Comment by schroeding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schroeding | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Voting doesn't have to be any different.

Yes, it has to be. If you break the ability for the average citizen to understand exactly how and why your vote is counted, you undermine trust. Trust into the democratic process is the thing keeping a democracy alive.

If someone currently says "<Country> / <Party> interfered with the voting process!", I can tell them to just observe their local polling station or even become part of the polling station staff themselves. Be there, check that the election staff doesn't start throwing away votes and count correctly. Check that the numbers they count are equal to the one on the official result for the polling station. It's all paper. It's easy to follow.

If we put anything between this, which requires trust into a magic box with a display, I cannot do this. If your credit card is abused, you see it on your bank account, always. You cannot have the same certainty the same for an anonymous election - yes, they may have proof that their vote was correctly counted, but what about the polling station as a whole? The votes of the other citizens? Most people will not check, just as you may only get one observer per polling station max today (which is already enough to prevent fraud for the whole station, in the case of paper ballots).

"Trust the journalists" does not fly.

> And remember, physical voting is actually tremendously complicated as well

It doesn't have to be. You don't need complex equipment, you can count directly in the polling station after it closes. Paper and people suffice.

I completely disagree. You claim:

> Check that the numbers they count are equal to the one on the official result for the polling station. It's all paper. It's easy to follow.

I say that, using paper, it's not easy -- it's next to impossible for any individual to do.

On the other hand, if I can download a file of voting results, import it into Excel, and run SUM(), it's about a million times easier.

What's important to rely on is the fact that people are able to verify that their own votes are consistent with what's in the public votes (using something like tracking numbers), and we can also verify there isn't vote stuffing (which there's no room for, if the number of votes and "didn't-votes" equals the size of the voter rolls).

You claim this "requires trust into a magic box with a display" but that's simply not true. All it requires is the ability for everyone to verify that their vote got included accurately, that people who didn't vote got included as not voting, and that nothing got stuffed on top.

Paper and physical voting is actually far, far, far harder to independently verify and trust. It's just that until recently, we haven't had a practical alternative.

I don't know what the US does, but in Germany all ballots are poured onto a big table and then sorted into staples for each candidate / party. Especially since the votes / crosses are always at the same position for each staple, it is trivial to keep an eye on 5, 6 staples at once, and the remaining parties get almost no votes anyway. After that, the staples are split into 10s and counted by two people, independently, after each other. All results are called out loud. The results are also given to the city hall via phone, so everyone in the room can hear it. City hall publishes the official results per party per polling station as nice images, easily digestible. I don't see how this is next to impossible to supervise, even for a single individual.

If you want, you can even stay the whole day and keep an eye on the whole voting process except when the voters make their choice behind the privacy screen, you can see everything which enters the ballot box. I've seen myself someone regaining trust in the democratic process because of this - a guy who openly accused us, the polling station workers, of voting manipulation, being openly hostile, agreeing that everything was done correctly in the end. This would've been impossible while using electronic or online voting.

> it's about a million times easier.

If you, as a random citizen, know SUM() and even think about downloading the data for Excel, you are the top-n% in computer literacy. You are aware of that, right? ^^'

For most people, verifying their own vote on a website with no understanding of the underlying process is the absolute maximum you can expect, IMO. In this case, it is "trusting a magic box with a display". You compared it yourself with HTTPS, for which the same is true for the general public.

> What's important to rely on is the fact that people are able to verify that their own votes are consistent with what's in the public votes

But will people do this at scale and do people trust that they do so? The latter is the most important. It doesn't have to make statistical sense, it's about feelings in this case.

Because if most people (of a certain demographic like the elderly) don't check their own vote or a significant amount of people don't believe that they do so, you cannot automatically assume that all votes in the polling station have been counted correctly. It may have been e.g. only the votes of certain demographics (who are unlikely to check their own votes), which have been tampered, even if this believe is statistically unjustified.

If you supervise a whole analog polling station, you see for yourself this is not the case.

>> What's important to rely on is the fact that people are able to verify that their own votes are consistent with what's in the public votes

> But will people do this at scale and do people trust that they do so? The latter is the most important.

Yes, absolutely. This is the most important, and that's what makes it all so easy! If you don't trust, verifying your own vote is a click away. If you think there's something fishy in your town, ping a few friends and ask them to verify. Journalists and international observers can sample a few thousand randomly chosen people and verify that the election is at least 99.9% accurate.

Because we all know that if journalists find even any pattern of people whose votes aren't getting counted, or were changed, it would be front-page national scandal news.

The whole process you're describing for physical polling places is a million times more work for any individual. It requires a massive amount of time and attention.

Meanwhile, with electronic/online voting, all you need to do is see if people are reporting discrepancies that hold up upon further investigation. If they're not, then it all works. I don't understand why you think people wouldn't trust this. It's dead simple.

Well, agree to disagree. :D I see your points, and I would agree that the majority would still keep their trust.

> I don't understand why you think people wouldn't trust this.

Because people are not always rational beings, often don't understand statistics and, in my experience, the set of people not trusting journalists and having doubt on past elections having significant overlap. If you are not convinced the press isn't lying, and maybe just prints what the government wants, you will not expect that they uncover election intervention. And your friends may be on a list of the city hall, "they" know that they vote for certain parties[1]. This is basically verbatim what voters sometimes tell you, why they don't vote via mail. It's easy to transfer those fears onto electronic voting.

It's very hard to keep believing in serious election fraud if you see how (this kind of) analogue voting works, though. You have to trust nobody, only yourself, at least in regards to your local polling station.

> The whole process you're describing for physical polling places is a million times more work for any individual. It requires a massive amount of time and attention.

Yes, I don't disagree. It's significantly more work, inefficient and antiquated. All true. I'm just not convinced that the convenience of electronic / online voting is worth the risk that a) a fuck-up due to any kind of bug / security problem and b) people losing even the slightest bit of trust into elections because of "magic computer", even if they are caused by delusions, would pose.

[1] Germany has no "registration" as Republican or Democrat (w/ German parties of course) like the US has - they don't have such lists

Reply on news.ycombinator.com