Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

DaiPlusPlus

> I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place

> You can't just make people up!

> You certainly can't just make up a final tally

> the paper ballots have to match up

It seems you live in an area with auditable physical copies of the poll receipts. Good. That should be the standard.

But 5 states still don't do that: https://www.axios.com/2018/02/16/five-states-without-paper-t...

And I seem to recall things were pretty disheartening nationwide in the early-2000s too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2004_us_voting_machine_pr...

View on HN

Receipts would not have mattered here.

The guilty parties were literally casting votes for people they knew would not show up.

It’s an identity issue, much harder, and with its own set of controversies.

Yes. Specifically, pro-Democrat media and organisations have spent the last several years arguing that measures to make fraud like this harder, such as unregistering people who aren't living in that state anymore and checking ID when voting, are themselves election rigging. There are endless headlines counting every single entry removed from the electoral roll or even just marked for extra checking as a vote suppressed. Again, this includes people who won't vote because they're not living in that state anymore! They've been campaigning against checking if votes are being cast under the same person's identity in more than one state too, so using their identities is basically an easy and safe way to add fraudulent votes in much of the US. There was even a theory in widespread circulation on social media that the 2016 election was rigged in favour of Trump, based on counting every person whose voter registration was flagged as inactive and requiring further confirmation as a stolen vote for Clinton.

> such as unregistering people who aren't living in that state anymore and checking ID when voting, are themselves election rigging

Unregistering has had some serious problems of hitting active voters in the past, though I'm not an expert there.

But I can easily say that checking ID, without first making sure valid voters can easily get the needed ID, is unacceptable.

> But I can easily say that checking ID, without first making sure valid voters can easily get the needed ID, is unacceptable.

Agreed. The issue is the Democratic solution is to never ID, instead of coming up with a way to easily get people IDs. That makes me rather suspicious of their motives.

I think they do that because nuance gets lost so easily. And some of those laws going through are anti-voter in so many ways that getting lost in the weeds of hypothetical situations weakens the pushback.

ID is required to register to vote in the first place though? It's literally a crime to not present ID when demanded by police. I'm all for removing the (negligible) fees associated, but it's not exactly a huge barrier to voting.

> It's literally a crime to not present ID when demanded by police.

No, it isn't, anywhere in the US. A bare majority (26) states have stop-and-identify laws which allow stops to determine identity based on reasonable suspicion of crime, but many don't, and those that do don't (and cannot Constitutionally) require presenting identification.

IANAL, but it’s not this simple.

Everywhere in the US, the law around Terry stops[1] applies. In fact every time the police “pull you over” on the road is a Terry stop.

In such a stop, mere “reasonable suspicion” is required for police to require you to identify yourself. You’re not required to present ID but you must tell them your name (you could lie, but that’s another crime). You can be arrested for refusing to identify yourself.

In order to determine if your are experiencing a Terry stop, ask the officer “Am I free to go?”, if the answer is no, ask “Why am I being detained?” and the officer should state his cause. If it’s not valid you won’t be able to fight it until after the encounter, possibly after you’ve already been arrested.

Egregious example: The infamous NYC “stop and frisk” policy[2] was essentially a massive Terry-stop program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_stop

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...

> IANAL, but it’s not this simple.

IANAL, either, but I passed Con Law in law school, and it is.

> Everywhere in the US, the law around Terry stops[1] applies.

Yes, that’s what we are talking about.

> In such a stop, mere “reasonable suspicion” is required for police to require you to identify yourself.

Wrong. In such a stop, it is not federally unconstitutional for such a demand to be made, but it still requires that there is actual state law authorizing it. In 26 states there is, and in the rest there is not.

> You’re not required to present ID

Yes, that’s what I said, that even in the 26 states with stop-and-identify laws, permitted by the Supreme Court, you are still not, as the upthread commenter, required to present ID.

You’ve literally repeated what I said (except for confusing the federal limits of state authority with what police can do without supporting state law), after saying “It’s not that simple”.

