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Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

> Also I doubt this type of buying votes with verification is that big of an actual thing. You can trivially do it with paper voting to by just asking them to stream themself voting or by taking a picture of their ballot.

It's not so much selling votes, as to discourage voter intimidation: The husband forces his wife, the boss forces his subordinates, the local mafia forces their victims to vote a particular way.

I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority.

Someone might still privately take that picture of their ballot paper, after all there's a private voting booth; the officials wouldn't know. You're allowed to say you made a mistake and ask for a replacement ballot paper, so you could show your boss the version they want to see, and then vote differently.

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> I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority.

Except we allow postal voting pretty much willy nilly, especailly in areas where intimidation can happen

That's due to a trade-off of requirements, to maximise free and fair representation.

Lack of postal votes makes the ballot less fair and representative, because it affects people with systematic bias in relevant sub-populations (wealth, working conditions, age, health, etc) and areas.

In areas where intimidation can happen... for going to the polling station. (All the intimidator has to do is post menacing guards, soldiers, etc. outside the station or on the routes to it. There are plenty of news reports of this happening in some countries. I'm not aware of this in the UK though.)

So the question is whether you get a more fair and representative vote outcome by allowing postal voting, or by disallowing it.

The balance of trade-offs has led to UK policy allowing postal votes, encouraging each individual to fill out and seal their vote in private, and use statistical and other investigation methods to look for signs of fraud, while maintaining a high standard of secret ballots when voting in person.

That might not be the balance that works best in other countries. In the UK it is said by the Electoral Commission that there is no evidence that postal voting has changed electoral outcomes to date, but some attempts at large scale fraud were discovered and prevented.

I canvas in a rural ward, about half of voters are postal voters, many have adult children living with parents, and where one is postal, usually all are postal.

It's quite easy to see how a secret ballot can be not secret if the (typically patriarch) says "lets fill the forms out together and I'll take them all in"

I don't know how it's done in the USA, but in Germany voting by post has to be carried out before the day of the election. The actual postal votes are stored and only opened on the day of the election. After somebody send in their postal vote they can go to the public voting office and declare to invalidate their postal vote. The people counting the postal votes will get a list with invalidated votes and remove these envelopes before the votes are opened. The person who invalidated can then either do another postal vote or vote at the ballot box.

So in Germany postal voting is secured against selling votes.

If there is a way to invalidate a vote in the UK, I'm not aware of it, and as someone who's actively stood for election I've got a greater awareness of the average voter, and 50% of people have less awareness than the average voter.

It's not about selling, which would be easy to detect like all large conspiracies. It's about subtle coercion that postal voting can enable.

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