ggm
16 days ago
I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down.
(this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship)
-I have been offered voting remotely in elections for my home economy of the UK and I would have welcomed some kind of homomorphic encrypted, secured voting method, given I have done KYC with the UK government to get my pension paid, I don't see there is a problem with them knowing who I am online.
I therefore do not totally agree with the headline, but I'm willing to be convinced by the article, because comparing the land of hanging chad to my own, I think paper and pencil is just fine. BTW we have a senate election which demands ballot papers cut from A0 paper in long strips. Hundreds of boxes to be filled in. What we don't have is the vote for every judge, official, proposition on the table, we just elect representatives and senators, but we have a complex vote method. It just works. We do machine reading, but every single paper is reviewed by people, and parties have rights to monitor the vote, in secured spaces. We do not have a serious concern with the integrity of our vote, and the question is regularly asked and tested. (it's not just because we believe its secure and don't check)
Its a great list of signatories, includes people I respect. I would think that the prime question for americans is "how much worse or better than the current approach could this be?"
Tagbert
16 days ago
Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. the counting is done by simple photoelectronic tabulators and there is a built-in, human readable record that can be checked by hand. It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. i hate the idea of using internet voting. I also don’t trust the electronic voting booths where the whole action is virtual or the older mechanical systems with the chads. Just a pen and paper is sufficient.
schmuckonwheels
16 days ago
>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen.
>It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.
Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.
Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.
Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
camgunz
16 days ago
These problems are all theoretical. If you actually tried to implement them at the scale you'd typically need to sway a federal election you'd find it pretty unworkable. And in close elections, the recount process is pretty intense, so it's even less likely that you'll be successful.
You'll probably want more detail. Ballot harvesting can't work because data analysis shows weird patterns like this ("huh this nursing home went 95% Biden whereas every other nursing home in the county went 55%"). Recounts do signature validation and lawyers from either party can challenge any ballot they want. Voters are contacted to cure their ballots. I've worked on the Democratic side and been heavily involved in doing all of this. We had armies of lawyers, software and data engineers, and organizers.
Most of the pointing out opportunities for fraud comes from a place of like, reasoning from first principles. But elections are huge undertakings involving tons of people. It's hard to successfully commit election fraud at a large enough scale to sway a federal election. It's why foreign adversaries prefer to swarm social media with bots: it has a chance of working.
beej71
16 days ago
The thing is, right now we have very little evidence that there is any significant mail-in voting fraud.
But we do have a fair amount of evidence that there is suppression of in-person voting.
So neither of these systems is perfect, but we should go with the one that gives us the most accurate legitimate vote.
Someone else posted a list of ways that in-person voting would be more acceptable, e.g. having a large window to cast ballots. But instead, we see move the other way, trying to restrict the window in which we can cast ballots.
You put a free ID in the hands of every legitimate voter and give them enough time and opportunity to vote, and then I will consider in-person to be on par with mail-in.
crote
16 days ago
> People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times.
Or more subtle: watching them vote, with the implicit threat of violence if they vote the "wrong" way.
> The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water.
In my country it is mandatory to give time off to vote if necessary. But the booths are open from 07:30 to 21:00, are located in a bunch of convenient locations (schools, libraries, train stations, shopping malls), and have basically zero waiting time, so in practice rarely anyone needs to make use of it.
ralph84
16 days ago
Ballot harvesting is viewed as a feature, not a bug, by the people who control vote-by-mail states.
ggm
16 days ago
Because they operate in a non good faith model where discouraging voting and gerrymander is normalised. The electoral commission is politicised, not neutral and independent. Because voting is held at times and dates which disadvantage working poor, because voter ID rules are capricious and partisan.
joe_mamba
16 days ago
>because voter ID rules are capricious and partisan.
Can you elaborate?
croon
16 days ago
When looking at supporters of voter ID laws, look at whether they support free IDs, expansion of DMVs/issuers of IDs, etc.
Similarly, opposition of mail-in-voting typically ignores or supports closing down polling places (in strategically partisan areas), making it difficult for groups of people to vote.
These issues are always (by design) discussed in isolation, while ignoring the intrinsically related issues.
TL;DR: Voter ID laws are fine, only if, coupled with universal free IDs for citizens. And no mail-in-voting would be fine, if voting occured on a national holiday, and polling places were reachable by all eligible voters. This is not supported by any (elected) proponent of voter ID laws or opponent of mail-in-voting.
iamnothere
16 days ago
My proposal:
- Free FEC federal voter ID (requires proof of citizenship) to be used ONLY for voting
- Voter ID can be obtained early (age 16?) but DOB is connected to ID and you can’t vote before the legal age
- Funded FEC program to register students for voter IDs at schools and colleges and teach them about voting
- FEC to work with agencies like social security and IRS to determine if a voter is deceased (messy process). Likely deceased voters are communicated to the states ASAP. States must report confirmed deceased voters to FEC ASAP for recording.
- Federal 2 week minimum early voting period
- Federal funding and monitoring of elections requiring adequate polling site coverage of geographic areas, notification of residents, etc
- Federal program to provide free shuttle to and from nearest polling station for residents without transit. Operated federally, states have no involvement. Contract with private transit as FEMA does.
- Mail in ballots heavily restricted, must provide proof of absence or be military
- Voting day is a national holiday
- Federal ballots are separate and simplified to speed up counting/recounting (ballot complexity is often cited as a reason for slow counting)
It will never happen but this would solve so many issues.
croon
15 days ago
Yes, which is why no politician who supports stricter voter ID laws or limiting mail-in-voting would support those proposals, because those issues aren't about strengthening democracy/participation but about voter suppression.
GJim
16 days ago
> Where I live we vote by mail
The problem with this, like internet voting, is that you can be coerced.
e.g. a family member or your boss can tell you who to vote for and force you to submit that vote.
Whereas a polling both is utterly private; you are alone and free from coercion. Nobody else knows who you voted for and they have no way of telling.
In the UK, our voting is also done by paper and pencil. The votes are counted overnight by humans (with plenty of checks, independent oversight and rights of recounting) with the result typically declared the next day.
Its secure, and it just works.
edmundsauto
14 days ago
If you limit your perspective to the people who can do it, yes. If you feel it’s important to enable everyone to participate, it doesn’t “just work”
Given the ample attention recently, with no evidence of impactful fraud, it sounds like disenfranchising citizens for no reason other than unrealistic fears.
But now that one party sees their voters increasingly use mailin, I expect to see a shift in opinions quickly. (Recent evidence suggests democrats benefit from low turnout more)
giobi
15 days ago
You can be coerced with paper and pencil too. In Sicily mafia gives you a voting paper with a predrawn X on the candidate they want, and you must come out with a clean voting paper so they are sure you did leave the pre-voted one.
GJim
15 days ago
In the UK, you are handed a ballot paper in the voting room by an official immediately before you go to the polling booth; the ballot paper has an official mark on it, meaning no pre-printed or duplicate ballot papers are possible.
