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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

I think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.

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In many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times.

What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?

The problem isn't necessarily voter registration per se, but how easy or hard you make it. Giving politicians or bureaucrats the power to disenfranchise voters by requiring jumping through seemingly arbitrary hoops or based on vague rules will always lead to abuse.

In many countries if you are a citizen (or permanent resident, depending on the election), old enough, and registered as living in the country you are automatically registered to vote. No need to do anything, your form shows up in the mail before every election. The only times you might have to do something is if you've very recently moved to a different part of the country or if you live abroad.

It's an additional step that must be completed well ahead of election day, making voting a two-step process. It shouldn't be necessary: you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.

That requires some preparation. Example: in Italy the state knows where everybody live (this is self reported but it could be inferred in many ways) and, more importantly for this case, where everybody has residence (that might not be the correct English word, sorry.)

I could have residence in a city because I was born there but I could live in another one because for one year I have to work in that other city. But I don't sell my home, terminate contracts with utilities etc, also because maybe I go back home once or twice per month to visit friends and parents. Ok, so when I have to vote I do it in my city of residence, in a given place and not in any other one, and I have a card that I have to present together with my photo id. They have a register with the voters that are expected to vote there and they check my name on the list, stamp my card, give me the ballot.

Note that this is a process that starts when one is born and keeps going through all the life of a person. It's quite an effort but it makes participating to elections very low effort for a voter. If we had to register to vote... Who would vote, only very interested people. It's amazing that so many people vote in the USA given the process.

Merely requiring photo ID is controversial in the US (and not done in MA where I vote).

Additionally having a continually up to date registry of persons would definitely not fly here.

Millions of voting age Americans do not have a non expired photo ID.

I wonder how that compares to Italians.

Going from memory:

In Italy you're meant to always carry a valid, officially accepted form of ID (and as far as I know, only ID card and Password fully qualify, but driving or nautical licenses, gun permits, and some forms of railway employee ID are also generally accepted as they're ultimately made by the government) and it's a crime (with up 2 months in jail, though it's usually just a fine) to refuse to show it upon request to on-duty "public security officials" (Italy has a bunch of entities in addition to the normal police) and in a few other rare categories (a bus or train inspector has the power to demand your ID if you're travelling without a ticket and need to be fined).

If you don't actually refuse, but you explain you just forgot your ID at home, you can still provide your details verbally and are usually allowed to go, and "invited" to show your ID within XX days at any police post. But if you were driving a car, there will be a small fine anyway.

If the officer has any suspicion you lied, or that your ID is fake, you can be taken to a police station for identification.

....ahem, obviously I meant Passport... not Password...

> you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.

Can you suggest a specific mechanism to do it that would be transparent to the public?

I don't know about the US specifics but in Russia people voting multiple times was the main strategy of fraud in 2010s (that is before they gave up all the pretence). Before this scheme came into being, the system of isolated voting points where every action was observable and verifiable based solely on the local context had worked reasonably well, to the displeasure of authorities.

You should apply a large permanent mark to people that already voted. It must last one day or so. But that could infringe the right of not to vote, unless voting is mandatory. Or make impossible to vote twice because everybody is tied to exactly one anonymous ballot. See my reply to parent, about the voting system in Italy. However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote. In my country they'll have to get the photo id number of those people but it's not difficult to get if they have access to official data.

> However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote.

They did that in my country at scale. Physical presence is a must-have if you ask me.

Some time ago every election or referendum simply put a stamp in the passport when voting, but that was before plastic ID cards. Now they have an online verification process before handing you the ballot papers; this also reports your ID for the invalidation of any pre-election votes (e.g. mail-in ballots) elsewhere.

> Now they have an online verification process before handing you the ballot papers

How can a voting observer ensure that double voting is actually blocked by this system? Government can whitelist people 10x-voting the right way (real case from Russia).

Issuing 10 passeports to these people is orders of magnitude harder to scale and will have negative consequences (fraud elsewhere) a government is typically less willing to take.

You used to need a passport to vote? 42-47% of Americans have passports currently. In 1990, only 5% of Americans had passports.

That comes from a time/place where it was issued to 100% adult citizens and it was illegal not to have it - i.e. you have a duty to get one when you come of age or become a citizen or your old one expires, and it's a misdemeanor with some fines if you don't, plus quite a few other legal interactions will be simply refused until you get that sorted out.

Now an ID card is a valid option so some people have only the ID card and not a proper passport; but there is an expectation that everyone (who isn't e.g. actively hiding from the authorities as an outlaw) would have a valid ID and if they don't it's acceptable to require that they get one before they can fully interact with the rest of the society e.g. government, banking, driving, owning real estate or cars, any legal contracts such as rent or credit, etc.

