Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
theregister.com
theregister.com
Sheriff monitors the ballot box (ex. Jimmy Carter's opponent).
Only allow loyalists to count the result (and then report w/e you want; ex. Russia).
Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people.
No the thing you're missing is that the ballots are always electronically counted. Sure, at the very low level they'll manually count each ballot but the sums are then provided to different people electronically who then report the combined total sum.
But also a handful of people can just remove registered voters to have the same effect.
The fraud is easy to scale though because it if you win local offices you can use that to control state offices which you can then uses to control federal offices.
If the local results anywhere were different from those published in the papers, people would notice. If they were different in different papers, or in different parts of the country, people would notice.
We have, unfortunately, switched to a list on a website instead of in the papers :(
But the ballots are not even printed on security paper. They don't have a serial number on them, either.
It is then slipped into a security sleeve to make it harder to read within the envelope.
The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.
Security is provided by the envelope which is the attestation that the citizen cast their ballot. Offhand, the county voting office is likely required to retain the ballot as part of the state/federal records. I haven't checked but that or a centralized ballot repository are the only things that make sense.
Alas, the signature must reasonably match one on file (from somewhere ... presumably a state ID) or the ballot may be rejected. Since human signatures can vary wildly for reasons, this non-deterministic feature requires a human guess for -each- ballot. No mechanism to dispute that decision.
Hence "stuffing" in more ballots cannot be detected.
Printing the ballots on security paper will not eliminate this risk, but it will make it much harder.
I don't know if there is an auditable "chain of custody" of ballots from mailbox to the counting center. The fraud here would be "losing" ballots that are from precincts that tilt significantly in one direction or another.
The whole envelope opening and ballot counting process is recorded and streamed live from multiple angles.
https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/elections/about-us/security-a...
In other cases, people get money/bag of potatoes for a photo of their correctly filled ballot.
With EVMs the polling officer can just deactivate the machine (which stops the counting at that moment) making booth capturing pointless.
Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths (especially if the candidate in question is bound to lose due to corruption/scandal and needs to cling onto political power to prevent himself/herself from going to prison).
Yeah, but these are visible! They provide evidence that the voting was not fair.
Compare to electronic voting, where a capture might be done and no one ever finds out.
We want rigging of elections to be visible. That's the whole point.
I fully expect this happening more as the systems degrade in the west and, arguably, it already has happened several times now in many different ways, even if executed in more “sophisticated” ways that make it less apparent.
What do you call the many “color revolutions” the US and EU have now perpetrated in many different ways and places? The ”gang” was just a state level actor with immense resources and methods that exceed the local capacity to prevent them… just like a local gang using arms to take over a local polling booth.
There are declassified versions of old and obsolete CIA guides on how to conduct the precursors of such “color revolutions” through long term “capacity building” that is then activated if/when necessary. That’s the voluntarily declassified manual of the CIA; someone might suggest there are more effective instructions that are classified.
There have also been medium sophistication level events like what has happened over the last several years in Europe, where Merkel ordered an election result cancelled through technicalities because she/the literal The Party, did not like the result (I guess you can take the woman out of the dictatorship…), the EU simply used the judiciary to force a “runoff” because the election results were not to its liking, de facto canceling elections, or even all the subtle measures like visually misrepresenting election results where the bar or pie chart does not match the numerical data to suppress public mandate and perceptions about results, i.e., higher result numbers being represented by smaller bars than lower numbers.
I would argue they are all examples of the very same things you describe, the equivalent of “…gangs take over polling booths…” only it’s done through process, authority, policy, or even law and those in power tell themselves they’re doing it for “our democracy” and justified through similar dystopian, narcissistic, megalomanic, authoritarian mindsets; “I need to be in power for your own good because you don’t know any better”.
It could go both ways, either things will increasingly start degrading even more as the power slips out of the “gang’s”hands, and the system starts crumbling around them; or if “digital voting” is fully implemented there will essentially be “backdoors” to make sure the powers can “preserve our democracy” just like they need OS backdoors and media control to “protect the children”, which coincidentally seems to always coincide with them remaining in power and control and the people not even being asked about major upheavals of their society and their votes being effectively meaningless because the agenda is continuous regardless of election results.
It’s like those people who used to play slot machines at the casino, (now doing so digitally on their phones) pounding at the buttons that do absolutely nothing since the algorithm is what determines where the spin ends, not them rapidly hitting an essentially dead button just because the “clicking”, the “voting”, makes them think they have control. . . . “our democracy” where you and I are not part of that “our”.
- Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have'
- South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail
I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.
Until we all have government-issued public keys or something, there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if I'm wrong here)
It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...
Edit: But as a comment somewhere else in the tree noted ,,And if it could tell you that then a third party could force you to reveal that you voted "right" as agreed before.`` - I guess everything's trade-offs.
The reason that paper voting is so good in this regard is that everybody can fully understand the entire process. It is so very, very simple. And if you need proof, you can go see the counting for yourself.
The issue with electronic voting is that there is far greater complexity. There are many valid reasons that someone could distrust it, for example:
- You might not trust the cryptography experts that claim the algorithms are secure.
- You might not trust the algorithms to be implemented correctly.
- You might not trust the computer manufacturer to have designed a secure machine.
- You might not trust the computer manufacturer to have built a defect-free machine.
- You might not trust the machine hasn't been compromised by some bad actor.
- You might not trust that there hasn't been some random bit-flips.
- You might just not understand how computers work.
- ect. ect.
Note that it is not important whether it can be proved to be correct and secure. The unique goal here is that everyone can prove to themselves that it is correct and secure. It must be obvious to everyone that they can trust it.
In my opinion, this is not possible to achieve with an electronic system.
Do you trust the system now enough to say your views are fairly represented (looking at the war and ... all the other things) ?
I volunteered as a scrutineer for a major Canadian political party as a teenager. You show up and watch the electionworkers open the ballot box and count the ballots. The ballots were counted fairly although some people couldn't tick the boxes correctly.
It's unclear how such a system would work in the United States, though, because you've merged all elections into a single voting day. If people struggle with ticking a single box from 5 options I can't imagine what a multipage ballot binder would be.
- We already trust computers to run our markets, banks, cars, energy infrastructure, etc. Is a computer popularly untrustworthy?
- Do low-tech physical ballot systems offer good guarantees? See 2024 Russian elections [0], for an extreme counter-example.
I'd say cryptography or smart algorithms can go a long way in upholding certain invariants, but you need some infrastructure for that: e.g. key pairs per voter and a trustless counting system. If you can't get that, then you're relying on the good will of others: in some cases it's the volunteer counters, in others it's whoever deploys and operates the trust-based black box e-voting system. I think that cryptocurrencies alone should be proof to anyone observant that a trustless voting system is doable, though I'm honestly surprised by this thread, because it alludes to the opposite.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/03/20/t...
This is true, but its used in other countries as well, as it's a simple, effective, low-tech, affordable process.
Most notably in India https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/style/india-elections-pur...
but also in many other countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink#International_use
You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that:
1) all valid votes were counted
2) no invalid votes were added
3) the totals for each candidate is correct
And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting
Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard them in the trash?).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-o...
Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the national identity card, which essentially is government issued public/private keys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though, especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-running users of online voting in the world)
https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e9...
In these systems the voter cannot verify that their vote was secret as they cannot understand, and much less verify the voting machine.
> And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for.
Which is good for preventing the sale of votes, but keeps things obscure in a magical and correct box.
How can I tell the machine didn't alter my vote if it cannot tell me, and just me, who I voted for? The global sanity checks are worthless if the machine changed my vote as I entered it.
Paper ballots with mutually suspicious representatives of all parties watching themselves during handling and counting is the only way to go for big things like parliament/presidential elections and national referendums where, in the worst case, the greatest of all matters are at stake. And foolproof method for voting is most needed when the levels of trust are at the lowest.
Isn't that the whole point of having ballot secrecy ? Even with paper vote you cannot tell which ballot is yours (or at least, a recognisable ballot is voided during the counting).
likewise e-voting systems pass through cryptography experts auditing to verify it does what it says it does.
said that the voting solution can also provide cryptographic proof that your vote was unaltered, and accounted for, without need to expose your actual vote.
the claims about database altering, are also false as the vote is cryptographically signed and unalterable.
also there is another feature where you can recast vote on top of your previous one and the last vote will be the valid one. This is crucial for countries where the bad guys can come at your place and under distress (gun) force your vote. you can then recast safely invalidating the forced vote.
e-voting solutions is really interesting and in an alternate reality I think we could have had a mainstream e-voting and more even direct-democracy vs our current democracy by proxy (elected officials)
...because when I get on the plane, I can look out the window and see that it's in the air.
