[HN Gopher] Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after...
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Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption
failure
Author : jjgreen
Score : 132 points
Date : 2026-03-11 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| palata wrote:
| The title is misleading. It's an e-voting PILOT. That's
| important. "Switzerland is running small-scale e-voting pilots in
| four of its 26 cantons", three of which were not affected.
|
| From Wikipedia [1]:
|
| > A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is
| a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate
| feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the
| study design prior to performance of a full-scale research
| project.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment
| jjgreen wrote:
| Had to truncate the title since too long for HN (often the case
| for the Register)
| palata wrote:
| And it makes it sound like a production system failed, where
| what actually happened is that this was a pilot that worked
| in 3/4 of the involved cantons and that the people who
| participated to it _knew_ it was a pilot.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| You cut out something that changed the message entirely
| jjgreen wrote:
| I thought the edit window was 15 minutes, but it seems it
| is an hour, so edited to restore the "pilot"
| beautiful_apple wrote:
| Switzerland has been very careful/ conservative about rolling
| out e-voting. The same cannot be said of other jurisdictions
| (like Ontario's municipal elections) where adoption is very
| rapid and without coordination/support/standards from the
| provincial or federal governments.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Meanwhile Brazil does full e-vote for almost 30 years collecting
| more than 100 million votes (that's 11 times the whole of
| Switzerland's population).
|
| You'll get there Switzerland, it can be done. It is safer and
| faster.
| palata wrote:
| And they probably started with small-scale pilots, too.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Yes, they did.
|
| But I think that the main reason is that Brazil's elections
| were a lot dirtier and a lot more unreliable than
| Switzerland's.
|
| What I mean is that the push towards e-voting is much
| stronger in countries with unreliable elections, because
| e-voting is harder to tamper than the crude ways you can
| defraud paper ballots.
|
| Switzerland's and other organized countries have elections
| that are "good enough", so the push towards e-voting is
| probably not that strong.
|
| Is the "leapfrog" concept. Sometimes it is easier to adopt
| newer technologies in places where the existing ones are
| horrible. Other examples: electronic payment systems, solar
| panels and EVs in India and Africa.
| palata wrote:
| 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.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Can't talk about Switzerland, don't know the
| particularities.
|
| But in continental countries like Brazil it makes a lot
| of sense. It is cheaper, faster and safer.
|
| > E-voting can be hacked from the other side of the
| world, because it happens on computers
|
| How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a
| computer that isn't even online? True, the transmission
| of computed results is made online, but keeping that safe
| is trivial, banks do it.
| palata wrote:
| > How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a
| computer that isn't even online?
|
| E-voting in this case means that they can vote from their
| computer, ipad or mobile phone. They are connected to the
| internet.
| brainwad wrote:
| 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-developed countries.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| That's easily fixed by extending the deadline. No new
| technology is required.
| brainwad wrote:
| It's not necessarily easy. The timing of Australian
| elections from issuance of writs is limited by the
| constitution, and since they can occur at the discretion
| of the prime minister, you can't prepare for them in
| advance.
|
| Swiss votes are scheduled in advance, but the explanatory
| material and campaign flyers still have to be made and in
| order to be topical you don't want to make them too
| early. In particular the consequences of previous votes
| can affect the upcoming votes, and the closest interval
| is only 2 months (September/November).
| beautiful_apple wrote:
| Brazil's e-voting does not allow voters to vote online from
| home on a personal computer (like in Switzerland). It has very
| different requirements.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil
| zoobab wrote:
| eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not
| even by nerdy ones. It's just good for the trash.
| palata wrote:
| Also e-voting can be hacked (I guess they vote from their
| computer/smartphone, which can be hacked from the other side of
| the world). The last place you want to care about phishing,
| IMO, is voting.
|
| Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail
| voting from the other side of the world.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Regular ballot voting can also be hacked and on a scale.
| Making ballots invalid while counting them, or modifying them
| in some form or other, intentionally writing wrong values in
| the counting protocols...
|
| And of course controlled vote or paid vote...
|
| E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see
| Venezuella.
| another-dave wrote:
| but it's done in public where anyone observing the count
| can see that the people counting don't have any pencils etc
| in their hand
| tribaal wrote:
| Exactly - it's done in public, and not centrally. Any
| citizen can go and check how it's done in their own
| Geminde.
| palata wrote:
| Yeah but it cannot be hacked from the other side of the
| world. I think it's a different kind of threat.
|
| If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to
| tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to
| modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-
| German, good luck with that :D.
| atoav wrote:
| It is not even about understanding. It is about how easy it is
| to distrust it.
|
| Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to
| get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is
| to create _agreeable consent_ among those who voted. A good
| election system is one where even sworn enemies can
| begrudgingly agree on the result.
|
| A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be
| monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the
| skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not
| everybody, but it is _much_ better than any hypothetical
| digital system
| phoronixrly wrote:
| How about a machine voting system with paper fallback. You as
| a voter can review the paper protocol from your vote. If
| there is distrust, the justice system can review the paper
| trail as well.
| rwmj wrote:
| I don't understand the reason for electronic voting. The UK
| manages to tally up paper votes overnight, even from far-
| flung Scottish islands. Electronic voting is literally
| solving a problem that nobody has.
| 85392_school wrote:
| The UK is the world's 22nd most populated and 78th
| largest country.
| rwmj wrote:
| UK population density (people/sq km) is 289 and
| Switzerland's is 228, so not very different. Plus
| Switzerland is fully connected, there are no remote
| islands.
|
| [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-
| population/population-by...
| themafia wrote:
| So more populated countries have more potential poll
| workers to choose from. Isn't this a linear relationship?
| What does size have to do with anything?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > If there is distrust, the justice system can review the
| paper trail as well.
|
| There is always, so you would just always count the
| ballots.
| themafia wrote:
| What is the rush to tally the ballots? Do we need an
| _instant_ count? Isn't that actually a negative attribute
| as far as security is concerned?
|
| The distance between the election and the taking of the
| office is often months. I just don't understand why
| electronics need to be involved _at all_ in this system.
| brainwad wrote:
| FWIW Swiss elections are counted in at most 6 hours,
| usually quicker except for big cities. If your system
| takes longer than that, it's a bad system.
|
| Also it's not just elections to offices, but also votes
| on yes/no propositions, which can take effect more or
| less immediately.
| themafia wrote:
| > If your system takes longer than that, it's a bad
| system.
|
| Why?
|
| > which can take effect more or less immediately.
|
| In our jurisdictions they're usually reserved. Courts can
| be used to challenge laws as unconstitutional. And you
| typically want a bright line implementation date that
| everyone can see coming.
| zahlman wrote:
| > the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by
| mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable
| consent among those who voted. A good election system is one
| where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the
| result.
|
| First you must explain to them why the former is not an
| example of the latter.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| GP already said.
|
| > eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal
| citizens, not even by nerdy ones.
|
| I suggest you explain the verifiability of evoting systems
| to your grandma or your friend with an art degree. Then ask
| them to explain the same to their peer while you just
| listen. Then repeat the exercise with paper voting. You
| will see the difference.
| atoav wrote:
| Just imagine you have to explain a child in kindergarden
| how the collective choice is made. Raising hands works.
| Putting different pieces of paper into a jars works.
| Magical machine says the result was X does _not_ work
| unless they trust it, regardless of how _correct_ the
| magical machine was under the hood, because the majority
| lacks the skill of intuitively understanding this
| themselves. Sure, they could trust an expert or an figure
| of authority, but that is a fleeting thing. A fleeting
| thing that may be enough for inconsequencial decisions, but
| not enough to steer countries.
|
| Even I as someone who would have the skillset to understand
| why it has to be correct would have an easier time
| verifying a paper ballot process than ensuring that network
| connected complexity behemoth was running the program I
| checked for weeks correctly in any moment during an
| election. And even if you had a way to guarantee that, who
| tells me this was the case in the whole country or thst
| evidence wasn't faked a millisecond before I checked?
|
| Meanwhile with paper and poll watchers from each party it
| is very easy to find actual irregularities and potential
| tampering -- trust is a gradual thing with paper while it
| is much more binary with digital. If there is a sign for
| the digital machine being untrustworthy you can throw the
| whole result into the bin.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's easy to explain. We live in a world where A&W's
| 1/3rd pound burger failed to compete with the McDonald's
| 1/4th pound burger because 4 is bigger than 3 so people
| thought the McDondald's product was bigger. There's zero
| hope that this public will understand fancy encryption.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| The ballot voting process is also misunderstood by regular
| citizens, even nerdy ones. From experience, even by voting
| officials.
| tribaal wrote:
| As a Swiss citizen I strongly disagree. Most people capable
| of reading and basic maths (addition!) can understand the
| counting of our paper ballots. My kids understand how this
| works since they are like 5.
|
| Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their
| Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the
| federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > basic maths (addition!)
|
| Technically you don't even need that, you just need to be
| able to count, i.e. find the successor to a given number.
| brainwad wrote:
| The rules for deciding the winners in proportional
| parliamentary elections are quite a bit more complex than
| that...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| True.
| jackweirdy wrote:
| It's a nice property of elections that you can measure votes
| needing more intervention against the margin of victory before
| you decide your next step
| ritzaco wrote:
| I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get
| out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how
| you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted
| once) but not both.
|
| - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone
| lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have'
|
| - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail
|
| I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland
| and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some
| point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can
| change that database.
|
| Until we all have government-issued public keys or something,
| there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if
| I'm wrong here)
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > At some point, you have to give someone access to a database
| and they can change that database.
|
| It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the
| blockchain...
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| But generally sacrifices that anonymous axis via a
| reproduceable public ledger
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Unless pseudonymized...
| beautiful_apple wrote:
| Ironically most production e-voting systems do not use
| blockchains. That's because there isn't need for
| decentralization, just verifiability of a correct result and
| protecting voting secrecy.
| kanapala wrote:
| There's a goverment issued public & private key right here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
| presentation wrote:
| Japan has them built into My Number Cards too
| https://www.digital.go.jp/en/policies/mynumber/private-
| busin...
| dmos62 wrote:
| You should care how much maths and encryption you use [0][1],
| because this is not only possible, but there are multiple
| approaches.
|
| [0] https://satoss.uni.lu/members/jun/papers/CSR13.pdf
|
| [1] https://fc16.ifca.ai/voting/papers/ABBT16.pdf
| jjmarr wrote:
| More important than lack of voter fraud is proving to the
| population a lack of voter fraud.
| _0ffh wrote:
| I'm sure you could even let every voter verify that their
| vote has been registered correctly.
|
| Edit: But as a comment somewhere else in the tree noted
| ,,And if it could tell you that then a third party could
| force you to reveal that you voted "right" as agreed
| before.`` - I guess everything's trade-offs.
| raron wrote:
| This. A voting system and it security must be
| understandable to the average people. You can not do that
| with electronic voting. (Even if electronic voting can be
| done securely.)
| dmos62 wrote:
| Why?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your
| fingernail
|
| This is true, but its used in other countries as well, as it's
| a simple, effective, low-tech, affordable process.
|
| Most notably in India
| https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/style/india-elections-pur...
|
| but also in many other countries:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink#International_use
| beautiful_apple wrote:
| You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and
| are verifiable.
|
| You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that:
|
| 1) all valid votes were counted
|
| 2) no invalid votes were added
|
| 3) the totals for each candidate is correct
|
| And you can do that without providing proof of who any
| particular voter voted for. A few such systems:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting
|
| https://www.belenios.org/
|
| Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are
| problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard
| them in the trash?).
