[elbasti]

Voting is not a monolithic process. It's actually a combination of 3 things:

- How votes are cast

- How votes are counted

- How votes are custodied

In order for an election to be trusted, all three steps must be transparent and auditable.

Electronic voting makes all three steps almost absolutely opaque.

Here's how Mexico solves this. We may have many problems, but "people trust the vote count" is not one of them:

1. Everyone votes, on paper, in their local polling station. The polling station is manned by volunteers from the neighborhood, and all political parties have an observer at the station.

2. Once the polling station closes, votes are counted in the station, by the neighborhood volunteers, and the counts are observed by the political party observers.

3. Vote counts are then sent electronically to a central system. They are also written on paper and the paper is displayed outside the poll both for a week.

The central system does the total count, but the results from each poll station are downloadable (to verify that the net count matches), and every poll station's results are queryable (so any voter can compare the vote counts displayed on paper outside the station to the online results).

Because the counting is distributed, results are available night-of in most cases.

Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.

**

Edit: Some people are confused about what I mean by "coerced." Coerced in this case means "forced to vote in some way."

The typical way this is done is as follows:

- The "coercer" obtains a blank ballot (for example, by entering the ballot box and hiding the ballot away).

- The blank ballot is then filled out in some way outside the poll station.

- A person is given the pre-filled ballot and threatened to cast it, which they will prove by returning a blank ballot.

- Rinse and repeat.

This mode of cheating is called the "revolving door" for obvious reasons.

[hintymad]

What I failed to understand is why only in the US the voting procedure is so controversial. Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. It's funny that the US criticized that EU countries were getting less democratic. Well, at least those countries have a much more sane voting process.

[hackyhacky]

> Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism.

This characterization is reductive and basically a straw-man.

The principle underlying opposition to "counting in one day" is basically that every vote that is correctly placed in time should be counted, and as many people as possible should have access to voting. Mail-in voting, for example, has been shown to increase voter turnout by making voting more convenient, but you have the question of what to do with ballots that are received late. There are pretty good arguments for counting all mail-in ballots that are postmarked before the election, and I don't think "xenophobia" is among them.

In America specifically, all decisions relating to access to voting are considered against a backdrop of our widespread and systematic attempt to restrict voting. A modern example of this is related to wide disparity in the number of polling places, and therefore the amount of time required to vote, in "urban" regions of some southern states as compared to rural regions.

I have never heard of a racism-based opposition to paper ballots. I think you just made that up.

[mmooss]

I think these claims are badly miscontrued at best, and match one party's outlook. The Republican Party has tried inhibiting voting in ways that benefit them, often by making it more difficult for minorities to vote.

Many of those tactics existed on a large scale in the South before the Voting Rights Act, and when the Supreme Court recently invalidated the Act, many have returned. For example, reducing voting locations in minority areas so people have to travel far and wait longer. Texas and possibly other states have criminalized errors in voter registration (iirc), making it dangerous to register voters. Georgia, and others, conducted a large-scale purge of voting rolls, requiring people to re-register. Requiring government-issued ID prevents many people from voting, often poor people and immigrants who lack what wealthier people are accustomed to. Florida's voters passed a ballot measure enabling ex-felons to vote; the Republicans added a law requiring full restitution to be paid (iirc) before they could vote, effectively canceling the ballot measure vote. And these days almost any Democratic victory is called fraud; remember the 2000 election, the lawsuits, riots, threats against ordinary citizens working on local election boards and on elections, etc.

Directly addressing the parent's claims: I've never heard of paper votes being called racism - could you share something with us? Calls to limit counting are often accompanied by calls to limit the voting period, invalidate votes received later (e.g., due to US mail delays), and calls to greatly restrict mail-in voting - all things that make it more difficult for people working two-three jobs.

The Democrats have their flaws; I've never seen them try to limit voting. That should be something everyone in the US - and in the world - agrees on: Do all we can to enable everyone to vote.

[popalchemist]

Are you American? Are you white?

