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Comment by hanibrel | Hacker News Reader

> In person, pure paper voting, in local community halls etc, run by volunteers is the best voting system.

Unless those volunteers are all die-hard fans of a particular party/candidate and thereby intimidating everybody that has a different opinion. (Not openly of course, but if everybody knows everybody, the mere presence suffices to sway people.)

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In Blighty, the counters (paid volunteers from the local council working voluntery overtime) are supervised and audited. Not to mention representitives from the local political parties will be present as well as the local press to oversee the proceedings. Typically the returing officer will also allow anybody else to be present and observe the proceedings, space and practicalities permitting.

The process is quite fair and rigorous.

Certainly it´s possible to rig in person voting - but if you do, people will know that you did. And that also matters.

This would need at least a majority of die-hards present in a (near) majority of polling locations. At this point, the party can probably win the election without fraud.

For the counting process you have "auditors" from all the different parties. We have that system in Argentina and it works pretty well in terms of electoral transparency. People's choices are another thing.

This seems both the least likely and easiest threat to remediate. Also the threat doesn’t scale.

Could just draft people, for example. On a local level there is also more knowledge in voters that can be compared to counts etc.

These volunteers will have a far easier time scaling their conspiracy if voting machines are involved. There are fewer points of failure to corrupt and it is easier to produce a plausible sketchy result where their guy wins by 100 votes.

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