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-o...
|
| Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the
| national identity card, which essentially is government issued
| public/private keys.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
|
| Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though,
| especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I
| outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online
| elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-
| running users of online voting in the world)
|
| https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e9...
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy
| and are verifiable.
|
| In these systems the voter cannot verify that their vote was
| secret as they cannot understand, and much less verify the
| voting machine.
|
| > And you can do that without providing proof of who any
| particular voter voted for.
|
| Which is good for preventing the sale of votes, but keeps
| things obscure in a magical and correct box.
|
| How can I tell the machine didn't alter my vote if it cannot
| tell me, and just me, who I voted for? The global sanity
| checks are worthless if the machine changed my vote as I
| entered it.
| yason wrote:
| And if it could tell you that then a third party could
| force you to reveal that you voted "right" as agreed
| before.
|
| Paper ballots with mutually suspicious representatives of
| all parties watching themselves during handling and
| counting is the only way to go for big things like
| parliament/presidential elections and national referendums
| where, in the worst case, the greatest of all matters are
| at stake. And foolproof method for voting is most needed
| when the levels of trust are at the lowest.
| choo-t wrote:
| > How can I tell the machine didn't alter my vote if it
| cannot tell me, and just me, who I voted for?
|
| Isn't that the whole point of having ballot secrecy ? Even
| with paper vote you cannot tell which ballot is yours (or
| at least, a recognisable ballot is voided during the
| counting).
| spiddy wrote:
| you don't need to be an aviation expert to trust the plane
| will fly.
|
| likewise e-voting systems pass through cryptography experts
| auditing to verify it does what it says it does.
|
| said that the voting solution can also provide
| cryptographic proof that your vote was unaltered, and
| accounted for, without need to expose your actual vote.
|
| the claims about database altering, are also false as the
| vote is cryptographically signed and unalterable.
|
| also there is another feature where you can recast vote on
| top of your previous one and the last vote will be the
| valid one. This is crucial for countries where the bad guys
| can come at your place and under distress (gun) force your
| vote. you can then recast safely invalidating the forced
| vote.
|
| e-voting solutions is really interesting and in an
| alternate reality I think we could have had a mainstream
| e-voting and more even direct-democracy vs our current
| democracy by proxy (elected officials)
| beautiful_apple wrote:
| I've worked on some research in this area as well (the
| experience of people with verifiability systems in real-
| world elections)
|
| https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-43756-4
| _...
|
| Beyond this paper, based on my experience working with
| election officials, political candidates, and voters, I
| would agree that verifiability is not well understood.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| If it's a completely binary choice of "election was valid"
| and "election was invalid" without any partial verifications
| of results, I think it's still a massive step back.
|
| By which I mean: paper ballots have problems. But a fault in
| a handful of ballots doesn't mean the rest of the ballots
| need to get tossed out.
|
| I do not believe that a system managed by humans can be
| faultless.
| Overdr0ne wrote:
| You would still be getting partial counts by district
| right? Isn't that a partial result? Make the validation
| algorithms open source. And I imagine there's some kind of
| independent auditing of the voting systems. I think it
| would be neat to have multiple competing implementers of
| the voting system, where ballots are sent to each, and
| results are compared. And hey, why not, maybe after voting
| you get an anonymized receipt, that could then be human-
| counted as well
| tomp wrote:
| Why are you lying?
|
| from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting
|
| > The centralized server must be trusted not to violate
| ballot secrecy,[7] this limitation can be mitigated against
| by distributing trust amongst several stakeholders.
|
| > The ballot auditing/reconstruction device must be trusted
| to ensure successful ballot auditing (also known as cast-as-
| intended verifiability),[7][16] this limitation can be
| mitigated against by distributing auditing checks amongst
| several devices, only one of which must be trusted.
|
| So neither secure nor anonymous...
| fermisea wrote:
| What about this? Consider a toy system: everyone gets issued a
| UUID, everyone can see how every UUID voted, but only you know
| which one is your vote.
|
| This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to
| share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which
| the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private.
| Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote
| (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion
| you can always generate a key that will give the output that
| you want, but only you know the real one.
| looperhacks wrote:
| Besides the fact that 99% of the general population won't be
| able to understand this, a $5EUR wrench says that you show me
| proof of the correct private key (either by you showing me
| the letter you received, me being present when you set it up,
| or however it is set up)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Until we all have government-issued public keys or something
|
| That's actually pretty common in Europe. The Spanish DNI
| (national identity card) has a chip these days, which gives you
| an authenticated key pair for accessing digital services.
|
| In the pilot project for digital voting, that identity is only
| used to authenticate the user, and then an anonymous key needs
| generated that can be used to cast the final vote.
| mothballed wrote:
| South Africa is in a somewhat similar situation of having a
| gigantic (1-10%, government is too broken to figure out where
| in that range) illegal immigrant population and poor access to
| paperwork for many citizens that would make any heavily
| scrutinized citizenship for registration lean heavily towards
| disenfranchisement of the poorer segments.
| zahlman wrote:
| Sure you can, you just need an anonymous voting mechanism
| that's sufficiently naive. You use the verifiable process to
| restrict access to that anonymous mechanism.
|
| In Canada, at both federal and provincial levels, you walk up
| to a desk and identify yourself, are crossed off a list, and
| handed a paper ballot. You go behind a screen, mark an X on the
| ballot, fold it up, take it back out to another desk, and put
| it in the box. It's extraordinarily simple.
|
| > At some point, you have to give someone access to a database
| and they can change that database.
|
| Well, that kind of fraud is a different issue from someone
| reading the database and figuring out who someone voted for
| (you just... don't record identities in the database).
| Bender wrote:
| There will never be a technical or operational process that
| excludes cheating. The only deterrence that seems to work on
| humans and even then only _most_ of the time is severe
| capitol punishment and that will only be as effective as
| people believe it happens thus requiring live streaming of
| the removal of cheaters heads without censorship. The current
| legal process of each country would have to be by-passed or
| people would just sit in a cage for 30 years. Even in such
| cases there will be people that sacrifice themselves if they
| think that bribe money can go to their family but that is at
| least a start.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Also cheating with paper ballots is much harder to scale
| and remain undetected than cheating by altering records in
| a database.
| Bender wrote:
| _remain undetected than cheating by altering records in a
| database._
|
| Absolutely. Any time something is centralized it becomes
| an irresistible target for unlimited numbers of bad
| actors and the bar to entry _for remote anonymous access_
| makes it a much easier target. Anonymous access to paper
| ballots means someone is going to be on at least a
| handful of cameras and has to bypass many security
| systems so if cheating happens it is because the people
| gathering the votes want it that way. Such cities or
| states should be excluded from the voting process.
| Ardon wrote:
| I agree with your point that attempts at cheating are
| inevitable, the rest is confusing though:
|
| We have a long and storied history of coming up with
| extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in
| public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much
| higher rates of criminality then now.
|
| Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty
| gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from
| the church, etc.
|
| People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to
| their current decision making. Any consequence that relies
| on people being able to model a future problem against
| their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot
| of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more
| horrible punishments to overcome the losses in
| transmission.
|
| I think the goal should be the smallest possible
| _functioning_ consequence, which is possible by being close
| to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do
| it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up,
| but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am
| very confident this will prevent then from doing it again
| much more _efficiently_ then a distant jail sentence.
| (among all the other ways too, there 's never one clean
| action to take to solve problems on a societal level)
| dirasieb wrote:
| > paper ballots and requiring IDs
|
| isn't that racist? i've heard it repeated but i'm not so sure
| some_random wrote:
| It's been a talking point specific to the voting system in
| the US, strangely no other country seems to think it's an
| issue and as soon as the topic changes no one in the US has
| an issue requiring IDs for things.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Voting is a civil right. We need to have a system that
| allows everyone who is allowed to vote, to vote. Many
| people don't have IDs and it is an onerous process to get
| one. Any system that requires IDs for voting suppresses
| these people's civil rights.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Many people don't have IDs and it is an onerous process
| to get one.
|
| I have seen this constantly claimed, and never reasonably
| evidenced. It's also hard to believe the kind of American
| exceptionalism that supposedly causes these problems that
| everyone else can easily solve, despite an environment
| that is clearly heavily politically invested in solving
| it (because that _also_ avoids the appearance of racism).
|
| Meanwhile, American proponents of voter ID can readily
| find people including among the supposedly discriminated-
| against groups who will testify to the contrary.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Under the text of the proposed SAVE Act, drivers licenses
| or state ID's wouldn't be enough to count as a voting ID.
|
| In Canada a drivers license is enough to vote.
| lefra wrote:
| There's a trivial solution to this: IDs should be
| provided by the government for free.
| IX-103 wrote:
| No other country is quite as heterogeneous as the US. And
| there is a significant history in the US of using
| restrictions around voting to disenfranchise certain
| ethnicities. That makes any restriction around voting a
| sensitive topic in the US.
|
| Proponents of voter ID claim it is needed to prevent
| fraud, while opponents point out that there's not enough
| fraud for it to be worth the cost.
|
| Note that countries such as Australia, Canada, and New
| Zealand also didn't require voter ID. First-world
| countries that do require ID to vote have systems in
| place to ensure that getting that ID is easy even for
| poorer people - such as automatically sending the ID to
| the voter by mail if the government requires you to
| report your residence or filing out the necessary forms
| once, before turning 18.
| dirasieb wrote:
| > No other country is quite as heterogeneous as the US.
|
| there's no scientific link between race and the ability
| to go to a DMV once every 10 years
| IX-103 wrote:
| Depends on what qualifies as an ID and how hard it is to
| get one. But unless you're actively providing them to
| people that need them with no extra work or travel on their
| part then you're going to be discriminating against people
| with less money or time.
|
| In the case where disproportionately more poor people are
| of a certain race then it can be seen as racist (as it
| affects the population of that race differently). If the
| reason that disproportionately more poor people are of a
| certain race is because of racism, then a policy that
| disenfranchised the poor would effectively extend economic
| discrimination into political discrimination.
