Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
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Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#202sigh This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.) Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.
If you are doing paper voting why bother with voting machines at all? What's the benefit?
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#203Stories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results. That being said for…
> That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expen…
> I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.
This is essentially what the Supreme Court said when they upheld Indiana's Voter ID law in 2008 [1]:
> The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies with the requirements of SEA 483. The fact that most voters already possess a valid driver’s license, or some other form of acceptable identification, would not save the statute under our reasoning in Harper, if the State required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. But just as other States provide free voter registration cards, the photo identification cards issued by Indiana’s BMV are also free. For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.
> Both evidence in the record and facts of which we may take judicial notice, however, indicate that a somewhat heavier burden may be placed on a limited number of persons. They include elderly persons born out-of-state, who may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate; persons who because of economic or other personal limitations may find it difficult either to secure a copy of their birth certificate or to assemble the other required documentation to obtain a state-issued identification; homeless persons; and persons with a religious objection to being photographed. If we assume, as the evidence suggests, that some members of these classes were registered voters when SEA 483 was enacted, the new identification requirement may have imposed a special burden on their right to vote.
> The severity of that burden is, of course, mitigated by the fact that, if eligible, voters without photo identification may cast provisional ballots that will ultimately be counted. To do so, however, they must travel to the circuit court clerk’s office within 10 days to execute the required affidavit. It is unlikely that such a requirement would pose a constitutional problem unless it is wholly unjustified.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#204Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
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Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expen…
> I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. I completely agree and I don't think there is a fair argument to suggest otherwise.
Great but history is proof that it won’t be equally accessible to everyone. There’s no evidence these laws are necessary. This juice just ain’t worth the squeeze.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up. It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pre…
> You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
It only works if the people working at the polling station are in on it, because you can't normally get an absentee ballot more than once.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#207Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
Control. If you can centralize all voting results in a single place you can control distribution of them. If you are the only entity able to read the results then everyone else has to take your word for it.
Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I don't understand the push towards e-voting in countries like Switzerland. E-voting can be hacked from the other side of the world, because it happens on computers. In-person voting or physical mail is much harder to hack from the other side of the world.
Most of the push for e-voting in Switzerland is from the Swiss abroad (10% of the electorate), who have a right to vote, but whose exercise of that right is subject to the vagaries of the international postal system. I personally have had problems with receiving postal ballots from Australia to Switzerland with not enough time to return them; presumably Swiss voters in Australia have similar problems, let alone less-…
That's easily fixed by extending the deadline. No new technology is required.
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#209Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
If it works, it should be much more efficient than the current system. Of course that is a massive "if"
Re: Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expen…
> I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens. This is essentially what the Supreme Court said when they upheld Indiana's Voter ID law in 2008 [1]: > The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies…
Yes, but I don't think most of those IDs qualify as "proof of citizenship."
Even a RealID compliant ID is not direct proof of citizenship.
Others in the comment chain have talked about localities with very few DMV officer per capita in some districts and appointment wait times of over a month. If we are going to require such a step to be eligible to vote, we need to hold states and municipalities to a high standard of providing an adequate level of service for all citizens.