>We use traditional paper ballots in Spain, and we have the full results within 2-3h of polls closing.
Thats great for a country of 44 million, not so great with a country the population of 333 million spread across multiple time zones.
>The trick is using a distributed system. Each ballot box is opened, counted and tallied at the same time. The results (along with the votes themselves for posterior re-counting if needed) are sent to local electoral authorities who input the updates into a central system in real time. It essentially takes as long as it takes to count the fullest ballot boxes in big cities.
Lets set aside the issues involved with transmitting data electronically (sounds like just a distributed electronic system). Each state in the US runs its own election process and has its own budget. You would have numerous problems implementing this system across a country with 4 primary time zones(lets ignore the lone two states with separate time zones for now).
>Funny that you mentioned speed as an argument for electronic voting, though. I never understood how the US uses it, yet it takes them days to get the full results.
What are you talking about? The last several elections were typically decided within 12-24 hrs of the polls closing on the east coast. Where are you getting your "days" from? Maybe you are just reading Spanish news that is days behind in covering American news?
EU elections work just fine on paper. EU has 449M people vs 331M in USA. Multiple time zones as well. Each country has its own process and budget too..
This is not an argument. It is the official reasoning on why DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) is used. Said by both state legislators and election security researchers.
They have done better: Since 2016 a majority of states with "DRE only" have switched to DRE with verifiable paper trail. It provides quick results with the backup option of manual counting. They could go further by doing statistical risk limiting auditing for all elections and not just the ones that are close but it is still a large step forward since 2016.
> They could go further by doing statistical risk limiting auditing for all elections
I doubt that would help with avoiding or correcting any damage.
Lets take the obvious scenario, someone does a blatant large scale steal of an election. (they get access to manufacturer, set up their own firmware to be updated on all voting machines)
Imagine the damage in that case.
Let's say you do detect and try to correct.
It's already too late. The winners will contest statistic analysis and say fake news then tie it and any recount up in lawsuits. (perhaps combined with arranging for some ballots to be destroyed in secondary storage so any recount would be contestable too)
They will assume power and it will be too late. (there is a time limit for recount and supreme court might decide to force usage of bad results)
Or they might be prevented from getting in power (how would that work, who would be leading?)
You will have revolts and unrest either way...
That sort of chaos would be exactly what a foreign power like Russia or China would want.
Punishing them would be impossible and they would have already won at this point, it wouldn't even matter who wins eventually.
Domestic actors might also view this as their only option to win and use it regardless... If they get in power it's game over, if they lose they might still be in a powerful position with lots of support.
So why not avoid the issue entirely and go paper ballots with independent observers.
>Lets take the obvious scenario, someone does a blatant large scale steal of an election. (they get access to manufacturer, set up their own firmware to be updated on all voting machines)
A DRE machine with a paper trail works by having the voter see the actual printed paper before committing the vote. How can an attacker overcome the paper record that has been verified by the voter before the vote is committed? Thats why I said that risk limiting audit where you perform statistical analysis on the paper ballots is the best of all worlds. It allows quick results and if there is either a close election or an anomaly from the audit then the entire paper backup is counted manually.
Fortunately many states have already laws on the books to automatically trigger a manual count if the election is within a specific extremely close margin but I believe they should also do the risk auditing on all elections which is still something that activists are working towards getting implemented.
>It's already too late. The winners will contest statistic analysis and say fake news then tie it and any recount up in lawsuits. (perhaps combined with arranging for some ballots to be destroyed in secondary storage so any recount would be contestable too)
That implies that the election staff is compromised. Each ballot has a unique serial number(at least in the states I have looked at).
>So why not avoid the issue entirely and go paper ballots with independent observers.
I have also been involved in a lawsuit contesting an election in NY. The bigger issue is not intimidation of staff or potential destruction of ballots(there are mitigations for both of those), its that when the ballots themselves are ambiguous (say in the case of a person marking a paper ballot incorrectly) then it allows legal maneuvers to dismiss ballots and swing an election which is exactly what happened in the recount triggered by the lawsuit. We had a number of paper ballots marked incorrectly and it was not possible to reach the voters in time to have their vote registered correctly so the election was lost by the person filing the lawsuit.
This issue would have been avoided by a electronic machine producing clean paper records verified by voters and are not ambiguous in a recount.
> This issue would have been avoided by a electronic machine producing clean paper records verified by voters and are not ambiguous in a recount
What happens if paper ballot is correct but machine then changes some small percentage of votes randomly when sending upstream?