|
| Though I tend to think that even if we remove the economic
| effects of racism such that disenfranchising the poor
| couldn't be called racist, they would still be classist and
| should be avoided where possible.
| dirasieb wrote:
| >Depends on what qualifies as an ID
|
| how about the ones accepted by the police when they ask
| "show me your ID"?
|
| if it's enough to ID you to cops it should be enough to
| ID you to enter the voting booth, no?
|
| >and how hard it is to get one.
|
| you can get one at the DMV
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Tell that to our legislators. Because that sort of ID
| would not be a valid voting ID under the SAVE act.
| zahlman wrote:
| Americans who make this link to racism are welcome to
| explain why the same argument gets zero traction in
| Canadian politics, even among the most left-wing parties.
| macintux wrote:
| I have to imagine the Canadian ID situation is different.
| Here, simply obtaining a copy of your birth certificate
| can be a long trip to a different state.
| dirasieb wrote:
| birth certificate is not the only form of ID
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > you walk up to a desk
|
| I think the day I _must_ walk go a desk to vote is the day
| I'll give up. Voting by mail is one of the best things
| occuring here (in Switzerland). You get the voting stuff by
| mail, make your crosses, put it back into the postal box and
| it's delivered for free (as in beer) to the government.
| zahlman wrote:
| It's completely normal here. People get federally mandated
| time off to go vote; 3 hours IIRC, which is way more than
| would ever ordinarily be necessary (and polling stations
| are open well past typical work hours). I typically walk a
| few minutes from home, and never experience a significant
| lineup.
|
| Relying on the postal service here would make it much
| worse, honestly.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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 pretend
| to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're
| caught you will go to jail.
|
| We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to
| defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it
| harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election
| integrity.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > 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
| cj wrote:
| At least in NY, you would have to know the name of someone
| else assigned to the 2nd polling site, since your name is
| only on the list of 1 polling location?
| drstewart wrote:
| This is of course a very high bar to clear, as data such
| as people's names is highly confidential and almost
| impossible to get unless you're any one of these 750+
| data brokers: https://privacyrights.org/data-brokers
| alistairSH wrote:
| You'd also need a fake ID. And be willing to risk a
| felony conviction to add a single vote. It just doesn't
| happen here, despite the GOP trying to prove otherwise
| for decades.
| trelane wrote:
| I've only ever seen one time it was tried. The experiment
| was wildly successful:
| https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/01/voter-fraud-weve-
| got-...
| alistairSH wrote:
| Looks like those were in states that don't require ANY ID
| to vote, which I find ridiculous, so I guess we agree. I
| live in VA, we require ID, so the problem shown in NY
| shouldn't be possible.
|
| And again, you still have to be willing to commit a
| felony to move the needly by ONE vote, which is not
| likely to be very common. The risk/reward simply isn't
| there.
| MC995 wrote:
| > You'd also need a fake ID
|
| For what? In my state there's no requirement to show ID.
| When I first moved here I attempted to show mine at the
| poll and the poll worker told me to quickly put that away
| and she didn't want to see it. I'm not even sure it's
| legal for them to ask for ID here, given her panicked
| reaction to me trying to show it.
|
| Since then I've voted in this state for around 10 years
| and it's always the same. I could say I'm whoever I want,
| and just be given a ballot.
|
| Edit: I don't live in NY either, as the other poster used
| as an example. ID should be an obvious and necessary
| requirement, but it isn't in many states.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yeah, it's inconsistent between states. I'm in VA and an
| ID is required. Despite being a bleeding heart liberal,
| I'm ok with that safe-guard (despite much of the left
| being against the notion). I'd also prefer an actual
| national ID (not the half-baked RealID programs, which
| some states still haven't adopted).
| skibble wrote:
| I'm not from the U.S. but as my country's elections work
| the same way, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Here
| in the UK, you go to your local polling station, you give
| your name, they check it against the list, then cross you
| out and hand you a ballot. (This was tweaked in the last
| few years to require government ID, but the process
| remains the same. More on that later).
|
| While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone
| on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a
| name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already.
| This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a
| name that had already been used, or someone turns up
| later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's
| going to set off alarm bells.
|
| On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-
| effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple
| polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well.
| Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more
| people are involved the harder it would be to keep
| secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election
| with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference.
| Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional
| race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting,
| and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are
| more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are
| alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter
| fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.
|
| Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was
| tampered with by the government of the time, who took a
| leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics
| and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a
| an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of
| thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the
| polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process
| is likely to be reverse before our next major election,
| however.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Interesting. In Canada, for federal elections at least,
| you're assigned to a specific location and station. You
| can't vote anywhere else. There's a separate process for
| mail in ballots to confirm you didn't vote in advanced
| voting or on election day as well.
| jfengel wrote:
| Same in the US.
|
| You can try voting again at other stations, especially
| since they don't require ID. You just need the name of
| somebody assigned to that station, who hasn't already
| voted. There is a signature check if there is a
| suspicion, but that's rarely done.
|
| But that's practically never done. The risks are too
| high, and to have a significant impact would require
| enough votes to make it certain you'd get caught.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| You still need id in Canada; either that or someone at
| the same polling station to vouch for you.
|
| https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=bkg
| &do...
| jfengel wrote:
| And in Russia, it is. That's why they call it "karusel'".
|
| In the United States, it hasn't been. The article you link
| to doesn't even mention the United States. To do it on a
| large scale requires cooperation from the people running
| the election, and the US isn't (yet) that corrupt.
|
| The US system isn't completely robust against it, and
| perhaps some day it will be a problem. But right now there
| is no evidence that it is a problem, and all of the
| attempts to "fix" it are clearly aimed at preventing some
| people from voting.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Limit voters to one polling location. Problem solved.
|
| That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling
| location based on your home address. You can't vote
| anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away.
|
| You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently
| moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate
| your ID/address/etc later.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 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.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Have you considered that in a system where proving cheating
| is so difficult, even weak evidence is powerful?
|
| If cheating is difficult to prove then we would expect only
| minimal evidence even with material amounts of cheating.
| moduspol wrote:
| Also, most crimes aren't uncovered by lawsuits. They're
| uncovered by law enforcement. The reason people resort to
| lawsuits is because law enforcement does not rigorously
| investigate or monitor. Voting laws vary by state /
| municipality, and they're mostly run by well-meaning
| volunteers acting in good faith.
|
| When we're not sure how well the TSA is doing, we try to
| send prohibited items through, and infamously get abysmal
| results [1]. IMO the reason we don't see more election
| fraud cases is because *we're not looking for it*, so we
| just see the obvious cases like when dead people vote or
| people brag about voting twice publicly.
|
| Until we actually do some "red teaming" of elections, we
| won't ever know. But the reality is, if we actually did,
| the results would reduce credibility of numerous prior
| elections.
|
| [1] https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-
| undercover-ope...
| trelane wrote:
| Red teaming, yes. But also, what other signals of fraud
| are we able to detect? What measures of validity (or
| signals that sending was attempted) are there? How are
| they distinguishable from honest voter errors?
| moduspol wrote:
| It's going to be difficult with our current policies
| because we've erred on the side of making it as easy as
| possible for everyone to vote. We don't have a complete
| whitelist of citizens, it's against the law to require
| proof of citizenship to register to vote (unless that
| changed recently) and address verification in most
| jurisdictions isn't done more than the first time unless
| it's challenged.
|
| To be clear, though, I don't think non-citizens are
| voting en-masse. My concern is that if you aren't even
| verifying they're citizens, you probably aren't really
| verifying that they are a real and unique person that
| isn't already registered.
|
| Honestly I think if we actually wanted secure elections,
| we'd start with the red teaming and go from there. The
| signal to noise ratio of fraud is too meaningless to
| resolve without tightening up rules, which the results of
| the red teaming would give you the political capital to
| do.
| jfengel wrote:
| Sure. And the weak evidence still isn't powerful, because
| so much effort had to be expended to gain it. If cheating
| were widespread it would have been detected much more
| easily.
|
| Instead, efforts to clean up the voter rolls never cause
| people to get caught. But they do cause many legitimate
| voters to lose the ability to vote.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Except people are actually getting caught.
|
| https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/03/09/ice-arrests-criminal-
| ill...
| jfengel wrote:
| THEY FOUND THE GUY! WOW!!!!!!!
| CaptWillard wrote:
| > If cheating were widespread it would have been detected
| much more easily.
|
| This is a ridiculous assertion.
| archagon wrote:
| Since we're just considering things without providing any
| evidence, have you considered that we don't have such a
| system?
| alistairSH wrote:
| This. The process in my precinct is roughly...
|
| - Enter queue
|
| - A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted)
| to volunteer
|
| - They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper
| scantron sheet
|
| - Go to private booth, fill out scantron
|
| - Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a
| locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)
|
| The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily
| caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.
|
| For people who forget their ID or have address changes that
| haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is
| provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep
| the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility
| to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so
| they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot
| was accepted.
|
| As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly
| small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise.
| The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on
| proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to
| prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning,
| have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of
| already).
| rayiner wrote:
| > As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are
| astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on
| proving otherwise
|
| How would you even know? The fact that _prosecutions_ for
| fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions
| for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades
| taxes? If you have a system that's insecure, how would you
| even know when it's been compromised?
| jfengel wrote:
| There have been numerous efforts to scrutinize the
| voting. In 2020 there were 62 lawsuits; none of them
| succeeded.
|
| Tax evasion is rarely prosecuted because nobody is
| looking very hard. People looked very, very, very hard
| for fraud in 2020 and found zilch.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > How would you even know?
|
| The people who have claimed for decades that there is
| rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars
| and have found so little that it actually proves the case
| against their claims. Further, it has been shown that
| what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing
| 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote
| prevented.
|
| HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to
| avoid in this case because it is one party which is
| claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a
| simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:
| * Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim
| millions of illegal votes have been made against him,
| including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim,
| perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and
| frequently repeated by conservative media *
| Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might
| and resources of the full federal government to root out
| voter fraud * Donald Trump aggressively
| prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal
| votes against him would be against his self-interest
| * As president, it is not just in his personal interest
| but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair
| * Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG
| of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of
| the rampant voter fraud * Nothing of note
| was produced by the commission ... it just kind of
| petered out
|
| One must conclude one of three things:
| (1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not
| investigating the issue (2) Trump or his
| subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of
| the issue (3) Voter fraud is not common.
| I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest
| mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were
| lying for political gain
|
| Read the wikipedia article about these issues relative to
| Kobach. Even before Trump, he was banging the drum as Sec
| of State for Kansas, claiming he knew of more than a
| hundred cases and asked for special powers to find the
| thousands of cases he _knew_ were happening in Kansas. He
| was given authorization to do that investigation. How did
| it turn out? Start reading here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_cla
| ims
|
| Quoting a bit of it:
|
| > At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100
| possible cases of double voting." Testifying during
| hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael,
| Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives
| its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February
| 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six
| convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting;
| none would have been prevented by voter ID
| laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more
| remained pending. All six convictions involved older
| citizens, including four white Republican men and one
| woman, who were unaware that they had done anything
| wrong.
