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Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

Is paper considered open source?

Yes and it's inner workings are 100% transparent.

Paper still needs a system to verify ballots aren't forged, and that system should be robust and transparent too.

The system is a whole bunch of people from different parties being present when votes are collected and counted. And with paper ballots you need to do the fraud in many different polling stations.

It is possible to do small-scale fraud with paper ballots, you can never fully eliminate that option. But it is exceedingly hard to do larger scale fraud without it being extremely obvious to any observer.

Yes, and it's incredible how many problems are solved by hand-counted paper ballots. I get that it's a big task, that it takes time (and some US administrations seem to despise not knowing election results the night of the election), and that it's very tempting to automate, but the basic formula of 1) everyone gets a paper ballot; 2) the ballots are collected at a polling station; 3) the ballots are counted by hand is much harder to corrupt. Maybe build the fancy stuff on top of the paper ballot, like serialized ballots to prevent duplication or timed locks on ballot boxes to prevent tampering, but for the love of Democracy, keep it simple!

Other countries get preliminary election results the same day even with hand-counted paper ballots. So even that isn't impossible.

You can also use statistical techniques to audit results that are for the most part automatically tabulated by machine.

Some stakes couldn't start counting mail-in ballots before the election day. That slowed down counting a lot.

Mail in ballots are even less secure

Source?

These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.)

Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical systems, people had to count ballots by hand. There were many fewer people voting then, and regardless, that's not really the point: they counted by hand because they had no alternative.

Electronic voting certainly brings new problems into the mix. I don't think those problems are insurmountable. The problem isn't the technology itself. It's the legal and social landscape around voting technology. Open source, with reproducible builds and a method to verify that the code running on a machine was built from a particular version of source, is a start. Verification of that software's functionality, on par with the verification done of critical software (medical devices, things that go into space, slot machines, etc.) would be another good move.

Voters can also receive paper receipts, and I'm sure we can come up with some sort of scheme to take a representative sample of the electronically-recorded votes and validate them against the paper receipts, while maintaining voter privacy.

There is too much power at stake and too many dollars in the mix for this to work. Take a look at how expensive it is to break electronic voting machines then compare that to the billions of dollars that flow into an election cycle.

it’s called distributed voting centers, there’s this many people so there’s plenty of people available who can count their block’s ballots, there’s no motive of convenience in using electronics for voting that could ever surpass the motive for simplicity and trust, it’s just not that hard of a thing, there was no new problem that suddenly emerged when electronics became available for this, this notion should inform you of the various motives of why someone started to market them to decision makers

The absolute number of people doesn't matter. If you have more people voting, you can have more people counting. If you have more people, you have more polling stations, you can keep the size of them constant no matter your total population.

Other countries do paper ballots and manual counting without issues. The US isn't that special or unusual.

> I don't think those problems are insurmountable.

As soon as you try to be more clever than electronic counting of paper ballots, yes they are.

You can either audit the count by replaying the input event stream, or you can't.

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