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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

Please forget about showing up physically because conflatingl caring* with your ability to do things physically is ableist as fuck, and not all disabilities are visible and/or certifiable.

Please forget about showing up physically because setting up a polling station in a place where there's effectively no public transportation cuts off poor people from voting.

Please forget about showing up physically because mail voting works fine, paper ballots are already anonymous and verifiable, and we don't need to argue about why showing up in person is better for the umpteenth time (or that adding extra friction is not a good thing).

Please forget about showing up physically because that "you really care" nonsense is in the same vein as literally testing, and democracy isn't about excluding voters who don't care enough.

This line of thought is, frankly, disgusting, and I'm ashamed that this is tolerated here.

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Here in Argentina, in some places there were a few types of fraud, for example chain voting. (I can't find local case, but see [1] [2].) People can be paid or coerced to participate in such a scheme.

The solution was that you get a signed envelope when you enter, go to a isolated room alone and put the ballot inside and they verify the signatures of the closed envelope before you vote.

With remote voting, nobody can check that people is alone when voting.

[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/67486/what-is-cha...

[2] https://english.atlatszo.hu/2022/04/05/this-is-how-chain-vot...

>Here in Argentina, in some places there were a few types of fraud, for example chain voting

Thanks for pointing out another vulnerability of in-person voting that mail-in voting doesn't have, due to its distributed nature.

Chain voting is something that's only practical to organize when everyone in the group is voting at the same place and at the same time, so the chain doesn't need to be coordinated in advance.

As long as people know what kind of guy to look for outside, they know there's quick money to be made.

Good luck coordinating a vote buying scheme with enough people to skew the vote by mail without anyone finding out.

>With remote voting, nobody can check that people is alone when voting.

Neither can any other system of voting, including in-person voting.

And if the person is truly on their own in the room, and they truly only have one ballot... they can snap a picture of their ballot to show how they voted.

The problem isn't "being alone" when voting, the problem is buying votes - and it's solved by going after the money in any case.

With chain voting, the schemers also have no way to verify that their pre-filled ballot was actually used (and didn't go into the trash bin). It works because the voters themselves are corrupt and lying to the state, but honest to the people who pay them - in which case the voting system is neither the problem nor the solution.

> Thanks for pointing out another vulnerability of in-person voting that mail-in voting doesn't have, due to its distributed nature.

If they implement something like that here, I expect in some places that people is ask to go to the local party office and left the ballot/envelop with the code. It is easier. Voting chain is a trick to avoid the in-person checks.

The in person secret paper ballot voting system on voting day appears to be a system with some of the least drawbacks, which is likely why it has been so popular.

Mail-in systems work too, with their own set of benefits and drawbacks, and is used in combination with the above in some countries.

>in person voting appears to have least drawbacks

Citation needed.

Specifically, what are the drawbacks of mail-in voting compared to in-person voting?

>Mail-in system is used in some countries

The US is one of those some countries.

And in the US, with a long history of voter disenfranchisement and an abysmally low voter turnouts, where the election day is always a workday, mail-in voting is absolutely the best system currently in use, by a long shot.

Its benefit of being actually available and removing many of the artificial barriers to voting that exist across the US far outweighs any disadvantages it may have over in-person voting.

These barriers include:

-people having difficulty to vote on a workday

-difficulty getting to the polls

-lack of polling places in "undesirable" neighborhoods (and super long lines as a result)

-varied ID laws

-etc

Not coincidentally, the party that openly aims to decrease voter turnout for their benefit also opposes mail-in voting.

Nobody says that in-person voting should not be available. But it absolutely should not (and rarely is) the only option.

Unfortunately, its availability across the US is limited through the efforts of the aforementioned political party.

Hi from Argentina:

> -people having difficulty to vote on a workday

We vote on Sunday.

> -difficulty getting to the polls

My poll station is half a mile away (or less). I can go walking or by bus that is free that day.

> -lack of polling places in "undesirable" neighborhoods (and super long lines as a result)

I vote in a school that has like 20 voting rooms. The waiting time is usually like 10 minutes. Last year in some rooms the waiting time was like 1 hour and people was angry. In that cases vote for the other party.

> -varied ID laws

Everyone has an ID here. It has a nominal cost, but if you ask nicely you can get it for free.

If the idiots here can organize an in-person voting election, anyone can.

Hi from the US.

You don't seem to understand that what you see as problems to be solved are seen as features by half of our politicians, who would rather have people not vote at all.

These are the vulnerabilities of in-person voting that mail-in voting does not have.

>If the idiots here can organize an in-person voting election, anyone can.

No, that's not the case. I can't organize elections in Texas because I'm not in charge of organizing elections in Texas.

And people in charge of elections in Texas make sure that urban neighborhoods (which are likely to vote for the other party) don't have enough polling places to go to.

Oh, and did you know it's common in the US to have churches as polling locations? It's especially great when you're voting on issues like separation of church and the state, abortion, gay marriage, etc.

> You don't seem to understand that what you see as problems to be solved are seen as features by half of our politicians, who would rather have people not vote at all.

I understand because we had the same problem until 1912 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1enz_Pe%C3%B1a_Law that the problem was solved with secret obligatory in person elections. It was not easy. The 1930 were weird. All the last century was weird. This century is weird too, but at least elections are quite transparent.

> And people in charge of elections in Texas make sure that urban neighborhoods (which are likely to vote for the other party) don't have enough polling places to go to.

That's weird. I'm not sure how we ensure everyone has a good site to vote, because I expect some provinces to use all the dirty tricks that are barely legal. It's a good question. My guess is that elections are obligatory here (nobody really checks that, but there is a threat of a fee or something if you don't vote). So people wait outside the voting locations until they can vote, and if the queue is too long they get angry, and may start a small riot, and get the TV, and the federal government may decide to do something like investigating the local corruption.

> paper ballots are already anonymous and verifiable

I don't understand this part. What stops people responsible for giving out those ballots, from taking some of them and mail under someone's else name (for example, homeless person, drug addict etc)? You often need just several hundreds or thousands votes to win in a swinging state.

>What stops people responsible for giving out those ballots, from taking some of them and mail under someone's else name (for example, homeless person, drug addict etc)?

A requirement to keep a record of which paper ballot envelopes were mailed out to whom, and to which address.

Ballot blanks are all identical, but the outer envelopes go through the USPS and have identifying numbers on them.

When the ballots are counted, the envelopes can be examined by all interested parties separately from the ballots. The ballots are taken one by one out of the outer envelopes, and put into a bin (they're folded in blank inner envelopes, so nobody can see anyone's vote at that stage).

Presence of an envelope that was received, but not mailed out is evidence of fraud.

Conversely, once put into the mail, the USPS can track each such envelope, and anyone other than the intended recipient tampering with that mail is committing a federal crime (regardless of what they do with it).

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