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Comment by klipklop | Hacker News Reader

I am glad you pointed this out. Few seem to understand that once the envelope is open and thrown away there is no way to verify the ballot being legitimate in many states. It's sad that people think with such a system there is no chance of voter fraud. They will smugly say that a recount confirmed everything was legitimate, etc. Very frustrating that the nuance is lost on them.

Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. Being unable to do a spot-check audit is just plain stupid. Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election.

Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?

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You have to weigh the good with the bad.

The secret ballot is essential, as compromise of that secrecy enables vote selling and voter intimidation. One of the reasons New York had tabulating machines and kept them was to limit the ability of political machines to interfere with elections at the local level. Tammany Hall operatives and others would retaliate against voters who didn’t do what the machine wanted. (Later those machines aged and became a liability)

There’s no such thing as a perfect process, and while your idea is a worthy way of providing validation, it creates more serious issues that ultimately undermine the democratic process.

If you have any kind of audit background they answer to ensuring integrity is always a same: a well defined process where different individuals are responsible for different parts of the process and are audited to achieve best practices.

The reality is that measures designed to target individual voter fraud are solving a problem that doesn’t exist and are done to suppress turnout.

The actual risk of voting related fraud is pretty obvious - political partisans with the access and ability to intimidate or bypass civil service employees from following the process. As a nation, we should be lauding the courage of the GOP election commissioners in Georgia who risked their careers and perhaps their lives to defy a demented president. Whatever the politics, those are people with integrity.

> Later those machines aged and became a liability

The tabulating machines or the political machines?

Lol. Both!

I meant the physical devices. Towards the end of their tenure, there were some statistical irregularities that suggested the gears were failing to roll over correctly, resulting in undercounting.

> Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested.

That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud.

Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

No, because literally every other true democracy on Earth has found a way to keep elections safe and anonymous. You don't need to to be able to trace ballots back to voters actually I'd argue being ablr to do so is deeply undemocratic.

The formula is simple: Central, automatic voter registration, easy access to ID cards (the general one, not a voter Id. You know, the thing most use to identify citizens instead of drivers liscences), easy access to polling stations, no Gerrymandering and paper ballots. That's all you need.

Large scale (e.g. to the point that actually matters) electoral fraud is invariably done through gerrymandering. It's also mostly legal in "literally every other true democracy on Earth", so it's usually considered as a legitimate part of the game, instead of what it really is: Fraud.

> Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election.

Generally the thinking is that there must never exist a mechanism by which you can prove to some other person how you voted, or voters can be coerced into voting a certain way.

My state provides a webpage for verifying the status of your ballot by serial number. There may also be a way to do so by phone. I’m not aware of a way to obtain the map of ID to voter but I don’t think it’s necessary. Plus it’s radioactive from a voter intimidation and privacy perspective.

> Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?

Because if you aren’t careful you can make it worse.

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