A classic. By the way electronic with paper trail gives you faster counts, a way to validate the results and recompute them by hand when there’s an issue.
And doing voting over multiple days and/or by mail in ballots gives you time to count everything.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote. Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
I’ve seen pushes for mail in ballots to be held and not counted until Election Day and then only those ballots counted by the end of Election Day counted. Which is absurd. Do mail in, count them up to and after. Or count them up to and give people with mail in ballots access to them a lot earlier. So they can be accurately counted leading up to Election Day.
Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too. Hence why they’re often not counted until day of and so, by extension, result in ballots not being fully counted for a few days.
It is theoretically possible to devise a mathematically secure electronic voting system using cryptography, but only if everyone can follow instructions perfectly and people can understand how it works and why their vote is secure. In other words, not in any way that would work in real life.
The principal benefit of pen-and-paper voting is that it is really easy to convince people that taking a ballot paper into a booth, marking it, and then depositing the ballot into a locked glass box which is later counted in front of a room of independent observers is a secure way to run elections. It is impossible to convince the average voter that cryptographically secure voting schemes are actually immune from tampering.
Edit: I never understood why we have "election days". Why not have an "election week"?
Same here. FWIW, it's built on older, slower, less-reliable tech, which forced ridiculous amounts of resiliency into every layer of the design. It's still amazing, but perhaps slightly less so if we look back 40 years. I'm convinced that some parts are running just fine over infrastructure no better than wet string.
Having multiple days of open voting would be a game changer for some people. It can be absurdly difficult to actually get the day off, depending on the employer, and I've had ones try to treat it as a "perk", like it shouldn't be the damned baseline that we're able to actually take part in the democratic process they're parading around like a shiny bauble.
Personally I think they should do something like opening the polls on October 1st and then have November 1st be closing day, and all through October we take a page from the aussies and just have a rolling cookout/party at each of the polling places.
Ya get your "I voted sticker" any time in the month and can walk right in for beer and hot dogs and heck maybe even some of Kronk's spinach puffs if that one guy can make Babish's recipe work like he said he was gonna at the planning meeting for who's bringing the goods, and best of all, it's rolling for a month, so you've got every opportunity to stop in and cast your ballot, or just to come back with your "I voted" sticker to keep enjoying the festivities!
This is our most sacred institution as a nation, we should be making a celebration out of it!
Yup, I'm in a state with mail voting, and it's great! The ballot comes with the "I voted" sticker, you can drop off the ballot any time before election day (or mail it), and you can check if they've received and counted it online. It's great! I've never been to a voting booth and I don't intend to ever go.
In Minnesota, the law requires employers to give employees time off (of their choosing) to vote. At my previous job where they were anal about time in the office, I made a point of voting in the middle of the day which would require another commute. When I got the nasty email about "break too long". I just replied with a link the statute. And made sure all my co-workers knew what their rights were.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote.
Oh, I can assure you that-
Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
Blockchain technology based (BBVS) could be safer but regular EVMs are still hackable
Trustless systems are always better than centralised systems especially when the government in power is also in authority to decide whether they continue to stay in power.
US has been blessed till now.
But look at Russian or North Korean elections. They also use paper ballots
I am confident that Putin is not gonna last if they go for a blockchain based voting system.
The problem is not being secure; it is convincing people that it is secure. Even the stupidest person understands that marking off a paper in a booth and then depositing it in a locked box is secure. The voting method must give voters confidence that their vote was counted, the election was fair, and the results are legitimate.
Check online that it was received and the signature is accepted
Check on election day that the vote was counted
To break that system, you'd need to also hack the website or manipulate the votes on election day. That's a lot harder than manipulating proprietary software by bribing a software engineer somewhere.
Parties provides free food and transport to unemployed masses they know will vote for them
Wait 3-4 hours in queue at polling station to receive ballot in person
Drop ballot in secure box
Go back to work for a few days
See on election day that the party that spent the most on voter courting wins
How would you propose we deal with this when people who are working (and can't take a day off to go vote) would come out in much smaller numbers than ones that have nothing else to do (and get free lunch and transit to and from the polling stations) and even when voting happens on a weekend you have to trade your only time off to go and vote out of the goodness of your heart.
I think this is one of the reasons for digital voting - I'd much rather be able to vote from work or home or anywhere when I don't have the time to sit on a queue for 5 hours just to have my vote diminished by a group that isn't politically active but loves a free lunch and something to do
EVMs aren't a vote from home option, they just replace steps 1&2 with a machine instead of a ballot drop box. So maybe your wait goes down to 2-3 hours because it's a little faster.
I'm saying we replace the physical voting locations entirely and you can drop your ballot in your mailbox, or drop it at one of the secure voting boxes throughout the city. So it doesn't matter if you work two jobs and can't get a couple hours off, if you can check your mail and fill out a form, you can vote. And the ballot comes a few weeks before election day, so you have time.
I think we should also have a federal "election day" holiday so people can research candidates and vote.
I believe that's why people are pushing for a week of early voting, and the ability to vote by mail with postage paid.
Also, if you increase the number of polling stations and keep them available longer, the wait goes down.
We can also pass laws to make it so employers must give workers time to vote at the workers discretion.
Most of what you describe is the result of an effort to make voting harder to keep turnout low. The way to fix it is to make it easier, not to make it less secure.
I am just saying if you go for an electronic voting system using an airtight blockchain like Bitcoin and ethereum to verify votes using a biometric database is the only system trustworthy enough because.
If you use multiple blockchains like these it would require 10 trillion dollars or more to get the computing and staking power to hack the system.
It's inconceivably costlier than hacking a physical election.
Russia also has paper ballots and I can assure you we can easily kick out Putin with a blockchain based voting system.
He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
I should have seen this coming.
That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. (wikipedia)
It is actually possible to have a cryptographic structure that allows independent verification of the counts. Of course we will never have that because Repubs prefer buggy ES&S machines. (IIRC those are also the ones Kemp used to rig elections in GA.)
But is scantron voting electronic voting? Is mail in voting and early voting electronic voting? Is being ID'd on the voter registry because you know your SSN and address, name, signature, without having to use yet another ID electronic voting?
I would say that "electronic voting" means that the ballot itself is digital rather than physical. So, scantrons are not electronic voting and voter registries/ID/etc. are not ballots in the first place.
I think the supposed risk to electronic voting machines is that there would need to be thousands of them, are distributed, somewhat unattended, and operated by people that don't know them.
The possibility of an exploit or misconfiguration increases, and the ability to compromise someone supervising one of the polling station increases.
If there is are centralised systems, fewer higher skilled people would be required to secure/monitor/run the system. It can also be airgapped.
While some of these risks are also applicable to in-person and mail-in voting, these systems have been around for ages, are not proprietary, and anyone can figure out "how it works" and can make sure "how it happened" matches.
As soon as you get into cryptographic vulnerabilities and security, 99.99% of people would be lost in the woods
The rest of the questions, I feel, are more systematic things.
Seems to work alright for Estonia, they have had an option to vote electronically since 2005. If I can sign legal documents, pay bills and do other government related stuff electronically, why suddenly voting is a huge problem?
The only real risk comes if their voting server that decrypts votes would be compromised and no one would realise it. As with any electronic service there of course is some risk, nothing is 100% secure, but I would personally take that risk to vote electronically.
It's not a question if encryption fails, but when. Paper ballots are anonymous by design, unless you mark the ballots they are untraceable. Digital ballots don't have that feature.
Off topic, but... Can we retire this idiom? It's in this thread like 3 times and it's always used by people uncomfortable by the fact that someone they don't like made a good point.
I think people intend it to be a clever undercutting of the person they dislike. But it stopped being clever ages ago. When does something become a cliche? Because it just sounds petty now.
Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.
A system being slow and inefficient makes defrauding that system similarly slow and inefficient. To affect an election run on paper ballots you have to somehow physically alter or insert thousands or millions of pieces of paper without being detected. This will mean spending large amounts of time and money and must necessarily involve numerous people.
I don't get what's wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It's convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It's worked great in Washington for decades.
There's no way to guarantee privacy. An overbearing spouse, an anti-union boss, or a judgmental pastor could all insist on seeing the votes marked as they prefer.