Here in the northeastern US, we get a substantial number of people who try to vote in the town where they work, or a town where they've had dinner after work, rather than the town they live in.

It requires you to take time to register, either out of your days beforehand to be registered day of; or time out of your day to register to vote at the polling place day-of. This is on top of having to drive potentially a ways to get to the polling place, only to be told you cannot vote because you're unregistered.

It should be a national holiday, or you should be able to vote online. Session IDs would go a long way in preventing voter fraud, I think.

This is how it works in most EU countries afaik (at least where I live).

You're automatically registered essentially. You only need to show up with the form/ballet you were sent and your ID. Your vote is anonymous, just registered that you voted.

Personally I like the Aussie way even more, which is compulsory.

I feel this is necessary in a democracy. Voting needs to be easy, swift and free for that to work though.

And indeed, the way it's done somewhere else on this planet is you show up, vote, get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll and vote a second time, and that's all there is to that.

In places with more modern technology, instead of relying on ink on thumbs, we can just have a computerized system informing all the voting precincts that John Doe has now voted at Precinct X, perhaps with a face photo in case someone alleges fraud.

We just had an election in BC, Canada, and the way it worked here is that everyone has a "home" polling location which is responsible for ensuring that their vote is counted once and only once.

If the distributed system is not partitioned, you can show up to vote anywhere and they tell your home precinct that you've voted; then during vote counting the precinct where you voted tells your home precinct "add the following to your vote totals".

If the system is partitioned -- either from network outages or remote polling locations or mail-in ballots -- then your ballot goes into an envelope and is physically sent to your home precinct in the week following the election, to be verified and included in the count.

But what if I vote three times in three different locations all different from my "home" polling location?

If the network is connected, the first time you vote succeeds and marks you as having voted; subsequent attempts fail because they know you've already voted.

If the network is not connected, your three remote ballots go into envelopes marked "dh2022" and in the week following the election they are physically transported to your home polling location, at which point they see that you tried to vote three times, set those ballots aside, and call the police.

This breaks the anonymity of the vote, marks can be traced back to real people.

It also allows fraud by voting for people who didn't show up.

In the Netherlands at least, you just get a voting card sent to you by mail, and you have to hand that in to vote. Since you just have a single card, you can only vote once.

How does the electoral commission knows where to send the voting card? Does the voter need to register with some electoral commission (governmental agency)?

The government already knows where people live. Every time you move, you have to notify your municipality.

Unless you get someone else's card and forge their signature on the back side, which is a permission form indicating that you can vote on their behalf; I don't believe there's enough checks and balances in place for this voting-on-behalf-of system, but then again I don't know what checks and balances there are.

True, the guard rails there are that you can only do that for at most 2 people, limiting the impact of potential fraud there.

Well good luck voting-out the government that controls that system.

This is what is done in essentially all of the Western world (except USA and the UK) and it works just fine with free and fair elections and peaceful transfers of power.

>and peaceful transfers of power.

Yep, this is something the US can no longer claim, sadly.

So I can vote in these places when I am on vacation there? Of course just once.

> get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll

This can't possibly be a serious solution. A quart of acetone costs $2.

Why would you assume that actual election ink is as easily washable as that? Surely other people thought about the problem at hand for more than a minute, right?

It actually stains fingernails in such a way that the ink only truly disappears when the nail grows.

From Wikipedia:

> Election stain typically stays on skin for 72–96 hours, lasting 2 to 4 weeks on the fingernail and cuticle area. The election ink used puts a permanent mark on the cuticle area, which only disappears with the growth of the new nail. It can take up to 4 months for the stain to be replaced completely by new nail growth. Stains with concentrations of silver nitrate higher than 18% have been found to have no added effect on stain longevity, as silver nitrate does not have a photosensitive reaction with live skin cells. This means that the stain will fade as new skin grows.

This reminds me of college chemistry lab. The nitric acid was always interesting because when that got on your skin, it turned yellow, permanently. For skin, this would wear off quickly (on fingers at least), but if it got on your fingernails, those would turn yellow and it would never come out, until the nail had grown out.

Voter registration is reasonable, but it should be possible to register on Election Day, at a polling location, and it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

As I understand it the US doesn't have a giant federal government database that tracks everyone who is eligible to vote and their current postal adress.

How does this mechanism prevent one person voting multiple times in different locations?

> Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote.

Well, open borders for one.

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