This makes the attack you described impossible (short of having every official in the voting room being corrupt).
JanisErdmanis
15 days ago
Isn’t it still possible for the voter to not cast this ballot paper and bring it to the coercer who waits outside? Then the coercer fill this ballot and ask the next voter to cast it and bring back a blank ballot paper?
DreadY2K
15 days ago
> e.g. a family member or your boss can tell you who to vote for and force you to submit that vote.
Where i live, you can show up in-person on election day to override a mailed ballot, if you're in a situation like that.
sirdvd
16 days ago
>The problem with this, like internet voting, is that you can be coerced. As an example against coercion, on belenios faq they say that they let voter vote several times (and they count just the last vote).
M95D
16 days ago
How do you authenticate yourself for voting? Is it possible for the "boss" to prevent you from voting again for example by changing the password?
golem14
16 days ago
The problem, as I understand it, is that if you can prove to yourself that your vote was counted right, you can also prove it to the guy with the sledgehammer next to you saying "it would be a shame if something happened to your family, so prove how you voted"...
endgame
16 days ago
There are some really clever systems that let you prove that you voted without leaking how you voted.
Unfortunately, explaining them to Joe Q. Public in such a way that he's going to trust your election is a very tough sell, whereas counting paper is a much easier process to explain.
And that's before you begin worrying that the developer of your whizz-bang mathematically-provable voting system is a) going to win the bid to build it for the government, b) implements it correctly, and c) isn't subverted while doing so.
croon
16 days ago
I have had this discussion many times before, with people smarter than me, and I have not yet reached a counter argument to the idea that if you can only prove that you voted (and not couple each vote to a voter), how can you prove that innumerable votes were added to the record, or that your vote is correct?
You can either couple every vote to a voter and risk oppressive monitoring of votes at scale or coercion at micro level, OR you can have decoupled voting proving that your vote was counted, but not have convincing proof that your vote or anyone else's are accurate.
Please prove me wrong because I would love it if it was possible.
Edit: Booth/paper-voting solves this by:
* linearly scaling cost of multi-party verification of identity at time of voting
* your vote being anonymous and being decoupled from you at time of deposit
* you trust the system at scale since each step in the chain-of-custody has many-eyes-verification
* vote amount is grouped by location so vote insertion can't happen at scale without coordinating with each involved polling place to fudge each of their numbers
* you can't insert into one area without having a random 100k population increase in a polling place overnight
rstuart4133
16 days ago
You could try reading the Wikipedia article on the end to end voter veritable system called Prêt à Voter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%AAt_%C3%A0_Voter It's not that hard to grok how it works because there is no complicated math involved.
It allows any voter to verify their vote was accurately recorded in the reported total. The usual argument against is you need a lot of people to verify, and most won't. That's probably true when everyone is confident in the outcome, but I'm not so sure it works be true if there was a wiff of fraud in the air.
> how can you prove that innumerable votes were added to the record, or that your vote is correct?
In Australia it's easy to prove no votes to the record because everyone on the rolls must vote, or they get fined. Ergo total votes must equal the number of people on the roll minus the number fined. As for "your vote was counted" - read the Wikipedia article. These systems do prove that, while keeping your ballot secret.
croon
16 days ago
> You could try reading the Wikipedia article on the end to end voter veritable system called Prêt à Voter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%AAt_%C3%A0_Voter It's not that hard to grok how it works because there is no complicated math involved.
> It allows any voter to verify their vote was accurately recorded in the reported total. The usual argument against is you need a lot of people to verify, and most won't. That's probably true when everyone is confident in the outcome, but I'm not so sure it works be true if there was a wiff of fraud in the air.
There are a number of application details which wildly alters whether it's workable or not, where workable leans fairly close to current scalable cost, in which case the added benefit is minimal.
> In Australia it's easy to prove no votes to the record because everyone on the rolls must vote, or they get fined. Ergo total votes must equal the number of people on the roll minus the number fined. As for "your vote was counted" - read the Wikipedia article. These systems do prove that, while keeping your ballot secret.
Yes, but only by using as much verification as paper ballot casting, which is already provably robust and even more verifiable due to decentralization.
Skimmed these:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec05/tech/full_papers/k...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277296393_Pret_a_vo...
rstuart4133
16 days ago
> Yes, but only by using as much verification as paper ballot casting
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. A voter can not verify their vote in the current paper systems. Using these systems they can.
There are two kinds of attacks: typically classes as retail and wholesale. Retail attacks happen at the front end: stuffing ballot boxes, coercion, vote buying. As the effort involved roughly corresponds to the number of votes altered changing a large enough volume of votes to alter the outcome will be detectable using robust social systems, which boils down to teams of people watching each other.
Wholesale attacks happen when the vote is processed after they have been cast. An example is altering vote counting machine to lie about the votes counted. As they can systemically alter large numbers of votes they can be very difficult to detect even using statistical megtods. They are impossible to pull off when everything is done manually as teams watching teams still works, and you have to corrupt a lot of people. But when you introduce automation and machinery they voting system becomes vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.
Yes, "just continue to do everything manually using pencil and paper" does mostly eliminate wholesale attacks. But the reality is we are ditching pencil and paper for more automated processes. A famous example is a Diablo voting machine in some USA state, failed before regurgitating it's vote count (the "Volusia Error"). A man with a screw driver duely arrived, modified things, and handed over what he said was the correct vote count.
We are automating voting with voting machines and vote tabulators for good reasons. They are easier to use, particularly for the disabled, they are faster, they are cheaper than redundant teams of people, and they more accurate than manual methods. They are already arrived, and their use will only grow over time. Pleas like yours to "just use paper" are having little effect on their inceasing adoption.
The other option is to insist these machines and systems are end to end cryptographically verifable. That makes wholesale attacks these automated systems facilitate detectable. Currently we are deploying these systems without such safeguards. IMO this is insanity.
croon
15 days ago
> I'm not sure what you are getting at here. A voter can not verify their vote in the current paper systems.
In the current paper systems you don't have to, as you know what you put on it before it got anonymized and counted as one vote by the teams watched by teams.
> Using these systems they can.
In theory, yes. In practice, barely. If it was easy/practical it would be intrinsically susceptible to coercion.
In general, I agree with everything you write except for this paragraph:
> We are automating voting with voting machines and vote tabulators for good reasons. They are easier to use, particularly for the disabled, they are faster, they are cheaper than redundant teams of people, and they more accurate than manual methods. They are already arrived, and their use will only grow over time. Pleas like yours to "just use paper" are having little effect on their inceasing adoption.
The only "good" reason would be cost, but I wouldn't agree that it's a worthy trade-off. They could be easier to use, but it seems generally to be prone to UI issues making it unclear who/what you're voting for.
I'm sure their use will grow over time, but it won't be for any reasons that are good for democracy.
rstuart4133
15 days ago
> In the current paper systems you don't have to,
True. But the "secret ballot in a polling booth using paper" systems are disappearing. 32% of Australian votes aren't done that way now.