With paper ballots, the systems are very interpretable - you can sign up to audit the ballot counting process and watch it happen, etc.
But you can't do that with electrons in a computer - it's really just pure trust. That's what you lose.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-43756-4_...
Beyond this paper, based on my experience working with election officials, political candidates, and voters, I would agree that verifiability is not well understood.
By which I mean: paper ballots have problems. But a fault in a handful of ballots doesn't mean the rest of the ballots need to get tossed out.
I do not believe that a system managed by humans can be faultless.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting
> The centralized server must be trusted not to violate ballot secrecy,[7] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing trust amongst several stakeholders.
> The ballot auditing/reconstruction device must be trusted to ensure successful ballot auditing (also known as cast-as-intended verifiability),[7][16] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing auditing checks amongst several devices, only one of which must be trusted.
So neither secure nor anonymous...
This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.
In-person voting does provide these guarantees, to extent that violating them will be discoverable and both parties have an incentive to discover such things.
That's actually pretty common in Europe. The Spanish DNI (national identity card) has a chip these days, which gives you an authenticated key pair for accessing digital services.
In the pilot project for digital voting, that identity is only used to authenticate the user, and then an anonymous key needs generated that can be used to cast the final vote.
In Canada, at both federal and provincial levels, you walk up to a desk and identify yourself, are crossed off a list, and handed a paper ballot. You go behind a screen, mark an X on the ballot, fold it up, take it back out to another desk, and put it in the box. It's extraordinarily simple.
> At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.
Well, that kind of fraud is a different issue from someone reading the database and figuring out who someone voted for (you just... don't record identities in the database).
Absolutely. Any time something is centralized it becomes an irresistible target for unlimited numbers of bad actors and the bar to entry for remote anonymous access makes it a much easier target. Anonymous access to paper ballots means someone is going to be on at least a handful of cameras and has to bypass many security systems so if cheating happens it is because the people gathering the votes want it that way. Such cities or states should be excluded from the voting process.
We have a long and storied history of coming up with extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much higher rates of criminality then now.
Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from the church, etc.
People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to their current decision making. Any consequence that relies on people being able to model a future problem against their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more horrible punishments to overcome the losses in transmission.
I think the goal should be the smallest possible functioning consequence, which is possible by being close to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up, but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am very confident this will prevent then from doing it again much more efficiently then a distant jail sentence. (among all the other ways too, there's never one clean action to take to solve problems on a societal level)
isn't that racist? i've heard it repeated but i'm not so sure
I have seen this constantly claimed, and never reasonably evidenced. It's also hard to believe the kind of American exceptionalism that supposedly causes these problems that everyone else can easily solve, despite an environment that is clearly heavily politically invested in solving it (because that also avoids the appearance of racism).
Meanwhile, American proponents of voter ID can readily find people including among the supposedly discriminated-against groups who will testify to the contrary.
In Canada a drivers license is enough to vote.
In any case, it's not on me to show that they shouldn't need ID. It's on the proponents of ID laws to do so, and they have utterly failed.
Proponents of voter ID claim it is needed to prevent fraud, while opponents point out that there's not enough fraud for it to be worth the cost.
Note that countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also didn't require voter ID. First-world countries that do require ID to vote have systems in place to ensure that getting that ID is easy even for poorer people - such as automatically sending the ID to the voter by mail if the government requires you to report your residence or filing out the necessary forms once, before turning 18.
there's no scientific link between race and the ability to go to a DMV once every 10 years
Another thing is when the id requirement is not just there, but added right before the election, so it's not "going to dmv once every 10 years", but "going to dmv this year especially so you can vote.
If I would be optimizing for the minimal dropoff, the policy would look like "passing the law that takes effect in 5 years from now, tasking the blah blah agency with increasing the id coverage and putting reminders how important it is to get an id and vote everywhere you look at, increased funding for the dmv and whatever". But no, it's has to be done with the urgency and framed as threat.
So the actual argument is not that there is link between race and going to dmv once in 10 years, but that the intent behind passing such laws is not increasing integrity, but favoring a specific party. Even if doesn't actually work, it's still one of the worst things a party in a democratic system can do.
> added right before the election
I feel like it's not hard to counter-argue that the writing has been on the wall for decades and it's not a genuine surprise at this point.
> So the actual argument is not that there is link between race and going to dmv once in 10 years
IMO, it's probably better to make the the actual argument.
> DMV
This entire discussion appears to be over a red herring. You may be interested in my comment on the sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47345614
That form of ID is neither accepted per the proposed legislation [1] nor does it last 10 years (more like 4-5 years from what I've seen). Please go look at what's actually required per the SAVE Act.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_American_Voter_Eligi...
It's the same basic idea, richer people are more likely to already have an id (drivers licence, passport).
In the case where disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race then it can be seen as racist (as it affects the population of that race differently). If the reason that disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race is because of racism, then a policy that disenfranchised the poor would effectively extend economic discrimination into political discrimination.
Though I tend to think that even if we remove the economic effects of racism such that disenfranchising the poor couldn't be called racist, they would still be classist and should be avoided where possible.
how about the ones accepted by the police when they ask "show me your ID"?
if it's enough to ID you to cops it should be enough to ID you to enter the voting booth, no?
>and how hard it is to get one.
you can get one at the DMV
I got this state ID using my previous state's ID. The old one is now void. So I need to get a new one. I'll need my birth certificate mailed to me from my parents, because I'm still in the habit of letting them keep all the important family documents. I move alot.
My car broke down a few months ago. Good thing I can walk the relatively (americanly) short distance to work. For after-hours or weekend travel I take the buses (the few my city has) or an uber. Even though it would take me 20 minutes to drive directly to the DMV, the bus route is an hour and ten minutes, and the Uber is going to cost me money. Even if the ID was free, I had to have money to get to the DMV to get it. If I drove, I'd still have paid for the gas.
My work is understaffed and I'm one of the more knowledgable non-managers. I'm working before business hours start and leaving after they end. I can't see a weekday in the next month where I can take time off during the day "just" to get an ID. My boss might understand a medical appointment, but the DMV is not on his list of "reasons I can lose Qaadika for half a day or more".
"you can get one at the DMV" is not an answer.
The document itself says that someone had a name listed there, or at least that the authorities who issued it believed so about 20 years ago. If anything, the voters roll itself is more reliable for that matter (somebody still believed the same facts more recently).
I mean, proof of possession is some level of assurance, which is better than nothing. Knowing my mothers maiden name and birth date is also some level of assurance (this of it, you don't know those about a random me in the internet, so you can't vote for me in the elections for the next 15 minutes at least). But what is a desired level of assurance for something so many people feel strongly about? Is it more or less compared to visiting porn websites, boarding a plane, drinking alcohol, crossing international border and driving a car on a public road?
You can look up the Canadian list of accepted identification documents if you want the full thing, but it includes library cards, public transit cards, correspondence from educational institutions, student IDs, blood donor cards, letters of confirmation of residence from shelters and soup kitchens, residential leases or utility bills, and personal cheques.
You can also vote without ID in Canada by having a guarantor with ID vouch for you.
Contrast the proposed SAVE act, which accepts... passports, birth certificates, naturalization documents, and "REAL ID-compliant documents that also indicate citizenship", which is a fun one.
I think the day I _must_ walk go a desk to vote is the day I'll give up. Voting by mail is one of the best things occuring here (in Switzerland). You get the voting stuff by mail, make your crosses, put it back into the postal box and it's delivered for free (as in beer) to the government.
Relying on the postal service here would make it much worse, honestly.
Not everywhere though; it's up to the canton or municipality to implement this. It's literally the only reason I still buy stamps. Should be made a thing at the federal level imho.
It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.
We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.
So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale.
And again, you still have to be willing to commit a felony to move the needly by ONE vote, which is not likely to be very common. The risk/reward simply isn't there.
For what? In my state there's no requirement to show ID. When I first moved here I attempted to show mine at the poll and the poll worker told me to quickly put that away and she didn't want to see it. I'm not even sure it's legal for them to ask for ID here, given her panicked reaction to me trying to show it.
Since then I've voted in this state for around 10 years and it's always the same. I could say I'm whoever I want, and just be given a ballot.
Edit: I don't live in NY either, as the other poster used as an example. ID should be an obvious and necessary requirement, but it isn't in many states.