There are historical factors that contribute to those things you brought up. American minorities are disproportionately affected by things like limited hours, for example. You'd know that if you were an American POC.

[blharr]

I don't understand the critique. Nobody has ever made these claims.

I don't mean this as an ad hominem, but was this comment generated with AI or something?

[chrisco255]

Politicians just use those accusations as cover for conducting fraud or enabling the conditions that they inherently benefit from. There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.

[Nursie]

> Want to limit certain time window for counting?

Why would you want that?

Surely what you want is to enable everyone to vote, and then to count all the votes?

In the UK where I have most experience of this stuff, there are many, many small polling stations, and usually you just walk right in and vote without queueing. The longest I ever had to wait to vote was about 30 minutes. Votes are counted locally and results usually declared within a handful of hours. Some take longer due to recounts etc if the tally is very close in a certain area, but the whole thing is pretty uncontroversial and pretty low-effort.

Here in Australia, voting is compulsory, it's always on a Saturday, and there's usually a charity sausage-sizzle at the polling place, it's sorta fun. And again, AFAICT (I'm not a citizen yet) the infrastructure is over-provisioned so people aren't waiting around forever.

From what I hear about the US, in some places voting can take hours, it seems like the number of polling places is deliberately limited to make it hard for people to vote, and you have those weird/horrible rules cropping up like it being illegal to hand out water to people in line, which seems purely designed to discourage electoral participation. And then you have all these calls to stop the count after a certain time etc.

It's deeply weird from an outside perspective. If counts are taking too long, if people are having trouble voting, provision more... but of course it seems clear that there are motives for underprovisioning, because one or other group thinks it will benefit them.

[fzeroracer]

> Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting?

Why do either of these matter? If you assume paper voting in-person is secure, then there is zero reason to also limit the time spent counting or the time window for counting. Anything past that point is clearly trying to fill some sort of agenda for the sake of disenfranchising people who cannot adhere to the times you're trying to set.

[drBonkers]

These objections to secure voting always smell the same as “privacy and encryption bad, must protect children!”

[cogman10]

How we do it in Idaho, which I think is pretty much the ideal level.

1. Everyone votes on paper.

2. An electronic tallying machine tallies the vote.

3. Vote counts are sent to a central system, IDK if it's electronic or not.

4. Candidates can challenge and start a hand recount at anytime.

I think this combo is pretty close to the ideal. The actual ballots are easy to audit. Discrepancies can be challenged. And the machine doing the tallying isn't connected to the internet, it's just a counting tool that gets the job done fast.

For people with disabilities, poll workers can come in and help with the vote.

[derektank]

If you’re willing to do away with the secret ballot, you can eliminate a lot of the need for transparency in the mechanics. If people are able to check their own vote for discrepancies and speak to others to confirm their validity, you only really need to confirm that the final vote count is tabulated correctly (which again, is relatively easy to independently verify).

[hackyhacky]

> If you’re willing to do away with the secret ballot

We're not willing to do that. No modern democracy has public ballots. The reason is simple: secret ballots make it effectively impossible to buy votes, as there's no way to prove how any person actually voted.

[nwellinghoff]

You can achieve the same thing with electronic voting. Just because its electronic does not mean you do away with the “layers”

[LelouBil]

That's pretty much the same in France

[nonethewiser]

>Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.

If that's gaming the system, what even is the point of voting?

[elbasti]

The key word is coereced (as in, forced, not convinced).

[idiotsecant]

Are you suggesting that voting is pointless because some people can be convinced to vote for stupid things?

[capitanazo77]

Yeah. The weakness in any democracy are “populist” Robin Hood politicians.

[hackyhacky]

> If that's gaming the system, what even is the point of voting?

Good point. Let's just get rid of voting and go back to "divine right of kings", at least until they develop a cure for human gullibility.

[__MatrixMan__]

People can be taught to recognize when they're being duped.

This may be a bit tinfoil hatty of me, but I think the whole anti-woke thing is a ploy to interfere with that kind of education.