> In theory, yes. In practice, barely. If it was easy/practical it would be intrinsically susceptible to coercion.
It can be reduced to scanning a QR code in an app. It is a bit of a mystery to me why you think that isn't easy, practical or is susceptible to coercion.
croon
15 days ago
> It can be reduced to scanning a QR code in an app. It is a bit of a mystery to me why you think that isn't easy, practical or is susceptible to coercion.
Because "scanning a QR code in an app" would lead to:
1) integrity loss, ie reduction of peers in the secret sharing concept.
and/or
2) privacy loss, ie vote coercion, "show me you voted for our dear leader or something bad happens".
You can either confirm your encrypted ballot is present, OR you can decrypt it before being cast, in which case it can't be cast anymore. Unless I'm missing something they're mutually exclusive. The entire premise of the mix net is not being able to verify what you voted for, only that your vote is there, right?
rstuart4133
14 days ago
> Because "scanning a QR code in an app" would lead to ...
> 1) integrity loss, ie reduction of peers in the secret sharing concept.
> 2) privacy loss, ie vote coercion, "show me you voted for our dear leader or something bad happens".
Following your instincts instead of doing the work required to understand Prêt à Voter will lead you to that conclusion. Your instincts are wrong in this case. Neither of your claims are true. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page makes that plain. It says in part:
> In particular, Prêt à Voter enables voters to confirm that their vote is accurately included in the count whilst avoiding dangers of coercion or vote buying.
In case you haven't thought about it, vote buying is the hardest problem to solve for secret ballots. It is hardest because both the voter and a malicious third party are working cooperatively to corrupt the system. If you come up with a system that prevents that, you've pretty much solved all retail voting attacks. Prêt à Voter makes a vote verifiable, while ensuring votes can't be sold.
While you can't sell your vote with the typical implementation of Prêt à Voter, you can do it with your favoured paper ballot system:
1. Mallory obtains an authentic, blank ballot, and fills it in way he wants. Perhaps he does that by voting, pocketing the ballot paper, and putting the dummy in the ballot box.
2. Mallory gives the pre-filled ballot to a voter willing to sell his vote for an agreed sum outside the voting booth, where the transaction can't be detected. The voter isn't given his payment yet.
3. The voter goes into the secure voting place and is given a blank ballot. In the privacy afforded to him to cast a secret ballot he pockets the blank ballot, replacing it with the pre-filled ballot given to him by Mallory.
4. The voter casts the paid for vote.
5. The voter meets with Mallory in their secret spot, hands over the blank ballot and gets paid.
Rinse, lather and repeat all the way to winning the election.
If you haven't seen that little caper described before you will find it surprising. I did. But it is nowhere near the surprise you will get from spending the time to learn how Prêt à Voter achieves what appears to be impossible.
croon
14 days ago
> Following your instincts instead of doing the work required to understand Prêt à Voter will lead you to that conclusion. Your instincts are wrong in this case. Neither of your claims are true. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page makes that plain.
This is from the actual paper, not wikipedia:
> C. Audit of ballot forms Voters may wish to check that the order of candidates claimed to be encrypted on the right-hand side does indeed correspond to the list printed on the left-hand side. If this were not the case then a vote cast for one candidate may be considered after decryption as a vote for a different candidate. To provide such reassurance, voters may elect to ‘audit’ a ballot form. This involves removing the left-hand side of the ballot form, and asking the system to decrypt the candidate list from the onion on the right-hand side. The voter can then check that the decrypted list matches the list of candidates printed on the left-hand side. In principle, this audit can be carried out as often as the voter wishes. This gives the voter confidence that the ballot forms have been correctly constructed.
> However, the voter is not allowed to cast a vote on a decrypted ballot form. Once the candidate list associated with a onion is known, vote privacy, and hence resistance to coercion and vote-selling, is lost. The audit process gives an individual voter confidence that the ballot forms are correctly constructed, but does not allow her to check the ballot form that she is using to cast the vote.
What I said in GP is that you can't verify WHAT you voted for AFTER the fact, because the concept of coercion hinges on being able to threaten or pay for something the victim can provide. It's a logical proof, you can't design that away. I'm not saying it's not a valid trade-off.
rstuart4133
14 days ago
> What I said in GP is that you can't verify WHAT you voted for AFTER the fact
Agreed, you can't prove you voted in a particular way in any system that prevents vote buying. I'm struggling to see why that is relevant to this discussion.
What Prêt à Voter does is allow you to confirm that your vote was counted accurately. Its magic is it does that without revealing how you voted. You've now read the paper and you didn't contest that, so I'm guessing you concede it's true.
My point above was the two claims you made, ie scanning a QR code in an app would somehow lead to integrity loss, and/or privacy loss in Prêt à Voter system are wrong. You don't seem to be contesting that either, so I guess you now concede they are indeed wrong.
You made those incorrect claims after I pointed out your earlier claim that checking your vote in a Prêt à Voter system is so difficult no-one would do it was also wrong, as it boils down to scanning a QR Code with an app. I guess you had to concede that is indeed pretty easy, so you invented those incorrect "facts" to prove scanning a QR Code couldn't work for other reasons. But it does work.
It's not a good track record, is it? One invented fact after another, all in an effort to prove end-to-end verifiable voting is somehow worse or less secure than our current paper systems.
That's also wrong of course, but worse than that many of our current systems aren't the "secret ballots cast in a secure polling place" system you are assuming we use. They are postal, or electronic, or worse the combination of the two we call internet voting. These electronic systems are particularly susceptible to wholesale attacks, and in my view they need something like Prêt à Voter to have a hope of being as secure as the old paper systems.
I will concede one thing. Personally I doubt in an election everyone thought was well run that many people would bother checking their vote was counted correctly, but that's not because it's hard, it's for the same reason we don't recount every paper ballot if it isn't close - why bother? But if there was a whiff of fraud in the air, it seems likely a lot of people would do the check, particularly if the Prêt à Voter receipt was recorded on their phone when they voted. That way they would not even have to scan a QR Code. They just feed the receipt to the checking app when the election results are published.
croon
13 days ago
I haven't been inconsistent, nor invented anything, I would suggest getting a third party to read this thread if you believe so.
However, I would also suggest reading the guidelines, specifically these:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
godelski
16 days ago
Proving that you voted is different than proving you voted for a specific candidate.
In fact, the one isn't nearly as big of a privacy concern (if any at all). I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me the former could be done with some XOR scheme, but proving that both you voted and your vote counted for a specific candidate while keeping that a secret is a much more difficult task
lategloriousgnu
16 days ago
In Australia, which has mandatory voting, they literally just check your name off the voter roll when you arrive at the polling station. Each polling station has a list (digital or paper) of people registered to vote in that electorate.
After your name is checked off, you then proceed to a booth where you mark a piece of paper before folding and placing that paper into a plastic collection box on the way out.
It's very analog and the electoral commission have no way to know if you actually voted or who you voted for. They only know that you turned up to the polling station and gave them your name.