You can fill it out in a booth if you want, there's in-person locations with help for the disabled and privacy areas.
It's illegal to insist on seeing someone's vote, so I'm not sure what would stop such people from requiring this hypothetical person to record themselves voting at a polling location. In general mail in ballots make voter intimidation much more difficult.
every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.
even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.
errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.
there is no scamming. all of the USA's voting problems are self-created.
Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia.
Let me check. *looks through window* It's not the biggest source of voting fraud. Biggest source of voting fraud is Venedictov's box - Digital Electronic Voting.
Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
It’s pretty rich that one of his stans is harping about how the Left “steals elections”, yet his guy literally tried that in the last election cycle. Then there’s also Bush v Gore. But yeah, it’s those crafty lefties doing the stealing!
Out of how many votes? Oh, enough votes that hundreds of irregularities is statistically irrelevant? Cool, just checking.
Oh, a fraction of a percent of the thousands of manual votes that Republicans had and tried to have thrown out so that dumps could win in 2020? k, just checking.
Unfortunately Republicans are not good faith actors in this space. There are many issues to discuss about voting, but I'll just stick to one very important one, access. Republicans limit access to voting. They are not for mail in voting and continue to close down polling places forcing thousands of citizens to stand in line for hours. If they really cared, they would make it easier for the citizens to vote. But we know that's not their goal. They win when fewer people vote. So, whatever means to achieve that, that's what they'll do.
Counterpoint: There's a big difference between electronic voting machines and electronic counting machines.
The way we do elections in Canada, your vote is made on paper. The paper ballots are fed though electronic counting machines to get the initial tally, but the paper record is then kept and tallied up separately to check for discrepancies. This is both fast and secure.
Electronic voting machines, on the other hand, are an exercise in absolute insanity that security experts universally agree no one should be using.
Of course, Musk is railing against them because he's drunk the far right Kool-Aid about stolen elections, but actual smart, educated people have been saying the same thing for a lot longer.
As long as the hand count is recognized as the actual result i would be fine with that.Knowing humans and our tendency to be lazy, i fear we would first reduce the redundant checks and then skip them completely. In the name of efficiency of course.
Also after witnessing the history of absolute fuckups my government (germany) produced in the field of software and IT, i don’t want them to use machines. They lost any trust i had in them with any kind of technology. Let them count and add up by hand, i’ll gladly pay extra taxes for that.
As long as the hand count is recognized as the actual result i would be fine with that
That's how it works, yeah. Since there's unlikely to be any issue with the machine count, that works fine for getting results on the day, but ultimately you have the paper record that can be checked by hand, or run through different counting machines, in order to verify if there's any concerns.
In a smaller local election a few cycles back, I got to trial a paper backed electronic voting machine they were testing out for people who have dexterity or vision problems.
You basically got the same paper ballot as everyone else, but then you slipped it into the machine and it colored the bubbles for you after you selected the option on the screen.
Then you took your piece of paper out and handled it like a ballot filled in by hand.
Wasn't networked and didn't see anything that could tie you to a vote.
I got to share my appreciation for the concept, but concern about difficulty verifying it filled things out correctly, and the potential for touch screens to be difficult to use or act funny, all the difficulties of ux work to handle fixing an error, and the need for the UI to be exceptionally clear, which was difficult on the smaller screen with the larger font.
I think it also has screen reader support, but I didn't use it, so I'm not sure.
If you get an RSA receipt, it can be brute forced (in some years), if you don't you can't be sure it was counted.
If you get coerced into voting a certain way on paper and taking a photograph*, the coercing person needs to be in the toom to make sure you don't mark, take a photo, spoil and vote differently. With a receipt you can coerce the receipt, wait some time and buy some computing power to decrypt the vote later.
* secretly as it's illegal/vote spoiling for obvious reasons
I agree. While we're at it, we can also make election day a holiday and require employers to give workers at least a paid half-day off so that they can vote, and create a citizenship ID that is free and easy to get rather than using ID with requirements like a driver's license. Then maybe we can try out ranked choice voting and eliminate the electoral college. You know, since we want the election to be fair.
and create a citizenship ID that is free and easy to get rather than using ID with requirements like a driver's license.
Just a heads up, these already are a thing, you still have to go to the DMV to get it since they're the people who issue it, but they have IDs that are just "IDs" and then they have IDs that are also "drivers licenses." The one that is just an ID like you're talking about they just have to bring their birth cert, social security card, and proof of address like a bill or paystub or anything like that, then they fill out the info, take their pic, and voila, "Identification Card" without the driving priveleges.
People do it all the time, because without one you can't buy smokes, vapes, booze, go to 18+ concerts, have a job in some cases, hell watch porn in some states lol, etc, anything age restricted really.
i remember reading that even those are highly inaccessible to minorities, in areas with large minority populations the offices are farther away/have weird hours/other obstacles that make them harder to acquire
I mean, they all keep the same hours in my state and it seems like more of them are actually in the bad areas (where I happen to live myself, lol) rather than making the "rich neighborhoods look bad" with all the DMV offices. I can't speak for the entire country, but you'd think my area would be one of the worst with it if it were actually about stopping "the blacks" from acquiring them (US, South.) Also every single minority I know (which is actually a fair number, my area is diverse af,) has an ID and/or driver's license, so they definitely can get them.
Hell I know one dude, trans, half black, dad left as a kid because he was a crackhead, grew up poor with me, current heroin addict (hope he gets better before he dies like many of our other friends,) and he still has an ID. I think it may deadname him still, but he has one. I've actually never even met a single person over the age of 18 without one afaik, hell I know 4 homeless dudes and they have them. One lives in a tent and the other three just have sleeping bags under a bridge and they figured it out. I mean the address is a local shelter that lets them use the address specifically for this, but they do have one.
Tbh I think the whole "the blacks can't get IDs" thing is not only overstated, but also kinda racist, like how saying "we have to take care of women because they can't take care of themselves" is technically "nice" or whatever because they have good intentions but it's actually misogynistic af.
My state is similar to yours, dmv hours are same state wide and location wise they are not totally out of the way.
Same documents, birth cert, social card, 2 proofs of address.
Those requirements, while easy enough and even doable for the homeless, are harder for some than others, specifically the poor.
Those people who used shelter addresses didn't have to pay (thats national, first time and renewals are free to homeless.) Someone who is poor but not homeless has to pay. Also poor people often leave their parents home without their social and birth cert. Or have no where to safely store them and lose or have them stolen. Also, social security cards are not assigned to you at birth. If mom or dad never filed for one for you, congrats you get to do it as a adult. This can create a whole catch 22 style loop of them getting fucked.
Anyways, I'm not explaining myself well, but yes requiring state ID (non drivers license) to vote is prohibitive to a lot of otherwise entitled voters.
I am "the poor." Less so now, but still not "not," lol.
As far as the documents go, yeah, you need some, and can likely get them if they've been lost. The alternative is me claiming to be Elon Musk, getting an ID in his name, whole ass stealing his identity to fund my life (which while that sounds funny to me is a crime lol.) Really without some proof of identity there's no point to even have IDs at all.
State IDs are also required for another right, the right to bear arms. You can't buy a gun in the US without an ID, and buying a gun being a right much like the right to vote, if it's prohibitively hard to get an ID for one right so too must it be for all rights. Frankly you can kill more people with a vote, too.
Mine was $10. I agree they should be free but let's be real here $10-$26 isn't prohibitively expensive, my homeless friends would beg more than that in a few hours, even if you have to save a dollar a check that's still doable for something that by all accounts you do need, and for more than just "voting."
More like "we should be helping people get IDs" but cute you ignored the "i think they should be free" for good boy internet points.
Seriously you think "black people can't get IDs" and instead of "we should help them get them" your first thought is to feel sorry for them and do nothing other than say "well we shouldn't have them for voting?" What's wrong with you? Again, they need IDs for more than just voting.
Frankly, if we did provide everyone with an ID like we should, what then would be your argument against it? Would it still be racist?
Ignored, dismissed, use whatever word you like idgaf.
If you didn't say it reread the thread, that's what we're talking about over here. Dudes are posting whole ass ACLU links that actually are pretty convincing, catch up junior.