> I passed Con Law in law school, and it is.

Maybe after I take that course I’ll agree with you. I don’t think that’s a great option for most.

The funny thing about politics is that good ideas presented by the wrong source can be rejected because the source is simply untrusted. The concept of rejection of ad hominem attack is great if you are a Greek rhetorical student in the lyceum, and has never been how actual decisions are made.

Regarding this topic, there are historical and recent reasons for suggestions of cleaning, trimming, purging etc. the vote roster to be met with extreme scrutiny and skepticism. The United States simply has a bad history of using tools like that for shaping the electorate to meet a desired outcome.

I despise the inefficient media screeching just as much as anyone with a few brain cells, but the cause of why it happens is pretty clear, because there is a lot of partisan fuckery around voting in many states.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/b9fb2868c7c1a0e1f4f7e8f7c0f...

Wow so we need some explicit record of abstaining that the voter can submit and check the status on.

Leaving aside the question of whether it's realistic for the system to depend on non-voters checking their vote's status - what would be the procedure if someone claimed they were wrongly shown as having voted?

After all, it's easy to imagine a situation where certain groups might want to manufacture evidence of voter fraud.

In Pennsylvania at least, that is handled by the filing of a provisional ballot followed by a court system. One challenge to that solution is that there are hard limits on how long it can take for the election to resolve, so it is possible for that window to close before an investigation on an allegation of voter fraud to complete, and if it cannot be proven that that provisional ballot should be counted, the ballot is discarded.

The recourse should a person's vote be stolen that way is proof that the vote was stolen followed by punishment for the thief, and that punishment can be fairly severe because vote tampering cannot be taken lightly given the impact it can have on the process itself.

What elections you vote in is, in many cases in the US, pretty much public information.

Is there an officially recognised category of spoiled ballot paper in the US like in the UK?

Yes. I’m a poll inspector.

Spoiled ballots go into a separate lockbox. At the end of the night everything is tabulated (winners, losers, provisional ballots, spoiled ballots) and posted at the voting precinct. The spoiled ballots box is sealed and taken to the election office to be inspected. This is for 1 state. Every state manages elections differently.

BTW, if you can sign up to be a poll worker. It’s a thankless job that takes 1 day a year. Most poll workers are retirees and I was one of the youngest there.

Isn't this exactly what (in theory) systems like PKI or even PGP are supposed to fix?

I know this is probably techno-utopianism, but it'd be pretty cool if every resident were issued a certificate (for free) with their state or federal government as the certificate authority, which would be used for voting, paying taxes, etc. instead of ad-hoc verification systems like Name + SSN + Address.

I can imagine so many horrible problems with implementing such a system in any US state (let alone federally), but it would be pretty damn cool.

(dons mad scientist hat)

Create a system like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31668814 for voting.

Voters remain anonymous yet can still verify their particular vote was counted correctly (and in fact that all votes are counted correctly)

You’d still want a paper trail.

"You'd still want a paper trail" <<<<<<<<<<< this

Our new voting machines in our county are awesome, I hope they are used across the state (NJ).

You get a blank piece of paper that you insert into the machine. You vote electronically, and it prints your vote out in plain readable text on the paper, and presents it to you protected under a piece of glass (maybe pexiglass?) to validate your choices. If there is something wrong, you can reject it at this point. If you accept it, it records your vote electronically, and swallows the paper ballot as a record.

Nice clear printed text. No chads.

California was one of those places until Kamala Harris fixed it.

No doubt the machines were sold off to one of those. Should have scrapped them.

How did she fix it?

The machine prints a paper ballot that is considered the actual vote. Any electronic copy is just a counting optimization.

https://www.wired.com/2003/11/e-votes-must-leave-a-paper-tra...

That is how voting with electronics should be. It's great for entertainment/news etc to get early results but ultimately it doesn't matter if it takes a day or two with analog counting. Same day results really don't help with anything.