Support for photo ID requirements also remains widespread in both parties. More than nine-in-ten Republicans (95%) and about seven-in-ten Democrats (71%) favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majority-of-...
While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already. This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a name that had already been used, or someone turns up later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's going to set off alarm bells.
On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well. Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more people are involved the harder it would be to keep secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference. Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting, and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.
Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was tampered with by the government of the time, who took a leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process is likely to be reverse before our next major election, however.
You can try voting again at other stations, especially since they don't require ID. You just need the name of somebody assigned to that station, who hasn't already voted. There is a signature check if there is a suspicion, but that's rarely done.
But that's practically never done. The risks are too high, and to have a significant impact would require enough votes to make it certain you'd get caught.
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=bkg&do...
We had a vote thrown out of an election several years ago, the woman died right after the election, the signature on the card looked nothing like hers and was probably done by her daughter.
That said all indications are voter fraud is not any kind of wide spread problem in the United States.
In the United States, it hasn't been. The article you link to doesn't even mention the United States. To do it on a large scale requires cooperation from the people running the election, and the US isn't (yet) that corrupt.
The US system isn't completely robust against it, and perhaps some day it will be a problem. But right now there is no evidence that it is a problem, and all of the attempts to "fix" it are clearly aimed at preventing some people from voting.
The secret ballot perhaps made a particular type of election fraud, the kind done by dedicated partisans voting multiple times themselves, theoretically easier. But it removed the mechanics that allowed far more prevalent and lucrative election fraud. In the Tammany Hall era, you could buy votes and know that your paid voters actually voted the way you wanted. You could promise that your preferred candidates, if elected, would give rewards only to people who voted for them, and actually follow through with that promise. You could physically prevent people from voting with ballots that weren't yours, rather than trying to rely on demographics.
That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away.
You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate your ID/address/etc later.
That ain't universally true. Here in Nevada you can vote at any polling station (I think within the same county).
And this is a way to disrupt and tilt elections.
see: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/chao...
- Enter queue
- A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer
- They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet
- Go to private booth, fill out scantron
- Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)
The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.
For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted.
As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).
How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised?
Tax evasion is rarely prosecuted because nobody is looking very hard. People looked very, very, very hard for fraud in 2020 and found zilch.
If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome — I don't have time right now to go dig up five-year-old news articles, I'm in the middle of a project.
But no, they didn't give up then and there.
> If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome
See "Post-Election Cases Decided on the Merits" in [1].
How do you reconcile the idea that voter fraud is common with the existence of so many cases decided on the merits against the plaintiffs precisely due to sheer lack of evidence? You'd think these cases with people looking so hard would've uncovered nontrivial fraud if it was common, no?
[1] https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-el...
As for your "How do you reconcile ..." question, I'll assume that the summaries of those ten cases are correct (I don't have time to read all ten of them for myself), and look through them one by one:
First one, Trump v. Biden (Wis. Dec. 14, 2020): three out of four claims tossed for not being filed in a timely manner. Fourth claim, "that voters wrongfully declared themselves indefinitely confined", ruled against Trump because "Trump challenged the status of all voters who claimed an indefinitely confined status, rather than individual voters". Not expert enough on relevant law to know what that means, but it looks to me like this one was "your claim is overbroad and you can't prove it" rather than "your claim is false", and I don't understand how that case relates to vote fraud. (Perhaps someone more informed about relevant law can explain this one to me).
Second one, Trump v. Wis. Elecs. Comm’n (E.D. Wis. Dec. 12, 2020): Trump claimed that "Wisconsin officials violated his rights under the Electors Clause because said officials allegedly issued guidance on state election statutes that deviated significantly from the requirements of Wisconsin’s election statutes." Court ruled that "interpretations of election administration rules do not fall under the meaning of “Manner” in the Electors Clause" and even if they did, the officials had "acted consistently with, and as expressly authorized by, the Wisconsin Legislature". Again, I don't understand how this one specifically relates to vote fraud, it looks like an argument about whether laws were followed. Perhaps the laws being followed were highly relevant to vote fraud, but someone will have to explain that one to me as well.
Third, King v. Whitmer (E.D. Mich. Dec. 7, 2020): First part was a decision about whether the law was followed. "Second, the district court found the plaintiffs’ Equal Protection claim to be too speculative, finding no evidence that physical ballots were altered." This one is a case where the court said "you haven't presented evidence of fraud".
Fourth, Ward v. Jackson (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cnty. Dec. 4, 2020): This was a decision that the plaintiff showed insufficient evidence of fraud.
Fifth, Law v. Whitmer (Nev. Dist. Ct., Carson City Dec. 4, 2020): Plaintiffs failed to prove "that there had been either a voting device malfunction or the counting of illegal/improper votes in a manner sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the election’s outcome." Actual decision on the merits saying "not enough evidence of fraud".
Sixth, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar (M.D. Pa. Nov. 21, 2020): Court found that Trump lacked standing, but decided on the merits of his case. "The district court held that different counties implementing different types of notice-and-cure policies (many implementing none) did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because the clause does not require complete equality in all situations—“a classification resulting in ‘some inequality’ will be upheld unless it is based on an inherently suspect characteristic or ‘jeopardizes the exercise of a fundamental right.’”" Again, unless I'm misunderstanding the case, not a decision about "you didn't show evidence of fruad", but rather about whether election law was followed correctly. (If I understand right, "notice-and-cure" policies means a voter says "Hey, something's fishy here" and the election board has been put on notice and must "cure", resolve, the alleged problem. Which is relevant to fraud, but does not mean this was a decision where the judge said "you didn't provide enough evidence".)
Seventh, Wood v. Raffensperger (N.D. Ga. Nov. 20, 2020): first claim dismissed because "there was no disparate treatment among Georgia voters". Second claim dismissed because "Secretary Brad Raffensperger had not overridden or rewritten any state law". Third claim dismissed because "there is no individual constitutional right to observe the electoral process (i.e., monitor an audit or vote recount)". Again, maybe there's something I'm missing, but this doesn't look like a decision on whether there was evidence, or lack thereof, of fraud.
Eighth, Bower v. Ducey (D. Ariz. Dec. 9, 2020): Did address claims of fraud, saying plaintiffs had not presented evidence, merely speculation that fraud "could" have occurred or was statistically likely, which the court did not find to meet evidentiary standards. So this one was indeed a decision on the evidence.
Ninth, Costantino v. City of Detroit (3d Jud. Ct. Wayne Cnty. Nov. 13, 2020): Dismissed at preliminary injunction stage; "the court found that the plaintiffs’ claims of fraud would unlikely prevail on the merits" because "many plaintiffs failed to include crucial information in their allegations, such as locations of alleged misconduct, frequency of alleged misconduct, names of those involved in alleged misconduct, and so on." So in a rushed case filed a week or so after the election, plaintiffs didn't put together enough evidence, and the judge said "We don't need to proceed to fact-finding, I can tell your case is weak before I even look at the details".
Arizona Republican Party v. Fontes (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cty.): "The court noted that the relief plaintiff sought—an additional hand count of ballots—was not legally available due to the suit’s numerous procedural defects. The court found that plaintiff did not adequately assess the validity of their claims before filing the suit, and thus failed to prove that the county had inappropriately applied the statute in question." Decided on procedural grounds, not actually evidentiary grounds.
So of the ten cases in that list, five (cases 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10) were not actually cases where the judge ruled on evidence of fraud, as far as I can tell. (Again, corrections on specifics welcome if I misunderstood one of these). The other five were decided on "you don't show convincing evidence of fraud", though I question whether #9 should count in that list because it was a preliminary injunction rather than reaching the fact-finding stage.
So that's five, or possibly four if you discount number nine but let's count it for the sake of argument, cases out of the 62 where the court went as far as ruling on the evidence.
And I have no trouble reconciling the idea of widespread fraud with five court cases where plaintiffs couldn't prove it. Because in many cases, the kind of fraud people are claiming happened (note that I have not actually investigated those claims) are things that would be extremely hard to prove afterwards, such as people walking up to an unguarded ballot dropoff location and stuffing 50 ballots into it. We know that happened in some places, because a few times the person was caught on video. But how do you prove, to a court's satisfaction, that that was someone committing fraud, as opposed to someone helpfully collecting ballots for friends and family so they didn't have to drive downtown?
No, if fraud is happening then the way to prevent it is by putting rules in place to make it hard, rather than court cases afterwards. It's very very hard to prove certain kinds of election fraud (such as alleged ballot-stuffing) were fraudulent. But it's a lot easier (not easy, mind you) to put rules in place, like requiring some form of official photo ID for verification, that make fraud harder to commit.