Again you ignore or dismiss the "free" part. Are you intentionally doing that or is your memory about the quality of a goldfish's?
OH so NOW we all agree it should be free but I want to charge money? Get your fucking story straight you pompous ass.
Again catch up. But fine "if we did provide IDs like we should, would it still be classist?"
Ok c/fuckcars, calm down. Just because you have to get the non-drivers-license-ID at a DMV because they combine the two when it is a drivers license is no reason to pop a blood vessel.
Frankly it makes more sense to me to also offer them at high schools, but it couldn't only be that because homeschoolers/dropouts etc, so they'd still need to be somewhere else too.
Edit: except perhaps the citizenship certificate but I’ve never seen one before, but yeah they exist. We don’t have ranked voting, and elections aren’t holidays, although your employer must give you paid time off to vote, like 3 hours, and there are exceptions of course, like truckers for some reason don’t get the time off.
Isn't this the doofus who wanted to send a submarine into a cave? Dude doesn't have the intellectual heft necessary to manage a QuikTrip in Topeka.
But, take this drivel seriously. They like it when rural, red areas report their vote totals first, so that the news outlets will report that Republicans are "leading" early in the evening, before the blue cities finish their counting and overtake the early totals. It's a cheap trick to sell the claim that the election was stolen to their followers, y'know, the people who think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
There was a survey a few years ago that found that some absurdly-large number of Americans think that chocolate milk is produced by brown cows. Like, over 10 million people. I hope it's not true, but it's become kind of a meme to convey that Americans are misinformed about a lot of things, and generally just really dumb.
As others have said, the scalability ideal is to have electric/mechanical counters but with paper ballots. Keeps the paper trail for double checking, but also allows poll workers to deliver quick initial results to everyone breathing down their necks.
Pretty sure that's how we do it up on Canada. I think random samples are hand-counted to make sure the machine count is accurate. There's early voting too so not all just in one day.
That's how we do it in my part of the US. And the whole thing is live streamed and audited. My mail ballot is also scanned twice, and I can check if it was received (and signature checks out) and counted. If there's an issue, I can correct my ballot before election day.
Well here in Germany we have about 40-50 million votes to count in a federal election. Right when the booths close we get an exit poll that is already pretty close. After 1-2 hours there are extrapolations that are even closer and next morning, there is usually the certified result. All on paper, counted by hand.
not even joking, i find that if there's one Twitter account to act as a definitive guide to policy, science, technology and various issues, it's Elon's account.
just carefully read every tweet and do the exact opposite. there's no way you can go wrong with it.
Brazil has used electronic voting since 1997 and has had no major issues since (there was a bad history of fraud in the paper ballot era). It runs on Linux and they hold a public safety test in the year before where they test the system's security.
From what I can tell, Kemp didn't steal the election (btw, that's a left-leaning news source according to this site). If anything, it encouraged more Democrats to get out and vote, not less.
I was thinking of the wrong election. When the state gets sued over votes and those votes just so happen to be erased, that is suspicious af. But that wasn't 2018. Kemp wasn't running in the election where GA wiped the hard disks, but he was in charge at the time.
The 2018 election where he was able to remove voters from the registry and close poll sites is just standard conflict-of-interest, I suppose.
Or in a non-conspiratorial vein, it's literally his job to remove obsolete voters from the registry and ensure there are enough (and not too many) polls to keep costs in line.
I don't know anything about that guy to know if he's acting in good faith or not. I don't live in Georgia, and I've only been there for a couple days ever in my life. Maybe he's a corrupt pile of crap, or maybe he was just doing his job. The news on this is crazy slanted, but it seems like he was at least acting within the law.
I don't know, that's certainly pretty sus. Here's an article I found about it for a House seat, which Kemp oversaw but was not running in.
The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn't fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities.
...
The plaintiffs were counting on an independent security review of the Kennesaw server, which held electronic poll book data and ballot definitions for counties, to demonstrate the system's unreliability.
I haven't read a ton about it, but it sounds like there are legitimate concerns (at least about the original system), but the issues are theoretical. I read it as a smear lawsuit intended to cast doubt on the election process, similar to what Trump did when he challenged the election.
I'm interested in seeing the outcome of the lawsuit, but I'm guessing there will be no evidence of vote tampering, just like with a Trump's suits. I hope evidence is still accessible but we won't know until the lawsuit concludes.
Electronic voting is by definition not trustworthy enough.
A working election system needs to accomplish a few very contradictory things, while the voter needs to be annonymous, the system still needs to verify that one citizen only get's one vote, the system also need to count each vote.
In the Swedish system, on election day you go to your polling station, you get three envelopes, you go behind a screen and pick the ballots for the party you want to vote for, if you want to be extra anonymous you grab one from each party, you do that for all three elections (state, region and municipality), they are colour coded and the envelopes have a small cutout to make the color visible.
You then go behind another screen and put your ballots in the envelopes and seal them, you then take your envelopes, walk over to the election officials, hand them your ID, votes and election card.
One election official reads your name and ID number, the other finds you in the list, the first election official confrims that the second is ready, and they then say "voted white, voted blue, voted yellow" as each envelope with the coresponsig ballot is placed in the proper urn.
After the polling station closes, they deal with the pre votes and mail votes, they check all election cards against the list, and if someone has voted in person, the pre vote or mail vote is tossed, if not they are processed just as normal.
Then all votes are counted to get a total, if there are more votes than there should be, if just a few then I have heard it being resolved by tossing random votes.
Then the envelopes are opened, and ballots sorted and counted, anyone may come in and watch the process at any point.
This can't be done on a computer in a way that anyone should trust
It’s not accurate to say that electronic voting is inherently untrustworthy. That’s a subjective opinion rather than a fact.
There are countries that have successfully used electronic voting for a long time without significant issues. Since you’re European to begin with, take Estonia for example - their system is world class. Look it up.
Voter anonymity isn’t an issue exclusive to digital voting either. Standard voting systems also have to ensure that votes are cast anonymously while verifying the voter’s identity. With electronic voting, cryptography can be used to protect voter identity and maintain anonymity and it’s very effective.
You can also use advanced security measures like multi-factor authentication, biometric verification, and other technologies. There’s a metric shitload of ways to enhance security in electronic voting.
Electronic voting can be designed to be more secure and transparent than in-person. Blockchain can create tamper-proof records and paper audit trails for verification. Anything that can’t be verified can be excluded and investigated.
It’s ridiculous to dismiss electronic voting outright because the things you are worried about can already happen in traditional voting.
And on the other hand.. if I vote can’t be linked back to anyone, then you have a whole other problem. So maybe voting in general is able to be manipulated no matter what.
Black box voting are designed to to be transparent and they are open source so the public can scrutinize.
Why don’t you trust Estonias voting system? You didn’t give a reason. Look up VVPAT.
What do you suggest then, since in-person voting has actually been linked to fraud and manipulation. Voting machines are perfectly acceptable.
Let’s just do a quick AI generated list of examples:
Ballot Box Stuffing
1948 Texas Senate Race: In the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson narrowly defeated Coke Stevenson. Allegations of ballot box stuffing were rampant, particularly involving Box 13 in Jim Wells County, where 202 votes, all in alphabetical order and all for Johnson, were suspiciously added late.
Chicago, Illinois (1960 Presidential Election): Allegations persist that Chicago's Cook County, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, engaged in ballot box stuffing to help John F. Kennedy win Illinois and thus the presidency. Investigations revealed irregularities and improbable vote counts in several precincts.
East Chicago, Indiana (2003 Mayoral Election): Incumbent Mayor Robert Pastrick was accused of ballot box stuffing. Investigations revealed that absentee ballots were manipulated, leading to multiple convictions of election officials for their roles in the fraud.
Ballot Destruction
Kentucky (1944 U.S. Senate Election): In the Democratic primary, incumbent Senator Happy Chandler faced charges of ballot destruction. Boxes of ballots from counties favorable to his opponent were allegedly thrown out or destroyed, leading to investigations and widespread controversy.
Georgia (1946 Governor's Election): During the "Three Governors Controversy," ballots in Telfair County were reportedly burned or otherwise destroyed to influence the election outcome. Supporters of Eugene Talmadge were implicated in the destruction of ballots that favored his opponents.
