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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Two thoughts:

1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.

2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.

Which is it?

Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.

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The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.

A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.

The following blog series on why voting is hard goes into this in more detail: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting1/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-opscan/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-vbm/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-dre/

[0] https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/#scalability

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...

[2] https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/

This is what my state does. It works great.

> It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot

This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.

+1000

I should not have to vote on judges and dog catchers and stuff. I like officials being accountable, but voting for an unopposed “nonpartisan” candidate has negative value - it wastes time and resources and lends legitimacy to an essentially non democratic process with uninformed voting. Better to have an easy recall mechanism.

At the very least, put the federal stuff on a federal ballot, the state stuff on a state ballot, and the local stuff on a local ballot, and have them 4 months apart. Then we can get back to hand counting and election night results.

It's admittedly a bit difficult because we vote for so many things. President and VP, 2 senate, 2 representatives, then any number of state congressmen(mmost states have their own "senators" but operating within that state only), several district attorneys, mayor, comptroller, and state judges. Even your school board in your district is on the ballot. And lastly, any number of propositions to vote.

It's a big reason I vote from home. Properly researching every candidate on a ballot can legitimately be a full day's work. Spreading that out to a week of iteration helps a lot.

>The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly.

I think you have that the wrong way around.

The benefit of hand counting is that it scales very poorly.

Well said. Not everything in life is improved by larger scale and efficiency. Certain concerns like counting votes require accuracy and trust in the process, because distrust in the voting process is detrimental to the whole idea of a representative republic.

> The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Making ballot counting more efficient is not important. Ensuring that elections can't be tampered with _is_ important.

“there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US”

Even if you have many companies providing voting machines, it does not deal with the problem of distrust in national elections. Many elections that have recently occurred come down to the votes of a particular small area of the country or district. These districts are likely to be dominated by one voting machine or type of vote machine purchased by the election board at that district. So, effectively you still have a single or a few voting machines determining elections.

> It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.

I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).

What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.

If votes are counted by hand, you have to systematically corrupt hundreds, maybe thousands of people across jurisdictions. With machines you only have to corrupt a single person.

>Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”.

What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.

And, notably, Republicans have been making claims of widespread voter fraud in favor of Democrats since well before Trump, have gotten into state office in part on a message of cracking down on it, followed up with investigations, and come up with... nothing. A handful of "whoopsie" mistakes (still prosecutable, sure, but probably not done on purpose) and the odd one or two actual attempts at individual fraud, with no strong partisan slant. No conspiracy, no rampant fraud at all.

Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.

Great, so I’m sure that you will not complain at all if Democrats lose in the future where a single company controls so many voting machines, unless they are able to prove fraud beyond a reasonable doubt in mere days after the election, right? And you’ll not complain if the vast majority of the suits filed are dismissed on procedural grounds such as standing, right? Because voters and candidates and state attorneys general obviously have no case or controversy in a contested election?

Yes there were a very small number of kooky cases in 2020. The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.

[flagged]

> The vast majority did NOT get a fair hearing at all.

Which ones?

Lots. Anything involving standing at the least, but also many of the “unauthorized people changed the rules without the authority of the state legislature”.

https://election-integrity.info/2020_Election_Cases.htm

You’ll find similar lists on Wikipedia and at the American Bar Association; they slant their interpretations differently than I do here. Look into a couple of the “standing” or “no merit” cases and see if you really think they were without merit or that there was no “case or controversy” as defined in the Constitution.

Yes, a couple were kooky, particularly around voting machines, but most were “you changed the rules in a way that weakens election security and you are not Constitutionally allowed to do that, since you aren’t the state legislature and the written law is at odds with your rules”.

So I did go ahead and read over the first on your list, claims, Pennsylvania supreme Court ruling, and the district court ruling (super fun reading) and yeah... Not convinced. I won't attempt to summarize everything here because it's a grab bag, which is common with all these election cases. Throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope something sticks. The claims pretty much boil down to X common practice (including many that are common in my state of Idaho, ex mail in ballots, drop boxes, which, weird, no challenges) could lead to fraud and are therefore unconstitutional, under some fuzzily spelled out mechanizm, and we are entitled to ??? (Seriously, no clear cut relief was spelled out for most claims, which is generally a requirement).

Now sure, maybe this is one of the "kooky" ones, but then we are back to, which ones? "Here's a list of 100 cases, read them all" isnt a reasonable ask. Getting a handle on this one was a significant (wasted) time investment. One which I already wasted significant amounts of time on back in 2020-2021.

You claim "most" did not get a fair hearing. It shouldn't be hard to pick one and clearly explain what was unfair about it.

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