I don’t know how you can say people looked hard for fraud in 2020 when the lawsuits happened long after the ballots were counted. How would a lawsuit even reconstruct what happened in an election that happened months before where nobody was keeping detailed records?
The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.
HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:
* Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media
* Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud
* Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest
* As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair
* Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud
* Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out
(1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue
(2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue
(3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims
Quoting a bit of it:
> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.
The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).
Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:
> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]
How would you even verify past elections? You can point to millions spent on commissions and lawyers, but those can’t go back and generate data that was never contemporaneously collected.
Think of it in terms of computer security. You had a telnet server exposed to the internet for years. You have no logs, and the machine got scrapped before you ever got access to it. How would you do a security audit to determine if anyone broke into the server? You could spend millions on a commission and have the commission declare there was no security breach, but that would be for show, right?
You say people don’t look too hard for tax evasion, but people don’t look very hard for voter fraud as the voting is happening. And by its nature it’s something that you can’t reliably look for after the election has happened.
If you show up to the polling place, you need to list the name and address of a registered voter in that district. How do you know this information?
If you use a relative or acquaintance whose name and address you know they're registered at, when they show up to vote it will be noted that they have already voted. They can then put in their preliminary ballot, and presumably their signature will more closely match the fraudulent one and the real one will be counted.
There are enough basic hurdles to this that I don't see how it can even be done at scale.
If you're trying to register in someone else's name, you have to pray that they don't register themselves or show up to the polls to vote. That's a gamble which prevents systematic individual voter fraud.
(I was a bit concerned because the hospital I was born in had been razed and the whole area redeveloped 50 years ago, but there was no problem.)
A couple weeks ago I went to the nearest DMV and got a RealID. It took 15 minutes. (The RealID is proof of citizenship and residency.)
The DMV people and the people in the passport office are very helpful in how to get the necessary proof.
That's nice and matches my obviously-not-north-american experience. Have you considered that you are not the target audience of the voter suppression because of something ?
No. You register once and that applies to all future elections (at least until you update your registration for whatever reason, e.g. because you changed addresses).
> and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something?
Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
> What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place.
If the birth certificate is from somewhere within the US, then validating the birth certificate is usually just a matter of contacting the county clerk where you were born. If it's from somewhere outside the US, then you ain't eligible to vote anyway unless you've gone through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen — in which case you'd have more appropriate identifying documents that you'd use in place of your birth certificate.
It's nitpicking, but you can be a citizen by birth without either having a birth certificate from a country you are citizen of and without naturalizing, but you will have some other document in that case too.
>Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
Isn't it circular? To be in the database you are checked against the database?
It's turtles^Wdatabases all the way down.
On the other hand, there are other ways for people to steal elections. For example, you can steal mail-in ballots from mailboxes, fill them, and covertly drop them in. It's particularly easy to do in states where all ballots are mail-in by default. The risk-reward calculation is different, because now one organized person can cast dozens, or hundreds of fraudulent votes, instead of just one.
In other states, you don't even need to steal them: you can just knock on the door, ask people for ballots (or buy them, many people will happily sell their right to vote for $20, because it's worthless to them), fill them in, and drop them off completely in the open. Of course, the stealing/buying and filling in the ballots is illegal, but since this happens in private, it's much harder to detect and prosecute. That's why most states disallow dropping off votes for third parties, but some states inexplicably allow it.
There are multiple recent cases, where people were convicted for schemes like that, e.g State of Arizona v. Guillermina Fuentes, Texas v. Monica Mendez, Michigan v. Trenae Rainey, U.S. v. Kim Phuong Taylor, and more. Since these are only the cases where conviction was secured, the true number is much higher.
The official website says they collect either a driver's license number, state ID number, or the last 4 digits of your Social Security number. With that it should be trivial to flag potentially fraudulent applications for further investigation.
Do you have a source that says they don't use that information for verification?
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/voter-registration/r...
https://www.thurstoncountywa.gov/departments/auditor/electio...
Yes, it does. But who and how is someone going to challenge 100,000 registrations? This issue was brought up in the paper, and people objected to it saying such was an invasion of privacy.
There's usually an immediate personal benefit from evading taxes and not getting caught. Fraudulent voting doesn't have that.
This is explicitly not required, at least last time I volunteered as a polling place worker. You should NEVER be required to show ID to vote, at least in CA.
If you're trying to fake it, you need to know what address and name someone else is registered at, what polling place they were assigned, and you have to hope they don't show up to vote too.
All of these uncertainties mean it's pretty difficult for an individual to do any serious (if any!) voter fraud.
Remember we had voting for a long time before magnetic strips and plastic.
I have to show ID to get into my local zoo, but not to vote someone onto the board in charge of the zoo. That doesn't make sense.
That prompts an investigation. The “right” person casts an affidavit ballot and the police and courts investigate. If the count is close, the loser usually sure to recount and verify, and any of these incidents then become political kindling. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t worth it individually and difficult to coördinate en masse.
[^] except for the case of felony disenfranchisement laws, which I personally believe are a travesty
This can be argued for any hindrance to bureaucracy. On the balance you get a much more robust system, with fewer centralized fail-safes.
Trust in the system should always be highly valued even if the skepticism is largely unwarranted. Saying a lawsuit hasn't caught it yet won't persuade many skeptics.
It wasn't a factual argument to begin with, wholly based on vibes and fear of Other
No, no, no. January 6 is a systemic failure.
The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.
Even leaving aside the whole "Trump doesn't care if his lies are credible" thing, the US system works very poorly there. Mail-in voting, drive-in voting, voting machines, they leave room for suspicion, no matter how confident the people running the system are.
The systemic failure is not in a voting system in this case, unfortunately.
We had front-page news about how the election was "hacked by Russia" and trump cheated for over a year after his first win in 2016 (let's not pretend that keyword was chosen accidentally); They tried to put him in jail for it. In 2020, trump did the exact same thing and went even farther with it. And in 2024, the DNC tried again to claim cheating happened.
How many cycle of this BS do we need to go through before we accept that elections need to be done properly and safely?
The entire point of a democracy is that elected leaders get their legitimacy and their acting power from the certainty that it was voted by the population. Not everyone will agree with their ideas, but the majority do and we all agree to follow their lead because that's what the population want. If the vote is compromised, everything falls apart.
If the "will of the people" turn into the "will of an intern at Dominion who fucked with the code and rigged the election" or "the will of Pakistani hacker", it breaks the entire system.
The Russia allegations ranged from "Russia hacked DNC servers/accounts to interfer in favor of Donald Trump" (demonstrably true in several instances) to "Russia hacked voting machines" (very probably false). And then in 2024 the DNC quickly accepted election results.
By comparison, Donald Trump still claims that he legitimately won the 2020 elections, the majority of his base still believes it, Fox News spent years spreading that message even though their own journalists thought it was bullshit, etc.
I maintain that this is a systemic problem and a better system would not have given Trump the leeway to do this, but let's not pretend it's a bipartisan issue.
Does it?
This is the third election in a row where the losing party claim the election was not legitimate and/or hacked.
You have to be registered and must vote within your electorate, so your name appears on a certified list for that electorate and each voting location has that list. When you vote, they strike your name from the list.
After the election, the lists from these locations are compared. Anyone who votes twice has their name struck twice, and are investigated for electoral fraud.
Whether people know if you voted or not is immaterial, as voting is mandatory in Australia.
Works pretty well for a paper system.
(A few people voting more than once is unlikely to change the results of an election. If enough fraud is detected to impact the results, they'll run a new election.)
Given they are usually random primary schools and churches... do they have cameras?
I think the bigger deterrent is just the risk of claiming to be someone who already got ticked off at the same booth, which would immediately raise suspicions.
each citizen gets an anonymized private key via a secure channel (eg. postal) and use that to vote.
votes are double enveloped: outer envelop: anonymized id + inner envelop: vote.
mixnet separates the votes and cryptographically shuffles them to decouple relationships.
only at the end the shuffled votes are decrypted using the private key of the election itself that was split using shamir secret sharing (eg 5 out of 7 shares to reconstruct)
the thing that’s not clear from the article and it’s a shame is that it seems the failure was the hardware (the 3 USB keys) not the election software. This could be simply avoided by having redundancy on the hardware (2 USBs per share) or more shares themselves (5 out of 9 shares)
My state, Oregon, for example uses a very straightforward vote by mail system. They ask if you wanna register to vote when you get/update your drivers license or state id. Your ballot just comes in the mail, you fill it out, send it back. For folks that lack a permanent address or similar, you can get provisional ballots at libraries and similar city offices. The provisional ballots make you fill out enough information to check if you're allowed to vote.