2004 Ohio Presidential Election: In Cuyahoga County, reports surfaced that provisional ballots were improperly discarded or lost. Election observers noted that some ballots from predominantly Democratic precincts were missing or destroyed, raising questions about the integrity of the vote count.
These examples underscore the persistent vulnerabilities in the electoral process and the importance of robust oversight and security measures to safeguard the integrity of elections.
"Risk of being hacked by AI or human is still too great."
But he trusts his life and everyone elses to the AI and computer code in his car that goes 0-60 in 2.5 seconds to not be hacked. Makes sense actually yea.
I think in year 2024 we should be able to vote using a fucking app. No gerrymandering, everyone 18 our older automatically registered to vote.
If we could do that we never see another Republican in office again. Add rank choice voting and we might even have people who give a shit and can fix this country.
I can do my banking, file my taxes, access my social security, make changes to practically any national database, apply for citizenship, all online and secure.
We really need positive digital ID. The US DoD has the right idea with the CAC, though really it's just a digital certificate issued by the government. The smartcard format is convenient for being wallet-able but there's plenty of other form factors for these things these days.
It amazes me that we as a society do official, important real-life things on the Internet with no way to validate our identity.
I even cringe a bit anytime someone tells me to DocuSign. Buying my house was a trip, especially all the forms that took place before closing. Like, it's great that I'm signing these things digitally, but there's still no proof that I'm the one signing these. I'm not in the presence of a notary, lawyer, or any sort of witness. I'm just clicking a link on an email and drawing my finger on the screen. That could, theoretically, be anybody who gains access to my email, with or without my permission.
But, if I'm signing with a certificate, I have provided a PIN or password to unlock this device I carry on my person, that a trusted third party had given me when proved that I am who I say I am, in person. It's a solid technology and it really needs way better adoption.
I docusign for our house and my land. I done that a lot. If I remember correctly you do have to sign up and there lots of hoops there. But never thought of it like that.
I just saying it should be easy to vote bullshit they know who are legal citizens and who are not, no matter what they say.
Hell make it where I can go online fill in all my information and automatically every time voting is taken place in my area I received a package in the mail. We fill it out vote and mail it back.
Federal holiday on voting, and automatic registration.
Hell make it where I can go online fill in all my information and automatically every time voting is taken place in my area I received a package in the mail. We fill it out vote and mail it back.
This is exactly how it works in Washington state. You get the ballot in the mail, fill it out, seal it up, and mail it back or drop it off in a drop box. It's worked great for years.
I want to be able to vote online, too, but then I think about how easy it is to falsify your identify online vs in person and I don't know how it could work without introducing a new level of probable fraud.
I'm confident that if done correctly we can make it work. Like I said it would keep Republicans from ever winning again so be impossible to get our politicians to put money into a secure app that allow us to easily vote.
Barring that we should eliminate gerrymandering and electoral collge and make automatic registration for anyone over 18.
We know for a fact they can do that because they just did it with the draft.
That sounds like a really bad idea to me. Over here the voting machines are completely offline and don't have a hard drive. It prints out a small receipt with your vote in human readable form and as a QR code, which you drop in an electronic ballot box.
As a software engineer, this feels like the only safe voting machine.
I understand your concerns. With our machines the QR codes can be forged, but manual recounts are done using the human readable votes on the receipts, which you have to check before leaving the voting booth and dropping the receipt in the ballot box.
Also, we have opkomstplicht (compulsory attendance), although research shows that our votes wouldn't change a lot if voting were voluntary. We also always vote on Sundays.
EDIT: Also, about 1 million people (around 10%) didn't show up to vote, despite the possibility of getting a heavy fine. Not sure how this influenced the result.
Voting booths are important. People should be able to vote how they want, and that means secret ballots. This is only possible with a secure space.
I know that Americans love mail-in voting and yearn for online voting, but mail-in is a poor substitute for voting booths, and online voting would be terrible for this plus many many other reasons.
Even if we had online voting the DRM required to make sure nothing is amiss would be kernel level and unavailable to linux users or if available, objectionable. It would also probably be tied to fucking chrome.
A broken clock etc etc
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/
A classic. By the way electronic with paper trail gives you faster counts, a way to validate the results and recompute them by hand when there’s an issue.
And doing voting over multiple days and/or by mail in ballots gives you time to count everything.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote. Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
I’ve seen pushes for mail in ballots to be held and not counted until Election Day and then only those ballots counted by the end of Election Day counted. Which is absurd. Do mail in, count them up to and after. Or count them up to and give people with mail in ballots access to them a lot earlier. So they can be accurately counted leading up to Election Day.
Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too. Hence why they’re often not counted until day of and so, by extension, result in ballots not being fully counted for a few days.
One day only in person voting is purposeful suppression of votes.
Also, am coder, 100% agree with xkcd. I'm still amazed the Internet itself works.
It is theoretically possible to devise a mathematically secure electronic voting system using cryptography, but only if everyone can follow instructions perfectly and people can understand how it works and why their vote is secure. In other words, not in any way that would work in real life.
The principal benefit of pen-and-paper voting is that it is really easy to convince people that taking a ballot paper into a booth, marking it, and then depositing the ballot into a locked glass box which is later counted in front of a room of independent observers is a secure way to run elections. It is impossible to convince the average voter that cryptographically secure voting schemes are actually immune from tampering.
Edit: I never understood why we have "election days". Why not have an "election week"?
Same here. FWIW, it's built on older, slower, less-reliable tech, which forced ridiculous amounts of resiliency into every layer of the design. It's still amazing, but perhaps slightly less so if we look back 40 years. I'm convinced that some parts are running just fine over infrastructure no better than wet string.
Having multiple days of open voting would be a game changer for some people. It can be absurdly difficult to actually get the day off, depending on the employer, and I've had ones try to treat it as a "perk", like it shouldn't be the damned baseline that we're able to actually take part in the democratic process they're parading around like a shiny bauble.
Personally I think they should do something like opening the polls on October 1st and then have November 1st be closing day, and all through October we take a page from the aussies and just have a rolling cookout/party at each of the polling places.
Ya get your "I voted sticker" any time in the month and can walk right in for beer and hot dogs and heck maybe even some of Kronk's spinach puffs if that one guy can make Babish's recipe work like he said he was gonna at the planning meeting for who's bringing the goods, and best of all, it's rolling for a month, so you've got every opportunity to stop in and cast your ballot, or just to come back with your "I voted" sticker to keep enjoying the festivities!
This is our most sacred institution as a nation, we should be making a celebration out of it!
Yup, I'm in a state with mail voting, and it's great! The ballot comes with the "I voted" sticker, you can drop off the ballot any time before election day (or mail it), and you can check if they've received and counted it online. It's great! I've never been to a voting booth and I don't intend to ever go.
That sounds a lot like early voting which I have used in the past.
In Minnesota, the law requires employers to give employees time off (of their choosing) to vote. At my previous job where they were anal about time in the office, I made a point of voting in the middle of the day which would require another commute. When I got the nasty email about "break too long". I just replied with a link the statute. And made sure all my co-workers knew what their rights were.
As commies would say, you showed class consciousness.
Damn. "Perk" of being citizen.
Oh, I can assure you that-
I never should have doubted you.
When city falls asleep, mafia awakens
Yah, on this particular thing, he's not wrong.
Everythinge else, though, he's fucking batshit.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Blockchain technology based (BBVS) could be safer but regular EVMs are still hackable
Trustless systems are always better than centralised systems especially when the government in power is also in authority to decide whether they continue to stay in power.
US has been blessed till now.
But look at Russian or North Korean elections. They also use paper ballots
I am confident that Putin is not gonna last if they go for a blockchain based voting system.
The problem is not being secure; it is convincing people that it is secure. Even the stupidest person understands that marking off a paper in a booth and then depositing it in a locked box is secure. The voting method must give voters confidence that their vote was counted, the election was fair, and the results are legitimate.
Also, you can recount papers if you think something somewhere went wrong for some reason. You can't manually recheck software.
That gives so much more opportunity for human intervention.
A good locksmith is all it takes to manipulate the votes.
