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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

I mean, you left yourself open to that glib, low-effort criticism when you wrote this:

> no software or programmable hardware

That's obviously too stringent. Consider:

1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet.

2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader.

Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links!

Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.

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Indeed. That is what I was responding to; if I over-assumed the GP's position, my apologies.

We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election).

If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason alone) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception").

Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.

If your proposed process is implemented, it will take about 5 seconds before the precinct realizes that they can just feed it all to the machine and sign whatever number which comes out as the “hand-counted” one. Especially as they will be dinged whenever their count differs from the machine, which will be assumed by their superiors to be more trustworthy.

More seriously, even though some cars are programmable, I did not mean that nobody could use cars to transport ballot boxes. I obviously meant that the official results should be the manually-counted one; machines could conceivably be used to get interim results faster, and/or to double-check a count to see if it needs to be counted again. But I was serious about requiring absolutely no machines involved in the counting of the official results.

Most states (I don't have all fifty states' laws in my head) have a sample recount process; they generally trust the machine numbers but they will randomly sample some percent of precincts for a detailed hand-audit count. Any attempt to generally infect electronic systems falls afoul of this back-stop.

In addition, most states have a mechanism by which a candidate can formally challenge the results in a precinct, forcing a hand-recount. This usually has some kind of onus on the requester (I believe in PA for example you have to put up a bounty and if the hand recount results come out to the same result as the previous tabulation the state keeps the bounty as payment for the added cost of the forced audit). However, it is an option (and, most notably, not an option that anyone who claimed shenanigans in 2016 or 2024 exercised).

The problem of election integrity doesn't exist in a vacuum and didn't pop up overnight in 2016; states have been working the issue for a couple centuries and have a pretty good system. But it's a system that requires some detailed statistics and process control theory to understand, so I'm not surprised the median voter doesn't get it. There is, perhaps, a case to be made that for that reason alone we should go to manual, but someone's gonna have to spend the money on that if we're going to do it; it's going to be drastically more expensive than electronically-facilitated counting. And, indeed, people will have to accept that human counters will be less accurate than machine counters (because they're human; we don't train "computers" anymore as a discipline).

> they will randomly sample some percent of precincts for a detailed hand-audit count.

This places a lot of trust in that “random” selection.

That's an industry-standard quality control approach in almost every supply chain. Proven approach.

Not sure why you're scare-quoting random. Do you have reason to believe it's not random?

> industry-standard quality control ... proven approach

proven for the private market(s) != proven (or even acceptable) for governments

do the risk analysis. what happens when an industry-standard quality control measure fails in whatever way for a private company? some hit to their reputation, stock price, market share, maybe they even fail. these are perfectly acceptable outcomes for a private organization. they are not acceptable outcomes for governments. governments demand (much) higher standards and more stringent processes. slowness is a feature, not a bug.

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