The French presidential election got results within hours of closings, as does Germany in every election cycle. Without voring machines. How? Tons of ballot stations that count individually. Those preliminary results are recounted before it is official, usually without any deviations.

I agree so, that if a system isn't set up that way, early results should not be important.

As someone who’s done this before, it relies on tons of manual volunteer labor. You need around 0.75-1.25% of the population counting votes + the people running the polls.

The way French elections are run is insanely elegant though, it’s basically perfect from a security/transparency l POV.

But isn’t there something poeticly sound about this? It’s kind like “the family that eats together stays together” and other platitudes like that. A nation that requires a heavy involvement in the whole process is going to value it more. In the states, we worship money and automation, so we automate it true point where very few are involved. And then we’re surprised when “win at all cost” incidents start to rise over “determine the public will.”

It almost guarantees that the electorate won’t be consulted often, though. That’s something you can afford to do every 4 years, but not every 6 months.

I just checked, France has 70000 polling stations and 280000 volunteers for each election, so it’s rather 0.4% of the population.

We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.

Similar to Australia. We have mandatory voting, with paid staff, most being hired just before elections, and from my experience working there, it is well organised, with plenty of redundancy, in case of challenges and recounts.

I love the mandatory voting. Back the day I barely ever voted, that did change. Mainly because I saw political parties rise that I fundamentaly disagree with, meaning that the outcome all of a sudden actually did make a difference for me.

Having mandatory voting would mean that non votes don't screw up the results when one side manages to mobilize morw voters than others. And intentionally voting blank actually sends a pretty strong signal.

Yeah the volunteers you’re talking about here are the all-day (7am to 9-10pm!) volunteers, not the counting people who come for just the evening the day of the vote. They outnumber volunteers by a factor of 3-5 where I am.

I don’t know. Switzerland works the same way and they have votes more often than every 6 months. (Also the average German will vote more often than just every 4 years due to European, national, state-level and regional elections.)

And yet they do it, not every 6 months, but regularly. There are presidential elections (2 rounds every 5 years), general elections for the parliament (2 rounds every 5 years), elections for local (2 rounds every 6 years), department (2 rounds every 4 years), and regional councils (2 rounds every 6 years), and European elections (1 round every 5 years). Plus the occasional referendum. This year there will have been 4 voting days.

Sure, they don’t vote for judges and sheriffs and stuff, and it’s a system that’s more representative than participative as in, say, Switzerland. But it works.

One of the things that helps is that voting happens always on Sundays, when most people do not have to take a day off work to vote or to help counting.

In France it is done four times in a row every five years (presidential + parliament) and also two times in a row every six years (municipal elections, a few places have two simultaneous elections for the city mayor and "associated city" mayor) and I think once every five years (European elections, not sure of the modalities in France as I was never in France at this time).

It has a cost but most people involved are not paid. Referendums are uncommon but that has more to do with political culture than costs I think.

It's a lot easier when you have:

- substantial social services that don't directly require individuals to have disposable income and aren't tied directly to employment

- humane policies for vacation days in general, and

- national holidays for things like election day.

In the USA, we teach our children that civic engagement is important, but then corrupt politicians at all levels make civic engagement as hard as possible, abetted by moralizing reactionary conservatives.

No wonder Americans are generally cynical and don't participate in politics.

The UK pays its vote counters, and other people who assist at elections (such as the poll clerks who check names off the electoral roll and issue ballot papers). Sunderland South, which takes pride in being the first constituency to return its result each year- aiming to do so within two hours of polls closing- uses bank tellers to count the votes.

Pay rates vary by locality (as elections are run by local councils)- typically it seems to be around £200 for the day.

The printed paper "ballot" may not be what the voter intended.

There are multiple stories of electronic voting machines changing the vote on the screen. The voter corrects it, and the correct ballot is printed. But, if the voter misses the change, then an incorrect ballot is printed. Sometimes, the voter has to correct it more than once.

Here in New Hampshire, we use paper ballots marked with a felt tip pen. They are scanned with an optical reader, but it's straightforward to do a manual recount of the official paper ballots.