I assume the number of people who turn up at the polling station, only to walk away without voting is so small that it's not seen as a problem to solve.
yazantapuz
16 days ago
Years ago in Argentina, a corrupt politician forced a small community to vote for them using a clever trick. They instructed the voters to fold their ballots into a specific shape or figure. Since the paper wasn't torn or damaged, the votes remained legally valid. This allowed the politician to ensure the exact number of promised votes were in the ballot box during the count
M95D
16 days ago
But votes aren't counted by how the paper is folded. Any one of the voters could stamp/mark another name (or no name at all) and still fold the paper as instructed. So, how does that work?
yazantapuz
11 days ago
Because there was no unique ballot where you mark a name. Each party has it own ballot.
tucnak
16 days ago
I thought there were ZKP constructions that produce forward-secret receipts, while allowing to re-vote so that only the last vote would count, without ever breaking the original receipt.
The receipt would id candidate
KPGv2
16 days ago
> proving that both you voted and your vote counted for a specific candidate while keeping that a secret is a much more difficult task
Just have a code show the truth (for you to verify) and a second code to show a lie (in case of threats).
godelski
16 days ago
Sure. But if you talk about anything from a high enough level it's trivial. The hard part is actually implementing that.
KurSix
16 days ago
As soon as a system gives you a receipt, a cryptographic proof, or even a reliable way to re-verify later, you've created something that can usually be repurposed as evidence for a third party
testing22321
16 days ago
Australia has very strict laws about who can be near a polling place, and certainly nobody can be inside other than the few certified officials running the show.
Guy with sledgehammer is at least a block waylay, and everyone knows that everyone votes, by law.
axus
16 days ago
Obviously the person with the sledgehammer is a law enforcement officer working for the populist politician.
badestrand
16 days ago
By that logic we have to get rid of mail-in voting as well because there could always be a sledgehammer guy standing next to someone in their own home.
endgame
16 days ago
Yes. Here's a 2014 BBC article about that:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26487418
The article quotes one Mr Richard Mawrey QC:
> "Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud… on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility and indeed in some areas a probability."
> "Now I know that there is a very strong political desire to keep the present system. What I'm saying is that if you keep the present system, then however many safeguards you create, fraud and serious fraud is inevitably going to continue because that is built into the system."
somenameforme
16 days ago
In reality sledgehammer guy is never the threat, it's somebody fabricating votes. This can be done in a completely illegal fashion as in complete identity fraud, legally grey areas like ballot harvesting, or more socially palatable forms of identity fraud like somebody voting on behalf of family members who would not otherwise be voting.
And the biggest problem of this all is that it's basically impossible to prove because there's no meaningful identifier at any given point in the process. The only real evidence you'd have is a bad signature, yet in 2020 some states ceased comparing signatures and signature comparison was, in general, bizarrely under attack by certain interest groups.
habinero
16 days ago
This is 100%, completely absolutely untrue. Stop repeating this propaganda. The system is actually really well designed and safe, I was a poll observer.
You cannot "fabricate" votes, because all mail-in ballots are associated with a voter. Or rather, you put your ballot in an envelope and the envelope is associated with you. When your ballot is received, you are marked as voted and other ballots are invalid. The envelope is stored as proof of who voted and the ballot is kept separately to be tallied.
Ballot counting is done in public (you can go watch!) and there are a lot of safeguards and crosschecks. It's intended to make any fraud very obvious and incredibly difficult to scale.
yonaguska
16 days ago
Claims of voter fraud have shifted to mass voter registration occuring for people that are not eligible to vote, then ballots being sent out without being requested. How is this concern addressed?
habinero
14 days ago
Yeah, and those claims are made up to scare people who don't know how it works.
The government knows who is a citizen and who isn't lol, they literally have the records.
Voter rolls are very closely scrutinized. Dead people are, in fact, taken off the rolls. There is essentially ~no voter fraud and ~no instance of non-citizens voting in this country. Yes, it's audited and studied. Yes, they keep the data and you can audit it.
You're literally complaining about it being easier for people to participate in democracy, and you should stop.
Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.
somenameforme
13 days ago
From the mail-in ballots from 2024 alone, tens of thousands were returned because somebody had already voted. If you're generous that is 'accidental attempts at voter fraud'. If you're realistic those are going to largely compose a small percent of all successful efforts at voting on behalf of other individuals.
And this for elections which are increasingly decided (in terms of flipping the electoral college one way or the other) by votes in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands. So the scale of fraud in US elections is likely greater than the minimum margin of electoral college victory in them.
--
You also are substantially overstating the degree of organization of voter rolls. Voting in the US is heavily decentralized by design, which is what enables various states to have completely different electoral systems. But more specifically voter rolls are maintained by the states themselves and that, in turn, is typically further decentralized down to counties themselves.
This leaves a significant degree of inconsistency. In general I do not think that double voting or completely ineligible voting is a significant factor - nowhere near as much as voting on the behalf of others, but it certainly happens. For instance thousands of mail in votes were rejected because they came from dead people, and it is highly unlikely that 100% of these attempts were caught.
zamadatix
16 days ago
Some do think so, but there is also a material difference in needing to be intimidated at the time of the vote being cast vs any point in the future as well.
godelski
16 days ago
I think the bigger concern is that mail in ballots lead to fake ballots being submitted. Though I've seen no convincing evidence of this happening at any meaningful scale and the arguments seem unconvincing since you don't get a ballot unless verified with a state ID and your ballot has a unique ID associated with your name, preventing a double spend.
Personally, my concern is that with mail in ballots some nutjob that believes there's ballot stuffing can set fire to the ballotbox and even though they're caught it's a major inconvenience to get a replacement ballot and the websites that show your ballot is received take days to update.
But I still love mail in voting. My state sends a candidate brochure with it and I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies. It takes me hours to actually fill out my ballot but that's a feature, not a bug (there's nothing preventing you from along party lines but frankly I'd be happier without parties)
somenameforme
16 days ago
In 2020 a number of states were sending out mail-in ballots to every single registered voter, even if they didn't request it. Those states were CA, CO, DC, HI, NJ, NV, OR, UT, VT, and WA. [1]
[1] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...
habinero
16 days ago
And that's completely fine, because each mail-in ballot is associated with one voter, and the system is designed to make fraud very obvious and difficult to scale.
If thousands of people were told "you already voted" when they showed up, then that would be very very obvious.
They also really do look at signatures and contact voters to cure ballots if they're unsure.
somenameforme
16 days ago
Mail-in ballots tend to be counted (and received) after in person ballots, so you don't need to worry about in-person conflict. If we go the other direction (mail-in ballot rejected because the person had already voted), it was indeed in the tens of thousands. In 2024 about 584k ballots were rejected. [1] 11% of those, more than 64k, were because the person had already voted.
[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...
godelski
16 days ago
Not to mention that you can catch double voting across state lines. It's not common that people do this but it does happen and people are really looking for it.
