Comment by okanat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by okanat | Hacker News Reader

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That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee

- Secrecy of who voted for whom

- Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public.

Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process.

Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented.

Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones.

The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents.

The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone.

After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box.

Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other.

If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.

That sounds like a solid system! Thanks for explaining!

Is there any way to prevent the observers from knowing who votes? I could see a scenario where a party chooses observers that are likely to intimidate potential voters (e.g. KKK members in a majority black polling station).

Having elections is in no way enough to have a democracy. You also need a functioning justice system and free media. What you describe is not part of the election system but of the justice system.

If the police does not uphold the laws that guarantee just elections, if they allow intimidations or treat citizens differently, or if the military tries to influence election results, then you do not have a democracy.

That's why participation from opposition and actual members of the public in the area of election is important. If you and your friends / family are afraid of intimidation, you show up. Gather as many people as you can as observers. In my countries (of residence), being there is your unalienable right. Nobody can legally kick you out. If 50 black people show up in a station where KKK tries to intimidate them, KKK will back down given an actual democratic state.

If those people still feel unsafe, they are not living in a democracy but under an authoritarian regime. You cannot really have a non-violent, fair democracy under such regime. Democracy isn't just elections. It is creation of bunch of non-elected institutions that guarantee the fairness of the elected stuff. Judicial branch, expert organizations and regulators are all part of it. This has to come from realization that the alternative is violence. Sometimes needed violence. Most resilient democracies in the world like France are direct results of multiple violent events happened because institutions were not capable of striking the balance. Suppressing large swaths of people is just a powder keg. In true democracies, people from all views should have a good mutual understanding that alternative governance systems exist and may even be viable or more stable, but they will be murdering each other and they themselves will eventually be victims to the violence too.

Representatives from multiple parties are there, and there is at least a police officer nearby in case something happens. The people doing the intimidation could be kindly asked to leave, or not-so-kindly made to leave.

You may ask how do you make sure nobody changes the votes in the box somehow?

First the box is in front of everybody. Second, before allowing people to throw votes in, you seal the box with an tamper evident seal. Usually pouring beeswax over a string works. You can have multiple seals for all sides.

Having a mark anywhere else but the box you cross / stamp invalidates the ballot. You put ballots in envelopes. Each envelope must have a single ballot inside.

A voter can replace the ballot if they made a mistake. They need to destroy their ballot in front of everyone.

That's a lot to digest for a 7 years old, and you're still brushing over how you do a population survey, count the constituents and how to make that a trustworthy process.

My point: reality is messy and simplicity isn't a guarantee of reliability. The things hat really work in our societies are pragmatic, not simple.

Sure. Probably you shouldn't dump it at once but let the 7 year old ask questions one at a time. I think you can still explain it one at a time. I am aware that readers of HN are not 7 year olds.

Now try explaining any kind of encryption system that gives the same level of confidence to a high-scholer or even CS students in as many words as I used in that comment.

I'd say you can ELI5 most technical systems, it's a matter of finding the appropriate abstractions and spending enough time (for instance, just explaining the paper ballot system, we're already writing a full page or more)

It reminds me of a youtube channel explaining the Visa/Mastercard duopoly using monkeys and bananas. It doesn't perfectly fit, but works surprisingly well for such a subject.

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