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Comment by philips | Hacker News Reader

VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance, and of course the open source nature opening up the potential for a competitive market without rip and replace.

Since the article didn’t mention the RLA stuff it is here: https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits

A favorite part of watching their journey has been their case study videos which were produced after they ran their first elections in small Mississippi jurisdictions: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVu...

For those in San Francisco they are doing a pilot this year: https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20R...

disclosure: I am a donor to VotingWorks and previously a member of the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission.

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Would this speed up counting process?

One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience"

The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day.

Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California.

Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.

Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day.

I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy.

I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues.

As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.

Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain).

The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.

It is a feature of US elections that they are far more decentralized than any other country. To your point, the people conducting the elections in Oregon and Nebraska do so as employees of their respective state governments and not as Federal representatives.

I suggest that you and other commentators in this thread read the Elections Clause [1] and historical background on it. You can't just address flaws in a system that has been running for 200+ years with a flippant "stop complaining". It would require Congress to pass a bipartisan voting law, and recent efforts to that effect have failed because of lack of bipartisan support [2].

----------------------------------------

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...

[2] https://www.vox.com/22736509/freedom-to-vote-act

Other developed nations have no problem providing same-day (or near) tallies of all votes. The fact that it can take weeks to get a complete tally is a symptom of huge dysfunction.

> reset expectations

Voters want accurate results.

The recurring tantrums over speed come from media and candidates.

The party that sows doubt does so intentionally because it helps them politically. In many states that are controlled by that party, they’ve passed legislation preventing the government from even opening envelopes before polls close on Election Day, much less processing the ballots or counting the votes.

These things are not provable but hypotheses, the same thing is accused of our immigration policy that it helps to recruit voters. You can't really prove that and this level of discussion goes nowhere. No progress is made.

We should stay rational and just fix the bugs.

Edit: I meant the open-border policy and migrants flowing in. I am not stating my own opinion here, I am trying to say that these are the things thrown around in the debates and there is no way to prove one way or the other.

Oh, come on. Nobody here is as born yesterday.

It’s not some unprovable hypothesis, rather very plain facts. Many politicians who screech about the suspicious nature of delayed vote counting were in the majority legislatures that passed laws to ensure slow vote counting. Pretending otherwise is so silly.

There is literally no other reason to craft laws in this way except to later give credence to dishonest “voter irregularity” claims.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/why-...

You have been duped by hysterics.

The US certainly has problems. Election integrity isn't one of them.

Read here about the Australian election. The official result can take up to ten days. https://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/how-are-the-votes-count...

That doesn't mean it will always take long before a winner is clear. But it's certainly not a one day process!

Have you seen the distribution of seats in the Japanese parlament? No wonder the counting process is not exactly nail bitingly exciting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Japanese_general_electi...

Brazil have an electronic ballot counting system. That comes with its own set of tradeoffs.

> One id, one vote

If a significant portion of the electorate do not have an id this is a non-starter.

I am just giving you the typical tagline toed by the party in question, I literally just made up the list of countries as I was writing it. It does not matter what names I list there. That's not the point in the slightest, see quotation marks. The point would still stand if no other nation out there were better than US election system. The idea is that election counting process should be quick and the results should be evident on the same day. If no one else is doing it, we should be the first ones to build a system that can count votes in the same day.

That would be great. I certainly hope you'll achieve it.

But it seems unlikely to succeed given that parts of the Republican party actively undermines the process and the faith in the system, with the intent of limiting access to voting for poor people and minorities.

Cure the cause and not the symptom! How transparent, accurate and fast do a ballot counting system have to be for Trump and his gang not to question it?

They had 2 years to make sure tabulators work, this is happening right now in Maricopa County: https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1589987833846333440

This is why people lose faith in the election system. Katie Hobbs being the Secretary of State.

> If a significant portion of the electorate do not have an id this is a non-starter

Having a government program to get these people id seems like a no-brainer.

Except the party that would support such a program doesn't like voter id requirements and the party that wants voter id is hostile to putting government resources into making id easier to get.

You don't actually need the government here. The party that protests that people don't have ID can, themselves, do outreach to get them ID.

Here’s what I don’t get about this topic: Democratic voters skew urban, Republican voters skew rural: isn’t government ID easier to acquire in urban areas than rural ones? If you need to go to some government office to do so, odds are in a rural area you’ll be travelling a greater distance to get to it, taking up more time and money, requiring more time off work, etc. Wouldn’t it thereby follow that voter ID laws actually hurt Republicans more than Democrats? Why then do the former support them and the later oppose them?

Voter id laws hurt minorities and economically marginalized groups significantly more. These groups tend to vote democrat.

There are many more factors involved than the physical distance to an office distributing IDs.

Is it still true that "economically marginalized groups... tend to vote democrat"? In 2020, Trump won "high school or less" by 15 points, while Biden won postgraduates by 35 points [0] – surely the former group are much more "economically marginalized" than the later? Likewise, I would be surprised if there is anyone with a postgraduate degree who lacks government-issued ID, while I would expect that the vast majority of those who do lack it would belong to the "high school or less" educational category.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden...

