should not have and would have been stoped with voter ID.

All four voted for Trump, but that's not super relevant. What's relevant is that it was four out of 127,000,000 votes. Even if the problem were 1,000 times worse then we know it still would have had no effect on the election, even if they were all in Wisconsin.

Paper ballots with scanned results in the booth. No scan means redo your vote. That way you have a track record + instant results.

Folks can take home the stub to ensure non-repudiation etc..

They can look up the serial number on the stub they take home to see for sure it was recorded.

FYI we should also have basic ID requirements for voting. The arguments against it are kind of ridiculous, and federal or state ID should be free.

There should be no 'voter registration' required either: the state knows your address and that's that.

For lighter elections like city alderman, you can use your ID + passcode to SMS or email your vote.

Maybe make a law requiring that any tech used for legal voting has to get the thumbs up from the NSA or some super amazing agency that is also secular in nature. None of this 'quickie app for voting' rubbish.

At this point, I hate politics so much, I think every nation needs a 'caretaker' Pres/PM from the bureaucracy - someone who can clean out the cobwebs, get rid of a bunch of old laws, clean up the tax code, take on the public unions (I mean reform not destroy, I mean teachers probably need higher salaries) and basically do a big, operational house cleaning that has nothing to do with politics.

This is a caucus not a primary. From what I understand there are no ballots at all - you physically walk around the room until you find the group you want to support, if your group is large enough to choose delegates (generally there are more slots than people to fill them) to the next convention. The delegates are in theory (in practice it is different) not required to vote for you, so when your group chooses people you need to make sure they are like minded.

Once everything has been decided, an iron clad paper trail IS produced. There’s nothing anonymous about the results document and it is signed in front of witnesses. AIUI, the paper doc isn’t discarded until after the party convention.

I didn't say there was no paper trail. I said there no ballots. That is a subtle difference that if you don't go to democrat caucus in Iowa you probably don't understand.

Theoretically a group can win delegates in a caucus with just an issue not a candidate - for example you can all agree that the most important issue is Oranges (a fruit that doesn't grow in Iowa...) and get a delegate without committing to a president. Of course in practice most people show up only for the president poll and leave as soon as that is over.

You realize that every single thing you said there is political, right?

Why would an operational house cleaning be political?

I'm going to assume good faith here, and answer it seriously.

> "clean out the cobwebs"

This isn't specific enough to respond to.

> "get rid of a bunch of old laws"

Which ones, and why? Sure there are probably some like where people can tie up horses or something that aren't especially relevant, but having them there causes no harm because they aren't used.

> "clean up the tax code"

There is no way to do this without creating winners and losers. Choosing who wins and who loses is a political act.

> "take on the public unions"

Taking on unions is one of the most political acts you can do. Whether or not it is "right", unions are a powerbase of some political groups.

> "operational house cleaning that has nothing to do with politics"

What - specifically - do you mean? The two examples you give here are highly political.

I only asked why operational house cleaning would be political

Yes, I agree, 'everything' is politicized, but some much more than others.

'Simplifying' the tax code could be ideological, but it's only overtly political given the interest groups of those who profit from complicated taxes.

But by that virtue - every little policy of every government agency implies 'politics' and so we'll get nowhere.

There's quite a lot of things that Americans widely support, even on some of the heavy 'litmus' issues, it's surprising how much Americans have in common.

So yes, you're right, everything would be pulled apart by Fox and MSNBC, but there's a lot that would be less divisive.

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