US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies • Hacker News Board

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#301

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #295

asdff wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be hard to walk back from the election night hysteria we've developed as a populace.

Oh darn - will our elections be less of a circus? Will news channels be unable to milk election momentum coverage for nine straight months during the primaries? How will we ever survive? /s I moved up to Canada from ye olde US and their elections are so nice and simple. There are limits on the amount of time you can advertise as a campaign so no four year presidential campaigns up here. Additionally it's considered g…

This is exactly it. Elections have the same tone of reporting as the NBA draft. Look at how they butchered the debates. The first televised debate with Nixon was a deep dive into the inner workings of public policy, you practically had to have a polysci degree to keep up. Now it's just whoever is the loudest. They actually used to cut mics if it wasn't your turn to speak. Now they keep them open because a mean-spirited debate where everyone is cutting each other off to get their soundbite, and tearing each other apart on anything but policy is better for ratings.

It was a complete joke to have that many Dems on the stage, only joe and bernie turned out to be the only viable candidates out of that crowd once primaries started happening, and it became clear who actually had voters and who just had smoke and money for airtime on major networks. It's all for the ratings now, not to educate the public on policy. So shameful, but at least I can still just read the policy positions myself instead of watching a debate produced by Jerry Springer.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#302

Post by triceratops » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #274

triceratops wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against the idea of voter ID. But a well-intentioned voter ID law would make ID easier and cheaper to obtain. It would set up ID registration at banks, post offices, libraries, courthouses, city halls, senior centers, college campuses, churches or other religious/community centers, workplaces, school gyms, supermarkets and convenience stores, gas stations. Make it as easy as buying Girl Scout cookies. Heck, l…

You mention having that service at many places, including sending individuals to homes. What about that opportunity cost? You could use that budget for other community services. With voting as a part of your civic duty, one should be willing to incur small costs like spending a day getting a license every 4-7 years. My experiences have been fairly convenient, much better than other government agencies like the sherif…

> What about that opportunity cost? You could use that budget for other community services.

In a democracy, few community services are as fundamental or essential as those that allow people to vote universally and securely. Because without that you don't have a real democracy.

> It should be seen as a service to their fellow citizens of not having to pay another government employee salary, benefits, and retirement.

Who said anything about hiring more full-time employees? What I was proposing is manageable with contractors, volunteers, and some already-existing employees working overtime on weekends (e.g. to catch the people at church or out shopping), or evenings. Surely many citizens would be happy to discharge their civic duties by volunteering to help their fellow citizens get voter ID?

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#303

Post by specialist » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #276

specialist wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Brookings Institute had a handful of studies. (I'll help you find some when I get back to my computer.) My TLDR: Ballots should be secret. It takes very specific procedures to protect voter privacy, especially with postal ballots. Voter registration and participation (that you voted) are public records, by necessity, with some exceptions (judges, cops, victims, public figures). Voter eligibility should be adjud…

If they can successfully keep judges and cops out of the public registry, then they should be able to to that for everyone - no second rate citizens. I was hoping you had a system that could use something like public/private keys to verify the voter and the vote while remaining anonymous while providing furure result validation through your key.

Hi. Skim read your other replies. Am confident that you and I have enough common cause, overlap that we're pulling in the same direction. So this is a sincere response of my current worldview. My position has changed A LOT over time and I reserve the right to change more in the future. :)

I was an election integrity activist. I had some minor local victories. Like delaying the rollout of new gear (until 2009, a much less risky election) and prohibiting unique bar codes on our ballots (which were linked to voter id).

I've studied crypto voting proposals and other privacy preserving stuff like translucent databases and differential privacy. I'm just a simple bear, so I don't claim to be authoritative.

The core idea of the crypto systems I studied is to emulate the secure one-way hash of physical shuffle of the ballot box (Australian ballot) by inducing hash collisions. So there is no algorithm way to reverse the transformation.

Great in theory. Hard to implement in practice.

Over simplifying: you need simple (enough) ballots and large (enough) political jurisdictions (precincts) to ensure that each voter's ballot gets lost in the herd of ballots.

Otherwise straight forward brute force process of elimination (big data) allows trivial reidentification of each ballot's voter.

This is already a problem with our paper-based systems. Especially postal ballots. So us election integrity activists advocate very specific procedures to preserve voter privacy. Which are expensive and onerous, so rarely done.

For future, I will remain open minded about crypto voting systems. But it'll always remain a tough sell.

How this relates back to voter registration and eligibility? I don't know. Identity and authentication is very hard. My very best guess, per the translucent database strategies, is that once we issue everyone unique identifiers, such as Real ID, then we'll be able to technically unlock a lot of privacy protections.