Hell, the fact that so many people have been looking for massive voter fraud for about a decade now and haven't is pretty telling. People aren't good at keeping secrets and if it's being done at scale it would be uncovered or leaked. Accidents and stupid people happen, but that works both ways
direwolf20
16 days ago
What's wrong with that?
yonaguska
16 days ago
People were being unknowingly registered to vote, even if they weren't eligible to vote when they would get IDs. People move. They get sent ballots. Now you have tons of ballots that aren't really valid, but they're out there and usable. It makes illegal ballot harvesting a lot easier as well if there's no active step where the ballot must be requested. I have to request my ballot every election. it takes 5 minutes, I can do it online and I assert that I'm a citizen and am eligible to vote. I can also do that by mail and I get a mailer to do so. There's no reason to not implement that safeguard.
direwolf20
16 days ago
Why couldn't a ballot harvester send a ballot request on your behalf?
yonaguska
15 days ago
it depends on the state and how thorough their verification system is. I can only speak for IL, but in order to request a mail in ballot, you must be registered to vote first. Even if you register online, you must at minimum provide a DL number or SSN, and the state will associate a signature with your registration. Which is then cross referenced to the signature on your ballot envelope. If you don't have a signature and you try to vote by mail, and in the slim chance your registration is actually approved, you are now a first time non signatures voter, and your mail in ballot will be provisional at best.
This is why many of the election fraud claims focused on lax signature verification of ballots as well as the lax mail in ballot address locations. I feel that IL elections are probably more secure, but only because the state is solidly one party and comically gerrymandered anyways.
But technically, yes, a ballot harvester could send ballots on your behalf if they have enough information about you.
usefulcat
16 days ago
> I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies
But you can already do that, regardless of mail in voting or not?
godelski
16 days ago
In the booth I've never had a voter guide and you're definitely discouraged from pulling out your phone.
Not to mention the peer pressure. What asshole is going to stand in the booth for hours voting? I got to get to work!
Sure, you can do all this at home but there's a clear convenience when having both in hand
Detrytus
16 days ago
For me the problem with mail-in votes is that they are (in many jurisdictions) allowed to come in long after the in-person voting is closed, and the preliminary results are annouced. So it creates the space for manipulations, where you count the in-person votes first, and, if the score is close, then a week after the election day half a million of mail-in votes mysteriously comes in and swings the vote one way or another.
ab5tract
16 days ago
The postmark must be on or before voting day. I cannot fathom how people have bought into this idea that they can be sent after the preliminary voting has happened.
matsemann
16 days ago
If you however can go to a polling place afterwards and cast a new vote, that solves that issue, right? And then your mail-in just doesn't count.
dietr1ch
16 days ago
Yeah, and you should get rid of that
WWLink
16 days ago
By that logic we should require DNA testing because, you never know, someone might go to a polling place and lie about their name and have a fake ID too.
You never can be too careful!
Also, maybe someone inside will take their ballot from them.
IMHO this voting thing is too risky. We should just go back to having a ruling family /s
zug_zug
16 days ago
Such a weird argument. I've never met anybody with a sledgehammer threatening votes. Feels like a willfully absurd excuse to avoid having an audit trail in elections.
pdpi
16 days ago
Then you haven’t lived under a dictatorship. It might not be a sledgehammer, but breaking voter secrecy and pressuring people to vote the “right” way is very much a thing.
notpushkin
16 days ago
This. In Russia, employees of all sorts of organisations are “encouraged” to vote for a particular candidate or party (not always the ruling party, though it doesn’t really matter for different reasons I won’t get into).
As far as I know, these votes have gone mostly unchecked before electronic voting, but after that, they’ve started voting straight from the workplace computers. There were, of course, a lot of straight-up falsifications as well.
That said, our pen-on-paper voting isn’t too legit either :’)
somenameforme
16 days ago
In the sort of scenario you're talking about the dictator doesn't care how people vote. 'The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.' If he has such a lack of control that a mere election, which is to be counted fairly, could have him leave power, then it'd be somewhat farcical to declare him a dictator with all the connotations such a term implies.
anabab
16 days ago
Yes but no. The looks are also important. They want 80-99% to stroke their ego and nice pictures to claim legitimacy. The latter seemingly being useful both internally and externally.
golem14
16 days ago
Clearly, you haven’t lived behind the iron curtain. Checking up on what people do, and how they vote, would factor in promotions, school access for kids etc. this is by no means hypothetical.
I encourage everyone to look up the relevant sources, easy to find.
EGreg
16 days ago
Can you actually back this up? I have seen this argument before thrown around like dogma, even though I have NEVER seen it in the modern world.
The closest I can think of is rare cases like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel%27s_Case
shushpanchik
16 days ago
There are lots of reported cases in Russia, when your manager requires you to take photo of your paper ballot and show it to them, otherwise you have problems.
You can try to google-translate [this, for example](https://holod.media/2024/03/08/soprotivlenie-putinu/#h-3-%D0...)
EGreg
16 days ago
Reported as in an advice article that claims it’s happening? This same article gives advice for what to do if it happens with paper ballots in real life! So clearly, paper ballots aren’t a panacea. And there is a far larger problem with paper ballots: you cannot check whether your vote was even counted correctly. With properly designed crypto electronic voting systems using eg Merkle trees that doesn’t happen. There are ways to make sure your vote was correctly counted while at the same time not being to prove to anyone how you voted.
joe_mamba
16 days ago
You don't need a dictatorship to nudge people to vote the "right" way, just incentives for the masses:
Vote for me and I'll increase your pensions, the other guy wants to decrease your pensions.
Vote for me and I'll increase wages of gov workers and civil servants, the other guy wants to fire gov workers.
VOte for me and I'll increase your welfare and give you free* housing.
The gov has masses of people that depend on the gov's generosity that they can leverage with a carrot on a stick to swing the majority in their favor. You don't need to put a gun to their head. The gun to their head is the threat of losing those government provided perks.
That's how elections are won in Europe, just promise the boomers(largest voter base) higher pensions. That's why nobody who campaigns on reforming the pension system will ever win an election.
gus_massa
16 days ago
At some level, incentives, masses bribes and political polices are interchangeable. A few almost real examples from Argentina:
Party A) Keep the 80% discount in the electricity and gas bills
Party B) Reduce inflation from 200% y.o.y. to 50% y.o.y.
Party C) [I don't remember]
Party D) "A normal country"
---
PS: D was a slogan, they got less than 5% of the votes.
vineyardmike
16 days ago
I agree with the other comment about dictators and similar threatening voters, but at a mundane level: domestic violence.
People do, in fact, threaten or coerce their spouse and that extends to voting.
Being able to audit from a secure counting room and being able to produce an always-available-online permanent record is different.
somenameforme
16 days ago
You haven't in any way prevented this scenario. Somebody could just as well demand that their spouse take a photo or video of their vote. Yeah no cameras allowed in the voting booth is a rule, but it's not like it's enforced or even realistically enforceable.