Why are you looking at education rate rather than income? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

Isn’t education level a better indicator of social class than income? An unemployed grad student may currently have lower income than the high school dropout with a full-time low-skill job, but quite possibly has far greater future earnings potential.

Yes it's still true.

I don't believe minorities don't drive cars or purchase alcoholic beverages. Nor do I belive they're incapable of getting an ID. They have IDs and it's not a tall ask.

Many European countries use IDs to verify the integrity of the voter but for some reason we can't in the USA?

Why don't the Democrats organize to get them ID? It would seem like a no-brainer get-out-the-vote initiative.

How

>If you need to go to some government office to do so, odds are in a rural area you’ll be travelling a greater distance to get to it, taking up more time and money, requiring more time off work, etc

A rural office often is overstaffed for the population compared to an urban one, so while it may take a bit longer to drive there you'll spend less time at the DMV. Plus, traveling thirty miles in a rural setting can be quicker than ten in an urban one.

Basically I don't think this is a meaningful difference, and it has nothing to do with why some Republicans are against a required free ID.

Who is against a free government ID? I never heard of such opposition.

People think it'd be too invasive or expensive, and allows for things like tracking gun owners or racial profiling.

The Real ID act, which didn't even create a national ID merely required certain standards for state ID, was so controversial that I'm not sure all states comply with it seventeen years later. And there are still some people so opposed to a government ID that they don't register their births or get social security numbers.

I didn't say it had to be a national ID card. A state one would be good enough.

> allows for things like tracking gun owners

If that were true, the Democrats would be in favor of national ID

> or racial profiling

I don't see how. An ID card needn't specify race.

> some people so opposed to a government ID that they don't register their births or get social security numbers

And yet they register to vote?

>I didn't say it had to be a national ID card. A state one would be good enough.

I basically did, and as you were asking me the question I assumed you were asking why some Republicans are opposed to a required free ID. I tacked in a bit about why some Democrats may be opposed to it, but I'm not sure what you're hoping for by attacking my proof that there are people that oppose a required free ID.

Most of my point was that the time needed to get an ID is not a meaningful factor in any party's support of this issue.

> there are some people so opposed to a government ID that they don't register their births or get social security numbers

How do these people pay taxes?

I'm no expert on them, but I don't think they earn that much nor particularly care about taxes.

> You have been duped by hysterics.

> If a significant portion of the electorate do not have an id this is a non-starter.

Duped by hysterics?

Are you arguing that a significant number of eligible voters in the United States have no id? That position seems hysterical.

It's a problem!

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/oppose-voter-id-legislation-...

There are questions like what kind of IDs should be valid at the ballots etc.

From your link the problem seems to be that some people want voter ID legislation, not the lack of IDs.

1. Voter ID Laws Deprive Many Americans of the Right to Vote Millions of Americans Lack ID. 11% of U.S. citizens – or more than 21 million Americans – do not have government-issued photo identification.

2. Obtaining ID Costs Money. Even if ID is offered for free, voters must incur numerous costs (such as paying for birth certificates) to apply for a government-issued ID. Underlying documents required to obtain ID cost money, a significant expense for lower-income Americans. The combined cost of document fees, travel expenses and waiting time are estimated to range from $75 to $175.2 The travel required is often a major burden on people with disabilities, the elderly, or those in rural areas without access to a car or public transportation. In Texas, some people in rural areas must travel approximately 170 miles to reach the nearest ID office.

3. Voter ID Laws Reduce Voter Turnout. A 2014 GAO study found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by 2-3 percentage points, which can translate into tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state.

I always found it hilarious that while significantly poorer countries can have working national ID systems, in the U.S. it’s somehow too expensive to give 10% of people any form of ID at all. Like, have you considered a tiny slice of the trillions of stimulus, or military, or whatever money printed can be dedicated to solving this problem? In fact I bet EM’s Twitter acquisition money can solve this problem five times over. But no, we have to hear this “it doesn’t work here” excuse over and over. What a joke.

Doesn’t matter. People will lose their national id’s anyway and whiners would complain that the system is unfair because 11% of people lose their id’s and are unable to get a replacement. They will claim that getting a replacement is an unfair burden; some of these people cannot get public transportation from their cave in the middle of the Texas desert.

The statistics are nonsense and do not represent a significant population.

First of all, way beyond 11% of the population would be outside of the voting age, and/or unable to or unwilling to vote anyway.

Second, how could these people even rent or own a property without an ID or otherwise function in society? You cannot even get a library card, cash a check, get a bank account, or receive government assistance without an id. How are they able to pay any bills or receive income? Does cash sprinkle from the sky? Very few actual, able, or potential voters fit within this extremely small group.