Until then, because we have to link identifiers across heterogenous systems, we have to store PII as cleartext. Which defeats the purpose.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#304

Post by bargl » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 3:15 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #294

bargl wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence. There are people on Fox who are good, I.E. Chris Wallace. I mean he's my only example, but Jon Stewart did a skit with him and the quote that got me was, "how many times have you seen your show on my show?" It was a nod to the fact that Chris Wallace does actual news not opinion pieces. I'd actually say he's better and l…

I'm left leaning so it might just be bias from where I'm sitting but I dislike Fox, CNN & MSNBC but I feel like Fox is the greatest evil of those since Fox has an immense number of syndicated stations that pipe their message over local markets and since the media alternatives on the right are so few - go past Fox and you're getting into Brietbart and Daily Stormer pretty quickly, while as there are several left leani…

I can get behind that. I really have a problem with Fox being the single source of truth for right wingers. But that's been changing a bit as the right moves further to the right.

Another interesting albeit anecdotal thing I've notices is the progressive portion of the party moving so far left that they have started classifying some democrats as conservative. I don't think this has played out in the MSM yet but it's going to.

I can (as someone who now leans more left than right) say that if I had to pick I'd choose CNN over FOX/MSNBC. But I'd still have blindspots. If you listen to any of the networks in isolation you can't see the counterpoint. I'd also argue that our modern algorithms are more harmful in this way. If you watch one leaning show, it recommends that over others for a while.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#305

Post by 12xo » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

kfrzcode wrote: post #277

12xo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite any instances of this "fragility" being abused? There have been very few instances of voter fraud. Fraud in elections is common, that's how we end up with criminals and liars in charge...But election fraud is virtually non-existent.

I guess I can't. I'll go back to lurking.

Don't lurk, learn and help others learn. The only path forward is truth. Not opinion. (this is just my opinion :)

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#306

Post by alasdair_ » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

bargl wrote: post #273

alasdair_ wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence. I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Why would I add “CNN/MSNBC” to the sentence when I didn’t watch those channels? Nowadays, outside of a couple of notable exceptions (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and Perhaps one or two others) all of the stations are absolute total garbage. They are only worth…

>I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in similar ways. I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still has issues but I like them…

My current "quick" source of news is NPR's five minute reports that get updated many times per day, I mostly listen on Amazon's Alexa while I make coffee.

The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening to that is updated hourly.

For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Marketplace (NPR) generally get the facts correct and are generally fairly clear when expressing an opinion versus stating a face. Their biases (e.g. The Economist is pro-free market) are clearly stated up-front.

Le Monde Diplomatique is a solid addition, as is the English version of Al Jazeera (the Arabic version is supposedly much more biased but I can't confirm that).

Der Speigel is good but I rarely read it. Kommersant.ru is also decent (I use Google Translate). Again, even in. countries with authoritarian regimes, the ruling-classes need a way to roughly understand what is going on and usually this means the financial publications are closer to "the truth" than other sources.

Channel Four news from the UK is a solid TV News show, with journalists that hammer home on tough questions, but I haven't watched it regularly for a decade and it may have changed a lot.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#307

Post by DrScump » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

shwayn wrote: post #95

jkeuhlen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government does not have the jurisdiction to change how people vote in elections. That is determined by the states.

This is not completely correct Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat... "Manner of Elec…

Biennial November elections are a minority of elections overall.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#308

Post by bargl » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #306

bargl wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in similar ways. I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still has issues but I like them…

My current "quick" source of news is NPR's five minute reports that get updated many times per day, I mostly listen on Amazon's Alexa while I make coffee. The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening to that is updated hourly. For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall Street J…

Thanks for your input! I'll try some of these.

Also, I just saw Fareed Zakaria the between your first comment and today interviewing Bill Gates. It was really well done. A great recommendation. I remember seeing him before but he hadn't registered as an individual to watch out for.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#309

Post by rovolo » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

Armisael16 wrote: post #300

rovolo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* The employee can cancel the mail-in ballot and vote in person. * The ballots are sent to your home, not your workplace. * Employers can ask for a picture of an in-person ballot. Buying votes is illegal, which dissuades most people from buying votes. Your employees would turn you in, especially since people have very strong feeling about elections due to partisanship.

I’m afraid I’m insufficiently familiar with the details of the WA system to continue this. If you vote the day before Election Day and then submit a cancellation form an hour later, will you be able to submit another vote or will the system take too long to process your cancellation?

Apologies, I misread the "Voter Cancellation Form" on the WA website [0] as the "Vote Cancellation Form". I learned of my mistake after searching for information to answer your question. They didn't allow people to recast votes in the recent primary election after candidates dropped from the race. [1]

That said, I still think that you're unlikely to have people buying votes. The risk to the employer is going to be higher than the reward because every vote you buy is a potential snitch who could send you to jail. The more likely scenario for swaying votes is an emotionally manipulative/controlling partner.

[0] https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/

[1] https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2020/03/03/washington-s...

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#310

Post by masonic » Fri, May 01, 2020, 7:16 AM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #150

calvinmorrison wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think with 10+ million undocumented immigrants - a not insignificant portion of the population, but not citizenry - that people should not be concerned about ensuring only valid citizens can vote?

No. I live in a vote-by-mail state. You can only cast a ballot after you have registered. It is validated against your own registration. So at the time of voting, there is a hard limit on how much fraud is possible. To have an undocumented immigrant casting a vote, they'd have to register to vote and not get caught. Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens…

  Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.

They can't. There's no mechanism by which a state can take just a name and verify US citizenship for people not born in that state.