Even if you keep it under tight security and surveillance they can bribe the security.
In my state, here's how it works:
To break that system, you'd need to also hack the website or manipulate the votes on election day. That's a lot harder than manipulating proprietary software by bribing a software engineer somewhere.
In my country here's how it works:
How would you propose we deal with this when people who are working (and can't take a day off to go vote) would come out in much smaller numbers than ones that have nothing else to do (and get free lunch and transit to and from the polling stations) and even when voting happens on a weekend you have to trade your only time off to go and vote out of the goodness of your heart.
I think this is one of the reasons for digital voting - I'd much rather be able to vote from work or home or anywhere when I don't have the time to sit on a queue for 5 hours just to have my vote diminished by a group that isn't politically active but loves a free lunch and something to do
EVMs aren't a vote from home option, they just replace steps 1&2 with a machine instead of a ballot drop box. So maybe your wait goes down to 2-3 hours because it's a little faster.
I'm saying we replace the physical voting locations entirely and you can drop your ballot in your mailbox, or drop it at one of the secure voting boxes throughout the city. So it doesn't matter if you work two jobs and can't get a couple hours off, if you can check your mail and fill out a form, you can vote. And the ballot comes a few weeks before election day, so you have time.
I think we should also have a federal "election day" holiday so people can research candidates and vote.
I believe that's why people are pushing for a week of early voting, and the ability to vote by mail with postage paid.
Also, if you increase the number of polling stations and keep them available longer, the wait goes down.
We can also pass laws to make it so employers must give workers time to vote at the workers discretion.
Most of what you describe is the result of an effort to make voting harder to keep turnout low. The way to fix it is to make it easier, not to make it less secure.
I am not in favour of EVMs here.
However there are pros and cons for both systems
I am just saying if you go for an electronic voting system using an airtight blockchain like Bitcoin and ethereum to verify votes using a biometric database is the only system trustworthy enough because.
If you use multiple blockchains like these it would require 10 trillion dollars or more to get the computing and staking power to hack the system.
It's inconceivably costlier than hacking a physical election.
Russia also has paper ballots and I can assure you we can easily kick out Putin with a blockchain based voting system.
In many countries there is a security camera placed over the ballot box which is livestreamed to the Internet
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabha/maharashtra/cctvs-turned-off-for-45-mins-supriya-sule/articleshow/110094264.cms
Just turn off the camera and manipulate all you like
"Playing board games is pointless because people can just cheat"
No it wouldn’t.
"Hacked by AI" fucking lol
"All my information about AI comes from watching Avengers films"
"All my information about AI comes from AI."
Reminder that this fucking moron is pushing Twitter as a financial tool. He wants you to use X like you would use your credit card.
But voting machines are insecure?
I won't even use xitter like social media. Why in hell would I consider it as a credit card? Oh, I get it. The target audience is the idiot army.
I should have seen this coming.
Aw man, he's trying to build Paypal? Again?
Wow. I actually agree with Elon Musk about something for once, what a shock!
Tom Scott has a very good video explaining why electronic voting is terrible all around and it will probably never be secure.
Tom Scott's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott's video via the Computerphile channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&t=1s
It is actually possible to have a cryptographic structure that allows independent verification of the counts. Of course we will never have that because Repubs prefer buggy ES&S machines. (IIRC those are also the ones Kemp used to rig elections in GA.)
https://archive.is/2020.09.15-120013/https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-clerk-voting-tech-revolution/
But is scantron voting electronic voting? Is mail in voting and early voting electronic voting? Is being ID'd on the voter registry because you know your SSN and address, name, signature, without having to use yet another ID electronic voting?
I would say that "electronic voting" means that the ballot itself is digital rather than physical. So, scantrons are not electronic voting and voter registries/ID/etc. are not ballots in the first place.
I think the supposed risk to electronic voting machines is that there would need to be thousands of them, are distributed, somewhat unattended, and operated by people that don't know them.
The possibility of an exploit or misconfiguration increases, and the ability to compromise someone supervising one of the polling station increases.
If there is are centralised systems, fewer higher skilled people would be required to secure/monitor/run the system. It can also be airgapped.
While some of these risks are also applicable to in-person and mail-in voting, these systems have been around for ages, are not proprietary, and anyone can figure out "how it works" and can make sure "how it happened" matches.
As soon as you get into cryptographic vulnerabilities and security, 99.99% of people would be lost in the woods
The rest of the questions, I feel, are more systematic things.
Seems to work alright for Estonia, they have had an option to vote electronically since 2005. If I can sign legal documents, pay bills and do other government related stuff electronically, why suddenly voting is a huge problem?
Because what you vote is supposed to be anonymous....
If you ignore the anonymous part, then it's obviously not an issue.
The only real risk comes if their voting server that decrypts votes would be compromised and no one would realise it. As with any electronic service there of course is some risk, nothing is 100% secure, but I would personally take that risk to vote electronically.
Here's an overview how their process works, feels pretty solid.
It's not a question if encryption fails, but when. Paper ballots are anonymous by design, unless you mark the ballots they are untraceable. Digital ballots don't have that feature.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
even a broken clock is correct twice a day
Off topic, but... Can we retire this idiom? It's in this thread like 3 times and it's always used by people uncomfortable by the fact that someone they don't like made a good point.
it also exists in multiple different cultures with very different languages, so it seems it is not going away anytime soon
We should retire the idiom because people are using it as intended and everyone understands it as intended?
I think people intend it to be a clever undercutting of the person they dislike. But it stopped being clever ages ago. When does something become a cliche? Because it just sounds petty now.
It’s not about “someone I don’t like”, it’s that this guys opinions are pretty much always beyond total shit.
When did Lemmy get infiltrated by MAGA?
That's loads of BS. Manual in person voting is easily scammed, just look at voting in Russia. Fuck this shit, everything should be 100% digital.
Manual in person voting is not easily scammed on a scale that can swing an election. The slow, inefficient, in person, physical process is a security feature.
Lol what?
A system being slow and inefficient makes defrauding that system similarly slow and inefficient. To affect an election run on paper ballots you have to somehow physically alter or insert thousands or millions of pieces of paper without being detected. This will mean spending large amounts of time and money and must necessarily involve numerous people.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2024/mar/15/russian-woman-detained-after-pouring-dye-into-ballot-box-video
Mate, are you high? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owSxq50-DsI
https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1770364450144489510
Paper voting leaves a literal paper trail unlike electronic voting that's always a total black box in all countries that have tried it.
Blockchain based voting leaves a permanent and indelible record on the blockchain for all to see.
Look, mate, paper voting simply doesn't work. And Russia is not the only example.
If you think results contradict content of the boxes, then online voting just allows to do it on greater scale much easier.
No, online voting prevents malicious actors from scamming the voting process.
I don't get what's wrong with paper ballots sent by mail. It's convenient and easy, with a paper trail for recounts. It's worked great in Washington for decades.
Look at my other replies.
There's no way to guarantee privacy. An overbearing spouse, an anti-union boss, or a judgmental pastor could all insist on seeing the votes marked as they prefer.
A voting booth was invented for this very reason.
You can fill it out in a booth if you want, there's in-person locations with help for the disabled and privacy areas.
It's illegal to insist on seeing someone's vote, so I'm not sure what would stop such people from requiring this hypothetical person to record themselves voting at a polling location. In general mail in ballots make voter intimidation much more difficult.
Envelope.
it absolutely is not easily scammed at all.
every single piece of paper is numbered and tracked. (tickets and stubbs, basically). all counting is done by multiple people and watched by anyone who wants. political parties are banned from voting premises.
even better: early voting, in person, up to a week or two before. no crowds.
errors happen about 1 in 1,000,000 with a maximum of a couple hundred, and are caught immediately.
there is no scamming. all of the USA's voting problems are self-created.
Ahaha! Ok.
Let me check. *looks through window* It's not the biggest source of voting fraud. Biggest source of voting fraud is Venedictov's box - Digital Electronic Voting.
Sobyanin approves.
