The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.
You need to present an election system that will convince Joe Q. Public, who is almost certainly not as tech-literate as this forum, is probably not even white-collar or university educated, and likely also suspicious of globalisation. "Tamper-proof Indian system-on-a-chip" does not have that property. Otherwise you get increasingly unhinged arguments over the election results until something breaks.
Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...
Indeed! I've volunteered at polling places where this is done.
I think one reason polling places have gravitated towards the "use paper ballots for everything, which are then scanned" option is because you're likely going to have something like that anyway, for mail-in ballots. It does bring problems, but you still have the paper to fall back to.
That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years ago.
In principle I don't really disagree, but just saying the problems run rather deeper than just hand-counting vs. electronic voting. The one time a recount actually would have been useful it was stopped for highly legalistic reasons that are hard to explain to a normal person. Not only that, it's highly likely – perhaps even probable – that Gore won Florida, although we'll never know for sure.
I see no reason it would play out any different today. We all saw what happened during the last election.
Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted. Given the very small margins in some states, even a very small error rate (malicious or otherwise) can really matter. Perhaps this is paranoid, but I fully expect Trumpdroids to try to cheat. Any idiot can cheat a handcount "by accident" (prove it otherwise), but actually tampering with voting machines is operationally much more complex, and not something any ol' yahoo can easily pull off (need not just technical knowledge, but also physical access).
tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.
Which is one of the reasons why the Help America Vote Act[0] was passed two years later.
> The one time a recount actually would have been useful…
I understand things are stressful, but please avoid resorting to hyperbole. There are other times in American history when a recount has changed the result. For example, see the 2004 Washington State gubernatorial election[2].
> Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted.
> tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.
Be an observer.
Seriously: Be an observer. For example, Orange County (California) has their public notice[2] inviting "the public" (that's you!) to observe election operations. Tomorrow, assuming you're in a place that allows early voting, go to a polling place or vote center (or whatever they're called there) and observe. On (and after) Election Day, go to your county's registrar of voters (or whatever they are called where you are) and observe the tally. Learn how to call out when something is wrong, and learn how to "observe the observers" to call out if they say something is wrong (assuming you think their call is BS.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act
[1]: https://ocvote.gov/sites/default/files/elections/gen2024/Pub...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...
Appropriately documenting these occurrences should not be hard. Appropriately archiving them would be moderately difficult but would serve as the evidence of the final tally. The final tally of all precincts could then be calculated by any number of independent organizations.
There can't be any hard to understand computer voodoo, deleteable audit logs, or single vendor reporting the final tally. No one should trust that anyways.
We talk a lot on HN about people's beliefs being a reflection of the systems they're placed under— you show me the incentives I'll show you the outcome— and the incentives are clear as day. Democratic voters have two nice properties that are being exploited, Democrats are generally concentrated in major metro areas, and Democrats vote early and by mail. Being concentrated makes those counties easy targets for lawsuits hoping to tie up the process with vague nothingness and rule-lawyering to try and turn away voters. Attacking mail in voting very cleanly affects almost entirely Democrats. And pre-undermining the election results act as a hedge to explain away a loss. Because this is a must-win election for Trump's GOP, two losses in a two risks pushing the "MAGA" faction of the party into irrelevancy.
And so that's what you see, it's a narrative that has been pushed hard designed specifically to carry out the exploit. It's genuinely clever and once it reaches critical mass the people who are tricked into actually believing it outnumber the original concern-trolls so it's naturally self-perpetuating.
So look, I have no expectation that you'll change your stance, I just hope at least that if you really bought into it that going forward you'll at least do it on purpose and be in on the game.
I have some distrust in the American voting system, first with the computerized systems, but also that federal elections are run at the state level. With so many states and jurisdictions, I can't help but feel that fraud is happening. If the federal elections process was truly federalized, and funded if it is not already, managed and controlled by the federal government, then I think there could be greater control and security.
The chaos that would ensue from this is staggering.
And your proposed resolution means someone could DoS an election by copying their ballot and submitting it.
