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Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.

Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.

That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.

Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393

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Maybe that's the designed part? I mean, in lots of more "modern" countries (for the lack of better word), voting is basically showing up, presenting ID, then you can check for the results online yourself to see it registered properly, then that's it.

To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?

The system is designed to rely on fundamentally-flawed things like ID correlation and verification. Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.

> Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.

I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.

At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.

I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.

But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.

> At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals.

Until 2013, some states were under Federal preclearance rules because those "totally different goals" were historically "don't let black people vote".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder

Yeah! And that's bad!

But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".

The malicious-officials problem has fixes like "vote people out" and "decommission harmful programs" and "restore cut funding".

The busted-data-system problem has fixes like "national ID card system" or "remove regulations preventing effective data sharing" or "hold system implementors responsible for failures".

If you see the disenfranchisement/conspiracy of the former in the bureaucratic/tech debt of the latter, you'll fix the wrong problems in the wrong ways, and make things worse.

> But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".

The problem is when "oops we did a little oopsiefuckup" starts to look like a deliberate pattern to cause chaos.

American bureaucracy developed differently from European bureaucracy. In Europe countries developed very centralised governments who found it useful to track their citizens. Borders mattered (to the exact m²) and armies of conscripts needed to be raised. They needed to know exactly how many 20 year old men there were and where they lived. Chaos was not an option.

That's only possible in countries with completely broken citizen IDs (like the US and the UK). Of course correlation is messy and broken and it's not used in other countries. It's also intentional because every attempt at fixing gets stopped or even backtracked.

In other countries citizens have IDs, and the ID can be sometimes wrong (ask me how I know, although that was back in the paper era) and that's the one thing that needs to be fixed. Once the ID is correct, everything works, because that's the single source of truth after that.

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