MikeRichardson
16 days ago
The "no cameras/no phones" rule is absolutely enforced in Harris County, Texas, although as an election worker I have never seen this escalate beyond "Please put away your phone". Workers are to ask the voter to put it away and if not done so immediately they are to notify the election judge (top official for that location/precinct). Judge will approach and ask again and cite the actual Texas law and show the voter a posterboard with the law printed in at least 4 different languages.
At this point, if the voter has not checked in yet, we can refuse to do so. Either way, if the phone/camera is still out after the judge has asked and shown them the law, judge is to immediately call the constable's office (police), who have been positioned nearby (but never directly at any vote center, due to possible intimidation). The constable can and will remove the man from the vote center. (It's never escalated that far!) (arresting that voter for any length of time might be problematic on election day for obvious reasons).
The most common complaint is "but I wrote up all my selections on there!" and for these voters we can provide a paper "sample ballot" and even a pen and they are free to mark their selections outside of the room and then come back to vote on the machine. One location was a church that was even gracious enough to allow a gentleman to AirPrint his notes.
Also of note, we do not have any kind of a "booth", however, the machines are typically placed rather far apart, and no one is allowed to queue at or near the machines, or linger there after voting, so I believe that privacy is effectively maintained. (Workers including judges are not even allowed to linger there unless assisting a voter who has specifically asked for help, and even then, there's more rules - if the voter needs help actually making the selections for candidates, now you need at least one judge and one clerk, one of whom must observe and ensure that the voter's selections were made correctly.)
We also got rid of the problematic "digital only" machines several years ago, but this post is too long already.
degamad
16 days ago
The solution in Australia is simpler - you don't submit the vote that you took a photo of. You can get a ballot, fill it out the "right" way, take a photo, erase the markings, write on your preferred vote, and submit that.
Even if you ignore the pencil they give you and use a pen, you can simply tear or damage the paper, take it back to the elections officer, ask for a new ballot, and fill that out instead. We make it as hard as possible to coerce a vote while maintaining secret voting (noting that it is definitely still possible, just hard).
somenameforme
16 days ago
Are there no polling stations where you can submit the ballot in a private location, like a drop box inside a booth or whatever? In the US I've only voted electronically, and it's done in a private booth with a curtain preventing external visibility, so somebody can easily video record the entire process with no realistic way of altering their vote.
degamad
16 days ago
No, the booths where you fill out your ballot are on one side of the room, and the ballot boxes are on the other, supervised by an election officer, and near the exit. You:
- collect blank ballots (usually 2 pieces of paper, one for the House, one for the Senate) at the entry,
- walk over to the booth,
- fill out your ballot in secret at the booth (taking as long as you like),
- fold the ballots,
- walk over to the ballot boxes,
- drop the folded ballots into the corresponding box (House ballot in the House box and Senate ballot in the Senate box),
- then leave.
As no-one sees what you write at the booth, you can vote legally, draw pictures on your ballot, write obscenities, write nothing, or a combination.
somenameforme
16 days ago
Interesting. Sounds like a solid system.
femto
16 days ago
> it just works
The biggest reason "it just works" is that the Australian Electoral Commission, the organisation that sets electoral boundaries and runs the election, is independent of the government. Other reasons are compulsory voting and preferential voting. In my mind, it is these three things that keep Australia's democracy relatively healthy.
direwolf20
16 days ago
And yet the people keep voting for some of the strictest internet surveillance laws in the world.
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" said a politician asked about his policy of making encryption illegal.
KurSix
16 days ago
Paper systems fail locally and noisily; internet systems fail silently and at scale
ChrisMarshallNY
16 days ago
I've heard great things about the way that India votes.
It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
phanimahesh
16 days ago
Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby (<2km away from registered address). Including a monk who gets his own polling booth because he lives so far from everyone and everything else. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth...
Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...
seanmcdirmid
16 days ago
As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him.
There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).
autoexec
16 days ago
Yep. Physical voting places are great, but they're also an easy target for voter suppression. There should be a requirement that there be a nearby polling location, we should also have multiple days to vote there and employers should be required to give every one of their employees at least one of those days off.
seanmcdirmid
16 days ago
Georgia made sure African Americans had crowded long line voting locations with no access to water. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were doing that. The South is still pretty racist.
galago
16 days ago
I observed this in New England while living in a city with evenly distributed population. The polling locations were more abundant in the wealthier side of the city. This may not have been straight racism; there was no way for me to determine why this was the case. Looking at a map of median income and polling locations made it pretty obvious to me at least that polling location choice was biased.
the_snooze
16 days ago
It could be as simple as "wealthy areas get more county services." There are practical considerations when choosing polling places, like the availability of parking and enough space to accommodate a line, check-in tables, voting booths, and ideally separate entrance and exit doors. Public schools and county rec centers are go-to locations because the county (who administers the election) already owns them and they have the space needed. Churches are great too, but they require having an agreement with a private organization.
seanmcdirmid
16 days ago
By New England I guess you just mean Boston and the Boston area right? I'm unaware of any other huge concentrations of African Americans in that region. Boston is well known for its racism, I actually had a friend from Boston when I was living in Vicksburg MS and they got along there much better than me.
topspin
16 days ago
> It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
creata
16 days ago
Australia, as far as I know, doesn't require voters to show identity documents, and they seem to take election integrity very seriously.
KiwiJohnno
16 days ago
We do not. Elections here are run very smoothly, with no questions whatsoever about their integrity.
ggm
16 days ago
No un-answered serious questions. Serious questions are asked, regularly, as well as un-serious ones by cookers. But, the serious questions, the audit, the sense "did we do ok" is continuously asked.
We have an independent electoral commission. I'm not saying its incapable of being reproachable, nothing is "beyond reproach" but I have yet to hear a serious, non-cooker accusation any political party has tried to stuff the electoral commission.
What we don't have, (and I think should have) is capped party donations. I'm tired of the money aspect of who gets the most billboards.
We also have silly bad behaviour emerging: People doing their billboards in the same style and colours as the electoral commission. Often in foreign language support roles, using words like (not a quote) YOU MUST VOTE FOR PARTY A LIKE THIS which I think is really trolling the voter badly.
degamad
16 days ago
> but I have yet to hear a serious, non-cooker accusation any political party has tried to stuff the electoral commission.
We do get occasional issues with individuals trying stuff, but the AEC is very good at calling it out or prosecuting it.
It's strong enough that the parties don't try anything risky.
slg
16 days ago
>Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
The flip side is even more true. If someone is claiming they care about election integrity and isn't willing to pair that with funding of an equivalent ID system that is both free and easy for voters to acquire, they don't actually care about election integrity.
mullingitover
16 days ago
This needs to be said loudly from the rooftops.
If your voter ID system isn’t 100% free and absolutely effortless for voters to obtain, it’s a badly disguised vote suppression scheme.
It’s pretty much always a vote suppression scheme.
xp84
16 days ago
I’d like to respectfully challenge you on this. There is no chance anyone can ever create an effortless-to-get ID. Even if it was like the census where they sent someone to your house repeatedly to try to find you, take your picture and print an ID on the spot, it wouldn’t be effortless because you might not know where your passport or birth certificate are.
