Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

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> Well, don't vote for weeks.

They didn’t say anything about voting taking weeks, they were talking about counting. Counting the votes alone takes weeks. Cyber Ninjas took over 3 months to re-count votes from a single county in Arizona. What’s your proposal there?

> There is complaint that people don't trust the elections, but there are common sense methods to improve said trust

Far and away the biggest common sense thing that could be done to improve trust in elections is for the loser of the last election to stop saying he actually won but for the fraud can’t produce.

> I am not saying there is fraud.

Then why are all the measures you propose designed to stop fraudulent activity? If you don’t think there’s fraud then why the need for anti fraud provisions? If there’s no fraud how would the results be changed with anti fraud measures that don’t prevent any fraud (because it doesn’t exist in the first place)?

And if there’s no fraud, what plans do you have to make sure your anti fraud proposals (that do nothing about fraud) don’t actually end up disenfranchising American citizens and deprive them of their rights? Because you had better go to the ends of the earth to prevent that if your changes are to just make you personally feel better about the process rather than fix any concrete and identifiable problem.

If you count at the polling locations, most countries manage it in 24 hours for the most part and public scools/libraries can reopen on monday.

The purpose of the election is to 1 .: measure public support of candidates. 2.: convince the population that it has been fairly measured.

It is quite clear that some of the last two elections failed at the convincing part.

Give everyone mandatory 3 hours off on election day(which would be saturday so most people dont work anyway) and you are fine. Noone is "disenfranchised". This appears an excuse not a serious issue and just about every country managed to solve it.

just to reiterate. Dont just focus on candidates lieing about fraud. They do it. Also focus on independent verifiability of the fairness of the process where the USA is severely lacking.

> If you count at the polling locations, most countries manage it in 24 hours for the most part and public scools/libraries can reopen on monday.

First, most countries don't have elections as large as the US presidential election, which is the third largest in the world only behind India and China. Counting to 160 million is a lot harder than counting to 10 or even 50 million.

Secondly, if you really want to count in 24 hours you'll need a lot more trust. For example, my polling location was my neighbor's garage. My neighbor ran that polling location, so if you want to count at the polling location you'll just have to trust my neighbor opening up all the ballots and believe whatever he says.

If you don't want to trust him, you'll have to transport the ballots to some other location and count them with more process, and now you have to invent a system you can trust for transporting ballots. So why not just use that and not have my neighbor open up all the ballots?

Besides, no matter what you're going to want to audit the results, and you'll have to transport the ballots at that time for the audit. Yes it's true that transportation creates a vulnerability but at the same time it's not a really good one (as shown by the fact it hasn't been exploited as you imagine). So I feel like continually pointing it out just because it makes you "feel" like the system can't be trusted (although you can't really specify why, just that it doesn't have some features you like), is getting old at this point.

Yes it's not 100% secure in some way you imagine it can be penetrated. No, that doesn't mean we should put in place systems that do nothing to shore up the vote, but actually make it harder for everyone to access. Now that is a way to make people lose trust in a system. That's called "security theatre" - when you implement a pointless security regime for no other purpose than to make some people "feel" better.

> Give everyone mandatory 3 hours off on election day(which would be saturday so most people dont work anyway) and you are fine. Noone is "disenfranchised". This appears an excuse not a serious issue and just about every country managed to solve it.

When you hear people complain about disenfranchisement, this is never an option on the table. Of all the voting laws passed by Republicans since 2020, none of them include a voting holiday, let alone a mandatory one.

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