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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

It would take a lot to convince me of that. I haven't voted at a precinct in decades. I vote in my living room, then drop the ballot in my mailbox. Plenty of time to do some research, consider my options, banter with my wife about the issues, etc. A few days later I go to the county website to make sure they received my ballot.

The only thing I'd like to see is a relaxation of this idea that ballots need perfect secrecy as the most important goal, because that runs directly at odds with accountability. I'd like my ballot to come with a UUID that I could put into the public web site and verify my votes were recorded correctly. All those UUIDs and corresponding votes should be public, so everyone can do their own math. It would make coercion easier, but I don't see that as the most important issue.

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The UUID thing is an attractive thought but it also would act as an incentive to sell ones vote. Secret ballots protect from coercion and vote selling, as you can't verify someone voted how you paid them to. With validation you could see people literally buying votes. Just something to think about. I totally agree it would be nice to have a post vote validation. Maybe you get a UUID but have to submit that in person with an ID check to view the results? That would seem to meet the intended goal and minimize the hazards but with a cost to convenience.

I don't know how to make it work with in person ID verification. They could just give you a faked UUID. I'd put it on the ballots when they're generated, so it was just as untraceable as the ballot itself.

My assumptions are that 1) individual votes have almost no value on their own, so coercion or vote selling should be limited by low appeal, and 2) we still have a justice system, if someone forces you to vote a certain way, report it. Buying any significant number of votes would be exceedingly difficult to keep secret. Especially given how little compensation could be offered for them.

You know, you're right about the ID verification - I didn't really think that through. You don't want your ID encoded with the ballot in a way that they can be associated.

> we still have a justice system, if someone forces you to vote a certain way, report it.

While it's true that law enforcement has a role to play here, if you're being paid, you probably aren't going to report on yourself.

> individual votes have almost no value on their own

That's probably true in a national election, but it might not be true in e.g. a mayoral race.

An anecdote I share, recognizing the risk of downvoting: I've been an anarchist for years, and so do not normally cast votes.

I have offered to sell my vote to anyone in my area (a swing area of New Hampshire) who wants another vote for their side in any election at any level. I've never even set a price.

Not one person has ever offered a cent for it.

I mention this just by way of making the point that small-scale vote buying, which would be the hardest kind to detect, isn't happening.

Theoretically at least, detecting and preventing vote-buying at a scale significant enough to change the outcome of an election should be much easier.

Would-be buyers have to get word out to enough people for it to matter, but if most people assume this is unethical (or even just undesirable), it shouldn't be hard to get nearly everyone else to be willing to rat out the buyers.

I don't think the problem is nearly as hard to solve as you're thinking it is.

The odds of your vote swinging an election at any level are lower than the risk of being struck by lightning twice. Nobody wants to buy one vote. They need to buy hundreds or thousands before it will matter, and that makes them easier to catch.

Maybe I'm missing your point entirely, but that's one of the useful aspects of voter secrecy. Given that your vote is secret, your self-reported vote is worth approximately nothing. You could easily sell your vote to two or more parties, with none of them the wiser.

So your result is the expected one. But the outcome would not be the same with most types of harebrained "let's just vote with our phones" that people come up with regularly.

This is also why it is in most countries illegal to take photos or film around the voter booth.

Ah. Right. Relevant context: In 2016, a federal appeals court ruled that a 2014 New Hampshire law banning photo booth selfies and punishing them with fines up to $1,000 was unconstitutional.[0]

A photo of me with my completed ballot, in the voting booth, has always been part of the offer, since that was the same year I finally quit bothering to cast my own ballot.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-appeals-court-r...

That's ... highly unusual, from a democratic standpoint.

But I believe major point is still the same. Nobody knows if that's the actual posted ballot. You could easily take several and only cast one.

It is my personal belief that votes absolutely carry a market value, they're just very hard to monetize. (Which is usually regarded to be a virtue.)

Currently we only have sale of majority votes contingent on wins: If you vote for me, I will give you X. Enabling vote sales will enable sale of minority votes and not contingent on wins. This is better for people with minority opinions and allows them to correctly line up their desires with monetary reward.

If you hate abortion, but like $100 more than you hate abortion, then why shouldn't we just give you $100?

Of course, there is the knock-on effect of wanting inequality so you can control people and keep the vote price low, that's true. But that's just a question of the vote economics. I'm sure we can work something out.

> If you hate abortion, but like $100 more than you hate abortion, then why shouldn't we just give you $100?

Because it gives the person with more money more voting power (even moreso than they already have).

Well, that is always the case given that no candidate who raises 100 M+ loses to a candidate who raises less than 100 M, irrespective of per-donation size. Once we have a market, everyone can participate in this rather than just the big donors. It's a democratization of the voting market!

