No, because they have no idea what your true ballot ID was.
They can force you to show them a ballot, the idea is that all ballot ID's get made public. You could be showing them anybody's and they'll never have any way of knowing.
Not necessarily. In Colorado they handle this by putting the ballot in a blind envelope inside a trackable envelope. I can verify the details of the receipt of that trackable envelope to the tallying center where it is verified as untampered and opened under video with multiple people present. The unmarked envelope is added to all the rest of the ballots to be counted.
So then you can verify your vote reached the tallying center, but not that it was tallied correctly. Someone can look at your vote and count it wrong.
I think that's fine and the best we can do, but the person I replied to said you can verify your vote is tallied correctly. That implies checking what the actual vote was.
All true, but this is no different than any other ballot in the state. At a certain point you can choose anonymous ballots or you can choose trackable ballots.
Yes, and the reasons are outlined by the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body that runs Australian elections (see the first FAQ)[0].
There are scrutineers that watch counting happen at the booth once polls close, and who also see and hear the numbers get phoned into HQ. HQ has more scrutineers from all parties checking both postal votes and recounts.
If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).
Pen markings are perfectly valid however, so you can bring a pen to the booth to vote with if you'd like to do so.
It's also true of course that erasers don't quite erase pencil. It would be fairly obvious that the paper was tampered with.
> If anything doesn't match up it gets flagged. I think that the ability of every party to watch votes themselves means that trust is increased, and they have skin in the game (if they didn't object at the booth why not!?).
I mean the same is true in the United States. One of the key issues with the 2020 election was footage from several jurisdictions where the public was physically blocked from viewing the counting by election officials literally holding up giant white boards. The optics of that were extremely bad.
Unlike the US the elections aren't run by some local arsehat with local rules. they have consistent rules over the entire state or country (depending on election in question)
Scrutineers are also not members of the public. They are declared and appointed by candidates and parties for polling oversight and have complete access to the counting and polling area. They're not allowed to touch ballots but they can challenge and bring them up to all the scrutineers in the location (and EC staff) and finally they can take it to the court afterwards
Election officials are also not local council\elected people they're people working for the AEC\State Electoral commission. which is as mentioned above a non partisan organisation (which is highly different from bipartisan framing)
You also have a large number of counting staff. who do the sorting and then counting with machine assistance (how many sheets are here in this stack do they match the tally the 2 people already made on that pile)
Though the senate elections have a more complex voting software stack due to STV fun.
If you're worried about someone taking away your vote by erasing your pencil marking, then you should be equally/more worried about someone spoiling your ballot by voting twice on the same ballot, thereby invalidating it. You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that.
> You just need to trust that the people handling your ballot won't do that.
Given the number of people involved in watching ballots the entire time it is happening this would require a lot of compromised people and a lot of compromised scrutineers.
The problem is that disappearing ink is a thing, and someone could swap out the source of ink (pen, stamp pad) in the voting booth.
Erasing is indeed a possibility with pencil markings, but this can only happen during the counting process - which should be open to anyone to audit, and anyone messing around with an eraser during the counting process would stand out like a sore thumb.
Where I have seen stamp pads used for voting, you do not take them with you in the voting booth.
You must press the stamp on the stamp pad at the official who gives you the stamp.
Stamping is fast and convenient. While corrupted officials could apply additional stamps during the counting, to make the vote invalid, that should be prevented by witnesses belonging to the parties that compete in the election.
It's pencil in Canada too. Pencil works. Ink pens stop working, and are far more expensive than pencil in bulk. Voting is old. Using fountain pens, and quills to vote, is far more annoying than pencil when it just works.
The mark of vote being indelible or not is irrelevant. The monitoring and protection of the ballots is far more important. For example, representatives of all political parties are involved in the count, oversight by an agency, etc. If you had time to erase and re-mark ballots, you could swap out paper ballets too.
Someone needs to gain physical access to the ballot after voting in order to erase it. If they can do that they can just as well make it invalid using a pen, or they can just tear it up.
