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Comment by wannacboatmovie | Hacker News Reader

The issue in the US is compounded further as running elections is left up to not only the states, but the individual municipalities in those states and typically run at the county level.

Each with their own rules, whether or not ID verification is mandatory or literally illegal, style of voting (mail vs in-person), ballot design/UX, what languages the ballots are in (are ballots in Sweden in anything but Swedish?) and mutually incompatible equipment. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballot designs in use for the current election.

When viewing this at a macro level for electing the office of the President, it seems absolutely insane.

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On the flip side; it makes it incredibly difficult to pull off wide scale fraud.

Instead of having to compromise a single system, you are forced to compromise dozens or hundreds of systems run by people with opposing ideologies

On the flip side: it makes it incredibly difficult to notice you were a subject of a wide scale fraud.

You need to know an every single system and you can't look for discrepancies what would be obvious in the environment with a standardised system.

Wide scale fraud isn't necessary when elections are decided by 10k votes.

The point of voting is to kick people out of power when they piss off a clear majority thus keeping the system honest.

As such getting the count absolutely correct isn’t necessarily as important vs more systemic biases like gerrymandering or voter suppression. The vote may be rigged before people started casting ballots, but that doesn’t make voting useless. It’s the strongest signals that are most important and that’s still preserved.

> The point of voting is to kick people out of power when they piss off a clear majority thus keeping the system honest.

This is also a good argument in favor of decentralized voting management, as much of a shitshow as it may be. Centralizing the management of voting under the authority of the people voting intends to kick out of power is potentially self-defeating.

> getting the count absolutely correct isn’t necessarily as important vs more systemic biases

History lesson: The 2004 Washington state governor's election was decided by a mere 129 votes, and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering the totals and overturned the original result. The election was extremely controversial and not decided until two days before Christmas. Due to these irregularities, many people did not accept the results for years afterward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

Even more bizarre, the election closely shadowed the plot of the movie Black Sheep, which was released 8 years before.

>and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering the totals and overturned the original result.

The explanations given in the wikipedia article seem pretty plausible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

I don't see how it's any different what happened in the 2020 election, where Trump appeared to win at first, but a bunch of mail-in ballots (which were counted later) turned it around. While I can see why it might seem superficially suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if the pool of mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to get delayed/incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side.

> While I can see why it might seem superficially suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if the pool of mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to get delayed/incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side.

God help us that Pennsylvania mandates mail-in ballots can only start being counted on election day.

At that point it doesn't matter whether the voting system is centralized or left up to localities. If the election comes down to a few thousand key votes in one or a few localities you are left with a very small number of election systems to keep a close eye on whether that's the central one or a few local ones.

Its also worth noting that just because the central government could run one standardized election process doesn't mean that the election is easier to secure. Ultimately polling places would still be local. Maybe it helps a bit if everyone uses the same system, but that's more about consistency than security.

If you know exactly which 10k votes you need to compromise, it would be easier to just campaign there.

Not if you have no hope of actually changing their vote.

Which 10k votes?

How are you going to have 5 digit numbers of fraudulent voter registrations ready to deploy in all of the critical areas, but also ready to enjoy intense public scrutiny before and after the election. Voter registration databases are public, more or less, so you need to figure out how to fool the people running the election as well as the third party watchers, statisticians, academics, journalists and the veritable army of people who could have their entire career made by uncovering fraud.

Aside from national referendums every few decades, Swedish ballots only contain party and candidate names, no actual language.

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