No doubt we need to get people to vote. Making it easy and secure is always going to be a problem.
Voter fraud and hacking the vote will happen.
I think we should make Election Day a Holiday so it is easier for people to get out to a polling place and vote, if even by paper and pen.
3 Likes
Except that trying to game the system with mail-in ballots (or in-person paper ballots) is a lot of work for very low returns. In a district with 100,000 votes, each âbadâ vote only carries the weight of 0.001%. Very few elections are within such a small margin. Thatâs why all of the hand-wringing over in-person âvoter fraudâ is silly. Why would a single individual risk jail time/fines when their vote only counts as 1 one-thousandths of the total votes in their district.
An electronic voting system can flip an entire election with a single command.
4 Likes
It could⌠but setting aside a few double-digit population counties (because they have no nursing homes!), it wouldnât be likely, and even a VERY dim, VERY passionate fraudster would be daunted by the odds.
Consider a county of 1,000 people, 100 of whom are residents of the East Bumwad County Home for the Senile and Comatose. Personally swaying 10% of the vote might make the difference in a tight election for East Bumwad Sheriff, but can you do it without getting caught? Of course not. Itâs a matter of public record who votes, and even if your nursing home residents were legally entitled to vote, it would raise giant statistical red flags if they did, out of proportion to the normal population. The loser in the election only needs to find one definitively comatose voter to start the investigation that ends with you in federal prison for a very long time.
Now consider L.A. County, which clocks in at about 10,000,000 people. Would your nursing-home shenanigans go undetected here? Well⌠no, probably not, but maybe theyâd be less likely to. But now your 100 stolen votes are only 1/100,000th of the total votes cast. âLizard Peopleâ gets more write-in votes in most elections that size.
Long story short, there is no happy medium in here where the risk and reward match up. Thatâs a good thing! And itâs why fraudulent voting (as opposed to fraudulent denial of voting, via voter caging or frivolous challenges or false affadavits, etc.) is one of the least-committed crimes on the books.
The nub of it is that just because a crime COULD be committed, doesnât mean that it will, or that the system should make itself less workable overall just to further discourage the possibility that someone might decide to break the law.
3 Likes
Ambiguous: cursor mark on âYES,â red âXâ on âNO.â Voter intent unclear.
BALLOT REJECTED
9 Likes
I agree that using fraudulent mail-in ballots is not an efficient way to swing an election (especially compared to an e-voting system). Mail-in ballot fraud seems better suited to small personal things, like eliminating the vote of your politically differing spouse, or your crazy old aunt living upstairs. I expect there are people who wouldnât dream of in-person fraud who could rationalize this to themselves.
Mail-in ballots are also subject to vote buying or coercion (again, not a good way to change the outcome of the election, since buying/bullying your way to enough votes to make a difference is hard to keep secret â but still something that an ideal system would prevent).
Oregon has had mail only voting for years, any issues? Donât Washington and Colorado too, now? Any problems there?
There have been high-profile cases in the UK - but theyâre high profile because they were caughtâŚ
The concern in the UK has mainly been that one person in the household would commandeer everyoneâs votes.
1 Like
Iâm by no means an expert on blockchain technology, but my understanding is that itâs a publicly shared ledger of transactions (or in this case votes) that doesnât reside on any single server. Instead anyone who installs the blockchain software would become a part of the network and have a copy of the ledger themselves. As people submit their votes to the blockchain, other users on the network would authenticate the integrity of the blockchain. So if someone tried to submit a bogus entry that was trying to alter a previous entry in the blockchain, that would quickly get rejected.
As for secrecy, I believe you could randomly poke around the ledger and see votes, but you wouldnât know who cast them unless you could pair up the transaction id, which only the user who made the vote would know.
Again, I just have a passing bit of knowledge regarding blockchains, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Iâm curious if someone with a deeper knowledge of this stuff thinks this could be a good marriage of technology. Problems I foresee would be, what is the benefit to running the blockchain software to the end user, other than a sense of civic duty? With most cryptocurrencies, users are monetarily rewarded for helping to verify transactions. Also, what happens if some single entity gained more than 50% control of the network? Theoretically they could change the blockchain how ever they wanted⌠would this be likely to happen in a non-compensatory blockchain?