It's simple, convenient, secure, and efficient.
So why don't more states do it this way?
Unfortunately there's a long ugly history of using all sorts of dirty tricks for voter suppression in the US, in particular to keep Jim Crow going. And unfortunately variations of that continue today. I don't have the energy to dig into it fully here, I just want any international readers to be aware there's a whole lot of utterly craven bad faith when it comes to discussions around voting fraud and security in the US.
Maintain a list of identity hashes. When someone goes to vote, deny them if they're already in the list . Otherwise, add their hash to the list then allow a vote to be cast.
When I go to cast a vote in Italy I bring with me my state issued photo ID (everybody has one, I mean: must have one) and a state issued sheet of paper with the address of the place I must go to vote and a grid of empty spaces. I don't have to register to vote, basically I'm registered at birth. The people at the polling station take my two cards and look for me in their registry. They mark that I came to vote, stamp an empty space on the second card and handle me the paper ballots. I think that in this way it's both anonymous and verifiable. When the card with the stamps is full, they mail me a new one.
The state definitely know where people live. Babies are registered when they are born and people have to register any change of their address of residence. It's been like that at least since Italy became a country in the 1860s.
By the way, how do I know that they counted my vote as I cast it? I can't know it. I must trust that they did not open the box and replaced the ballots, but people from the several competing parties visit the polling station and can attend the counting. I trust that process much more than something happening inside a computer program.
Isn't that what secure hashes do? ID to hash is anonymous and checking for duplicate hashes verifies only voting once.
An extremely simple scheme is allowing voters to enter an identifier of their choosing and displaying that with the votes publicly. This is both verifiable and anonymous.
Any issues you can come up with this scheme are also iirc pretty easily solvable.
Seems like the obvious solution here would be for the voting machine to generate two separate records:
- A record of the vote itself, without specifying the voter
- A record of the voter having voted, without specifying for whom/what
And of course, if the number of vote records doesn't match the number of voter records, then shenanigans have likely ensued, warranting an election fraud investigation.
Nah, that still boils down to "you have to trust government". And I preferred when "Why would they care how I vote?" was a rhetorical question.
Actually, I think there might be a way to get both. I've been thinking about this while building my app SoWasIt.
The idea: A public chain records that "user X voted at time T" (like a digital voter roll). It's immutable and public. "user X" could contain voter Id, name, like on a signing sheet. The vote itself (the choice) is stored separately, with a random UUID generated. Privately during the vote, no timestamp, no incremental id, no link to the voter. The UUID is sent back to the voter who will use it to verify his vote integrity. At the end, all votes are published in batches (anonymous UUID + choice in clear). Ideally in an immutable chain so it can't be altered later (and ideally for me on my app )
=> You can verify your vote by looking for your UUID in the final table. => You can verify that the number of votes matches the number of voters (public chain count = final table size) => you can verify the counting for each candidate
=> You can't link a UUID to a voter unless you have both the UUID and the voter's identity, which only the voter knows.
It's not perfect, you still need to trust that the system doesn't secretly store the link between voter and UUID, or have a man-in-the-middle system to intercept votes whil it's processed. And to not add fake voters: That's why you need to publish something like voter cards ids, so that anyone can go to the administration, check that a specific voter actually exists.
So no, it's not impossible to have both anonymity and verifiability – it's just hard, and it shifts the trust to other parts of the system. But that's politics, not just tech
Anyway, in my humble opinion, people manage to cheat with traditional paper vote (mostly because citizens don't care enough to spend time lokking after the ballot box till the end), electronic can only make things worse. And as the French comedian Coluche once said: "If voting really changed anything, it would have been banned a long time ago."
I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.
No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.
It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.
We vote during the day... polls close in the evening... A few hours later we have the results. Hand counted, for the entire country.
What is the difference?
The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.
This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot.
There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.
Paper voting worked for thousands of years and was at the core of the foundation of this country.
There is no need to compromise the results of the election just to scale in a slightly more efficient way. If you need 10x more people because the volume is 10x higher, just hire 10x more people.
Edit: I just realized you also mentioned "voter-passes" when entering the voting site. That definitely makes it much harder! If those were corrupted you could still pull it off, but that level of sophistication is really likely to get caught.
You are misunderstanding "who to trust".
The source of trust in a paper vote election is your party's representative + independent election observers. You believe them that they were sitting at the polling station all day, watching both the voting and counting, and nothing fishy happened. You don't have to trust the state officials in any way, and you don't have to trust any one else either. Just your party - which is kind of the point. The only people you maximally trust is your party.
In your proposal, you are saying that to trust the outcome, I must trust the state officials - the ones who built the machines. Those are exactly the people I distrust to do a fair election.
They absolutely can. Brazil uses electronic voting machines and that exact method was proposed to increase the trustworthiness of the system. We'd get the best of both worlds: fast vote counting and an auditable paper trail that serves as the ultimate truth.
Supreme court declared it unconstitutional using total bullshit arguments ranging from "it compromises voting secrecy" to "it's hard to implement", thereby fueling concerns that the voting machines are compromised.
If it's counted electronically from the database, the piece of paper is completely worthless. Unless you can get the entire voting population to give you their paper and then count them, you will never know if the count is right. If a hacker switched 15% of the vote from one party to another, how could you tell from a piece of paper that tells you who you voted for?
Yes, it's not foolproof, attacker can just modify the electronic voting data in places where he knows people don't usually do recounting. But it makes his job harder
I have a hard time believing that it collected exactly 2,048 votes by coincidence
Every election has "bunch of weird stuff happening" because every election has losers that don't like to lose, either with paper or e-vote.
To use a soccer analogy, it is like the losing team that blames the referee.
The ones complaining about "bunch of weird stuff happening" are just playing Trump.
In fact, the issue of fair elections in Brazil has become background noise because of these so called "referees". They have usurped so much power elections are just theater at this point. It doesn't matter who wins because in the end it's the judge-kings who rule the country. There's no point in even discussing the matter until their fall.
Maybe a dual system of paper ballots and e-voting could be good so that they cross check each other. Can't stuff paper ballots without manipulating the digital counter, can't manipulate the digital counter without stuffing ballots. A digital counter also enables meta analysis which could identify suspicious patterns, like a wave of votes for a particular candidate.
Someone gets hand of an empty ballot, they fill in the ballot and give it to you and tell you to come back with another empty ballot. Rinse and repeat. Of course, with today's smartphones there are simpler ways to do this. Also moot if you can vote by mail, which is why voting by mail is a really bad idea.
The ballot you throw in the box does not have the sticker (vote is anonymous) and you cannot come in with a pre-marked ballot (and being out one) cause the number would not match.
For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption. That's one of the major reasons such a system will likely never appear.
OTOH, it enables vote buying and intimidation at scale: you vote from home in exchange for 5€/not being beat up and have to film yourself doing it, so that the local bad guy gets authorized to bulldoze the local nature reserve.
Vote buying and intimidation already exist, but proving it is harder, all remote voting on everything would just make it more convenient.
And bigger picture, once you prove a system that’s easier, more efficient, reliable… you could expand to more votes on more things. Like… the Swiss do.
—-
(A German advocating for paper-based bureaucracy… whatever next? ;) )
So paper systems require ballot boxes and polling stations for the vast majority, which makes elections expensive, complicated, and generally problematic. And unpopular, with low turnout, particularly during flu season and pandemic.
Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.
And of course controlled vote or paid vote...
E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.
If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-German, good luck with that :D.
Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.
A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not everybody, but it is much better than any hypothetical digital system
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...
The area isn't that much of a problem
There is always, so you would just always count the ballots.
The distance between the election and the taking of the office is often months. I just don't understand why electronics need to be involved at all in this system.
Also it's not just elections to offices, but also votes on yes/no propositions, which can take effect more or less immediately.
Why?
> which can take effect more or less immediately.
In our jurisdictions they're usually reserved. Courts can be used to challenge laws as unconstitutional. And you typically want a bright line implementation date that everyone can see coming.
In Switzerland the courts have no power to rule laws as unconstitutional - this is a power reserved to the people (who are sovereign), via referendums. So when the people strike down a law at referendum, that takes effect immediately as the voting population is the "final instance". Usually when they vote positively for something, there is still then some implementation period - sometimes quite a lot of it, e.g. there was a vote to reform the tax system passed on Sunday, and it will take effect according the government at the start of _2032_.