|
| The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that
| voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics,
| which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises
| 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches.
| And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far
| greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of
| the affected voters).
|
| Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on
| this topic from that same wikipedia entry:
|
| > A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that
| rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent
| and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is
| more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit
| voter fraud.[156]
| rayiner wrote:
| I'm not saying we have widespread voter fraud. My gut
| feeling is that we don't. But I'm a very trusting person.
| I always believe people when they ask for money on the
| street because their car broke down. I don't know how you
| can confidently say there isn't meaningful voter fraud.
|
| How would you even verify past elections? You can point
| to millions spent on commissions and lawyers, but those
| can't go back and generate data that was never
| contemporaneously collected.
|
| Think of it in terms of computer security. You had a
| telnet server exposed to the internet for years. You have
| no logs, and the machine got scrapped before you ever got
| access to it. How would you do a security audit to
| determine if anyone broke into the server? You could
| spend millions on a commission and have the commission
| declare there was no security breach, but that would be
| for show, right?
|
| You say people don't look too hard for tax evasion, but
| people don't look very hard for voter fraud as the voting
| is happening. And by its nature it's something that you
| can't reliably look for after the election has happened.
| nness wrote:
| Australia has a system where you are anonymous and can prove
| that you only voted once:
|
| You have to be registered and must vote within your electorate,
| so your name appears on a certified list for that electorate
| and each voting location has that list. When you vote, they
| strike your name from the list.
|
| After the election, the lists from these locations are
| compared. Anyone who votes twice has their name struck twice,
| and are investigated for electoral fraud.
|
| Whether people know if you voted or not is immaterial, as
| voting is mandatory in Australia.
|
| Works pretty well for a paper system.
| spiddy wrote:
| yes you can.
|
| each citizen gets an anonymized private key via a secure
| channel (eg. postal) and use that to vote.
|
| votes are double enveloped: outer envelop: anonymized id +
| inner envelop: vote.
|
| mixnet separates the votes and cryptographically shuffles them
| to decouple relationships.
|
| only at the end the shuffled votes are decrypted using the
| private key of the election itself that was split using shamir
| secret sharing (eg 5 out of 7 shares to reconstruct)
|
| the thing that's not clear from the article and it's a shame is
| that it seems the failure was the hardware (the 3 USB keys) not
| the election software. This could be simply avoided by having
| redundancy on the hardware (2 USBs per share) or more shares
| themselves (5 out of 9 shares)
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| On the US keep in mind elections are run at the state level and
| below, so we don't have a single voting system, we have 50+.
|
| My state, Oregon, for example uses a very straightforward vote
| by mail system. They ask if you wanna register to vote when you
| get/update your drivers license or state id. Your ballot just
| comes in the mail, you fill it out, send it back. For folks
| that lack a permanent address or similar, you can get
| provisional ballots at libraries and similar city offices. The
| provisional ballots make you fill out enough information to
| check if you're allowed to vote.
|
| It's simple, convenient, secure, and efficient.
|
| So why don't more states do it this way?
|
| Unfortunately there's a long ugly history of using all sorts of
| dirty tricks for voter suppression in the US, in particular to
| keep Jim Crow going. And unfortunately variations of that
| continue today. I don't have the energy to dig into it fully
| here, I just want any international readers to be aware there's
| a whole lot of utterly craven bad faith when it comes to
| discussions around voting fraud and security in the US.
| someguynamedq wrote:
| Sorry, isn't this dead simple?
|
| Maintain a list of identity hashes. When someone goes to vote,
| deny them if they're already in the list . Otherwise, add their
| hash to the list then allow a vote to be cast.
| kolinko wrote:
| I think with zero knowledge proofs we can have it both ways?
| eunos wrote:
| That's a very exact number if you know what I mean
| ericmay wrote:
| Stories 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 the United States, I am in favor of in-person
| voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a
| paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency
| reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory
| but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't
| have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested
| people voting anyway.
|
| Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount
| of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory
| day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some
| cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your
| neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of
| Democracy process.
|
| I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or
| "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to
| have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries
| run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there,
| but by and large I think the continued digitalization and
| alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be
| addressed with more in-person activities and participation in
| society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Voter registration already requires proof of citizenship. What
| is the point of requiring that high bar of proof on the day of
| voting as well?
| nomorewords wrote:
| Why have voter registration?
| ericmay wrote:
| In the United States at least, voter registration will
| include your place of residence which will place you in a
| specific precinct. In other words: "I am so and so, and I
| live here. Votes that affect this area include me, and I
| get a say."
|
| When voters are voting for things, for example a tax levy
| to fund a new school, or for who will be their state or
| federal congressional representatives, it's important that
| the voters in that school district or in that congressional
| district are the ones voting for their representatives or
| for the bills or initiatives that affect them. This isn't
| quite as important for national elections, gubernatorial
| races, or for the senate at the federal level, but it's
| obviously incredibly important the more local you get.
|
| Without voter registration, that model breaks down. Even
| mundane things like how much staff and equipment should be
| at a polling location is not easy to figure out when you
| don't know how many voters you'll have. If you haven't
| worked as a poll worker it's really enlightening to learn
| about how the process works and a great way to meet your
| neighbors.
| smw wrote:
| One of the issues is that the US, unlike most of Europe,
| for example, doesn't require registering your address with
| your locality or police when you move.
| grosswait wrote:
| How is it a high bar of proof if it is already required?
| Edit: and already met
| stvltvs wrote:
| It's not a requirement in most places. This would be a
| significant change in practice.
| tossstone wrote:
| I've lived in 3 states and none of them have required proof
| of citizenship to register to vote. You basically check a box
| that acknowledges that you are a US Citizen with the right to
| vote and that illegal registration carries penalties.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| In my state it doesn't require that. You just need someone
| else that's registered the vouch for you. A registered person
| can vouch for up to 8 people:
|
| https://www.sos.mn.gov/elections-voting/register-to-
| vote/reg...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think a lot of what you argue might make sense for American
| elections where you're voting for an absolutely ridiculous
| number of things.
|
| I'm not sure how it is in Switzerland, but in Canada I will
| vote for maybe three candidates in five years. And I don't mean
| three visits to the polls (though it's usually that), I mean
| three actual checkbox ticks for people to count. They're paper
| ballots and the counting is done that night. I think if we were
| stuck voting for like forty different races every two years it
| would be a very different story and a lot of what you say would
| resonate with me more. Except the voter registration stuff.
|
| We're pretty flexible about registration up here and it works.
| My wife one year showed up with some mail that had her
| name/address, and me vouching for her. Though I think a lot of
| the luxuries of democracy are most easily enjoyed with a
| trusting, cooperative culture that isn't constantly wound up
| about being cheated by _the others_.
| soco wrote:
| In Switzerland I voted last week for 5 election lists and 6
| different topics. This happens at least 4 times a year, but I
| don't call it "ridiculous number of things".
| Waterluvian wrote:
| For the voter that may not be a ton of work. I imagine to
| count all those votes you need technology and not just the
| election workers at each station? Here we have kept it dead
| simple. They're all just hand counted over a few hours.
| brainwad wrote:
| No, they count them by hand. Each issue/office has a
| separate ballot paper, so it can be done in parallel with
| sufficient number of counting personnel. It takes a
| couple of hours, sometimes more in big districts in
| cities but usually they are done by 6pm at the latest
| after starting at noon.
| stetrain wrote:
| > 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 expensive, then you are effectively restricting voting
| access for citizens. A measure to place stricter qualifications
| on voting access needs to also carefully consider and account
| for providing access to all citizens.
|
| The US is a geographically very large place with worse public
| transportation options compared to many other countries, and
| with that comes differences in economic and accessibility
| considerations for things like "Just go to your county's office
| and get a qualifying ID."
| xvector wrote:
| Even the poorest people have a state ID or drivers license.
| You cannot get most jobs without some legal ID.
| orwin wrote:
| In the US, a driver license isn't a proof of citizenship.
| Also, state IDs are not accepted by federal agencies, so it
| probably wouldn't work as proof of citizenship on federal
| elections.
| mplewis9z wrote:
| Federal elections are all run by the individual states,
| so a state ID would be all you need.
| stetrain wrote:
| If there is a federal law requiring proof of citizenship,
| as is currently being argued in Congress, a state ID
| would not be all you need since they are not proof of
| citizenship.
| lokar wrote:
| There really are not federal elections. We call them
| that, but they are state elections for federal office.
| appointment wrote:
| In many states these are available without proof of
| citizenship. When people say proof of citizenship they
| usually mean a passport or REALID.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Most state-issued Real IDs don't count as proof of
| citizenship under the SAVE Act.
|
| https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/will-save-act-
| allo...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Under the SAVE act, you kind of have to have a passport
| or don't vote in some states.
|
| Which is why I'm pretty sure it's not gonna pass. Both
| republicans and democrats depend heavily on mass votes
| from, let's just say, a lot of people who are, generally
| speaking, not the sort to have passports.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have a
| current (non-expired) driver's license. Just under 9%, or
| 20.76 million people, who are U.S. citizens aged 18 or
| older do not have a non-expired driver's license. Another
| 12% (28.6 million) have a non-expired license, but it does
| not have both their current address and current name.
|
| Additionally, just over 1% of adult U.S. citizens do not
| have any form of government-issued photo identification,
| which amounts to nearly 2.6 million people.[1]
|
| [1] https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Vote
| r%20I...
| anonym29 wrote:
| If 10% of drivers lacked car insurance, would your
| solution be to remove the legal requirement to possess a
| valid insurance policy to operate a motor vehicle because
| it discriminates against the poor?
| beej71 wrote:
| No. Because operating a motor vehicle is a very dangerous
| activity.
|
| This a very is a poor analogy that you have here.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Nobody ever voted someone dangerous into power? Was
| voting for Hitler a harmless act?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| The poor have a right to vote, while they don't have a
| right to operate a motor vehicle. We can debate over how
| disenfranchising it is to be unable to drive in the US
| (very), but the law makes a pretty clear distinction
| between these two activities.
| ericmay wrote:
| > 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.
| stetrain wrote:
| Right, so proposals that do not adequately address this
| point are not fair, and this is why the issue is so
| contentious in the US.
|
| I absolutely support ID to vote provided that everyone who
| is eligible and wants to vote can get such an ID and vote
| without hassle.
|
| I don't support most attempts to pass Voter ID laws because
| I am wary that they would not actually result in that
| outcome.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Pretty much every bill that has ever been put forward for
| needing an ID to vote has had a provision for free IDs.
| That's not where things get caught up.
|
| Also, it's a pretty silly thing anyways. I don't even drink
| and I still need my driver's license quite a few times every
| year.
| stetrain wrote:
| Free and accessible are not the same thing. And a driver's
| license is not necessarily proof of citizenship.
| delecti wrote:
| Yep. And in fact there's been a ton of resistance for 20
| years to rolling out an alternate form of driver's
| license which _does_ act as proof of citizenship. See the
| REAL ID, which even now is only _kinda_ a requirement to
| fly domestically.
| mothballed wrote:
| .gov own court filings have argued Real ID isn't a
| reliable proof of citizenship and have refused to accept
| it as such. "...based on HSI Special
| Agent training and experience, REAL ID can be unreliable
| to confirm U.S. citizenship."
