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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

You probably want a record of votes with times and not just a simple counter.

That's not impossible for a simple electromechanical calculator either. An attachment similar to those paper drums seismographs use would suffice while still being simple enough to be trustworthy; a video recording of the counter along with maybe an array of debug LEDs would suffice too now that I think about it.

I'll come off as glib. but... why? So third parties can make a funny youtube infographic timeseries?

So you can demonstrate that votes correspond to people voting. Not on an individual basis, but just to make sure that if you have 100 votes on a machine (or 1000 votes across 10 machines at a location, they happened when there were 100 (or 1000) people at that voting location. It prevents adding votes before or after the fact, like putting a thumb on a scale.

You'd have to hide the results of the vote if you're collating them with timestamp, otherwise you could pretty easily figure out Bob who showed up early voted for the square.

And I'm unsure how adding timestamp helps with the problem you're trying to solve, don't you just need Sum(machine vote count at location X) == voters visiting location X. (Also this hueristic is kinda leaky since how do you account for voters protesting with intentional spoilers?)

If you let the government get away with just simple counts they don't have to work as hard to fake an election. A time series can be compared with exit polling for example to highlight irregular patterns.

I can assure you that a corrupt nation-state level actor is at least as good at statistics as any analyst you know, if that's the threat model.

A motivated person could kick open your front door and tickle you, that doesn't mean a deadbolt isn't useful as part of home security plan.

Defence in depth.

A very least now they have to bring a math nerd into the conversation, increasing the footprint of the operation.

You could print a receipt that contains the voter's selection. The voter would then verify the selection and deposit the receipt into a receptacle. The voting machine results could then by audited by comparing the receipts to the voting machine's history.

I should clarify my question "why" is specifically about conflating votes with timestamps. I have more general concerns about voting machines, but those have been raised elsewhere in the comments many times by other commenters.

The timestamp of each vote in the machine could be useful during the audit. Imagine you found a discrepancy, you'd then want to determine when the discrepancy started.

If you're able to determine some subset of voters from the attached timestamp information, then you're equally able to use that data to harass people who didn't vote for the candidate you want.

What if the voter doesn't deposit the receipt?

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