Colorado ballot envelopes already have a bar code - essentially your "serial number".
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because everyone who thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not know anything about how elections work.
Does your knowledge imply the system is perfect? Is there more than one type of voter fraud? Do we mean just one or two particular federal elections or all elections at every level? What about internal party elections, have those all been extremely fair and above board lately?
There's obvious advantages to perpetrating this class of fraud. Historically we know this fraud has interfered in all types of elections at all levels. Why would this not continue to be a target?
I mean, even in your link, Step 1 includes mailing ballots in. Even recently we've seen the simple flaws in this insecure mechanism. How could you have such a level of confidence in this system? The fact the smart and well meaning people do is all the more reason to engage this subject more rigorously.
Perhaps a more generous interpretation to people making these claims is to understand that we are still not doing a good enough job at making our elections secure, easy, free and fair. For Hacker News this should easily be understood to be a technical challenge and one that the USA has yet again completely failed to succeed at.
I do agree that America is failing this test.
It's literally that easy in Colorado.
Further, if the person the ballot rightfully belonged to actually wants to vote, they'll either request a new one or vote in person - either one of which would invalidate the earlier mailed ballot.
Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported to the whoever they reported the results to.
This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack into electronically as the voting machines contain no electronics (at least for communications, for sure).
The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back).
Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a protocol for accommodating voter disabilities.
All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting integrity.
As an Indian citizen I see the casual lack of security mindset in large swathe of things implemented by both public and private actors. Many things get better only though iterative failures and corresponding reactive fixes.
What type of failures and improvements have happened here, or instances of demonstrated hardness against those with motivation and access to machinery.
There was an interview with one of the Profs who designed the EVMs here.
The Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) do simple counting of key presses and keep tally of the totals.
The machines are not reprogrammable, run on alkaline batteries and have no WiFi/Bluetooth, USB or ethernet.
We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore votes, in under 10 hours.
Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years.
One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but a ballot box does not).
At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer of security.
Why do you need the result in under 10 hours?
You forgot about 2000. Also, the main reason for the delays are mail-in ballots, which could be delayed for days/weeks, depending on how lenient the deadlines are.
By law the mail-in ballots have to be in by election day.
Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with computers.
I think the totals from every precinct could be made public in a way that they are verifiable from a central database, where the numbers add up to the total for the state and eventually federal count.
This is probably already happening, but people don't seem to think so.
I agree that for voting systems other than FPTP it is more work and may take longer - but it’s not an intractable problem.
The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error.
That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.
I lived through that, it wasn't that big a deal, and I still think fondly of the clarity of paper ballots. No system is perfect, but paper ballots work and work well.
The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization.
Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.
Totally standardised, coordinated, and decentralised. But fragmented (structuraly) or incoherent.
But agree would be a million times worse with a single electronic system
As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals, if you can interfere with just tallying during or after the fact, and you can get the information on other precincts before any other outlets, you could easily take advantage of this.
It's essentially the Superman II version of interfering with an election. Just put your thumb on the scale a little bit everywhere on late precincts all at once.
The fact that so many states let a simple majority of their state take _all_ electors actually makes this possible. If more states removed the Unit Rule and went like Nebraska and Maine this would be far less effective.
There is standardization within all precincts of a county. And from my past experience as a poll worker, I can tell you why precinct reporting times can vary wildly within a county.
(Note things I say here are specific to the county where I worked.)
Anyone in line to vote by 8PM is allowed to vote. We (the other poll workers and I) could not start closing the polls until every voter had voted. If the local community did not trust vote-by-mail, then that polling place will likely see delays in closing due to lines.
One polling place often covered multiple precincts, so you'll see multiple precincts delayed simultaneously.
After that, boxes go from one queue to another, with multiple queues consolidating into one or two. So, a one-minute delay in dropping off your box to a collection point, may mean a two-hour delay in that box being processed.
> if you can interfere with just tallying
First off, that would require a remarkable amount of fraud. Second, that's why there are observers. It doesn't matter if it's 2AM on the Wednesday after election day: If tabulating is happening, you are allowed to observe.