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alsd
| .76...
| jagenabler2 wrote:
| I'm not sure where this idea that REAL ID is a form of
| citizenship came from. I am not a citizen and i was given
| a REAL ID just by proving my legal (non-immigrant)
| status.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I think a lot of people just forget that non-citizen
| legal residents exist.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I have a Real ID, and I supplied a proof of citizenship
| to get it. However, in my state, it's possible to obtain
| a Real ID without providing proof of citizenship, so my
| Real ID does not qualify as proof of citizenship. My
| passport is the only document I have that could function
| as both photo ID and proof of citizenship. Passports are
| not the easiest things to obtain and they are not free.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Real ID only confirms one was lawfully present in the
| United States when the ID was issued, it is not intended
| to prove citizenship.
|
| https://www.dhs.gov/archive/real-id-public-faqs
|
| For example, DACA recipients, temporary protected status
| refugees, and citizens of states in free association with
| the USA (Micronesia/Marshall Islands/Palau) that are in
| the USA are all eligible for Real ID.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Correct. My understanding of the SAVE act is that it
| would require an _enhanced_ RealID drivers license to act
| as sole proof of citizenship, which is a type of license
| only issued in 5 states (all bordering Canada) that can
| act as proof of citizenship when driving across the US-
| Canada border. Even people with a valid RealID would be
| required to bring an additional form of ID to prove
| citizenship, such as a birth certificate. The fact that
| this is confusing to people is, in and of itself, a huge
| red flag for the impact this will have on voter
| participation.
| lokar wrote:
| The current bill Trump is pushing for requires "documentary
| proof of citizenship ", this can actually be very hard. It
| means an original/certified birth certificate, as well as
| any subsequent name changes (mostly married women).
|
| This is completely unnecessary.
|
| We establish citizenship, very reliably, at time of
| registration. This is on of the main jobs of the registrar
| of voters. They have plenty of time to look up the details
| of the person and establish citizenship (and intentionally
| lying in this process is a serious crime).
|
| We then establish identity at the time of voting, again,
| very reliably.
|
| Intentional voter impersonation or voting when not eligible
| is vanishingly rare in the US.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Some states only require a piece of mail and checking a
| box saying you are legally allowed to vote to register.
| Then when you checkin to vote the workers are not
| permitted to ask for ID to prove you are the person you
| claim to be.
|
| At no point during that process is there presentation of
| proof of citizenship.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I have cousins from Cuba and Venezuela, hearing this sort
| of information is rather alarming to them to say the
| least.
| selectodude wrote:
| Any ballots that are cast under same-day registration are
| cast as provisional and will go through the full
| verification process if the election is close enough
| where those ballots are necessary.
|
| Source: actually ran a fucking election precinct. Non-
| citizens aren't casting ballots illegally.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I'm not talking about same day registration. If you are
| on the rolls and proof of citizenship is not required to
| register, then how do you as a poll worker know the
| person on the rolls is a citizen?
| selectodude wrote:
| You don't, but also you don't have to. Voter rolls are
| cross referenced with other sources of data to verify
| citizenship. ID is required to submit a non-provisional
| ballot even during early voting if you're not in your
| designated precinct.
|
| Also just generally it's a severe federal crime to vote
| illegally, so people who are here illegally aren't out en
| masse publicly tying their identity to federal felonies.
| lokar wrote:
| Exactly, what you give them to apply is not everything
| they use to verify you.
| zdragnar wrote:
| They literally just charged someone in Philadelphia for
| illegally voting in every federal election since 2008.
| Non-citizen, ordered deported back in 2000 but still in
| the country.
|
| There's not been a reliable audit to show the extent to
| which this happens (probably not enough to affect even
| local elections), but to say that it isn't happening is
| just a lie.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| One of voter ID's biggest advocates, the Heritage
| Foundation, could only find 68 cases of non-citizens
| voting since 1980. Even if all of them are repeat
| offenders, that's a few hundred bad ballots out of
| billions cast. As you said, it is also possible to catch
| these people. Our election integrity is not threatened by
| non-citizen voters. It just doesn't happen on the scale
| that Republicans insist it must be happening, and the
| fact that they keep repeating it doesn't make it true, it
| means that they have an agenda that benefits from making
| you think it's true.
| selectodude wrote:
| Ok? And yet, they were caught. Dude's a shithead, swung
| zero elections, and got caught. They catch people all the
| time voting illegally. I would make a strong guess that
| they counted zero of his ballots as they were all
| provisional.
|
| He should go to jail and yet his existence is not proof
| that there are hoards of African deportees voting in
| state and federal elections.
| lokar wrote:
| If you listen carefully to the "ballot access" side of
| this argument (actually informed people and politicians,
| not random on the internet), you will see they don't ever
| say it does not happen.
|
| What they say is that it does not happen enough to
| plausibly come close to affecting the outcome. And this
| is widely supported, including by right-wing
| organizations (as a sibling comment observes).
|
| As with most issues, there is a trade-off here. As you
| tighten controls to prevent improper voting, you prevent
| some people from realistically being able to vote (it's
| just too hard, time consuming or expensive for them to
| meet the documentation requirements), and discourage
| others. This is particularly bad for the 1-2 elections
| after the rule change, which most people won't know about
| until they show up to vote. IMO, this is really the point
| of the changes.
|
| And you have to weigh that negative against the supposed
| benefit. But that benefit is really hard to find. It's
| very clear that intentional voter fraud (fraud in
| registration, or in-person impersonation) is extremely
| rare, and does not come anywhere close to affecting
| outcomes. It's already a crime, and we seem to be pretty
| good at catching it.
|
| The other argument for a benefit is that it improves
| voter confidence in elections. I reject this, since the
| only reason the public at large has any real concerns is
| because of intentional misinformation by the right. You
| can't lie to people to convince them there is a problem,
| and then use that to justify your heavy handed solution.
| meroes wrote:
| In _that_ process there 's no proof, but every state
| manages voter roles which your provisional information
| will then go through a _further_ process.
| lokar wrote:
| That is the documentation they ask for in the
| application. It's enough for them to understand who you
| claim to be. They then consult their own records to
| establish if that identity is eligible to vote. Then
| finally, on Election Day, you show you are that person.
|
| At that last part, Election Day identification, is not
| even that important, since the same person can't vote
| twice. So if you impersonate another person that will be
| quickly detected. It's not a useful strategy to alter the
| outcome of an election.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Trump expects half of the US to get a passport in the
| next 6 months.
|
| These kind of fundamental changes require years of
| preparation. Either Trump is an incompetent moron or he
| has ulterior motives.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| He's trying to prevent poor people from voting.
|
| Requiring poor people to pay a hefty fee, which they
| probably don't have, to get a passport seems a fairly
| competent way to go about making sure poor people don't
| vote to me.
|
| If I don't want poor people voting, then attaching a fee
| to voting doesn't mean I'm incompetent. It means I'm
| smart enough to know poor people don't have money.
|
| By the way, I think all of this is horrible. Everyone
| should be equal before the law and should have their vote
| count without having to pay for that right. I'm just
| pointing out that this is a really good way to eliminate
| the vote of the poor.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| I hate that we get so caught up on applying labels to the
| disenfranchisement, rather than completely and forcefully
| rejecting any attempts to disenfranchise any voter.
|
| In a functioning democracy, voting is sacred. It must be
| treated as THEE core, fundamental right of every person
| under its care.
|
| To violate this sacred tenet should be immediate grounds
| for exile. If you can't respect the ONE CORE tenet, or
| are incapable of, then there is not space for you in this
| society.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| It's an unconstitutional bill, but if all three branches
| of government hold it up it's going to be chaos
| (intentionally) come election time.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Even if the ID is nominally free, if I have to take a day
| off and pay for bus/train tickets to wait in line at some
| office, it's not really free.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Some districts have limited DMV hours in advance of
| voting days.
|
| Coincidental how these might be Democratic leaning areas
| in Republican states.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't even know why this is downvoted. Standard
| technique in Texas. Harris County does not have 40 DPS
| offices for its 5 million people. The current backlog to
| get a DPS drivers license appointment in Harris County is
| 45 days. The next available appointment in Kerrville is
| tomorrow. That is inequitable.
|
| But anyway, none of that is the real core issue with the
| idea of voter ID. The real issue is that there are many
| living Americans who were born in jurisdictions that
| steadfastly refused to issue birth certificates to Black
| people.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| This doesn't have to be binary... there can be multiple
| sources of disenfranchisement. They all add up.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's life. Figure it out. It's really an insult to a
| group of people to imply that they aren't capable of
| being a functioning adult in society.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| "Voting is only from 9-4" and you have a real job. Let's
| not pretend this wouldn't immediately be taken advantage
| of in certain places where disenfranchisement is real.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Get an absentee ballot then. And I've never seen such
| limited hours in my lifetime. Usually it's 6am-6pm on
| election day. And many places now have early voting, you
| have 20-30 days to find a time to go vote.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| The federal government is trying to severely limit
| absentee voting as well.
| mulmen wrote:
| Absentee ballots are available at the county seat from
| 2:00pm to 3:15pm on the second Tuesday the month except
| in September and October if the county has less than 5
| clerks available. Clerk allocations are based on property
| tax (pay for what you use). Congratulations poor and
| minority counties now can't access absentee ballots.
|
| This sounds made up but limiting access to "free"
| services is not unheard of. This topic has been litigated
| to death. There are no new arguments. If you are in favor
| of voter ID laws you are simply ignorant.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Making things more difficult means fewer people will do
| it. It's foolish to insist that it's all or nothing. It's
| not about being capable, it's about marginal effects in
| large groups of people.
| sejje wrote:
| That's not the same as "disenfranchised" or "taking
| voters off the rolls," as it gets talked about (see both
| of the sibling comments to yours).
|
| If they can't put up some minimal effort, what was their
| vote worth? I don't think the laziest folks probably vote
| in good policy.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Crazy people with extreme views vote in every single
| election. Sensible moderates with actual lives may decide
| that it's not worth the effort.
|
| I'm not worried about lazy people voting. I'm worried
| about crazy people voting, and not having enough votes
| from sensible people to drown them out.
| archagon wrote:
| Funny, because I have the exact same thing to say to the
| legislators. Oh, it's too hard to get everyone voter ID?
| Too expensive? That's life; figure it out _before_
| passing your pointless security theater law[1].
| Otherwise, we will do everything in our power to stop it.
|
| [1] (Though mass disenfranchisement is almost certainly
| the actual purpose of the law, not security.)
| jabedude wrote:
| Neither is voting free, what's the argument here?
| beej71 wrote:
| > Neither is voting free
|
| It's pretty free. You sit down at your table, fill out
| your ballot, and drop it in the mailbox. You don't even
| need a stamp. (In some jurisdictions.)
