Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

Having served as an election officer for the last decade, one must say that RCV is to ballots what a complex dependency tree is to your IT project: something that may look swell under laboratory conditions, but Fortune help you in the real world, at scale (see Maricopa County for related woes).

Arguments about election reform need to stress two points to gain traction with me:

1. Physical security of the (obviously tangible) ballot.

2. Physical security of the voter while marking the ballot.

I first heard Scott Adams point out that any situation involving great reward (e.g. political power) and low risk (the number of convictions pertaining to election fraud is scant) is going to be rife with corruption.

Give me:

- Election Day. Make it a holiday. Staff and provision it to make a positive experience for all.

- Minimal mail-in ballots. They are a huge physical security risk in both ways mentioned above.

- Minimal early voting. "Election Season" is bollocks and security risk.

There are reasons that half of Oregon wants to eject and join Idaho. And those reasons do not include satisfaction with their jacked up elections and the dodgy results thereof.

This is where I think Australia’s compulsory voting shows its strength.

Every citizen has a responsibility to submit a ballot (either valid, invalid, or covered in dicks).

And the state (or in our case an independent electoral commission) has a responsibility to collect a ballot from every voter. Which leads to making it as easy as possible for you to vote, with early voting, mail-in ballots and heaps of polling centres.

The ballot problem is easier than you’d think though. Make effective corruption untenable, by involving a lot of people in the process. Everyone who can gain from the outcome should have equal presence as observers.

And the tangibility of the ballot is crucial, it’s much harder to make 10,000 pieces of paper appear or disappear than to flip a bit.

The secret ballot is also known as the Australian ballot[1]

The beauty of casting a ballot in private is that no matter how biased my neighborhood is for Odius Candidate, I can freely vote for Obvious Altruist, no matter the coercion. When everyone is voting at home, ballots might be "helped". Especially if the contest is close.

And then there are concerns about ballot tampering. The USPS has lost much, including its reputation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

The UK has mail-in voting, which is necessarily early voting. I'm against it; you can't be sure that the voter wasn't coerced if they didn't vote in person. You need mail-in voting in specific cases, such as soldiers and diplomats serving overseas.

But in general, I don't think it should be allowed to cast a ballot before the hustings are over. Voters can't be compelled to listen to political arguments; but it should be at least possible for a voter to know, for example, that their favoured candidate was convicted of rape the day before the election.

Firm concur. Then there is the guilt by association: the people I think shadiest are the ones pushing all of these "innovations".

Many applications benefit from KISS, and voting is an important example.

> There are reasons that half of Oregon wants to eject and join Idaho. And those reasons do not include satisfaction with their jacked up elections and the dodgy results thereof.

I agree with your proposals but this part is inaccurate: the right-wingers are mad because their candidates didn’t do as well as hoped. In their current post-factual era, that means they’ll make up whatever excuses are needed to say the results aren’t valid but nobody should confuse that with a more principled argument than “elections are only valid when we win” - right now it’s the Trump 2020 fraud veterans pushing that story but as soon as that fails critical examination they’ll shift to something else.

I'll allow that my claim was strong for the amount of evidence proffered, but that does not decouple the changes to the election system from the results and the subsequent dismay of a substantial percentage of the State.

As we watch the #TwitterFiles unfold, and know that they represent the tip of a far larger crap-berg than anyone cares to face, please keep reminding me that the 2020 election was as perfect as Trump claimed his Zelelinskyy phone call was, for which Donald impeached.

Past the snark, let's simplify elections and make those casting the ballots, not those doing the counting, the most important.

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