You say there will be a recount, how would that work?, what would trigger it?, and what could a malicious actor do to prevent it from working?
Malicious actor that can have firmware modified (that seems like a easy target - compromise company making them), that can work up large crowds and have resources for lawsuits.
What would the end result be?
What would society look like after a few months of this?
>What happens if paper ballot is correct but machine then changes some small percentage of votes randomly when sending upstream?
If it does not change the outcome of the election then it does not have the intended effect. If the margin was so close as to change the election the laws on the books would force a complete manual count regardless. Nevertheless, you are proving my point about the risk limiting audits which would help to catch anomalies like this.
>You say there will be a recount, how would that work?, what would trigger it?, and what could a malicious actor do to prevent it from working?
If the margin is within a certain percentage (depends on the state) it forces a manual count of the ballots. I am advocating the risk limiting audits to help catch the machine acting malicious while printing the correct result on paper.
>Malicious actor that can have firmware modified (that seems like a easy target - compromise company making them), that can work up large crowds and have resources for lawsuits.
The lawsuits would still have to respect the law on the books. No machine is perfect but humans are not perfect either. In this thread I already discussed the incident in NY where they have paper ballots filled out by voters and then scanned. Humans messing up the ballots lead to the discarding of votes because they could not be validated. A combination of machine verifying human while human verifying machine is best.
We do not leave in an ideal world. Saying something should happen does not translate to it being done.
Example, Bush vs Gore was decided by the courts, not by recount.
So if that election was stolen, we will never know.
In that case, your whole argument falls apart, there should have been a recount but that never happened.
In that case, if firmware altered enough votes it worked.
" Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately.[1] On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. "
Now replace Bush with Trump, have a blatant steal, work a lawsuit up to supreme court, have supreme court decide the same way.
>Example, Bush vs Gore was decided by the courts, not by recount.
That whole event was triggered by the "hanging chad" nonsense found in the poorly designed paper ballots that led to ambiguity.
>Now replace Bush with Trump, have a blatant steal, work a lawsuit up to supreme court, have supreme court decide the same way.
If you cannot trust the law then a speedy result works in your favor. If you have a quick electronic result plus have a risk limiting audit done the night of the election as standard practice it makes it harder to challenge the result. In a paper only ballot by definition will take longer and leaves the door open for every election to be challenged.
>So it seems that election result was changed successfully by machines.
Did you read the right wikipedia article? The ballots were paper ballots! The poor design caused people to vote for the incorrect candidate. What machine are you talking about? Certainly not DRE. There was no DRE involved in this state.
>Alas, you still argue machines are better when there's precedent of them changing an election result.
I am arguing DRE with risk limiting audits solves all issues. Fast turnaround with two way auditing.
>I don't have anything more to add here, thanks for the discussion, was interesting digging through wikipedia on this.
Its so funny to see how HN people tend to be so ignorant of the real world because they think they know best. After all they are hackers right? Sooner or later they always get smacked with reality.
> Did you read the right wikipedia article? The ballots were paper ballots! The poor design caused people to vote for the incorrect candidate. What machine are you talking about?
From same article:
"Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case."
It looks like you haven't read the article.
I'll make it short:
- machines messed up, humans without machines would have not.
- attempts at recount were blocked by supreme court.
- bad result was used to alter election result.
As such, in your situation, if the voting machines you keep arguing for will produce wrong results, we can expect the same result, lawsuits and supreme court deciding election instead of the people.
Any "risk limiting audits" will be thrown in the trash if it's convenient. Same as the recount attempts in florida.
If you do not learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.
> Its so funny to see how HN people tend to be so ignorant of the real world because they think they know best. After all they are hackers right? Sooner or later they always get smacked with reality.
Kind if ironic, don't you think?
You keep arguing for a complex unproven system that is easily compromisable and needs risk limiting audits just to exist.
You are ignorant of real world risks.
You dismiss a simpler, resilient, proven, similarly fast without these glaring issues in EU.
You know best.
If voting machines ever mess up then reality will smack us all, same as in the past.
>"Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case."
So they improved a bit? Thats good? They are still using Optical scanning with no risk limiting auditing which is not great. What are you even arguing anymore?
>machines messed up, humans without machines would have not.
You don't know that. You are making an assumption while improperly understanding what did happen. It wasn't the machines that messed up, it was the people caused by the paper ballot. I cannot believe it is so difficult to understand that a machine producing a consistent printout is better to verify than trying to decipher what humans have drawn in a circle.