1 Like
There are multiple ways of âstealingâ a vote - you donât have to be as obvious as casting a vote as someone who didnât actually vote - particularly for a reason that would obviously be a matter of record.
You can also make casual conversation about the election in the months leading up, on which basis you decide whose mail to accidentally lose behind the filing cabinet.
(Also - whoâs going to investigate this alleged voting fraud - the sheriff? Conveniently enough, heâs my brother.)
That has always seemed to me one of the most likely (low-tech) vote fraud scenarios in any kind of mail-in or internet voting scenarios: âbe the abusive spouse of a the registered voterâ
It depends how itâs implemented. On one hand you have the situation in Florida during the 2000 US presidential election. On the other hand you have ballots that looks like this one, which is similar to what I used when I voted in the last presidental election (though I donât live in Minnesota.)
IMO using computers to print out ballots with the chosen candidates/issues marked uniformly (both in human-readable and machine-readable formats like a QR code or the circles processed by OMR software) is the sweet spot. The human voting can read the human readable information to confirm that the ballot accurately reflects their desires (and if they have a QR code app on their cell phone, they could check the machine readable information too.) The computer system tallying the votes can read the machine readable information to get an accurate count quickly. If thereâs a recount, both formats can be checked to ensure they match. No hanging chads, no partially filled circles, no offices with more circles filled than allowed, etc.
Identity itself is a terrible idea which should be disentangled from politics. Where one defines an âidentityâ is more or less arbitrary. How about when a collective of organism work under a single identity? How about when numerous identities together comprise a âsingleâ organism?
Politics, not unlike other choices and decisions, work better when they are not framed as problems with a fixed personal frame of reference. People need to dispose of anything being a âpersonal problemâ before they can make effective decisions.
Humans ARE networks.
Okay, but for what itâs worth, the current system has safeguards for lost (or âlostâ) ballots. If you donât get one by such-and-such a date, you can contact the authorities and get another one, or do drop-in voting (in most vote-by-mail jurisdictions). If Shady Acres Seniorsâ Home mail keeps getting lost, youâre as vulnerable to being caught as if youâd forged ballots.
As for the prospect of investigating vote tampering, I think youâll find that itâs well above the pay grade of a county sheriff. State election boards and the FEC and/or FBI would get involved, likely with a furious vengeance if they thought theyâd actually get to nail someone for mass fraud.
AgainâI donât deny that people could attempt to commit this crime. I do think that many cyclesâ worth of elections in many states and jurisdictions outside the US show that it works very well and gives more people access to the vote than would otherwise have it. The infinitesimally small and ineffective examples of the former doesnât mean we should give up on the benefits of the latter.
1 Like
Is Internet Voting a Terrible Idea?
- Yes
- No
- Sometimes
- Princess Pricklepants
- All of the Above
- All of the Following
- I agree with Nick
- It depends
- I, for one, welcome our social media campaign overlords
- Can you explain, using small words I can understand?
- Other
0 voters
2 Likes
Better answer:
1 Like
The fears about rogue apps, platform-level hijacks, or hackerz compromising communication channels sounds really simple-minded (almost dishonestly so). Whereâs the mention of cryptographic techniques that voters could use to not only verify their votes were received, but received untampered with?
The discussion of âdo we trust the people writing the software we useâ is WAY bigger than just voting-related. Hell, why not stoke paranoia about rogue Chinese chip-fabrication labs creating processors that will override software and deliver the votes China wants?
Or why not have mail-in paper ballots? Like what fucking works now?
Fine, do your blockchain stuff, make it easily navigable by the public and have an auditable process between the secret part of the ballot and the reception of the ballot.
Or do mail-in paper ballots like a goddamned reasonable polity.
1 Like
I fully expected that result!
3 Likes
Me, too!
(Sheâs got my vote.)
2 Likes
Irregularities in online voting can be detected if they differ from a sample group just like the current opscan + ballot box combo.
I would say voting is âa terrible ideaâ until we have something to vote for (instead of somebody).
