Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarek | Hacker News Reader

> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

Or that they don't happen...

> Or that they don't happen...

Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up.

If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.

Other countries rely less on machines where this sort of thing is even possible. The fact that human-built systems are likely to contain errors is an argument for making these system as simple as possible. The fact that we use touchscreen voting machines in the U.S., with all the hidden errors (honest or malicious) they can introduce into the canvass, is insane.

Yes! People are surprised when I hear that I, as a software developer, am utterly opposed to touch-screen voting and internet voting.

California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise.

I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.

Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?

What system, in your opinion, would minimize error?

> Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?

What on earth? I marked the candidate I wanted to vote for with an X in a circle on a paper ballot. Marking circles for more than one candidate is a spoiled ballot you can replace instead of depositing if you wish. This isn't rocket science.

Normal(paper) vote with one reviewer per political party.

Computer-based systems that print out a machine-readable paper ballot that can be hand-counted as well. You vote (perhaps with a touch screen, perhaps not) by making your selections, printing out your ballot, examining it, and inserting it into the tabulator once printed.

There's still plenty of margin for error (for instance, the printer could run misprint or run out of ink, the tabulator could be buggy), and corruption ("here, let me file that for you...") but I think it maximizes the benefits of touchscreen voting for disabled voters while minimizing the downsides.

We don't have voting machines exactly for that reason (Germany). There have been cases with voter fraud, but they got solved with recounts.

Oh, they get reported on (Netherlands). Usually there are four, five polling places in the country where there are problems with voting boxes or ballots. Yes, we have problems, but a) there doesn't seem to be intentional interference, and b) the scale is a few orders of magnitude smaller than in the US.

Must not be a programmer if you actually believe bugs don't exist.

Are there problems ("bugs")? Sure. Are there problems similar in magnitude to the 'shenanigans' in the United States of America being discussed by morsch? Quite possibly not.

what is this fantastic place?

Denmark? I've never heard of these sort of things happening around here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com