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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Each polling station should have representatives from multiple parties as well as independent observers.

> how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted

The representative of your party plus independent observer said all votes at your polling station were counted. You know both those community members and know them to be generally honorable. Ergo your vote was counted.

> every voter in the system was legal

None of the observers at the polling station, or the station head claimed any illegal person voted.

> the final tally was authentic

The observers all signed as witnesses on the final tally.

This is not the "system. it is humans you know who are telling you what they saw. If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.

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> If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.

This, but also, important to point out that this is a question of scale: "If you can't trust other human*s*" - plural.

To rephrase: "You should trust political volunteers."

Surely we could do better? Testimony doesn't assuage my concerns that the process may not be tamper proof.

delegation of trust is an essential and unavoidable property of any system that serves a non-trivial number of human participants

It's a bit more than that.

You should trust political volunteers after you have seen their track record of being honest and truthful. (Though there is some default amount of trust the process gets because of the adversarial nature of volunteers with opposing biases checking the process).

This is along the same vein as

You should trust candidates for the seat after you have done your due diligence that they have honest and truthful, and will faithfully represent you in the legislature/administration.

as well as

You should trust civil servants to have done state activities justly and produced truthful records and reports of state activities after you have seen a record of them doing these things correctly over time.

Democracy with humans is built on a lot of trust in humans. We have to keep this in mind when arguing about these things.

Hopefully one of those volunteers is yourself.

You do not have to watch every district, every election, every time. But given that enough people do it, at least once, at least in their own district, then it is easy to see why the system as a whole is trustworthy.

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