Paper ballots work just fine if done correctly and most democracies have a long history of knowing how to do them correctly with very high stakes.
Electronic (or even online) votes are fine for low stakes stuff, like what the color of that new bridge ought to be, but not to select the fate of a whole nation.
First you must explain to them why the former is not an example of the latter.
> eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones.
I suggest you explain the verifiability of evoting systems to your grandma or your friend with an art degree. Then ask them to explain the same to their peer while you just listen. Then repeat the exercise with paper voting. You will see the difference.
Even I as someone who would have the skillset to understand why it has to be correct would have an easier time verifying a paper ballot process than ensuring that network connected complexity behemoth was running the program I checked for weeks correctly in any moment during an election. And even if you had a way to guarantee that, who tells me this was the case in the whole country or thst evidence wasn't faked a millisecond before I checked?
Meanwhile with paper and poll watchers from each party it is very easy to find actual irregularities and potential tampering — trust is a gradual thing with paper while it is much more binary with digital. If there is a sign for the digital machine being untrustworthy you can throw the whole result into the bin.
The problem with e-voting is that it gives the losers an infinite number of things to complain about and challenge the election.
It is also interesting which role human psychology plays in this. Trump for example used the late trickeling in of the mail vote to incite the January 6th riots. His followers found it shady that the gote changed in the end.
If you still consistently miscount so that popular power isn't aligned with the electoral results, you will still face all the problems a democracy was designed to avoid. Starting with violent protests and revolutions.
But then, most countries fail this at other stages already.
This isn't rocket science.
The system should be so obviously secure that any person walking into a poll station should intuitively understand, seeing the poll workers, why fraud would be very hard to perform, so that when their favourite populist candidate loses and claims fraud, they think "that doesn't make sense".
If the voter needs to read technical documentation to understand why the populist is wrong, it's already too late.
Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.
Technically you don't even need that, you just need to be able to count, i.e. find the successor to a given number.
https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...
Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
My Līberum Cōnsilium (see references on page 55):
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/...
Looks like some block-size thing.
That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested people voting anyway.
Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of Democracy process.
I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there, but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.
When voters are voting for things, for example a tax levy to fund a new school, or for who will be their state or federal congressional representatives, it's important that the voters in that school district or in that congressional district are the ones voting for their representatives or for the bills or initiatives that affect them. This isn't quite as important for national elections, gubernatorial races, or for the senate at the federal level, but it's obviously incredibly important the more local you get.
Without voter registration, that model breaks down. Even mundane things like how much staff and equipment should be at a polling location is not easy to figure out when you don't know how many voters you'll have. If you haven't worked as a poll worker it's really enlightening to learn about how the process works and a great way to meet your neighbors.
https://www.sos.mn.gov/elections-voting/register-to-vote/reg...
I'm not sure how it is in Switzerland, but in Canada I will vote for maybe three candidates in five years. And I don't mean three visits to the polls (though it's usually that), I mean three actual checkbox ticks for people to count. They're paper ballots and the counting is done that night. I think if we were stuck voting for like forty different races every two years it would be a very different story and a lot of what you say would resonate with me more. Except the voter registration stuff.
We're pretty flexible about registration up here and it works. My wife one year showed up with some mail that had her name/address, and me vouching for her. Though I think a lot of the luxuries of democracy are most easily enjoyed with a trusting, cooperative culture that isn't constantly wound up about being cheated by the others.
I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.
This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive, then you are effectively restricting voting access for citizens. A measure to place stricter qualifications on voting access needs to also carefully consider and account for providing access to all citizens.
The US is a geographically very large place with worse public transportation options compared to many other countries, and with that comes differences in economic and accessibility considerations for things like "Just go to your county's office and get a qualifying ID."
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/will-save-act-allo...
Which is why I'm pretty sure it's not gonna pass. Both republicans and democrats depend heavily on mass votes from, let's just say, a lot of people who are, generally speaking, not the sort to have passports.
Additionally, just over 1% of adult U.S. citizens do not have any form of government-issued photo identification, which amounts to nearly 2.6 million people.[1]
[1] https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Voter%20I...
This a very is a poor analogy that you have here.
I completely agree and I don't think there is a fair argument to suggest otherwise.
I absolutely support ID to vote provided that everyone who is eligible and wants to vote can get such an ID and vote without hassle.
I don't support most attempts to pass Voter ID laws because I am wary that they would not actually result in that outcome.
Also, it’s a pretty silly thing anyways. I don’t even drink and I still need my driver’s license quite a few times every year.
"...based on HSI Special Agent training and experience, REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship."
https://www.dhs.gov/archive/real-id-public-faqs
For example, DACA recipients, temporary protected status refugees, and citizens of states in free association with the USA (Micronesia/Marshall Islands/Palau) that are in the USA are all eligible for Real ID.
This is completely unnecessary.
We establish citizenship, very reliably, at time of registration. This is on of the main jobs of the registrar of voters. They have plenty of time to look up the details of the person and establish citizenship (and intentionally lying in this process is a serious crime).
We then establish identity at the time of voting, again, very reliably.
Intentional voter impersonation or voting when not eligible is vanishingly rare in the US.
At no point during that process is there presentation of proof of citizenship.
Source: actually ran a fucking election precinct. Non-citizens aren’t casting ballots illegally.
Also just generally it's a severe federal crime to vote illegally, so people who are here illegally aren't out en masse publicly tying their identity to federal felonies.
There's not been a reliable audit to show the extent to which this happens (probably not enough to affect even local elections), but to say that it isn't happening is just a lie.
In states that bother, millions have been removed from voter rolls who weren't eligible in recent years, but the DOJ hasn't done anything with the data either.
As for the removal of millions from various voter rolls, you'll have to be more specific; most of these are administrative tasks being performed as they are meant to be performed, and very few of the millions removed are non-citizens. Most are removed because they've died, or moved, or failed to respond to inquiries, etc. Oregon, for example, recently moved to remove 800,000 voters from their rolls, but again, this was an administrative move; the voters were already marked as inactive and inactive voters in Oregon do not receive ballots. Removing them wasn't a priority, but now it is, so they're doing it. The point is that millions being removed is not really a cause for alarm or a sign of fraud; it's just a sign that you're unaware of how the system works.
He should go to jail and yet his existence is not proof that there are hoards of African deportees voting in state and federal elections.
What they say is that it does not happen enough to plausibly come close to affecting the outcome. And this is widely supported, including by right-wing organizations (as a sibling comment observes).
As with most issues, there is a trade-off here. As you tighten controls to prevent improper voting, you prevent some people from realistically being able to vote (it's just too hard, time consuming or expensive for them to meet the documentation requirements), and discourage others. This is particularly bad for the 1-2 elections after the rule change, which most people won't know about until they show up to vote. IMO, this is really the point of the changes.
And you have to weigh that negative against the supposed benefit. But that benefit is really hard to find. It's very clear that intentional voter fraud (fraud in registration, or in-person impersonation) is extremely rare, and does not come anywhere close to affecting outcomes. It's already a crime, and we seem to be pretty good at catching it.
The other argument for a benefit is that it improves voter confidence in elections. I reject this, since the only reason the public at large has any real concerns is because of intentional misinformation by the right. You can't lie to people to convince them there is a problem, and then use that to justify your heavy handed solution.
> Source: actually ran a fucking election precinct. Non-citizens aren’t casting ballots illegally.
So, you can see people are actually claiming that it doesn't happen. Further,
> It's already a crime, and we seem to be pretty good at catching it.
How can we be good at catching it if it is too hard for our own citizens to actually get proof that they are citizens? We hear about the cases that happen, but we don't hear about the people go go undetected, because they go undetected.
At that last part, Election Day identification, is not even that important, since the same person can't vote twice. So if you impersonate another person that will be quickly detected. It's not a useful strategy to alter the outcome of an election.
These kind of fundamental changes require years of preparation. Either Trump is an incompetent moron or he has ulterior motives.
Requiring poor people to pay a hefty fee, which they probably don't have, to get a passport seems a fairly competent way to go about making sure poor people don't vote to me.
If I don't want poor people voting, then attaching a fee to voting doesn't mean I'm incompetent. It means I'm smart enough to know poor people don't have money.
By the way, I think all of this is horrible. Everyone should be equal before the law and should have their vote count without having to pay for that right. I'm just pointing out that this is a really good way to eliminate the vote of the poor.
In a functioning democracy, voting is sacred. It must be treated as THEE core, fundamental right of every person under its care.
To violate this sacred tenet should be immediate grounds for exile. If you can't respect the ONE CORE tenet, or are incapable of, then there is not space for you in this society.