Some people probably are so badly organized and/or ignorant that they can’t manage making and keeping one single DMV appointment even once every 15 years so that they could get an ID (I think we can all agree that an “expired” ID would do fine, as long as the picture isn’t so out of date it can’t be verified).
Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious. It’s ok that some things in life are reserved for people that have invested a tiny amount of effort once in their lives. There’s also not a free and effortless way to feed or bathe yourself.
By the way, a state ID costs $15 in Mississippi and $9 for “eligible people” in California.
array_key_first
16 days ago
The main problem with obtaining ID is that is takes time, and it's not evenly distributed. In the US its not folklore that people of color are less likely to have ID, it's a statistical fact.
This can be fixed, but you will notice the people who champion voter ID never bother trying. Naturally, the only reasonable conclusion is they like it that way. They're not stupid, after all.
mullingitover
16 days ago
> By the way, a state ID costs $15 in Mississippi and $9 for “eligible people” in California.
If it costs a penny and is a requirement to vote, it is an unconstitutional poll tax.
greenie_beans
16 days ago
for real. read one single american history book and you'll realize this is bad
slg
16 days ago
>Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious
I hate calling something a slippery slope, but I don't know how else to describe an argument that is fundamentally "Sure, it will disenfranchise people, but who cares about those people anyway?" Once you accept that people's rights can be taken away simply because protecting those rights is an inconvenience, then none of us actually have any protected rights.
mullingitover
16 days ago
Exactly, a freedom you have to pay to access isn't a freedom. "If people can't get it together to pay a modest $9 fee for the 'don't get imprisoned forever' tax, who cares if they get throw into the forced labor camps?"
Beyond this point: voting isn't just a freedom, it's a duty in a civilized democracy. We don't enforce it like Australia does, but anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it, isn't fully on board with government by the people.
xp84
14 days ago
Voting itself takes effort (even to vote stupidly, where you just vote a straight ticket blindly and pick all the judges and ballot props at random). Voting in a way that's good for society (meaning you read about the candidates and ballot props and actually think through their true implications) takes WAY more effort. Why is it so important that we enable people who can't be arsed to make more than a trivial effort at all to vote?
There are already a bunch of arbitrary de facto restrictions:
- If you can't read, you won't be able to use your ballot.
- If you don't have transportation or any time off to vote, you can't vote in person. (Also the main objection given to requirements to get an ID card).
- If you don't know where you'll be living consistently, mail-in voting is problematic.
We accept that there will be people whose lives are so chaotic and messed up that voting probably won't be easy for them. So why is the requirement of identity proof, which is not more difficult to overcome than the above existing barriers, such a trigger to some?
> anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it...
My response is, anyone who cares so little about casting a vote that they wouldn't set aside time once in a decade to get an ID for the purpose of voting isn't fully on board with participating in government by the people -- and I'm totally fine with that.
I also don't see the point in the Australian idea, especially since paying $20-50 is trivial for anyone who's not homeless, and uncollectible (moot point) if you are actually destitute. You're still getting basically the same set of people in the voting booth anyway -- only the ones who give a shit about voting.
deathanatos
16 days ago
> By the way, a state ID costs […] $9 for “eligible people” in California.
A state ID is not required to register to vote in CA[1]. (The requirement is CA ID number or last-four-of-SSN or a third complicated way, but I'm assuming ID or SSN is attainable for nigh everyone eligible.)
xp84
14 days ago
Sure, it's not needed, but if it were needed it would be a $9 burden.
PaulDavisThe1st
16 days ago
> Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
Asserted without evidence, and apparently quite likely to be an attempt to cast aspersions on "election integrity" in the USA and elsewhere.
creata
16 days ago
Maybe, but the election ink stuff feels a bit overboard.
TiredOfLife
16 days ago
> it just works
And the pieces of paper with votes for the wrong candidates are easy to dispose of. See, for example, russia.
joshcsimmons
16 days ago
That seems common sense. It’s wild that this is an extremist position in the US now.
BurningFrog
16 days ago
Australia really uses erasable pencil markings to vote?
I would feel much better if they required ink.
hydrox24
16 days ago
Yes, and the reasons are outlined by the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body that runs Australian elections (see the first FAQ)[0].
There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts.
If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).
Pen markings are perfectly valid however, so you can bring a pen to the booth to vote with if you'd like to do so.
It's also true of course that erasers don't quite erase pencil. It would be fairly obvious that the paper was tampered with.
anon291
16 days ago
> If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).
I mean the same is true in the United States. One of the key issues with the 2020 election was footage from several jurisdictions where the public was physically blocked from viewing the counting by election officials literally holding up giant white boards. The optics of that were extremely bad.
tacticus
16 days ago
Unlike the US the elections aren't run by some local arsehat with local rules. they have consistent rules over the entire state or country (depending on election in question)
Scrutineers are also not members of the public. They are declared and appointed by candidates and parties for polling oversight and have complete access to the counting and polling area. They're not allowed to touch ballots but they can challenge and bring them up to all the scrutineers in the location (and EC staff) and finally they can take it to the court afterwards
Election officials are also not local council\elected people they're people working for the AEC\State Electoral commission. which is as mentioned above a non partisan organisation (which is highly different from bipartisan framing)
You also have a large number of counting staff. who do the sorting and then counting with machine assistance (how many sheets are here in this stack do they match the tally the 2 people already made on that pile)
Though the senate elections have a more complex voting software stack due to STV fun.
anon291
16 days ago
Again, misconceptions abound. US elections are run by bureaucrats with an elected head. There are consistent rules across the entire state for all elections, with some federal oversight. Scrutineers are appointed by both parties, but also from members of the public.
Like... what do you think American elections are actually like? Do you think some democrat/republican counts them in secret somewhere?
xmprt
16 days ago
If you're worried about someone taking away your vote by erasing your pencil marking, then you should be equally/more worried about someone spoiling your ballot by voting twice on the same ballot, thereby invalidating it. You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that.
tacticus
16 days ago
> You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that.
Given the number of people involved in watching ballots the entire time it is happening this would require a lot of compromised people and a lot of compromised scrutineers.
b112
16 days ago
It's pencil in Canada too. Pencil works. Ink pens stop working, and are far more expensive than pencil in bulk. Voting is old. Using fountain pens, and quills to vote, is far more annoying than pencil when it just works.
The mark of vote being indelible or not is irrelevant. The monitoring and protection of the ballots is far more important. For example, representatives of all political parties are involved in the count, oversight by an agency, etc. If you had time to erase and re-mark ballots, you could swap out paper ballets too.
crote
16 days ago
The problem is that disappearing ink is a thing, and someone could swap out the source of ink (pen, stamp pad) in the voting booth.