Not just digital but trustless decentralised blockchain based so it's impossibly hard to manipulate
https://xkcd.com/2030/
It’s pretty rich that one of his stans is harping about how the Left “steals elections”, yet his guy literally tried that in the last election cycle. Then there’s also Bush v Gore. But yeah, it’s those crafty lefties doing the stealing!
Every accusation is a confession.
"hundreds of voting irregularities"
Out of how many votes? Oh, enough votes that hundreds of irregularities is statistically irrelevant? Cool, just checking.
Oh, a fraction of a percent of the thousands of manual votes that Republicans had and tried to have thrown out so that dumps could win in 2020? k, just checking.
Counterpoint: whatever methods Kemp used in GA to rig his election and erase the evidence point to significant flaws.
Might want to /s that.
Reads pretty straight.
Unfortunately Republicans are not good faith actors in this space. There are many issues to discuss about voting, but I'll just stick to one very important one, access. Republicans limit access to voting. They are not for mail in voting and continue to close down polling places forcing thousands of citizens to stand in line for hours. If they really cared, they would make it easier for the citizens to vote. But we know that's not their goal. They win when fewer people vote. So, whatever means to achieve that, that's what they'll do.
Or at least vote in sunday.
You'd be surprised how few people have Sunday off.
I probably would. Damn, get some commies to write labour law.
Well, he's got that one right.
Elections should be as low tech as possible. Everything going on should be verifiable with your eyes and basic tools only.
Keep it simple and keep it monitored by at least 3 to 5 people at all times.
who cares if the counting takes a few days, as long as i can trust the results.
And dear fellows in the USA, for the love of god, move the voting day to a Sunday already.
Counterpoint: There's a big difference between electronic voting machines and electronic counting machines.
The way we do elections in Canada, your vote is made on paper. The paper ballots are fed though electronic counting machines to get the initial tally, but the paper record is then kept and tallied up separately to check for discrepancies. This is both fast and secure.
Electronic voting machines, on the other hand, are an exercise in absolute insanity that security experts universally agree no one should be using.
Of course, Musk is railing against them because he's drunk the far right Kool-Aid about stolen elections, but actual smart, educated people have been saying the same thing for a lot longer.
Good point, thanks!
As long as the hand count is recognized as the actual result i would be fine with that.Knowing humans and our tendency to be lazy, i fear we would first reduce the redundant checks and then skip them completely. In the name of efficiency of course.
Also after witnessing the history of absolute fuckups my government (germany) produced in the field of software and IT, i don’t want them to use machines. They lost any trust i had in them with any kind of technology. Let them count and add up by hand, i’ll gladly pay extra taxes for that.
Maybe i’m just a bit to paranoid :/
That's how it works, yeah. Since there's unlikely to be any issue with the machine count, that works fine for getting results on the day, but ultimately you have the paper record that can be checked by hand, or run through different counting machines, in order to verify if there's any concerns.
In a smaller local election a few cycles back, I got to trial a paper backed electronic voting machine they were testing out for people who have dexterity or vision problems.
You basically got the same paper ballot as everyone else, but then you slipped it into the machine and it colored the bubbles for you after you selected the option on the screen.
Then you took your piece of paper out and handled it like a ballot filled in by hand.
Wasn't networked and didn't see anything that could tie you to a vote.
I got to share my appreciation for the concept, but concern about difficulty verifying it filled things out correctly, and the potential for touch screens to be difficult to use or act funny, all the difficulties of ux work to handle fixing an error, and the need for the UI to be exceptionally clear, which was difficult on the smaller screen with the larger font.
I think it also has screen reader support, but I didn't use it, so I'm not sure.
Check this article out, might change your mind: https://archive.is/UCAKM
Very Interesting, thanks!
Still I'm not sure if I would trust that system more than a handcount with at least six eyes present at all times.
If you get an RSA receipt, it can be brute forced (in some years), if you don't you can't be sure it was counted.
If you get coerced into voting a certain way on paper and taking a photograph*, the coercing person needs to be in the toom to make sure you don't mark, take a photo, spoil and vote differently. With a receipt you can coerce the receipt, wait some time and buy some computing power to decrypt the vote later.
* secretly as it's illegal/vote spoiling for obvious reasons
I've never heard of in-person stations counting for longer than 6 hours.
It isn't already? Then USA gets "worse than Russia" award again.
I agree. While we're at it, we can also make election day a holiday and require employers to give workers at least a paid half-day off so that they can vote, and create a citizenship ID that is free and easy to get rather than using ID with requirements like a driver's license. Then maybe we can try out ranked choice voting and eliminate the electoral college. You know, since we want the election to be fair.
Just a heads up, these already are a thing, you still have to go to the DMV to get it since they're the people who issue it, but they have IDs that are just "IDs" and then they have IDs that are also "drivers licenses." The one that is just an ID like you're talking about they just have to bring their birth cert, social security card, and proof of address like a bill or paystub or anything like that, then they fill out the info, take their pic, and voila, "Identification Card" without the driving priveleges.
People do it all the time, because without one you can't buy smokes, vapes, booze, go to 18+ concerts, have a job in some cases, hell watch porn in some states lol, etc, anything age restricted really.
i remember reading that even those are highly inaccessible to minorities, in areas with large minority populations the offices are farther away/have weird hours/other obstacles that make them harder to acquire
I mean, they all keep the same hours in my state and it seems like more of them are actually in the bad areas (where I happen to live myself, lol) rather than making the "rich neighborhoods look bad" with all the DMV offices. I can't speak for the entire country, but you'd think my area would be one of the worst with it if it were actually about stopping "the blacks" from acquiring them (US, South.) Also every single minority I know (which is actually a fair number, my area is diverse af,) has an ID and/or driver's license, so they definitely can get them.
Hell I know one dude, trans, half black, dad left as a kid because he was a crackhead, grew up poor with me, current heroin addict (hope he gets better before he dies like many of our other friends,) and he still has an ID. I think it may deadname him still, but he has one. I've actually never even met a single person over the age of 18 without one afaik, hell I know 4 homeless dudes and they have them. One lives in a tent and the other three just have sleeping bags under a bridge and they figured it out. I mean the address is a local shelter that lets them use the address specifically for this, but they do have one.
Tbh I think the whole "the blacks can't get IDs" thing is not only overstated, but also kinda racist, like how saying "we have to take care of women because they can't take care of themselves" is technically "nice" or whatever because they have good intentions but it's actually misogynistic af.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/aclu_voter_id_fact_sheet_-_final_1.pdf
here we go I'm pretty sure this or a related summary is what I'd seen before, it wasn't a recent read so i might be wrong but it sounds familiar
My state is similar to yours, dmv hours are same state wide and location wise they are not totally out of the way.
Same documents, birth cert, social card, 2 proofs of address.
Those requirements, while easy enough and even doable for the homeless, are harder for some than others, specifically the poor.
Those people who used shelter addresses didn't have to pay (thats national, first time and renewals are free to homeless.) Someone who is poor but not homeless has to pay. Also poor people often leave their parents home without their social and birth cert. Or have no where to safely store them and lose or have them stolen. Also, social security cards are not assigned to you at birth. If mom or dad never filed for one for you, congrats you get to do it as a adult. This can create a whole catch 22 style loop of them getting fucked.
Anyways, I'm not explaining myself well, but yes requiring state ID (non drivers license) to vote is prohibitive to a lot of otherwise entitled voters.
I am "the poor." Less so now, but still not "not," lol.
As far as the documents go, yeah, you need some, and can likely get them if they've been lost. The alternative is me claiming to be Elon Musk, getting an ID in his name, whole ass stealing his identity to fund my life (which while that sounds funny to me is a crime lol.) Really without some proof of identity there's no point to even have IDs at all.
State IDs are also required for another right, the right to bear arms. You can't buy a gun in the US without an ID, and buying a gun being a right much like the right to vote, if it's prohibitively hard to get an ID for one right so too must it be for all rights. Frankly you can kill more people with a vote, too.
Those aren't free, though.
At least in California I had to pay 26 bucks for mine 10 years ago
Mine was $10. I agree they should be free but let's be real here $10-$26 isn't prohibitively expensive, my homeless friends would beg more than that in a few hours, even if you have to save a dollar a check that's still doable for something that by all accounts you do need, and for more than just "voting."