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| This like saying that because ISPs charge for access, HN
| could have a subscription fee. The argument is that
| quantity matters.
| connicpu wrote:
| In Washington voting is free. My ballot comes in the
| mail, I fill it out, I drop it in the outgoing mail. It's
| pre-stamped. I don't mind full citizenship verification
| at the time of registration, as that can be done months
| before it's actually time to vote.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| A (small) majority of states require employers to grant
| time off to vote and a (large) minority require that time
| to be paid. Although as others have noted, it is often
| the case that the window for voting exceeds a single
| shift (dependent on your area of work).
|
| https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2024/10/time-off-to-
| vote-...
| trelane wrote:
| Seems to me that a small portion of the funds being used
| to fight voter ID could help such citizens get IDs.
|
| Given how often ID is required outside of voting, it
| seems to me like this would be a big win for people, if
| getting an ID is so hard for some.
| macintux wrote:
| There are such efforts. It's still a bandaid on the
| systemic problems.
| TSiege wrote:
| > Pretty much every bill that has ever been put forward for
| needing an ID to vote has had a provision for free IDs.
|
| Do you have a source for this because I have seen very few
| laws like this and runs counter to the overt intention of
| these laws
| sejje wrote:
| Look up the 25 states that already have voter ID laws,
| and corresponding free-id programs to avoid being
| considered a poll tax.
| mulmen wrote:
| You can make it free but still require a person to travel
| to the county seat or some other distant location to get
| the ID. That requirement disproportionately hinders
| minority and poor voters. It's also easy to "forget"
| their registrations.
| servercobra wrote:
| While Wisconsin was debating this, they also closed a bunch
| of DMVs and limited hours for other ones.
|
| The WI constitution enshrines the ability to vote. So you
| may think it's silly and for 99% of people it may be silly,
| but if anyone is prevented from voting because there's not
| a reasonable way for them to get a license, their rights
| are being infringed.
| dolni wrote:
| > but also have places where getting to a government office
| to get such an ID is difficult or expensive
|
| Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get
| an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has
| an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere
| it is easier?
|
| What constitutes an ID being expensive?
|
| Nearly every country in the world requires proof of
| citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing
| with this problem? Do you think that their democratic
| processes might be compromised because of it?
| orwin wrote:
| The person I used to stay with when I used to visit WV
| don't have a proof of citizenship. He doesn't know where
| his birth certificate is (probably with the US army if they
| kept track of their nurses giving birth on ex-allied
| territory during a war), and get by with is SSN and driver
| license.
|
| How it works in my country : my electoral card is freely
| sent to my address when I register to my voting office. I
| can vote with it, or with an official ID, as long as I'm in
| the correct place. The only moment I need my ID is to cast
| a vote on behalf of someone who identified me as a
| 'surrogate'.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > What percentage of the population has an ID in a place
| where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier?
|
| Not the OP, but except for passports (and passport
| cards)... there isn't really any federal-level ID in the US
| (and passport booklets/cards are _expensive_ , just a bit
| over $100 IIRC).
|
| The nearest equivalent in the state level are driver's
| licenses, which are also on the expensive side considering
| the ancillary costs (because it's a _driver 's license_,
| not just an identification card). This is also the reason
| why US-centric companies like PayPal, for this exact
| reason, accepts a driver's license as proof of
| identification (obviously where not otherwise prohibited by
| local laws).
|
| Some (New York for example) do have an ID (called a non-DL
| ID, that's how embedded driver's license is in the US), but
| most states do not have a _per se_ ID.
|
| > What constitutes an ID being expensive?
|
| Developing countries, rather ironically, issue their IDs
| for free? Okay, indirectly paid by taxes, but there's no
| upfront cost. The above-mentioned identity documents have a
| clear cost attached to them.
|
| > How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem?
| Do you think that their democratic processes might be
| compromised because of it?
|
| Cannot talk about other countries (because there _is_ an ID
| system and it 's not a controversial affair to them), but
| instead I'll answer with a reflection of the US system.
|
| Unfortunately, American ID politics are _hard_ , mainly due
| to concerns of surveillance, but I think (only my opinion)
| because some of them _want_ those historically
| disenfranchised (even if a fully native-born US citizen)
| _de facto_ disenfranchised. This means that there is no
| uniform and freely-issued identification system in the US
| (or even a requirement to do that at the state level).
| Unfortunately, this... is a tough nut to crack,
| politically-speaking.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Note that drivers licenses wouldn't count as proof of
| citizenship under the SAVE act.
| ricree wrote:
| >but most states do not have a per se ID
|
| Out of curiosity, do you have a source or list for this?
| My own home state and those around me that I've spot
| checked all have a state ID available as an alternative
| to a driver's license. My understanding was that this is
| the case for most states.
|
| Unless I've misunderstood you and you meant a state ID
| that is completely separate from a driver's license to
| the point that people with a DL would have one?
| devilbunny wrote:
| > most states do not have a per se ID
|
| I haven't researched this thoroughly, but what state will
| not issue an ID that is equivalent in every way to a
| driver's license except that it _isn 't_ a license to
| drive? I just checked Mississippi, Wyoming, South Dakota,
| and West Virginia, all of which do, so clearly being
| rural, poor, or both isn't enough to stop states from
| doing it. (The detailed politics are, as you say, a
| mess.)
| stvltvs wrote:
| Proof of citizenship is not the same as the driver's
| licenses people are issued by their state.
|
| Not everyone has ready access to proof of citizenship in
| order to register to vote. It gets even more difficult if
| your current legal name doesn't match your birth name, e.g.
| if you took your husband's name.
|
| Not every eligible voter has or needs a government issued
| ID. For example, retired people who don't drive. For them
| to get to the DMV to get an ID just to vote would be a
| challenge.
|
| The US has large rural areas where government offices are
| hours away.
|
| All of this adds up to significant barriers to eligible
| voters. There's a reason even the GOP isn't bending over
| backward to pass the SAVE Act.
| stetrain wrote:
| There are rural places in the US where it is an hour +
| drive to whatever the equivalent of the DMV office is, with
| no public transit. You can find similar places in cities
| where people may not have a car at all, with a long walk to
| find such an office that is only open during narrow hours.
|
| People in or near poverty are going to be
| disproportionately affected by those conditions.
|
| And just getting to the DMV does not necessarily mean you
| can get an ID that counts as proof of citizenship. There is
| no standard federal citizen ID in the US. A basic state ID
| or driver's license is not proof of citizenship. Even a
| RealID compliant ID is not a direct proof of citizenship,
| so depending on how strict the voting requirements are it
| may not be adequate.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Nearly every country in the world requires proof of
| citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing
| with this problem?
|
| Most of those nations have a mandatory national ID, so
| everyone already has proof of citizenship. The US and UK
| are very much outliers in having vocal and successful
| resistance to the implementation of a national ID card.
| mothballed wrote:
| It's still bizarre though how this plays out in reality.
|
| In some places like Illinois, an ID is required to
| exercise the rights of people but not the rights of
| citizens (FOID required to bear guns, but ID not required
| for vote).
|
| In places like Arizona, it's the exact opposite. You can
| bear or conceal guns without an ID but you need an ID to
| vote.
|
| Vermont is the _only_ state I know of with any
| consistency on lack of ID requirements that convey non-ID
| citizens to also have the right of people. You can
| conceal guns _and_ vote without ID.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Most of those nations have a mandatory national ID
|
| And what are the fees for these IDs, something you
| conveniently are leaving out (hint: mostly not free)?
| sejje wrote:
| Perhaps those nations don't have laws against poll taxes;
| the US does.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Until 1986[1] most Americans didn't get a Social Security
| Number until their first job.
|
| In The Matrix (1999) there's a scene where Agent Smith
| explicitly remarks that Neo has an SSN as proof he's a law-
| abiding citizen in a white-collar job.
|
| [1] when it was made a requirement to claim tax deductions
| for dependent children. Even today, if you don't want the
| tax break, you can opt out at the cost of ruining your
| child's life!
| sejje wrote:
| I was born before that and issued my SSN at birth.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The first pilot project to issue SSNs with the birth
| certificate automatically was in 1987. You can read the
| history here:
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v56n1/v56n1p83.pdf
|
| Prior to that, getting the SSN required giving your birth
| certificate to the government. If the family wasn't
| getting government benefits, many didn't bother.
| beej71 wrote:
| > What constitutes an ID being expensive?
|
| If you're talking about this as a requirement for voting,
| then anything greater than $0 is too expensive since it
| smells like a poll tax.
| mulmen wrote:
| > Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to
| get an ID?
|
| Minority and poor areas.
|
| > Where is it not?
|
| White and affluent areas.
|
| This isn't hypothetical. Voter suppression is as American
| as apple pie.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _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._
|
| [1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/181/
| stetrain wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and
| highly-accessible right for all citizens.
|
| I do not think it is that straightforward. Making it more
| accessible makes it possible for people with less skin in the
| game able to vote. Imagine how invested someone who owns
| several properties and businesses in a city is and how much
| they care about the success of the city compared to some
| other person who is just renting an apartment and has not
| even a job in that city meaning they could move at any time.
| The vote of the first person is much more important than the
| second. Trying to make voting overly accessible may make more
| people from the second category start voting which could
| result in bad decisions being made because people can easily
| move away if things go wrong.
| lolc wrote:
| Please realize that Switzerland holds many votes per year.
| There is no big voting day where I have to go somewhere. I
| could go cast my ballot in person, but I can also fill out and
| send in my ballot in advance. That is entirely routine and part
| of my day like other paperwork.
|
| The problem with e-voting is that it is much harder to
| validate. My paper ballot rests at a community building where
| it will be counted on the day of the vote. I can understand the
| process from start to finish in physical terms. Throw in a USB
| stick and anything could happen. It is possible we will never
| know what went wrong here.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| What would constitute a "proof of citizenship"? Would a
| passport be enough, for example?
| rhcom2 wrote:
| > voting requiring proof of citizenship
|
| Isn't this just a solution in search of a problem though?