> With validation you could see people literally buying votes.

I think this is an area where you don't need a technological solution, just a legal one.

Vote selling/buying just needs to be as illegal as blackmail, fraud, etc. Fines and jail terms. (As I assume it already is?)

The thing is, it's going to be incredibly easy to catch, because if you're attempting to pay a group of people (employees, villagers, whatever) to sway their vote, there's always going to be at least one person who doesn't want to and inform the law. (Or else you don't need to be paying in the first place.) Hell, set up punitive damages so a whisteblower is guaranteed 50x whatever price they were being offered for their vote.

Personally, I don't understand why buying votes in this way is bad. I should be able to sell my vote if I want. Rich people can skew elections either way, at least this way ordinary people might get a cut of the corruption.

It is bad because it takes a problem and makes it much worse.

It's not much of an incentive if you just publish all the UUIDs on a public website and who they voted for. If my employer says 'let me see your UUID and if you voted for Bob Jones you get an extra day off!' I can just find a UUID that voted for Bob Jones and give my employer that and they won't be any the wiser, regardless of who I voted for in reality. Recording results is no big deal as long as they aren't provably my results.

Vote by mail also easily allows selling votes. You can sell your ballot and signed envelope to somebody. The best way to avoid this is only having in person voting.

Or control absentee voting in same way as real voting.

With fancy cryptography (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs), you can allow the public to verify that the tally is correct while keeping votes secret. It's called end-to-end verifiable voting, and this is a good introduction: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/end-end...

The idea is that people post their votes publicly, but encrypted, and there's a procedure (based on zero-knowledge proofs) that allows to check that an encrypted vote is correctly accounted for in the tally without decrypting said vote. If sufficiently many voters post their encrypted votes (and if it's not too predictable who will do so), a wrong tally will be detected with high probability.

Vote-by-mail ballots are fed through a computer tabulation system once received. In some states, especially those that are entirely vote-by-mail like OR and WA, large centralized tabulators are used that read multiple ballots per second from a stack feeder. In most states though it's very common for mail-in ballots to be fed through the same precinct tabulators as in-person votes, just at the election administrator's office instead of in a precinct location. This "mail-in precinct" approach has the advantage of keeping the process very consistent across voting methods, although it tends to require more staff since precinct tabulators are not built to quickly feed large numbers of ballots.

Remember that hand-counting of ballots has been unusual in the US for quite some time. Some states process their mail-in ballots through large central tabulators even though they have only a small portion of mail-in votes, simply because they still have the central tabulators from before they switched to precinct tabulation, back when they used to drive the ballot boxes from every precinct and have staff re-stack the ballots and feed them to a tabulator after close.

Ballot secrecy is unlikely to change. It was widely adopted in the US as a direct result of the fact that non-secret ballots facilitated purchased and forced votes, since the payer could verify that the voter cast the ballot they were supposed to. This is not a theoretical problem but one that was widespread in the 19th century.

Something like you describe is already in available in many states, though, at the pollbook level rather than the tabulation level: in many states you can obtain a record online of whether or not you were issued a ballot and, if you were issued the ballot by mail, whether or not it was received back. The ballot is 'severed' from this record system (usually by physical means like dual-envelopes or even passing through a slot in a wall) before tabulation so that your voting choices cannot be proven after the fact to facilitate bribery or intimidation.

I have a love/hate relationship with mail-in voting.

It's super convenient. You don't have to be at the polling place at a certain time in bad weather. Just fill out the form in the comfort of your home and drop it in the mailbox.

I hate it though because it really does make fraud and mismanagement easier:

- People are sent ballots for people who no longer live in the house, or are dead

- The post office fails to actually send you your ballot, as in this case: https://www.wmar2news.com/matterformallory/mail-in-ballots-f...

- This article details several more ways to commit fraud via mail-in voting/absentee ballots - and cites fraud cases from both Republicans and Democrats: https://insidesources.com/mail-in-ballots-make-voter-fraud-e...

If you would have a ID you can later imput and check what you voted, you can be pressured by your boss/spouse/parent/etc. to reveal your vote and then be punished if you voted wrong. If voting is truly anonymous, you can just lie about your choices.

True, I recognize this is the trade-off. You cannot have perfect secrecy and perfect accountability both. Lately it seems like we're suffering a crisis in confidence, so maybe we could relax the perfect secrecy a bit to regain that trust.

Yeah, mail-in paper ballots work too. I was speaking more in the "we must have in-person" mind-set - I assuming convincing the election skeptics to use good machines is an easier task than convincing them on mail.

The difference between in-person vote and mail vote is chain of custody. Basically, when voting by mail you can never prove that your vote has not been tampered with in transit. With in-person vote there usually are procedures in place to ensure that no one messes with the ballot box.

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