More like "we should be helping people get IDs" but cute you ignored the "i think they should be free" for good boy internet points.
Seriously you think "black people can't get IDs" and instead of "we should help them get them" your first thought is to feel sorry for them and do nothing other than say "well we shouldn't have them for voting?" What's wrong with you? Again, they need IDs for more than just voting.
Frankly, if we did provide everyone with an ID like we should, what then would be your argument against it? Would it still be racist?
Ignored, dismissed, use whatever word you like idgaf.
If you didn't say it reread the thread, that's what we're talking about over here. Dudes are posting whole ass ACLU links that actually are pretty convincing, catch up junior.
Again you ignore or dismiss the "free" part. Are you intentionally doing that or is your memory about the quality of a goldfish's?
OH so NOW we all agree it should be free but I want to charge money? Get your fucking story straight you pompous ass.
Again catch up. But fine "if we did provide IDs like we should, would it still be classist?"
Fucking christ lmao. You ok?
USSA is not car-centric country, it is car-ruled country.
Ok c/fuckcars, calm down. Just because you have to get the non-drivers-license-ID at a DMV because they combine the two when it is a drivers license is no reason to pop a blood vessel.
Frankly it makes more sense to me to also offer them at high schools, but it couldn't only be that because homeschoolers/dropouts etc, so they'd still need to be somewhere else too.
NATIONALIZE TACO / DEMOCRACY TUESDAY
everything is better with guacamole
You've achieved Canada.
We literally have none of those things.
Edit: except perhaps the citizenship certificate but I’ve never seen one before, but yeah they exist. We don’t have ranked voting, and elections aren’t holidays, although your employer must give you paid time off to vote, like 3 hours, and there are exceptions of course, like truckers for some reason don’t get the time off.
Isn't this the doofus who wanted to send a submarine into a cave? Dude doesn't have the intellectual heft necessary to manage a QuikTrip in Topeka.
But, take this drivel seriously. They like it when rural, red areas report their vote totals first, so that the news outlets will report that Republicans are "leading" early in the evening, before the blue cities finish their counting and overtake the early totals. It's a cheap trick to sell the claim that the election was stolen to their followers, y'know, the people who think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
wasn't it a big tube? like an inflatable tube? this guy loves tubes
There was a survey a few years ago that found that some absurdly-large number of Americans think that chocolate milk is produced by brown cows. Like, over 10 million people. I hope it's not true, but it's become kind of a meme to convey that Americans are misinformed about a lot of things, and generally just really dumb.
Seems almost paradoxical but yeah physical voting is the way to go https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
As others have said, the scalability ideal is to have electric/mechanical counters but with paper ballots. Keeps the paper trail for double checking, but also allows poll workers to deliver quick initial results to everyone breathing down their necks.
Pretty sure that's how we do it up on Canada. I think random samples are hand-counted to make sure the machine count is accurate. There's early voting too so not all just in one day.
I've never used a machine in 40 years of voting in Canada. And if they show up, I won't use them.
We fill out a paper, but a machine might scan them based on what OP is saying.
Then they will spot check it and have the paper backup if needed.
That's how we do it in my part of the US. And the whole thing is live streamed and audited. My mail ballot is also scanned twice, and I can check if it was received (and signature checks out) and counted. If there's an issue, I can correct my ballot before election day.
Well here in Germany we have about 40-50 million votes to count in a federal election. Right when the booths close we get an exit poll that is already pretty close. After 1-2 hours there are extrapolations that are even closer and next morning, there is usually the certified result. All on paper, counted by hand.
Unfortunately the software we use(d?) to transmitt and add up the votes is abysmal:
https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2017/pc-wahl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J61-t3OJKg
My state does Scantron style ballots. You fill in the little ovals and put it into a machine to be counted.
Did Musk figure out people will always rather want the opposite of what he is yapping about?
not even joking, i find that if there's one Twitter account to act as a definitive guide to policy, science, technology and various issues, it's Elon's account.
just carefully read every tweet and do the exact opposite. there's no way you can go wrong with it.
Broken clock this time though. Electronic voting is risky.
Even his good opinions need to overhype AI...
Anyway, we all saw that Tom Scott video, we know it's a bad idea.
Brazil has used electronic voting since 1997 and has had no major issues since (there was a bad history of fraud in the paper ballot era). It runs on Linux and they hold a public safety test in the year before where they test the system's security.
If the machines are running open source software and are easily auditable that's fine. The problem is in the US, they're not.
Those must be the ones he can't pay to manipulate.
Wow, this is one of the very few oppinions me and Musk share.
@OP why add an acronym when it is just a twitter post that doesn't even mention said acronym?
Yup, mail voting every time, with dropoff locations everywhere. There's a paper trail, so recounts can be done if we suspect issues.
I'm not worrried about voting machine fraud, I just don't see the point.
came to say that mail in voting was the most secure method.
I'm worried about voting machine fraud when there is no paper trail, since that is how Kemp stole an election and got away with it.
From what I can tell, Kemp didn't steal the election (btw, that's a left-leaning news source according to this site). If anything, it encouraged more Democrats to get out and vote, not less.
I was thinking of the wrong election. When the state gets sued over votes and those votes just so happen to be erased, that is suspicious af. But that wasn't 2018. Kemp wasn't running in the election where GA wiped the hard disks, but he was in charge at the time.
The 2018 election where he was able to remove voters from the registry and close poll sites is just standard conflict-of-interest, I suppose.
Or in a non-conspiratorial vein, it's literally his job to remove obsolete voters from the registry and ensure there are enough (and not too many) polls to keep costs in line.
I don't know anything about that guy to know if he's acting in good faith or not. I don't live in Georgia, and I've only been there for a couple days ever in my life. Maybe he's a corrupt pile of crap, or maybe he was just doing his job. The news on this is crazy slanted, but it seems like he was at least acting within the law.
I don't know, that's certainly pretty sus. Here's an article I found about it for a House seat, which Kemp oversaw but was not running in.
It looks like the lawsuit is finally being heard in court as of earlier this year.
I haven't read a ton about it, but it sounds like there are legitimate concerns (at least about the original system), but the issues are theoretical. I read it as a smear lawsuit intended to cast doubt on the election process, similar to what Trump did when he challenged the election.
I'm interested in seeing the outcome of the lawsuit, but I'm guessing there will be no evidence of vote tampering, just like with a Trump's suits. I hope evidence is still accessible but we won't know until the lawsuit concludes.
You’re not even American, you’re Swedish
Correct, but how is that relevant?
You’re saying you don’t trust our voting machines.. even though you’re not American? Elon Musk is referring to American voting machines.
Electronic voting is by definition not trustworthy enough.
A working election system needs to accomplish a few very contradictory things, while the voter needs to be annonymous, the system still needs to verify that one citizen only get's one vote, the system also need to count each vote.
In the Swedish system, on election day you go to your polling station, you get three envelopes, you go behind a screen and pick the ballots for the party you want to vote for, if you want to be extra anonymous you grab one from each party, you do that for all three elections (state, region and municipality), they are colour coded and the envelopes have a small cutout to make the color visible.
You then go behind another screen and put your ballots in the envelopes and seal them, you then take your envelopes, walk over to the election officials, hand them your ID, votes and election card.
One election official reads your name and ID number, the other finds you in the list, the first election official confrims that the second is ready, and they then say "voted white, voted blue, voted yellow" as each envelope with the coresponsig ballot is placed in the proper urn.
After the polling station closes, they deal with the pre votes and mail votes, they check all election cards against the list, and if someone has voted in person, the pre vote or mail vote is tossed, if not they are processed just as normal.
Then all votes are counted to get a total, if there are more votes than there should be, if just a few then I have heard it being resolved by tossing random votes.
Then the envelopes are opened, and ballots sorted and counted, anyone may come in and watch the process at any point.
This can't be done on a computer in a way that anyone should trust
It’s not accurate to say that electronic voting is inherently untrustworthy. That’s a subjective opinion rather than a fact.
There are countries that have successfully used electronic voting for a long time without significant issues. Since you’re European to begin with, take Estonia for example - their system is world class. Look it up.