Erasing is indeed a possibility with pencil markings, but this can only happen during the counting process - which should be open to anyone to audit, and anyone messing around with an eraser during the counting process would stand out like a sore thumb.
adrian_b
16 days ago
Where I have seen stamp pads used for voting, you do not take them with you in the voting booth.
You must press the stamp on the stamp pad at the official who gives you the stamp.
Stamping is fast and convenient. While corrupted officials could apply additional stamps during the counting, to make the vote invalid, that should be prevented by witnesses belonging to the parties that compete in the election.
ben-schaaf
16 days ago
Someone needs to gain physical access to the ballot after voting in order to erase it. If they can do that they can just as well make it invalid using a pen, or they can just tear it up.
On the other hand, disappearing ink has been around for a long time.
xp84
16 days ago
At this point the main problem here is one of trust either way. Most Americans, of any party affiliation, believe that one party’s officials are presiding over a vast conspiracy to steal every election. The Left thinks the GOP is intimidating real citizens who happen to be immigrants from voting by trying to pass laws for proof of identity, and the Right thinks Democrats are trucking in illegals to stuff the ballot box, or that some random voting machine company is systematically rigging every vote. All these positions are presented without evidence.
Then both parties think that if their party’s guy isn’t in charge of the election itself, that the vote counting itself is being faked. Of course, these concerns only ever come out when their preferred party loses.
Mix internet voting into this, and the average person’s utter cluelessness about computers, and no amount of fancy crypto, blockchain, etc. would ever convince any American that their party lost fair and square. “The new online voting system was rigged!”
slg
16 days ago
>All these positions are presented without evidence.
What evidence do you need that making it more difficult to vote will result in fewer people voting? Isn't it common sense?
creata
16 days ago
There's plenty of evidence of voter suppression in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
themafia
16 days ago
> we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship
Then my refusal to vote should be counted. If enough people refuse to vote then the entire election should be cancelled and new candidates found. Otherwise this is a ridiculous catch 22 of state bullying to no actual purpose. Who would even think to create such a law?
crote
16 days ago
Which country doesn't count spoiled or blank votes? And the whole "cancel the election and find new candidates" is pretty pointless when anyone can start a political party of their own and participate in the election.
themafia
16 days ago
> Which country doesn't count spoiled or blank votes?
The USA. We have districts where turnout is as low as 25% of eligible voters.
> anyone can start a political party of their own and participate in the election.
You don't get federal funding and the FCC doesn't force networks to cover your party or include you in debates until you win 5% on a national platform. Have fun actually doing this. Which was the only reason I voted for Nader. I wanted the greens to have a standing in the US. It's never even come close to happening since.
> "cancel the election and find new candidates"
Then your political parties will engage in a race to the bottom with you. You don't sense this already happening?
GJim
16 days ago
> Then my refusal to vote should be counted.
Then spoil your paper.
Spoiling your paper shows that you got off your arse and voted to say "I don't want any of these people". (See the number of spoilt votes in the UK Police and Crime Commissioner elections for a prime example of this; many in the UK disagreed with politicising the police and spoilt their papers in protest)
By simply not voting, the assumption is you are either lazy or simply don't care...... And as a result, the politicians will not care either.
themafia
16 days ago
> shows that you got off your arse
Is that the point of democracy?
> See the number of spoilt votes in the UK Police and Crime Commissioner elections
The candidate was still elected with a turnout of 15.3%. This is farcical to give this person a mandate where they clearly earned none. Shouldn't the parties get off their arse and pick better people for office? I'm busy and I pay taxes. What are you hassling me for?
> the assumption is
Assume whatever you like.
> the politicians will not care either.
I hate to be flip, but your entire tenor has brought it out of me, and this is the hardest to take. Then why would else would they run for office? They need my approval by engaging in a national cargo cult ritual to function properly? You accept this from your "leadership?"
How has that actually worked out in practice?
mos_basik
15 days ago
Disclaimer: I'm not Australian.
It'd be a pity to get heated up over a misunderstanding of the Australian election system.
OP said (somewhat confusingly I admit):
>[Australia has] compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine,
and I think you understood that to mean:
>Australian citizens must choose: drop a valid ballot in the box or be fined
but I think what OP intended was (and this is consistent with the Australia Electoral Commission website [0]):
>Australian citizens must choose: drop a ballot (spoiled is fine) in the box or be fined
(As an aside - one WILL get fined if one appears the polling place but refuses to drop a ballot in the box - see [1].)
Then, believing (incorrectly) that casting a spoiled ballot incurs the fine, you said "Then my refusal to vote should be counted [for the system to be anywhere near reasonable, given that I went to the polling place and exercised my civic duty to the extent permitted by my moral fiber, fully expecting to be fined for it]" (emphasis and context added).
And Australia does keep track of how many "informal votes" (their term for what we're calling spoiled ballots here) are cast. See [2] for an official results page breaking out informal votes by count and percent. But informal votes have no bearing on the election results; they are thrown out and only the valid votes contribute to the result.
So I think you're fundamentally asking for the "informal votes" to have a first-class mechanism for contributing to the election result (specifics TBD, maybe a threshold to meet, maybe an disqualification of the candidates for a period of time, maybe a re-do, whatever).
And that's a valid ask and an interesting discussion to have!
But given that the reason you asked for that was based on a misunderstanding, do you even still want that? Do you still think the AUS system is unreasonable as-is?
----
0. https://aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/voting/index.htm#c...
>Under the Electoral Act, the actual duty of the elector is to attend a polling place, have their name marked off the certified list, receive a ballot paper and take it to an individual voting booth, mark it, fold the ballot paper and place it in the ballot box.
>Because of the secrecy of the ballot, it is not possible to determine whether a person has completed their ballot paper prior to placing it in the ballot box. It is therefore not possible to determine whether all electors have met their legislated duty to vote. It is, however, possible to determine that an elector has attended a polling place or mobile polling team (or applied for a postal vote, pre-poll vote or absent vote) and been issued with a ballot paper.
1. https://www.aec.gov.au/about_aec/publications/backgrounders/...
in Krosch v Springell, at the polling place, Mr Springell handed the presiding officer a note saying, paraphrased, "none of these candidates deserve my vote". He was fined, because it could be proven that he didn't uphold the "duty of the elector" as defined in [0].
2. https://results.aec.gov.au/31496/Website/HouseInformalByStat...
Nursie
16 days ago
You can pay the fine or spoil your paper. If significant numbers do this, it will be reported publicly.
As it is though, people tend to vote for one of the parties on offer, of which there are many. And as it's also preference voting, Australia is not stuck in the trap of "better vote for A or B will get in" either. You can vote for C, with a fallback to D, E and F before putting in A as a back-stop.
themafia
16 days ago
> it will be reported publicly.
Does this manifest as any real political outcome?
Nursie
16 days ago
Who knows? The numbers that choose to take this action are pretty small so there’s no particular driver for any political reaction. Turns out if you make people show up, most of them decide they do want to vote.
We also have a lot of choice of parties here which helps. Shame the same 2 majors keep getting in but the smaller parties and independents do take some seats.