Coincidental how these might be Democratic leaning areas in Republican states.
But anyway, none of that is the real core issue with the idea of voter ID. The real issue is that there are many living Americans who were born in jurisdictions that steadfastly refused to issue birth certificates to Black people.
This sounds made up but limiting access to “free” services is not unheard of. This topic has been litigated to death. There are no new arguments. If you are in favor of voter ID laws you are simply ignorant.
If they can't put up some minimal effort, what was their vote worth? I don't think the laziest folks probably vote in good policy.
I'm not worried about lazy people voting. I'm worried about crazy people voting, and not having enough votes from sensible people to drown them out.
[1] (Though mass disenfranchisement is almost certainly the actual purpose of the law, not security.)
It's pretty free. You sit down at your table, fill out your ballot, and drop it in the mailbox. You don't even need a stamp. (In some jurisdictions.)
https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2024/10/time-off-to-vote-...
Given how often ID is required outside of voting, it seems to me like this would be a big win for people, if getting an ID is so hard for some.
Do you have a source for this because I have seen very few laws like this and runs counter to the overt intention of these laws
The WI constitution enshrines the ability to vote. So you may think it's silly and for 99% of people it may be silly, but if anyone is prevented from voting because there's not a reasonable way for them to get a license, their rights are being infringed.
Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier?
What constitutes an ID being expensive?
Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?
How it works in my country : my electoral card is freely sent to my address when I register to my voting office. I can vote with it, or with an official ID, as long as I'm in the correct place. The only moment I need my ID is to cast a vote on behalf of someone who identified me as a 'surrogate'.
Not the OP, but except for passports (and passport cards)... there isn't really any federal-level ID in the US (and passport booklets/cards are expensive, just a bit over $100 IIRC).
The nearest equivalent in the state level are driver's licenses, which are also on the expensive side considering the ancillary costs (because it's a driver's license, not just an identification card). This is also the reason why US-centric companies like PayPal, for this exact reason, accepts a driver's license as proof of identification (obviously where not otherwise prohibited by local laws).
Some (New York for example) do have an ID (called a non-DL ID, that's how embedded driver's license is in the US), but most states do not have a per se ID.
> What constitutes an ID being expensive?
Developing countries, rather ironically, issue their IDs for free? Okay, indirectly paid by taxes, but there's no upfront cost. The above-mentioned identity documents have a clear cost attached to them.
> How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?
Cannot talk about other countries (because there is an ID system and it's not a controversial affair to them), but instead I'll answer with a reflection of the US system.
Unfortunately, American ID politics are hard, mainly due to concerns of surveillance, but I think (only my opinion) because some of them want those historically disenfranchised (even if a fully native-born US citizen) de facto disenfranchised. This means that there is no uniform and freely-issued identification system in the US (or even a requirement to do that at the state level). Unfortunately, this... is a tough nut to crack, politically-speaking.
Out of curiosity, do you have a source or list for this? My own home state and those around me that I've spot checked all have a state ID available as an alternative to a driver's license. My understanding was that this is the case for most states.
Unless I've misunderstood you and you meant a state ID that is completely separate from a driver's license to the point that people with a DL would have one?
I haven't researched this thoroughly, but what state will not issue an ID that is equivalent in every way to a driver's license except that it isn't a license to drive? I just checked Mississippi, Wyoming, South Dakota, and West Virginia, all of which do, so clearly being rural, poor, or both isn't enough to stop states from doing it. (The detailed politics are, as you say, a mess.)
Not everyone has ready access to proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. It gets even more difficult if your current legal name doesn't match your birth name, e.g. if you took your husband's name.
Not every eligible voter has or needs a government issued ID. For example, retired people who don't drive. For them to get to the DMV to get an ID just to vote would be a challenge.
The US has large rural areas where government offices are hours away.
All of this adds up to significant barriers to eligible voters. There's a reason even the GOP isn't bending over backward to pass the SAVE Act.
People in or near poverty are going to be disproportionately affected by those conditions.
And just getting to the DMV does not necessarily mean you can get an ID that counts as proof of citizenship. There is no standard federal citizen ID in the US. A basic state ID or driver's license is not proof of citizenship. Even a RealID compliant ID is not a direct proof of citizenship, so depending on how strict the voting requirements are it may not be adequate.
Most of those nations have a mandatory national ID, so everyone already has proof of citizenship. The US and UK are very much outliers in having vocal and successful resistance to the implementation of a national ID card.
In some places like Illinois, an ID is required to exercise the rights of people but not the rights of citizens (FOID required to bear guns, but ID not required for vote).
In places like Arizona, it's the exact opposite. You can bear or conceal guns without an ID but you need an ID to vote.
Vermont is the only state I know of with any consistency on lack of ID requirements that convey non-ID citizens to also have the right of people. You can conceal guns and vote without ID.
And what are the fees for these IDs, something you conveniently are leaving out (hint: mostly not free)?
Not far from free? It costs €12 to obtain a Spanish DNI, and the fee is waiver for low income, or folks with lots of kids
In The Matrix (1999) there's a scene where Agent Smith explicitly remarks that Neo has an SSN as proof he's a law-abiding citizen in a white-collar job.
[1] when it was made a requirement to claim tax deductions for dependent children. Even today, if you don't want the tax break, you can opt out at the cost of ruining your child's life!
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v56n1/v56n1p83.pdf
Prior to that, getting the SSN required giving your birth certificate to the government. If the family wasn't getting government benefits, many didn't bother.
If you're talking about this as a requirement for voting, then anything greater than $0 is too expensive since it smells like a poll tax.
Minority and poor areas.
> Where is it not?
White and affluent areas.
This isn’t hypothetical. Voter suppression is as American as apple pie.
This is essentially what the Supreme Court said when they upheld Indiana's Voter ID law in 2008 [1]:
> The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies with the requirements of SEA 483. The fact that most voters already possess a valid driver’s license, or some other form of acceptable identification, would not save the statute under our reasoning in Harper, if the State required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. But just as other States provide free voter registration cards, the photo identification cards issued by Indiana’s BMV are also free. For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.
> Both evidence in the record and facts of which we may take judicial notice, however, indicate that a somewhat heavier burden may be placed on a limited number of persons. They include elderly persons born out-of-state, who may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate; persons who because of economic or other personal limitations may find it difficult either to secure a copy of their birth certificate or to assemble the other required documentation to obtain a state-issued identification; homeless persons; and persons with a religious objection to being photographed. If we assume, as the evidence suggests, that some members of these classes were registered voters when SEA 483 was enacted, the new identification requirement may have imposed a special burden on their right to vote.
> The severity of that burden is, of course, mitigated by the fact that, if eligible, voters without photo identification may cast provisional ballots that will ultimately be counted. To do so, however, they must travel to the circuit court clerk’s office within 10 days to execute the required affidavit. It is unlikely that such a requirement would pose a constitutional problem unless it is wholly unjustified.
Even a RealID compliant ID is not direct proof of citizenship.
Others in the comment chain have talked about localities with very few DMV officer per capita in some districts and appointment wait times of over a month. If we are going to require such a step to be eligible to vote, we need to hold states and municipalities to a high standard of providing an adequate level of service for all citizens.
I do not think it is that straightforward. Making it more accessible makes it possible for people with less skin in the game able to vote. Imagine how invested someone who owns several properties and businesses in a city is and how much they care about the success of the city compared to some other person who is just renting an apartment and has not even a job in that city meaning they could move at any time. The vote of the first person is much more important than the second. Trying to make voting overly accessible may make more people from the second category start voting which could result in bad decisions being made because people can easily move away if things go wrong.
The problem with e-voting is that it is much harder to validate. My paper ballot rests at a community building where it will be counted on the day of the vote. I can understand the process from start to finish in physical terms. Throw in a USB stick and anything could happen. It is possible we will never know what went wrong here.
Isn't this just a solution in search of a problem though? Multiple investigations have discovered absolutely minuscule amount of non-citizen voting in US elections. It's something that seems reasonable on its face but lacks any purpose and comes with an ulterior motive that it is part of the made up GOP talking points of a "stolen election" and "illegals voting".
But then they showed how easy it is to hack and we live in a world with evil countries like the US, China and Russia who want to destroy our way of life.
This would be less of a problem if the US had some sort of national ID issued by right, but we don't, and the same people pushing for requiring ID for voting would be against creating one. They hate the idea of a national ID.
My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even work?
All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?
Trump told Congress to ban most mail ballots.
> All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?