| Multiple investigations have discovered absolutely minuscule
| amount of non-citizen voting in US elections. It's something
| that seems reasonable on its face but lacks any purpose and
| comes with an ulterior motive that it is part of the made up
| GOP talking points of a "stolen election" and "illegals
| voting".
| expedition32 wrote:
| I used to be really angry that we still vote with paper and red
| pencil. The Netherlands is ultra digital after all!
|
| But then they showed how easy it is to hack and we live in a
| world with evil countries like the US, China and Russia who
| want to destroy our way of life.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I would guess most people don't have a proof of citizenship
| handy. This would get even worse if the effort to get rid of
| birthright citizenship succeeds, how would you even prove you
| are a citizen?
|
| This would be less of a problem if the US had some sort of
| national ID issued by right, but we don't, and the same people
| pushing for requiring ID for voting would be against creating
| one. They _hate_ the idea of a national ID.
|
| My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even
| work?
|
| All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the
| states, not the national government. Would such a law even be
| constitutional?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > My state does all elections by mail now. How would this
| even work?
|
| Trump told Congress to ban most mail ballots.
|
| > All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by
| the states, not the national government. Would such a law
| even be constitutional?
|
| Experts said no. But this Supreme Court surprised experts
| before. And the constitution said Congress could decide
| elections of Congress. They have the power. They need an
| explanation enough people would accept.
| natebc wrote:
| It's not really up to Trump or Congress though is it?
|
| Elections are run by the several states.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| I edited my comment. But before you replied I thought.
| Congress can decide elections of Congress.
| natebc wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I see now that I've refreshed. Yes, it will get
| tricky with the current Supremes. Hopefully the signs
| we're seeing around Obstruction and Contempt in the
| federal courts lately indicate the _maybe_ the Judiciary
| is finding it's backbone.
|
| I don't have much hope for Congress doing the same.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yeah, I think most people who want proof of citizenship are
| forgetting that your driver's license (even your REAL ID)
| isn't a proof of citizenship. It's passport, certificate of
| naturalization, or birth certificate.
|
| Restricting voting to people with passports and who happen to
| have a birth certificate handy is going to make the first
| election with the requirement weird as hell and probably
| backfire on Republicans if their goal is winning at any cost.
|
| Requiring some form of ID that your state is willing to
| accept as good enough is a very different beast than proof of
| citizenship.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >> requiring proof of citizenship
|
| Go and try to figure out how to do this from scratch. Imagine
| your house burned down and you need to start with "nothing".
|
| If your parents are still alive you can use them to bootstrap
| the process of getting those vital documents (or if you're
| married that can be another semi viable path).
|
| Pitty if you don't have those resources. Furthermore it might
| get complicated for any partner who adopts their other partners
| last name (were talking about getting the documents, before you
| can get some sort of verified ID).
|
| The reality is we don't have a lot of instances of "voter
| fraud" committed by people who aren't citizens (see:
| https://www.facebook.com/Louisianasos/posts/secretary-of-sta...
| as an example) . And the amount of voter fraud we do have is
| very small (and ironically committed by citizens see
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...
| for some examples).
|
| > I am in favor of in-person voting
|
| Again, the size and dispersion of the American population makes
| this odious. Dense urban areas will face lines (they already
| do) and many of them (Chicago) have moved to early voting
| because spreading things out over many days is just more
| effective. Meanwhile places like Montana (where population
| density is in people per square mile) make travel to a location
| burdensome.
|
| I get why you feel the way you do, but the data, the reality of
| America, makes what you desire unnecessary and impractical.
| Feelings are a terrible reason to erect this barrier when it
| makes little sense to do so.
| kanbara wrote:
| i don't think that requiring in-person "ID"-proofed voting and
| removing mail-in ballots (which is the best part of voting in
| CA) does anything to bring people back to reality...
|
| Even if it were a holiday, people may not be able to travel or
| take time off from obligations. There's no obligation to drive
| 2 hours to vote, to fly back if you work in another country, or
| to go get a new birth certificate because Real ID doesn't prove
| citizenship even though you provide citizenship documents to it
| when you get one...
|
| I've heard of a lot of takes here about what we should do for
| voting to make it "more secure" but all of this is actually a
| solution for a problem we just don't have.
| ramon156 wrote:
| We should at least start with electronic voting to _compare_ it
| against real voting. I know there have been more smaller local
| tests, but they are not comparable.
| estebank wrote:
| > That being said, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring
| proof of citizenship
|
| The appropriate time to verify citizenship is the one that
| already happens: during registration. Poll workers only need to
| verify who you are and that you're registered.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| In my experience there was no verification other than
| verbally verbally confirming address and name.
| estebank wrote:
| At https://covr.sos.ca.gov/ I have to positively state that
| I am a US citizen an tie my name to a driver's license or
| SSN. Neither driver's license nor SSN confirm that one is a
| citizen (I had both before naturalizing), but both of them
| _are_ tied to citizenship information in _some_ database. I
| know I had to attend the Social Security offices in person
| to provide proof of my naturalization in order to receive
| an SSN card without the words "valid for work only with
| DHS authorisation".
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'd agree in principle with your idea about proof of
| citizenship, but unfortunately the reality I experienced is I
| had a valid California driver's license with a Texas address
| because I had been in the military and California allowed that,
| but Texas changed their laws to require a Texas ID to vote, and
| subsequently they also closed 90% of the offices you have to go
| to to get an ID. Luckily, I knew about this way in advance, but
| it took 9 months to get an appointment, and when I got there,
| it required something like four different forms of proof. There
| were people in there who still lived with their parents who
| didn't have their own names on any bills bringing their parents
| in with them to vouch that they actually lived there, getting
| turned away and told to go fuck themselves. It was extremely
| transparent and obvious what the state was trying to do, not
| wanting young people and recent transplants to vote.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Instead of full e-voting I would love to see an additional
| scheme to a traditional paper ballot that allows for
| verification. Something like STAR-Vote or Scantegrity. Even if
| it's flawed, it would be nice to run specifically because it
| doesn't affect the elections but could produce useful insights.
| If it fails - nothing particularly bad happens, if it works -
| cool, we get extra assurances or maybe spot some fraud that we
| weren't aware about.
|
| But there seems to be either no political will, or some issues
| with the practical implementations. There were some municipal
| experiments here and there, and then just... crickets. Anyone
| knows what happened to those efforts?
| openasocket wrote:
| Voter ID is often touted as an important part of election
| security, but when you look at the threat model of elections it
| just doesn't do much. Think about how you would try to cheat at
| an election. The common methods are things like ballot
| stuffing, throwing out votes, discouraging people from voting,
| etc. Examples include spreading disinformation about what day
| voting is happening, seizing ballot boxes and replacing them
| with forged ballots that favor your candidate, or calling in
| bomb threats to polling places. These are not prevented by
| voter ID requirements.
|
| The only thing voter ID prevents is voter impersonation. It
| prevents you from finding someone else's name and polling
| place, going there, pretending to be that person, and
| submitting a vote on their behalf. But that threat doesn't
| really scale. Even if you assume no one at the polling places
| notice you coming to vote over and over under different names,
| a single person could probably only do this a few dozen times
| on election day. To scale that you would need more people; and
| every person you add to the scheme increases the odds of
| someone slipping up or getting caught. But the real issue is if
| any of the people you are impersonating try to vote! While
| election officials don't record what people voted for, they do
| record who voted, and the ballot counting process will
| automatically note that people voted multiple times. So you
| would have to figure out some way to gather a database of a
| large number of people you know aren't going to vote, and get a
| bunch of people to turn up at a bunch of polling places under
| those names. It's just not practical to do, when elections are
| decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes.
|
| > how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird
| when you look at how other countries run elections)
|
| The devil is in the details. I don't trust that the groups
| drafting Voter ID legislation are doing so in good faith. For
| example, North Dakota passed a voter ID law years ago. It
| stated that you needed a valid state-issued ID that included a
| street address. Sounds fine, right? The problem is that most
| homes on Native American reservations don't actually have
| street addresses. Tribal members use P.O. boxes for mail, and
| that P.O. box is on their driver's licenses. This was brought
| up when the law was proposed, but it passed anyway. The Spirit
| Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux tribes had to sue in
| federal court. They were eventually successful, but it took
| years, and in the meantime the 2018 midterms were held with
| many Native Americans literally unable to vote.
|
| See https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806083852/north-dakota-and-
| na...
| mulmen wrote:
| > That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-
| person voting requiring proof of citizenship
|
| Why?
|
| > I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency"
| or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is
| to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other
| countries run elections)
|
| How do other countries run elections to overcome their racially
| motivated systemic voter suppression?
|
| > and there are certainly things to discuss there
|
| This is a laughable understatement.
|
| > but by and large I think the continued digitalization and
| alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be
| addressed with more in-person activities and participation in
| society.
|
| I think this is naive. You are attempting to force an outcome
| without understanding the cause. Systemic racially motivated
| voter suppression is an undeniable reality in American
| politics. Voter ID is a clear example of exactly that. It is
| used to disenfranchise minority voters. This is clear
| established fact.
|
| There is zero evidence of any voter fraud happening that would
| be eliminated by additional voter ID.
|
| This is a serious topic that requires you educate yourself on
| reality. I suggest you take your advice above and touch
| reality, you are overly digitalized if you think voter ID has
| any merit at all.
| fabiofzero wrote:
| Brazil has digital voting since 1996 and it works pretty much
| flawlessly. I'm sure Switzerland will figure it out someday.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| > Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the
| Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My
| smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands
| via alexa! I love the future!
|
| > Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I
| own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot
| it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
| anonymars wrote:
| Indeed -- https://m.xkcd.com/2030/
| clcaev wrote:
| Don't forget about https://verifiedvoting.org/ and its decades-
| long advocacy for scanned paper ballots.
| pilingual wrote:
| https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-i...
| eqvinox wrote:
| _sigh_
|
| 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.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| If you are doing paper voting why bother with voting machines
| at all? What's the benefit?
| eqvinox wrote:
| Immediate results without miscounts and at far lower cost.
| Given some confidence into the system, you'd only audit the
| paper ballots stochastically for a randomly chosen, say, 5%
| of election districts each time.
|
| [Whether that's worth it, I'll not make a statement on.]