Third, if a citizen is unable or unwilling to travel a short distance to obtain a simple id for $25 in order to ensure basic participation in society, are they likely even able to understand for whom or what they are even voting? Also, if they cannot travel or afford to travel to get an id, how are they even able to travel in order to vote, get groceries, get medical care, or anything else for that matter?

Fourth, if a citizen has no id, how can you know they are even a citizen that is able to vote in the first place?

>Second, how could these people even rent or own a property without an ID or otherwise function in society? You cannot even get a library card, cash a check, get a bank account, or receive government assistance without an id

They can't. It's a red herring that gets tossed around as an in-group signaling mechanism by those who have never lived near the margin and therefore don't realize how much more often you need to ID yourself when you're "down there" so to speak.

> You have been duped by hysterics.

> The US certainly has problems. Election integrity isn't one of them.

The US has a real problem with perceptions of election integrity. You may argue that’s all because one side is duping people-but even if that’s right, the real flaws in US election administration make it easier for people to believe those claims, and addressing those flaws - for example, elections being run by elected officials rather than independent electoral commissions as in most other English-speaking countries-will make them less believable, and hence help prevent people being duped.

> Read here about the Australian election. The official result can take up to ten days.

A large part of why it takes so long here, is because Australia has a significantly more complex voting system than the US - a combination of ranked choice (or “preferential voting” as we call it) and single transferable vote, instead of first-past-the-post - so how long it takes here isn’t really relevant to how long it takes in the US.

Furthermore, a big reason why claims of election fraud are far less believable in Australia, is because we have an impartial/independent/apolitical and highly respected government agency, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which fully runs all national elections, and also controls redistricting - and each state has its own state-based equivalent which does the same for state and local elections. Australia’s system is miles more trustworthy than the US system of leaving the management of the process to elected state and local politicians.

That link is about Queensland state and council elections, Federal elections are run by the AEC: https://aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/ (although the process is similar).

When looking at this information you need to keep in mind that virtually all ballots in Australian elections are paper ballots that must be manually counted. Postal votes can still be received for a week after the election, but a result can be declared anyway if the margin is greater than the number of outstanding votes.

Counting is initially focussed on the House of Representatives, which uses single-member electorates, is where control of government is decided and has terms that start at the first sitting after the election. The Senate count is left later - it uses multiple-member electorates where the count can't be declared until literally every ballot is data-entered, but it is also of less public interest as it doesn't decide control of government and there is a delay before the Senators take their seats.

Hey I didn't mean to bash the Australian system. It seems great!

My point was just to illustrate that the idea of elections with "immidiate result" "total transparency" "exactly accurate" is neither realistic or necessary in a well functioning democracy.

Democracy is not in the decimal place of the accuracy of the election result. It's a combination of factors about of how political disagreement is handled. Separation of powers. Anti corruption work. Etc.

Oh yeah, just wanted to provide some necessary context for those reading our links. I'm not sure I'd put the case that Australian elections are overall counted particularly fast, they do seem to be well resourced though.

Election integrity is not the reason why nations elect to not use voting machines, do not use mail in voting, or also require ID. The purpose of all those choices is to encourage voter confidence and trust, which has shown to increase voter turnouts and trust in the democratic process.

People think the US has an election integrity problem. Therefore the US has an election integrity problem. The system must be broadly trusted. And by "broadly" I mean "overwhelmingly within any given subset of the population", not just a particular filter bubble.

> The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day.

That comparison isn't even the problem, the problem is that we used to be able to. Does no one else remember staying up late on election night to see the result?

Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California?

You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.

Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above:

> How Does a RLA Work?

> A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won.

> The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome.

Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins.

If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed.

Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away.

There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)

> There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004.

Uhh, citation please?

Given that countless companies, websites, social media networks, governmental organizations, hospitals, school systems, and individuals including consumer credit companies are hacked every year, do you really need more evidence that an electronic voting machine could be compromised?

generally we need to see evidence, yes.

particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in.

do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”

Yes. What kind of bullshit question is that?

The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.

It doesn’t have to be widespread in order to have a widespread impact. Some national elections are extremely close and essentially decided in one county of a single swing state. Most local elections are by definition “local” and close local elections can be decided by the votes from a single voting precinct.

Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.

> …widespread evidence of systemic fraud…

i’m sorry, that’s a very bold statement to make without a number of reliable citations…

Voter Action proved in court that Kerry won New Mexico, rather than Bush. The problems in NM were a subset of the problems in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere. Make of that what you will. Walks like a duck...

Eye On Ohio: The Informed Citizen's Guide to the 2004 Election http://hamburgsteak.sandwich.net/mirrors/EyeOnOhio/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...

https://www.amazon.com/Was-2004-Presidential-Election-Stolen...

https://www.projectcensored.org/voter-fraud-august-2005/

https://www.amazon.com/Stole-Americas-2004-Election-Rigging/...

I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically.

The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”.

In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks.

Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.

The nice thing is that all the votes with this system are on paper ballots. The paper ballots can then be verified against the machine counts.

It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.

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