Voter anonymity isn’t an issue exclusive to digital voting either. Standard voting systems also have to ensure that votes are cast anonymously while verifying the voter’s identity. With electronic voting, cryptography can be used to protect voter identity and maintain anonymity and it’s very effective.
You can also use advanced security measures like multi-factor authentication, biometric verification, and other technologies. There’s a metric shitload of ways to enhance security in electronic voting.
Electronic voting can be designed to be more secure and transparent than in-person. Blockchain can create tamper-proof records and paper audit trails for verification. Anything that can’t be verified can be excluded and investigated.
It’s ridiculous to dismiss electronic voting outright because the things you are worried about can already happen in traditional voting.
The problem with electronic is that by it's nature it can't do secrecy while preserving integrity.
That is just not possible, and if you can have your vote linked back to you in anyway after having cast it, then the system is bad.
And this is not getting into the whole black box problem, there is no way to verify that the system is actually running the code it should.
You are trusting a black box built by other people with their own political agendas, or who possibly has been influenced by other interests.
I am well aware of Estonia's voting system, I would never trust it if I had use it.
There is just too much money and power combined with voter secrecy involved in the election process that it can't be trusted to software.
And on the other hand.. if I vote can’t be linked back to anyone, then you have a whole other problem. So maybe voting in general is able to be manipulated no matter what.
Black box voting are designed to to be transparent and they are open source so the public can scrutinize.
Why don’t you trust Estonias voting system? You didn’t give a reason. Look up VVPAT.
What do you suggest then, since in-person voting has actually been linked to fraud and manipulation. Voting machines are perfectly acceptable.
Let’s just do a quick AI generated list of examples:
Ballot Box Stuffing
1948 Texas Senate Race: In the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson narrowly defeated Coke Stevenson. Allegations of ballot box stuffing were rampant, particularly involving Box 13 in Jim Wells County, where 202 votes, all in alphabetical order and all for Johnson, were suspiciously added late.
Chicago, Illinois (1960 Presidential Election): Allegations persist that Chicago's Cook County, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, engaged in ballot box stuffing to help John F. Kennedy win Illinois and thus the presidency. Investigations revealed irregularities and improbable vote counts in several precincts.
East Chicago, Indiana (2003 Mayoral Election): Incumbent Mayor Robert Pastrick was accused of ballot box stuffing. Investigations revealed that absentee ballots were manipulated, leading to multiple convictions of election officials for their roles in the fraud.
Ballot Destruction
Kentucky (1944 U.S. Senate Election): In the Democratic primary, incumbent Senator Happy Chandler faced charges of ballot destruction. Boxes of ballots from counties favorable to his opponent were allegedly thrown out or destroyed, leading to investigations and widespread controversy.
Georgia (1946 Governor's Election): During the "Three Governors Controversy," ballots in Telfair County were reportedly burned or otherwise destroyed to influence the election outcome. Supporters of Eugene Talmadge were implicated in the destruction of ballots that favored his opponents.
2004 Ohio Presidential Election: In Cuyahoga County, reports surfaced that provisional ballots were improperly discarded or lost. Election observers noted that some ballots from predominantly Democratic precincts were missing or destroyed, raising questions about the integrity of the vote count.
These examples underscore the persistent vulnerabilities in the electoral process and the importance of robust oversight and security measures to safeguard the integrity of elections.
I suggest not wasting my time with your AI bait
You deleted your comment after my response. Lmao.
It's not even all about being hackable. Voters should be able to fully understand exactly how their vote is counted. These systems ain't it.
Unironically blockchain go brrrrr
"Risk of being hacked by AI or human is still too great."
But he trusts his life and everyone elses to the AI and computer code in his car that goes 0-60 in 2.5 seconds to not be hacked. Makes sense actually yea.
Can't election committees call recount anyway?
EVMs, especially those, that do not connect to the internet, are fine. Online voting on the other hand...
I think in year 2024 we should be able to vote using a fucking app. No gerrymandering, everyone 18 our older automatically registered to vote.
If we could do that we never see another Republican in office again. Add rank choice voting and we might even have people who give a shit and can fix this country.
100%
I can do my banking, file my taxes, access my social security, make changes to practically any national database, apply for citizenship, all online and secure.
But for some reason I can't vote online.
GTFOOH
We really need positive digital ID. The US DoD has the right idea with the CAC, though really it's just a digital certificate issued by the government. The smartcard format is convenient for being wallet-able but there's plenty of other form factors for these things these days.
It amazes me that we as a society do official, important real-life things on the Internet with no way to validate our identity.
I even cringe a bit anytime someone tells me to DocuSign. Buying my house was a trip, especially all the forms that took place before closing. Like, it's great that I'm signing these things digitally, but there's still no proof that I'm the one signing these. I'm not in the presence of a notary, lawyer, or any sort of witness. I'm just clicking a link on an email and drawing my finger on the screen. That could, theoretically, be anybody who gains access to my email, with or without my permission.
But, if I'm signing with a certificate, I have provided a PIN or password to unlock this device I carry on my person, that a trusted third party had given me when proved that I am who I say I am, in person. It's a solid technology and it really needs way better adoption.
But muh mark of the beast!
I docusign for our house and my land. I done that a lot. If I remember correctly you do have to sign up and there lots of hoops there. But never thought of it like that.
I just saying it should be easy to vote bullshit they know who are legal citizens and who are not, no matter what they say.
Hell make it where I can go online fill in all my information and automatically every time voting is taken place in my area I received a package in the mail. We fill it out vote and mail it back.
Federal holiday on voting, and automatic registration.
This is exactly how it works in Washington state. You get the ballot in the mail, fill it out, seal it up, and mail it back or drop it off in a drop box. It's worked great for years.
I want to be able to vote online, too, but then I think about how easy it is to falsify your identify online vs in person and I don't know how it could work without introducing a new level of probable fraud.
I'm confident that if done correctly we can make it work. Like I said it would keep Republicans from ever winning again so be impossible to get our politicians to put money into a secure app that allow us to easily vote.
Barring that we should eliminate gerrymandering and electoral collge and make automatic registration for anyone over 18.
We know for a fact they can do that because they just did it with the draft.
Software guy here. I'd like a paper ballot. If it's possible, it wouldn't be done correctly anyway.
Putin approves.
Please don't do this on country scale. Relevant xkcd.
Agreed. That's fucked.
USA has another "worse that Russia" award here.
Last step would be removal of Iron Throne(presidency) and USA becoming United Soviet States of America.
Fuck you. You think rank choice voting and automatic registration are bad?
You attribute statement to me, that I didn't say. Very manipulative.
I said that after implementing RCV there are other things to improve. Like removal of post, that concentrates obscene amount of power.
Sorry sounded like you were saying these things would lead us there.
So short answer is no. It is wierd to me you don't have automatic registration.
Nope they actually do everything they can to keep us from voting. Republicans wouldn't win another wise.
I want everyone to have a cryptographic identity rooted in government trust that they use for voting and everything else related to the government.
That sounds like a really bad idea to me. Over here the voting machines are completely offline and don't have a hard drive. It prints out a small receipt with your vote in human readable form and as a QR code, which you drop in an electronic ballot box. As a software engineer, this feels like the only safe voting machine.
I understand your concerns. With our machines the QR codes can be forged, but manual recounts are done using the human readable votes on the receipts, which you have to check before leaving the voting booth and dropping the receipt in the ballot box.
Also, we have opkomstplicht (compulsory attendance), although research shows that our votes wouldn't change a lot if voting were voluntary. We also always vote on Sundays.
EDIT: Also, about 1 million people (around 10%) didn't show up to vote, despite the possibility of getting a heavy fine. Not sure how this influenced the result.
Voting booths are important. People should be able to vote how they want, and that means secret ballots. This is only possible with a secure space.
I know that Americans love mail-in voting and yearn for online voting, but mail-in is a poor substitute for voting booths, and online voting would be terrible for this plus many many other reasons.
Even if we had online voting the DRM required to make sure nothing is amiss would be kernel level and unavailable to linux users or if available, objectionable. It would also probably be tied to fucking chrome.
Honestly, I'm open to election reform if it means dead people can't vote.
Dead people already can't vote. People get arrested for using ballots of dead people already in the US.
In that case, leave voting how it is.