Experts said no. But this Supreme Court surprised experts before. And the constitution said Congress could decide elections of Congress. They have the power. They need an explanation enough people would accept.
Elections are run by the several states.
I don't have much hope for Congress doing the same.
How could the Supreme Court justify Congress could not decide elections of Congress?
My broader point was that the Judical Branch itself is starting to show some signs of backbone regarding the unchecked flexing going on in the Executive Branch. I was more talking about where you said:
> Experts said no. But this Supreme Court surprised experts before.
That generally, maybe, hopefully the Executive Branch will get a surprise or two as well.
I can be naively hopeful at times.
Restricting voting to people with passports and who happen to have a birth certificate handy is going to make the first election with the requirement weird as hell and probably backfire on Republicans if their goal is winning at any cost.
Requiring some form of ID that your state is willing to accept as good enough is a very different beast than proof of citizenship.
Go and try to figure out how to do this from scratch. Imagine your house burned down and you need to start with "nothing".
If your parents are still alive you can use them to bootstrap the process of getting those vital documents (or if you're married that can be another semi viable path).
Pitty if you don't have those resources. Furthermore it might get complicated for any partner who adopts their other partners last name (were talking about getting the documents, before you can get some sort of verified ID).
The reality is we don't have a lot of instances of "voter fraud" committed by people who aren't citizens (see: https://www.facebook.com/Louisianasos/posts/secretary-of-sta... as an example) . And the amount of voter fraud we do have is very small (and ironically committed by citizens see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio... for some examples).
> I am in favor of in-person voting
Again, the size and dispersion of the American population makes this odious. Dense urban areas will face lines (they already do) and many of them (Chicago) have moved to early voting because spreading things out over many days is just more effective. Meanwhile places like Montana (where population density is in people per square mile) make travel to a location burdensome.
I get why you feel the way you do, but the data, the reality of America, makes what you desire unnecessary and impractical. Feelings are a terrible reason to erect this barrier when it makes little sense to do so.
Even if it were a holiday, people may not be able to travel or take time off from obligations. There’s no obligation to drive 2 hours to vote, to fly back if you work in another country, or to go get a new birth certificate because Real ID doesn’t prove citizenship even though you provide citizenship documents to it when you get one…
I’ve heard of a lot of takes here about what we should do for voting to make it “more secure” but all of this is actually a solution for a problem we just don’t have.
The appropriate time to verify citizenship is the one that already happens: during registration. Poll workers only need to verify who you are and that you're registered.
But there seems to be either no political will, or some issues with the practical implementations. There were some municipal experiments here and there, and then just… crickets. Anyone knows what happened to those efforts?
The only thing voter ID prevents is voter impersonation. It prevents you from finding someone else's name and polling place, going there, pretending to be that person, and submitting a vote on their behalf. But that threat doesn't really scale. Even if you assume no one at the polling places notice you coming to vote over and over under different names, a single person could probably only do this a few dozen times on election day. To scale that you would need more people; and every person you add to the scheme increases the odds of someone slipping up or getting caught. But the real issue is if any of the people you are impersonating try to vote! While election officials don't record what people voted for, they do record who voted, and the ballot counting process will automatically note that people voted multiple times. So you would have to figure out some way to gather a database of a large number of people you know aren't going to vote, and get a bunch of people to turn up at a bunch of polling places under those names. It's just not practical to do, when elections are decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes.
> how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)
The devil is in the details. I don't trust that the groups drafting Voter ID legislation are doing so in good faith. For example, North Dakota passed a voter ID law years ago. It stated that you needed a valid state-issued ID that included a street address. Sounds fine, right? The problem is that most homes on Native American reservations don't actually have street addresses. Tribal members use P.O. boxes for mail, and that P.O. box is on their driver's licenses. This was brought up when the law was proposed, but it passed anyway. The Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux tribes had to sue in federal court. They were eventually successful, but it took years, and in the meantime the 2018 midterms were held with many Native Americans literally unable to vote.
See https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806083852/north-dakota-and-na...
Why?
> I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)
How do other countries run elections to overcome their racially motivated systemic voter suppression?
> and there are certainly things to discuss there
This is a laughable understatement.
> but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society.
I think this is naive. You are attempting to force an outcome without understanding the cause. Systemic racially motivated voter suppression is an undeniable reality in American politics. Voter ID is a clear example of exactly that. It is used to disenfranchise minority voters. This is clear established fact.
There is zero evidence of any voter fraud happening that would be eliminated by additional voter ID.
This is a serious topic that requires you educate yourself on reality. I suggest you take your advice above and touch reality, you are overly digitalized if you think voter ID has any merit at all.
Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.
The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.
sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can be used for good or bad ends, and I felt the Swiss were using it more towards good ends. But I agreed that the ability to misuse it is intrinsic.
[1] https://www.news.admin.ch/en/newnsb/ZLw6w1GV_UdJKDocuT0sX
It’s not a United States issue. Look how Taiwan does vote counting: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. They don’t do it this way because of anything distinctive about American politics. Being self-evidently difficult to manipulate, without requiring voters to trust an opaque system, is an intrinsic benefit for voting systems.
That's a thing pretty much everywhere. Developed countries such as Germany automatically enroll everyone eligible based on the registration data (you gotta register at the local authority after moving), but even we have a deadline if you think you should be eligible but didn't get a voting invitation to sort that out.
The big problem is, the folks who count the votes and cheat. They can invent an arbitrary number of votes to swing their guy.
Let's worry about the problems that matter.
Electronic voting has lots of advantages. It can be end-to-end verified, it can be a great help to disadvantaged people (blind, illiterate), it can deliver results faster, it can probably be made more robust to retail-level tampering than paper ballots provided a paper audit trail it kept (as all electronic systems designed with security in mind do).
The one question mark in my mind: the current US system resisted Trump's efforts to corrupt it pretty well. I think that was because of the inertia created all the people involved in staffing the ballot stations, counting and verifying the votes. The machinations of the electoral college being highly visible put people doing the wrong thing at high risk for decades after Trump leaves the stage.
An automated electronic system could remove a lot of that human inertia. Human efficiency is not an advantage in an electoral system, it's a weakness. You want as many people involved as possible.
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
No thanks.
Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.
This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.)
Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.
[Whether that's worth it, I'll not make a statement on.]
And is there good data on the relative costs?
For HN I would have expected a more detailed discussion of what could have gone wrong (it seems like a bug in some software package since we have this power of 2 ^ 11 being 2048
You'll get there Switzerland, it can be done. It is safer and faster.
But I think that the main reason is that Brazil's elections were a lot dirtier and a lot more unreliable than Switzerland's.
What I mean is that the push towards e-voting is much stronger in countries with unreliable elections, because e-voting is harder to tamper than the crude ways you can defraud paper ballots.
Switzerland's and other organized countries have elections that are "good enough", so the push towards e-voting is probably not that strong.
Is the "leapfrog" concept. Sometimes it is easier to adopt newer technologies in places where the existing ones are horrible. Other examples: electronic payment systems, solar panels and EVs in India and Africa.
But in continental countries like Brazil it makes a lot of sense. It is cheaper, faster and safer.
> E-voting can be hacked from the other side of the world, because it happens on computers
How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a computer that isn't even online? True, the transmission of computed results is made online, but keeping that safe is trivial, banks do it.
E-voting in this case means that they can vote from their computer, ipad or mobile phone. They are connected to the internet.
Supply chain attacks. You just need to get in there before everything is cryptographically signed and sealed.
The best part is even if they published the source code for everything it would prove nothing. I seriously doubt the builds are reproducible. Lack of source-to-binary correspondence means source code would serve only to embarrass anyone protesting the electronic voting system.
As it stands, nothing short of a full audit of the complete signed software image that the machine booted and executed on election day would suffice. The judge-kings are on the record saying this system is UNQUESTIONABLE so they should publish the image on the internet and let the whole world take a look. I'm sure no faults will be found.
Swiss votes are scheduled in advance, but the explanatory material and campaign flyers still have to be made and in order to be topical you don't want to make them too early. In particular the consequences of previous votes can affect the upcoming votes, and the closest interval is only 2 months (September/November).
That said, Brazilian elections are completely unverifiable. They don't seem to be false, but it's hard to say anything that would be different if they were.
When it started, at the 90s, the machines were at least simpler and possible to verify up to the firmwares. Nowadays, they are not.
The government _must_ come to every city to collect votes.
Internet Voting https://phrack.org/issues/69/11
From Wikipedia [1]:
> A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project.
The votes made up less than 4 percent of those cast in Basel-Stadt and would not have changed any results