>- attempts at recount were blocked by supreme court.
Again you are conflating two separate issues. The cause of the supreme court blocking the recount was the poor paper design. If the count was concluded before the networks called it then there wouldn't have been exposure to this seperate issue that activists needed to work on.
>Any "risk limiting audits" will be thrown in the trash if it's convenient. Same as the recount attempts in florida.
Not if there are laws and processes on the books or else you could just do anything like throw out the paper ballots with some nonsense stating they are tampered with.
>You keep arguing for a complex unproven system that is easily compromisable and needs risk limiting audits just to exist.
Its the system that all the election security researchers say is the best system for the US's complex ballots. I trust them more than some rando on HN. Not to mention that it makes sense.
>You dismiss a simpler, resilient, proven, similarly fast without these glaring issues in EU.
This is the height of ignorance, thinking that since something works in one locale that it automatically works best in all other environments.
>If voting machines ever mess up then reality will smack us all, same as in the past.
Arizona counts by paper ballot and is suffering from the problem that DRE is designed to solve. Their multiple days election is a function of a very close race and is not typically indicative of the majority of past election results. Maybe we are living in an era where each race will be razor close, which actually makes the argument for DRE.
> Thats great for a country of 44 million, not so great with a country the population of 333 million spread across multiple time zones.
> You would have numerous problems implementing this system across a country with 4 primary time zones(lets ignore the lone two states with separate time zones for now).
You have mentioned timezones twice but haven't really explained why or how they would be an issue. Spain has two timezones, early results are withheld until polls close in the westmost timezone. The EU spans across multiple timezones as well, and elections to the European Parliament follow the same principle.
> Lets set aside the issues involved with transmitting data electronically (sounds like just a distributed electronic system).
Data is transmitted electronically and made publicly available on a per-ballot-box basis. Representatives of political parties with obviously competing interests are present during the counting process (and any member of the public who wishes to can attend it as well) and keep their own tally. If they find out that it diverges from the published results, they can ask for a re-count, which is possible because the physical votes are preserved. In fact they are treated as evidence and follow proper chain of custody by the national police.
> What are you talking about? The last several elections were typically decided within 12-24 hrs of the polls closing on the east coast. Where are you getting your "days" from? Maybe you are just reading Spanish news that is days behind in covering American news?
I distinctly remember live following the 2020 presidential election, going to sleep after all polls closed in the US, and waking up 8 hours later with the race still undecided. How is this possible with a fully electronic system? Why is it not near-instant? This is what I haven't understood yet and would love to be explained.
From Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
> On the morning of November 7 at approximately 11:25 a.m. EST, roughly three and a half days after polls had closed, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, the Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News all called the election and Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes for Biden
>I distinctly remember live following the 2020 presidential election, going to sleep after all polls closed in the US, and waking up 8 hours later with the race still undecided. How is this possible with a fully electronic system? Why is it not near-instant? This is what I haven't understood yet and would love to be explained.
They were suffering from the downsides of switching to an all paper ballot system: If you recall there was a worldwide pandemic occurring in 2020 so as a result all states offered paper ballots which were mailed in.
And that election cycle, a record-breaking number of ballots were cast by mail.
In Pennsylvania, things were delayed because the state wasn't allowed to start the process of verifying and counting ballots until Election Day. Pennsylvania is the state with the most votes left to count, as the end of the election and it went into Thursday if I recall.
Some states, like Nevada, are also continuing to accept any mail-in ballots that arrive by Tuesday, Nov. 10, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. That means votes were still trickling in, and all of those would have been counted.
Thats great for a country of 44 million, not so great with a country the population of 333 million spread across multiple time zones.
>The trick is using a distributed system. Each ballot box is opened, counted and tallied at the same time. The results (along with the votes themselves for posterior re-counting if needed) are sent to local electoral authorities who input the updates into a central system in real time. It essentially takes as long as it takes to count the fullest ballot boxes in big cities.
Lets set aside the issues involved with transmitting data electronically (sounds like just a distributed electronic system). Each state in the US runs its own election process and has its own budget. You would have numerous problems implementing this system across a country with 4 primary time zones(lets ignore the lone two states with separate time zones for now).
>Funny that you mentioned speed as an argument for electronic voting, though. I never understood how the US uses it, yet it takes them days to get the full results.
What are you talking about? The last several elections were typically decided within 12-24 hrs of the polls closing on the east coast. Where are you getting your "days" from? Maybe you are just reading Spanish news that is days behind in covering American news?