Electronic balloting machines are an invitation to programmatic fraud.

I attended a Free Software Foundation annual meeting some years ago. The assembled group was asked whether they preferred electronic voting systems over paper ballots. Not a single hand went up.

The most common cause of mis-vote is operator error. I've watched people use the touchscreen devices; with so many voters both unfamiliar with the mechanics of a touchscreen and unsteady on their feet (the median voter age is about 50), and with the machines made of cheap plastic resting on a table, they grip the machine to stabilize it and themselves. Their gripping thumb rests on the screen and creates phantom signal that makes it hard to localize the touch coordinate.

This is the best argument I'm familiar with against the electronic machines we used to use, and our state switched to paper oval-fill ballots that are then electronically tabulated. But, I haven't seen the statistics yet on how many mis-counts we now have as a result relative to the old system and I'd be curious to see them... Ask yourself how confident you are that 100% of voters know how to successfully fully darken the oval. And since the system is anonymous, nobody looks over their shoulder to verify they understand how to do it before the vote is dropped in the box (though in the event of a close race, a manual recount will be automatically triggered and at that point, at least it'll be human eyes deciding whether the voter circling the oval indicates their intent to vote for that candidate).

I had a paper ballot print out under plastic after I made my in person vote in california. you have to agree that everything matches up with what you actually voted for. the times that the "system messes up and the voter has to change it" it's almost always either user error or the touch screen being calibrated incorrectly.

This is why designs usually require the voter to be able to inspect the paper ballot before finalizing it. Shenanigans like that would be caught, as the machine has no way of knowing how close the voter will look.

In yesterday’s California election (Los Angeles County, specifically), it had me review all of my choices on the screen (after I was done), then it printed out the form so I could review the printed copy. Then (very confusingly) the final step was to insert the form back into the machine. Basically everyone was confused by this review and reinsert process, but still it seemed like a good system for ensuring there are no glitches.

You could also just replace all that with a paper ballot.

I have had arguments with disability activists about this- apparently, some interpretations of American disability rights legislation require electronic devices to be made available to allow voters whose disability prevents them using a pen to mark their ballot unassisted.

In the UK we count ballots manually. We have 90%+ of results overnight.

There is even a race between a few constituencies to be the first to officially declare a result. These guys are really well organised, and for a few days it is a huge piece of civic pride.

With the results announced by a line up of all the candidates, almost always 2 or 3 mainstream candidates surrounded by candidates in clown or animal costumes…

It doesn't matter until the incumbent uses that delay to his advantage by declaring themselves the winner and trying to lead their followers into believing votes counted after that declaration are fraudulent.

We have those in NJ now. They are very cool. The printed ballot is presented to the voter, protected under glass, to verify that it is correct. It is then swallowed by the machine and the vote registered.

Very clear printed text. No hanging chads.

Georgia replaced their machines with ones that have paper trails.

Good. I never understood a rationale for not having a paper trail.

I am from Brazil, our current president been trying for years to introduce a paper trail, but the congress politicians (of all parties mind you, it is not a partisan thing) and the election judges are happy to find more and more reasons to block the effort.

Meanwhile the few politicians that DID attempt to do go along with this effort... died. Maybe they "died", who knows.

I bet they "died" died.

it's a tasty option when done perfectly, in a perfect world, in a vacuum and the voters are perfectly spherical cows.

Counting ballots by hand sucks. Moving paper ledgers physically sucks.

Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

It is possible to have paper ballots that can be counted by machine for fast results, but that can also be published afterwards so that anybody can check the count, and that allow individual voters to check to see if their vote was counted correctly (but not to prove to someone else how they voted--this is called coercion-resistance), using "fill in the bubble" ballots that can be counted by widely available inexpensive optical scanner with the only new equipment needed at the polling place being special pens for marking the ballots, with all the cryptographic magic that that allows the verifiability and public counting being in the ballots themselves and put their when they are printed. For voters that aren't interested in verifying later that their own vote was correctly counted, they can ignore all that and it appears just like a regular "fill in the bubbles" process that many places have used for decades.