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to
| me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
| sonofhans wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| As the article notes, the Swiss do both. The normal system is
| a paper ballot based system. This was for secure e-voting for
| those unable to use paper ballots.
|
| The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it -
| implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.
|
| sonofhans - to reply to your follow up here, I mostly agree
| with you. But I would soften it to say it is a tool that can
| be used for good or bad ends, and I felt the Swiss were using
| it more towards good ends. But I agreed that the ability to
| misuse it is intrinsic.
| sonofhans wrote:
| You are suggesting that it is a separate question. I am
| suggesting that it is not.
| luz666 wrote:
| In Switzerland, it is only done in few cantons and only up
| to 30% of the population.[1] I have no idea how it is
| intended, but I personally interpret it like this: - It is
| mostly an experiment so far. - If it fails (thinking about
| exploitation), Switzerland does not lose a lot and just
| goes back to 100% paper-voting. - It is a free service to
| other countries to show what e-voting can be in best-case.
| - It does not show what could happen in worst-case. - The
| riskiest part of this experiment is the interpretation.
|
| [1]
| https://www.news.admin.ch/en/newnsb/ZLw6w1GV_UdJKDocuT0sX
| rayiner wrote:
| > The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it
| - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.
|
| It's not a United States issue. Look how Taiwan does vote
| counting: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. They don't do it
| this way because of anything distinctive about American
| politics. Being self-evidently difficult to manipulate,
| without requiring voters to trust an opaque system, is an
| intrinsic benefit for voting systems.
| hatthew wrote:
| If it works, it should be much more efficient than the current
| system. Of course that is a massive "if"
| ge96 wrote:
| I'm still annoyed in the US I can't just show up and vote. The
| one time I wanted to vote "sorry you're not registered" like
| what? I'm a citizen just let me vote, oh well. And I was too
| late to register at the time.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > And I was too late to register at the time.
|
| That's a thing pretty much everywhere. Developed countries
| such as Germany automatically enroll everyone eligible based
| on the registration data (you gotta register at the local
| authority after moving), but even we have a deadline if you
| think you should be eligible but didn't get a voting
| invitation to sort that out.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| I think the issue is that you can only be registered to vote
| in one jurisdiction. So being a citizen isn't enough (though
| as I understand it, many jurisdictions let you cast a
| provisional ballot in these situations)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Without a real-time, probably national "who has voted & where
| did they vote" database - how would a "just show up and vote"
| system block a citizen from voting once in each of multiple
| jurisdictions?
| ge96 wrote:
| SSN? To me this is one of those friction things, why is it
| hard? Like taxes, I would take an option rather than
| tallying up just pay a flat $5K fee or something under your
| expected tax bracket.
| brainwad wrote:
| You can solve that simply by putting all such votes inside
| signed envelopes, and waiting to count the contents until
| all the envelopes can be checked for duplicate voter
| details. In Australia this can be forced on you if you are
| caught double voting, or you can opt into it if you don't
| want to appear on the (public) electoral roll (and hence
| can't be ticked off), or you're voting from outside your
| electorate (so they don't have a copy of your electorate's
| roll).
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Hard enough to get a person to vote once. Probably not a
| big problem.
|
| The big problem is, the folks who count the votes and
| cheat. They can invent an arbitrary number of votes to
| swing their guy.
|
| Let's worry about the problems that matter.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Every vote should be a separate piece of paper. My preferred
| voting method are the fill in the bubble sheets that get
| scanned as they go into the locked box. They automate the vote
| count but can be manually counted if needed.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If implemented properly it has some significant advantages:
| faster counting, votes can be verified, more resilient to
| fraud. Unfortunately it seems like nobody is implementing it
| properly yet.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| > It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
|
| Electronic voting has lots of advantages. It can be end-to-end
| verified, it can be a great help to disadvantaged people
| (blind, illiterate), it can deliver results faster, it can
| probably be made more robust to retail-level tampering than
| paper ballots provided a paper audit trail it kept (as all
| electronic systems designed with security in mind do).
|
| The one question mark in my mind: the current US system
| resisted Trump's efforts to corrupt it pretty well. I think
| that was because of the inertia created all the people involved
| in staffing the ballot stations, counting and verifying the
| votes. The machinations of the electoral college being highly
| visible put people doing the wrong thing at high risk for
| decades after Trump leaves the stage.
|
| An automated electronic system could remove a lot of that human
| inertia. Human efficiency is not an advantage in an electoral
| system, it's a weakness. You want as many people involved as
| possible.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I wish the article had more technical details. Obviously, 2048
| being a power of 2 stands out as being possibly related.
| nobrains wrote:
| It was a pilot. Isn't this (kinda) good news that this "bug" was
| caught and now the next iteration will be closer to the intended
| behavior?
| august- wrote:
| honest question - has any country actually deployed e-voting at
| scale without running into serious issues? it feels like every
| pilot i read about hits a wall at some point
| t0mas88 wrote:
| While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting
| that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper
| instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite
| some time, with estimates/interim counts in between.
|
| I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote
| on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while
| also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and
| can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election
| closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers
| as confirmation that nothing weird happened.
|
| No way to hack that. If you print something different on the
| paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing
| more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the
| amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting
| people into the polling station.
|
| It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if
| the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the
| database triggering an investigation as well.
| macintux wrote:
| Voting machines here (Indiana) will print a sheet with your
| choices, which you can review before feeding it to a counting
| machine. That way you have a paper trail for recounts, and a
| sanity check before the vote is cast.
| realo wrote:
| We have 100% paper voting in Canada.
|
| We vote during the day... polls close in the evening... A few
| hours later we have the results. Hand counted, for the entire
| country.
|
| What is the difference?
| mattashii wrote:
| Possibly, ballot sheet size?
|
| The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the
| whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of
| their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of
| the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of
| parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As
| a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are
| quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.
|
| This size issue also complicates verification and counting,
| because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly
| one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for
| practically every ballot.
|
| There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to
| a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the
| party of your chosen candidate together with their number on
| the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved
| for wider use.
| monkaiju wrote:
| I think this is probably sufficient, but also wonder if theres
| a circular logic to the "No way to hack that" claim. If the
| hypothetical hack could both corrupt the digital votes and the
| printing it could ensure the vote counts line up. I guess it
| maybe makes it harder, but if the printed paper votes are there
| to validate the digital votes and vice-versa I'm not sure its
| quite as air-tight as claimed.
|
| Edit: I just realized you also mentioned "voter-passes" when
| entering the voting site. That definitely makes it much harder!
| If those were corrupted you could still pull it off, but that
| level of sophistication is really likely to get caught.
| kosinus wrote:
| One of the reasons The Netherlands abandoned voting machines
| was because of electromagnetic emissions that could be read
| tens of meters away.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > The database is the instant answer at election closing time,
| and then you can take some days to count the papers as
| confirmation that nothing weird happened.
|
| You are misunderstanding "who to trust".
|
| The source of trust in a paper vote election is your party's
| representative + independent election observers. You believe
| them that they were sitting at the polling station all day,
| watching both the voting and counting, and nothing fishy
| happened. You don't have to trust the state officials in any
| way, and you don't have to trust any one else either. Just your
| party - which is kind of the point. The only people you
| maximally trust is your party.
|
| In your proposal, you are saying that to trust the outcome, I
| must trust the state officials - the ones who built the
| machines. Those are exactly the people I distrust to do a fair
| election.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Ireland has both paper only voting, and a PR-STV voting system.
| Counting can take, literally, days (the most recent EU election
| took five days to fill all the seats). It is a spectator sport
| for a certain type of nerd.
| luplex wrote:
| I don't understand the need for e-voting. Germany's entirely
| paper-based system works fine! After voting closes, volunteers
| count the votes for a few hours and we get a result.
| bdamm wrote:
| Canada also uses hand counted paper ballots and it works great.
| There's no need to make large-scale voting electronic, and I'd
| never trust it without major social institutions in place that
| can provide the kind of oversight we have with good old paper
| ballots.
| joaovitorbf wrote:
| Brazil uses fully electronic voting and it works great.
| rickpm wrote:
| No, it doesn't. Every single election bunch of weird stuff
| happening regardless of the winner. Paper ballots are much
| better.
| cedws wrote:
| The only potential benefit I can think of is getting results
| faster, but it's really not important enough to optimise for.
|
| Maybe a dual system of paper ballots and e-voting could be good
| so that they cross check each other. Can't stuff paper ballots
| without manipulating the digital counter, can't manipulate the
| digital counter without stuffing ballots. A digital counter
| also enables meta analysis which could identify suspicious
| patterns, like a wave of votes for a particular candidate.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Another possible benefit I've heard of is it can stop some
| kinds of voter intimidation:
|
| Someone gets hand of an empty ballot, they fill in the ballot
| and give it to you and tell you to come back with another
| empty ballot. Rinse and repeat. Of course, with today's
| smartphones there are simpler ways to do this. Also moot if
| you can vote by mail, which is why voting by mail is a really
| bad idea.
| riffraff wrote:
| there's a much simpler solution for in person voting, used
| in Italy for example: you have a numbered sticker on the
| ballot, when you get the ballot the sticker id is written
| down, when you get out of the voting booth it gets verified
| and detached.
|
| The ballot you throw in the box does not have the sticker
| (vote is anonymous) and you cannot come in with a pre-
| marked ballot (and being out one) cause the number would
| not match.
| coffinbirth wrote:
| Drawing two crosses on a piece of paper every couple of years
| has really nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is when one
| can vote on all topics on any level (local village, town,
| district, county, state, ...) using the computer at home. This
| is possible to implement using the algorithms/data structures
| available today. We actually do basically everything online
| today - except voting.
|
| For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption.
| That's one of the major reasons such a system will likely never
| appear.
| riffraff wrote:
| > For instance, such a system would be immune to corruption
|
| OTOH, it enables vote buying and intimidation at scale: you
| vote from home in exchange for 5EUR/not being beat up and
| have to film yourself doing it, so that the local bad guy
| gets authorized to bulldoze the local nature reserve.
|
| Vote buying and intimidation already exist, but proving it is
| harder, all remote voting on everything would just make it
| more convenient.
| mft_ wrote:
| Wider participation in voting? Easier to vote for people who
| can't travel to the voting station, for myriad reasons? Just
| more efficient for everyone involved?
|
| And bigger picture, once you prove a system that's easier, more
| efficient, reliable... you could expand to more votes on more
| things. Like... the Swiss do.
|
| ---
|
| (A German advocating for paper-based bureaucracy... whatever
| next? ;) )
| steve1977 wrote:
| Everyone ever involved with IT in Swiss governments (both on a
| cantonal and on the federal level) will not be surprised.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Paper has a trail, e-voting makes it's own trail.
|
| No thanks.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| The biggest advantage physical voting has it is follows human-
| scaling laws. Which often is a problem (inefficient) but for
| voting this is a massive benefit for one particular reason - due
| to lack of automation any fraud doesn't also benefit from the
| same automation so has to be large scale and widely distributed
| for it to be impactful (the fraud has to be distributed to the
| humans involved). Which isn't to say that it can't happen (and
| does!) but requires a lot more effort and in the physical world
| there always a lot more fingerprints left, cameras looking,
| informants, etc.
| thangalin wrote:
| How Cosmic Ray Influenced an Election:
|
| https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(...
|
| Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
|
| My Liberum Consilium (see references on page 55):
|
| https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/...
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