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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

With this comment you've demonstrated why voting machines will never be trusted fully; lack of understanding.

You understand paper and pen. It's right there. A child fully understands the dynamic.

As soon as the process moves into a machine, you cannot even tell if your checkmark is really counted.

This is doubly worked into distrust, by the amount of bugs, weird isses, and strange behaviour software exhibits to end users. People are trained from youth, via personal experience, how incredibly buggy and untrustworthy computers are.

They crash, can lose data, be wrong, and the worst of it? The layman cannot even figure out why. Computers are a black box, a mystery, they function by magic.

No expert, no claims of audits, or oversight, will ever, ever refute what end users know. Computers make mistakes all the time.

Taking these impressions and incorporating them into the votng system is madness for democracy.

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Not just those impressions, but those realities.

The trust model for paper ballots and observed human counting is so superior to any proposed or implemented electronic voting that it's madness to downgrade to electronic.

I agree completely, but find that my argument is easier to explain to literally everyone, where as describing trust models is harder to explain to many, and invites debate from others.

I prefer "mixed" > "paper" > "electronic", but a few year ago we had elections with only "paper" in our national soccer association:

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Football_Association

> With 75 presidents of different Argentine clubs voting, on election day something went wrong when the final count resulted in a draw of 38 to 38 (76 votes in total). The explanation given was that one of the electors put a double vote and that mistake was not reported. As a result, the executive committee decided to postpone the election.

As with anything, paper voting must be done correctly. There are literally hundreds of years of tweaking, bugfixing if you will, of process and method around paper voting.

Proper paper voting cannot be gamed by ballot stuffing. Voting paper has serial numbers, is guarded like a currency during creation, and like currency during transfer, has checks and bounds at both ends, is counted by representatives of all parties, the list is endless.

For example in Canada you vote, fold the form shut from prying eyes, take it to the lady with the ballot box (usually a retired person), and she detaches the two parts of the card, one she keeps, the other you deposit into the sealed ballot box under her watchful eye.

There is no chance to stuff anything extra, again members of all political parties are present, and any trickery is made doubly difficult by unknown serial number ranges at the voting station. A serial number you are assigned when your voting card is taken off of the randomized stack.

I assure you any "but... what about..." has been thought of, and any security hole you perceive is likely just me missing facts.

Here the ballots are printed in normal paper. Each party prints their own, and the goverment send them to the polling stations. But other parties may steal the ballots from the voting booth, so each party must print additional ballots to replace them, just in case.

There is a plan to make a single ballot printed by the goverment, but the local county chiefs don't like it becuase it avoids a lot of dirty tricks. (The elections are quite fair anyway. The petty cheating just changes very little globaly. I don't agree with cheating, but I can't fix it.)

Some parties distribute their ballot before the election to avoid the missing ballots problem. Some local county chief ever distribute their own local ballot with the national ballot of the opposing party if people want to vote a combination. Some people distribute old ballots to that are invalid to void the votes of confused persons of the other party. In some places, the rabbit hole is deeper than you think.

I don't know what to say, exceptn such rampant fraud and miscreantic activity is the problem.

And that has nothing to do with paper ballots.

Here, you'd end up in jail for those things, and trickery wouldn't get you out of it. And you'd get caught too, because members of your own party would turn you in.

Sadly, I have a higher threshold for "rampant".

No design is resistant to incompetent implementation.

I'm not sure what happened, they never released an official explanation. (It may have been just cheating, but my conspiracy theory is that it may have been a truce between the two factions to get a few more days to negociate.)

The other reason I don't want to use machines for voting is that it's not that much work to count them manually. We've been doing it well before computers existed. Government has never been interested in efficiency before, so why suddenly care about it with the most important component of a democracy?

> You understand paper and pen. It's right there.

You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.

No need to hypothesize about how it would work. Australia uses pen and paper for elections. It works fine.

And with more complex ballots with preferential numbering.

(Aside: it’s actually pencil and paper since pencils are more reliable. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm#pencils)

> (Aside: it’s actually pencil and paper since pencils are more reliable. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm#pencils)

In some ways, but the ability to erase a pencil mark is a huge issue with ballots.

IMHO, pens with tamper resistant ink, plus a process for making an exchange for a new ballot paper in case of a marking error, is a much better choice.

Canada uses pencil too. Erasing ballots and remarking them is never an issue, why would it be?

The security is in how ballots are treated, how they are monitored and handled, not how they are marked. It's never a problem that they are in pencil. Ever.

If someone has an opportunity to monkey with the ballots? The system has already failed.

As I said in another post, if you think you found a hole, it's because you didn't research what's actuallly happening.

Yes, hanging chads created by a machine, punching answers through perforated hole cutouts. Perforated holes, which started to break and fall out more and more as the ballots were counted.

The ballots were fragile, and this is an example of not using pen and paper.

You're actually proving my point here. Keep it simple! Pen and paper is perfectly fine, and all problems with how to handle the marking has been resolved for centuries.

It's change that is the problem here, and change for no sensible reason.

There's nothing to fix, to improve, to resolve with paper ballots. Nothing, except the pocket books of companies pushing ridiculous solutions.

>> You understand paper and pen. It's right there.

> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.

Punch cards are not "paper and pen."

> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.

A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.

No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.

Washington State uses fill-in-the-bubble and that seems to work fine. We vote by mail so voters even provide their own pens!

It works fine until there's a high-profile, close election. Then you'll discover the data source was noisier than you thought. We're only talking about one in a thousand people goofing up a vote and moving on.

We do all elections in the mail. We frequently have votes come down to a few hundred ballots without issue. They are all counted and tracked.

Just heard about this:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/25/evan-low-up-by-one-vo...

> Some of those challenged ballots in San Mateo County had illegible or no postmark dates and Assistant Chief Elections Officer Jim Irizarry said they were waiting on information from the U.S. Postal Service

With small margins, an election could come down to how people read a smudged postmark. It might not be an issue, but you won't know who "really" won, either. It depends how you count it.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

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