Comment by saevarom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saevarom | Hacker News Reader

I run the count at one of the constituencies. We have about 42.000 people on the electoral register and we'll probably see about 75-80% turnout, so we're going to be counting about 33.000 votes with about 30-35 people on staff, 24 of them doing the actual counting.

For the interest of the HN crowd, here is the technical report:

You'll find that the Icelandic voting system is very low tech.

The electoral registry for each local precinct is printed out and each voter is marked as having voted by hand. Three copies are made and three independent staffers make their own marks in their copy. These registers then come with the ballots to the count site to possibly exclude absentee ballots.

We use a paper ballot, marked using a pencil. Votes are counted by hand using a system of double counting and verification. Numbers are checked and cross checked throughout the process.

The count is added and checked in an Excel sheet and then reported by telephone or sometimes live broadcast to the media. Official reporting is usually via custom reports in Excel to the national electoral commission.

Low tech enables multiple interested parties to physically oversee the electoral process. That is a good thing.

I agree. It is very transparent.

The reason low tech works for something as important as voting is because it's expensive and inefficient. That expense and inefficiency is what protects it from fraud. You would need enormous sums of money to overturn an election like this even for a place as small as Iceland and even then, such amount of money wouldn't guarantee the result of future referendums.

We should never allow digital voting ever. Machines should only be allowed to help count with the ability to hand count the paper. There are so many exploits and leverage for software/hardware in any system (even closed ones) that has to be updated every year. It becomes very very hard to create a million "passable" paper votes out of thin air. It is trivial to do with a digital system.

But then, in a country of 300 plus million people like the U.S., there is a demand for getting election results as soon as possible, because without quick results, it opens the window for bad actors to claim the election was rigged. That's part of the reason why there was a motivation for digital systems. Furthermore, the U.S. In particular does a lot more than just voting for candidates. Often the ballots have referendum questions on them. There's so much voting happening that some localities vote for some of the smallest positions. I wouldnt be surprised if dogcatcher was on a ballot somewhere. As a result, the ballot size can be multiple pages in length, which just increases the amount of effort required to tally it. With the demand for very quick results, computerization naturally emerged.

I'm not sure if you are U.S. based or not, but if not, you need to understand the context as to why that system came to be. It wasn't all just nefarious. Voting intregity activists have argued for a two way verification system. Having paper ballots to provide a record that can be audited, as well as digital input so that you can achieve the goals of quick results. Obviously, two verification steps need to occur.

After the 2016 election, a lot of activists started pushing for each state to adopt this sort of system. In my particular state, NJ there used to be only electronic recording to a memory card which obviously can be tampered with. Now they have systems where you still input the votes digitally on a giant touchpad, but as soon as you make your selections, the choices you made are printed on paper and shown to you. Once you confirm that they are the selections you made, the paper is cut and dropped into a ballot box, giving you a paper record plus the digital copy.

The thing that NJ has not fully implemented is automatic two way verification. From my understading as of now results are still digitally tallied. I think Colorado has done in interesting process of mandatory risk limiting audits of the paper ballots to ensure no anamolies are present else the results are recounted manually. The problem with not doing some sort of two way verification is that the only time NJ would look back at the paper is if there's an obvious discrepancy or if a lawsuit gets filed. I'd argue that they need to take it a step further and do automatic two-way verification. Activists have proposed statistical risk auditing be implemented everywhere, so if there's any deviation, a full recount is automatically performed.

The biggest problem that I see right now is in a lot of the southern states or swing states that matter, the governments are not taking this issue seriously. And so they are still using direct electronic recording. So my frustration is: what's the point of putting in all this work if the states that really matter are not taking this seriously?

The issue is that the people claiming things are rigged are the same ones creating this opportunity and it has nothing to do with digital voting. I live in PA and the current law is that mail-in votes can't be even started to be counted until after the polls have closed. (This law had good intent so that a potential fraudster couldn't know exactly how many votes they needed.) During Covid, Democrats tried to get this law changed and Republicans categorically refused. The only reason not to is that the mail-in (especially during Covid) leaned heavily Biden so they could pretend there was fraud.

I get that people want results very quickly but I don't think paper is a restriction to that. There can just be a law that says you count votes every hour and add them to the tally. So at poll close, you only have to count a small number of late ballots and submit your totals. Everything would be done by 9:00 pm. The thing with double verification and recounts is that for 99%+ of races, the results aren't really in doubt. I do think that deviation from historical statistical patterns for a precinct should be an auto recount as well as results that are less than 1% (X votes) different. This is also where the FEC needs to step in and saw that there are federal rules for how voting must happen as this is a constitutional right, not simply a "do whatever you want" rule. Honestly, we need a new amendment to protect voting rights and stabilize the system a bit more.

All those ideas you suggested seem great. I'm sure they'd be better than the current status quo. Now, how difficult would it be to implement any of those ideas versus going state by state and convincing the local legislator to just swap out voting machines? The money is going to the same voting machine vendors anyway who probably have sway with the government and the local legislator wont get in trouble for going outside the norms(ex. No one ever got fired for buying IBM). Fortunately, some of these companies have had to deal with the pressure from the public and update the design of their voting machines to what I've described earlier.

The U.S., it should be clear by now, is just this patchwork of random laws and people blocking radical change at various levels. And everyone who wants to move forward is forced to find some other avenue to get some half baked solution in place just so they can get around the historical blocks. We see this in everything from zoning, to deploying Internet, to even fixing this system. There's just too much inertia to not change things.

We count votes in Czechia in very similar way and IMHO this beats any digital system by a mile. You don't have be an IT person to verify the count and trust the process, and the results for the entire country of 11 million are usually known in 3-4 hours.

"marked using a pencil"

Why would you not want to mark paper ballots with pens / ink which will be harder to change?

I've attended a few UK vote counts. Pencil is also used - but you can bring your own pen if you'd like.

I think it's mainly to prevent smudges as the paper is folded to be put into the ballot box. Pencils are also more reliable than pens, and have a longer shelf life between votes, I'd imagine?

At the polling stations & counts I've been to and overseen there is pretty much zero opportunity (or interest) in changing people's votes on the papers. I'd imagine this is the same in most first-world countries. In fact, once I spotted and got corrected a paper missed for a candidate opposing the candidate I was a counting agent for.

Not much different from the UK to be honest. The constituency and first past the post system means counting is a nicely decoupled distributed system.

Each constituency declares the local winner and the only outside impact is the total count of MPs for each party.

I would prefer something more complex that does give some of the smaller parties some MPs but no one seems particularly keen to change things.

Last time I voted in person in Germany it worked like that. I think a lot of the (supposed?) issues with voting in the US come from trying to automate it.

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