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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

Remote voting for senators and remote voting for the presidential election are very very different animals.

Remote voting for senators is an easy fix, probably (hopefully) temporary with a very low risk of foreign interference.

Remote voting for the general public is fraught with complexity due to voting being the jurisdiction of the states, as well as rife with opportunity for foreign governments to mess with the results.

I mean, we literally saw hacking attempts from the intelligence services of Russia on election reporting servers in 2016. Enabling remote voting for the general public needs EXTREME vetting before going live.

Not doable for 2020.

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Washington and Oregon only have remote voting. It works extremely well, is less open to voter suppression and tampering, and lets you sit down and research what you're voting for in comfort. A ballot is mailed to you, you fill it out, seal it up, and mail it back or put it in one of the many ballot drop boxes.

Electronic voting? Absolutely not. But it's hard to have cyberwarfare campaigns against paper trails.

Paper by mail voting should be our standard in the US. There is absolutely no need for real-time efficiency when it comes to potentially changing political office seats. There usually is a month or two before the successor takes office so we don't need to know that night, it could be a week later.

Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.

It will be hard to walk back from the election night hysteria we've developed as a populace.

Oh darn - will our elections be less of a circus? Will news channels be unable to milk election momentum coverage for nine straight months during the primaries?

How will we ever survive? /s

I moved up to Canada from ye olde US and their elections are so nice and simple. There are limits on the amount of time you can advertise as a campaign so no four year presidential campaigns up here. Additionally it's considered generally distasteful to excessively advertise during campaigns and, while you'll certainly get lots of phone calls from Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP - it's for a short window and then you're done.

The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.

>The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.

You might get downvoted for the snark but you're not wrong at all. I remain convinced that entertainment value is the most important qualifier for a President in modern times, and that probably goes back to JFK. Americans no longer trust government and don't believe in political leadership but they love celebrities and a good show.

This is exactly it. Elections have the same tone of reporting as the NBA draft. Look at how they butchered the debates. The first televised debate with Nixon was a deep dive into the inner workings of public policy, you practically had to have a polysci degree to keep up. Now it's just whoever is the loudest. They actually used to cut mics if it wasn't your turn to speak. Now they keep them open because a mean-spirited debate where everyone is cutting each other off to get their soundbite, and tearing each other apart on anything but policy is better for ratings.

It was a complete joke to have that many Dems on the stage, only joe and bernie turned out to be the only viable candidates out of that crowd once primaries started happening, and it became clear who actually had voters and who just had smoke and money for airtime on major networks. It's all for the ratings now, not to educate the public on policy. So shameful, but at least I can still just read the policy positions myself instead of watching a debate produced by Jerry Springer.

Postal voting undermines the secret ballot. People in your life with power over you can demand to see your ballot.

So have both.

People have cell phones in their pockets 24/7. Someone could demand photographic proof of your ballot regardless of mail in or voting booth. Sure you could doctor the photo, but you can doctor paper too. Neither are such common skill sets that there's a real difference between mail in and a booth.

I'd rather have postal voting along with an investment into education and enforcement of the secret ballot rights of citizens then have a polling place open for a single day with a six hour line - then again there's a lot of things the US government could do to improve the voting process, they just choose not to. Bear in mind that one party in the US doesn't like democracy and voter accessibility[1] - and please do recall Trump's specific, straight from the horse's ass, quote here:

> They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...

Sure you don't have cyberwarfare, but you do have old-fashioned vote selling and coercion. Postal voting denies many women a free vote.

> Postal voting denies many women a free vote.

How many? Is it more than the number of people who can't vote in person on election day due to work or inability to travel to voting places? If it's not, vote-by-mail still wins in aggregate. If it is, then it sounds like there's a serious domestic abuse issue in the broader society that needs to be addressed.

I'd also expect womens' rights organizations to be strongly against vote-by-mail, then. Are they? If not (for, say, political conflict-of-interest reasons) and it's a real problem, I'd expect some of their spokespersons to have had to answer questions about that at some point, and their responses not to have been very convincing. Has that, at least, happened?

Agreed.

What are you saying is the vulnerability introduced by mail-in voting, a method that has been working successfully in Oregon for years?

It may be relatively easy to commit a single act of mail voting fraud, but if it's not scalable, it doesn't really matter.

You mention election reporting servers being hacked, but that has nothing to do with mail-in vs. in-person voting.

Sounds like FUD to me.

Remote voting for senate and congress should be the norm. It create less corruption. Just imagine a special interest group needs to travel to 535 offices to get their message heard.

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