On the other hand, disappearing ink has been around for a long time.
And, in many cases, because that's where funding exists.
This comes up somewhat frequently in discussions of pet food. Most of the companies doing research into pet food - e.g. doing feeding studies, nutritional analysis, etc - are the manufacturers of those foods. This isn't because there's some dark conspiracy of pet food companies to suppress independent research; it's simply because no one else is funding research in the field.
Let's not label ourselves. Once we do it, we have this tendency to think in black and white terms. Like, I wish people didn't divorce, so kids could have stable families, does this make me a conservative? Maybe yes, or maybe no, because I don't want to FORCE people to stay married.
But once I label myself a conservative, I am stuck, and now have a new set of friends with the same label, because I am labeled myself, and they have all those radical ideas, and then I have to pretend to believe and ending up believing them too.
Of course, the same applies when you label yourself a progressive.
Eh, I don’t think not wanting gambling and amoral behavior to consume society makes me a conservative in any real sense of the word. More just common sense pragmatism, is how I’d put it.
No, it’s an argument against removing rules / making changes without deeply understanding why those rules exist in the first place, and what might happen when they are removed.
It’s perfectly fine to be for progressive social changes, as long as those criteria are met.
I’d call that a pragmatic approach, not a conservative one.
"It should in theory be possible to take a conservative approach to being progressive"
That's likely how most of the middle see themselves (if not in those words) - open to new changes but only if they're fully understood and not drastic.
No, sometimes social change is putting up a fence. And if social change is sometimes putting up fences, that would mean that not all fences are supposed to be torn down.
Sure, but Chesterton's Fence is a pretty foundational argument among many conservatives.
Conservatives think societies are hard to understand, which makes them hard to engineer, and replacing institutions that work with new inventions needs to be done carefully and slowly.
I think most serious left-wing people also hold a strong aversion to gambling on the grounds that it's financially exploitative and can be viewed as a regressive tax on the poor/uneducated.
> Does that automatically translate into more openings for the people whose full time job is providing that thing?
Not automatically, no.
How it affects employment depends on the shapes of the relevant supply/demand curves, and I don't think those are possible to know well for things like this.
For the world as a whole, it should be a very positive thing if creating usable software becomes an order of magnitude cheaper, and millions of smart people become available for other work.
Given the products that the software industry is largely focused on building (predatory marketing for the attention economy and surveillance), this unfortunately may be the case.
You will have an error rate of less than or equal to 1%. You can't average two measurements and get a result with a higher error rate than the worst of the original measurements had.
You wouldn't be well served by averaging a measurement with a 1% error and a measurement with a 90% error, but you will have still have less than or equal to 90% error in the result.
If the errors are correlated, you could end up with a 1% error still. The degenerate case of this is averaging a measurement with itself. This is something clocks are especially prone to; if you do not inertially isolate them, they will sync up [1]. But that still doesn't result in a greater error.
You could introduce more error if you encountered precision issues. Eg, you used `(A+B)/2` instead of `A/2 + B/2`; because floating point has less precision for higher numbers, the former will introduce more rounding error. But that's not a function of the clocks, that's a numerics bug. (And this is normally encountered when averaging many measurements rather than two.)
There are different ways to define error but this is true whether you consider it to be MSE or variance.
This is not how continuous probabilities work. The probability that a clock is exactly right is zero; hence there is always some error in a measurement of time. Adding additional clocks will always cause the error to be less or equal to the maximum error.
The result in the original article only applies when there are discrete choices. For stuff you can actually average, more is always better.
Oh, and even with discrete choices (like heads vs tails), if you had to give a distribution and not just a single highest likelihood outcome, and we'd judge you by the cross-entry, then going from one to two is an improvement. And going from odd n to the next even n is an improvement in general in this setting.
Then again looking at the table, laptop, and protein drink in front of me, I know that many people were involved in making and shipping them. Some were quite possibly rapists, racists and/or worse.
That’s interesting analogy! With art, you re receiving something that’s not physically consumed but informs you or even changes your mind - depends how that art works for you.
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