Here's a paper with details in PDF form [1], and here it is in HTML [2]. Here's a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3]. Here's a Wikipedia article [4] on it.

Voting systems with these kind of verification/auditing capabilities are called "end-to-end auditable" or "end-to-end voter verifiable" systems, and here is some information on them in general [5].

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

>> Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

Maybe in the US, a lot of places do it just fine so.

Assuming your a member of a union

Before election

Union boss: "we expect everyone to vote for candidate X"

After election

Union boss: "show me your vote receipt"

This is such a bad example that strikes me as contrived just to take a dig at unions. Why not replace: /Union boss/Employer/, it still works.

The receipt is kept with the machine. I’ve never been anywhere where they give you proof of who YOU voted for.

I don't know the scheme used, but _you_ also need to be able to verify that the vote was counted correctly in this situation. So make sure you read the receipt.

It's better than what we have. Vote-changing can be uncovered by an audit. ... But I still prefer the coercion-resistant systems that let you verify your own vote was counted correctly after the fact. Someone else posted a link to a bunch of papers.

As several people have commented, many systems print the receipt, which you then hand in to be counted. That’s the way my state does it, too. So you can see who your vote is being cast for.

In CA when you vote, there's a tracking mechanism you can use to see your vote was counted. A few years back I remember the ballots had a receipt you could tear off and use to verify it online later.

What would be cool is if you combined that serial number with a hash generated by filling in the ballot after the fact.

Eg you go to a page, supply your serial number and the things you voted for, and it tells you if it was counted and matches what you're saying.

Of course, this could still be used that way... but in CA ballots usually have enough options that it would be difficult for a malicious actor to have that much intent haha.

Most people would probably forget which smaller issues they voted for though.... so I dunno if it'd be reliable.

This is a weird caricature of how a union works. Unions protect workers from being fired by their employers so I’m not sure what a union “boss” could do to someone who upset them.

No, it’s an accurate representation of how many unions operated in the mid 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa

It happens now and has happened in recent times among all types of employers. The historical and union specific example wasn't necessary.

Companies can strongly suggest who employees should vote for and solicit donations to specific candidates.

As far as checking a record of actual votes, that's old days Tammany Hall kind of stuff. Not to say it wouldn't happen again if people could easily get away with it.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/in-house/can-a-company-te...

FWIW, the union example may be relevant because it's actually the origin of the anti-voter-interference laws in most states. Pennsylvania specifically is rooted in precisely the scenario up-thread described due to the heavy-industry history of the state.

It is good that these laws continue to protect the voter's right to autonomy against new threats to it.

Searching "vot" brings up one hit on that page, about a union election. Searching "elect" has several hits, none of which have to do with fraud. What part of that Wikipedia page shows unions operating like that?

That's not a page on union voting practices but on Jimmy Hoffa, the well known union boss who was also a well known criminal.

So "it's an accurate representation of how many unions acted, and to prove my point here's a biography of a criminal with union ties." I don't see how that's proving their point.

> So "it's an accurate representation of how many unions acted, and to prove my point here's a biography of a criminal with union ties." I don't see how that's proving their point.

Since you are asking me, If you read or scan the page you will see how unions historically operated in the US.

It would be really bad if the voter got to keep the receipt, or even had the chance to image it.

Philly has paper trail now, but only for the past couple years.

I’m in SC. Last election the machine printed out a paper copy of my ballot that I had to drop into a locked bin on the way out the door.

>But 5 states still don't do that:

Always bugged me too, but the good news is dirty jerz just got new machines that are auditable this year. Just voted yesterday in primaries and the machines print a paper ballot with answers ready to review. Before it drops into a lockbox, it gives you a final chance to accept or reject what is printed.

Delaware definitely replaced their voting machines after that article was published. I think in 2020.

Philly is on that list though according to that article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com