Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Thing is then you're still counting physical ballots, which does away with all the advantages of digital voting.
Unless you don't count them, have the physical and digital ballots have a matching ballot serial code on them, count the digital ballots then upload the digital ballots online/make them available to the public. Then a person can check their ballot by comparing the printed physical ballot they took home with the digital ballot available online. If there's a problem you can present your physical ballot as proof of how you voted, it's then matched to the digital ballot and an investigation is opened.
Thing is you're relying on voters to check for fraud themselves, plus there the possibility of physical ballots being tampered with or stolen so that you can tell how a person voted (in particular what's to stop a abusive head of household checking everyone else in the house's votes), likewise the database of votes could itself be tampered with, unless you make it a physical database that has to be accessed manually, which then makes it harder for people to check that their vote was counted right.
edited 10th Nov '15 4:16:45 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Say goodbye to anonymous votes and hello to C18th-style vote rigging, extortion and bribery.
Transparency has limits, and getting strong-armed or forced to take an implicating bribe by your boss, landlord or anybody else who cares to check on your vote and can hold a stick over you is something to avoid. :/
Writers Shouldn’t Romanticize Rejection
In the literary world, talent isn’t hiding. It’s being ignored. The US publishing industry, like everything else in the country is discriminating against minorities. It is even the case in countries other than the US, studies in Briton found that the best way for a minority writer to get published is to write about topics that they are supposed to write about, namely racism, colonialism, and post colonialism.
I assume it is the same in the US.
edited 10th Nov '15 4:38:18 AM by JackOLantern1337
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.You could limit it a bit, make it so that three things are done when you vote. Your vote goes in digitally into the system with a ballot barcode on it, a physical version that shows your vote and has a ballot barcode on it is printed and you place it in a ballot box, a ballot barcode slip is printed and you take it home.
The digital votes are counted and that's the election. The physical ballots are secured by the election authority at a local level. You can use your barcode slip to once, after proving you're registered to vote in that area and providing ID, have your physical ballot taken from storage and a copy of your digital ballot printed, both are then presented to you, with you having to be alone. Once you confirm that they match both ballots are disposed of the normal way, if they don't match an investigation is started (and the first thing they do is check the ballots themselves to make sure you're not playing a prank and pretending they don't match). Digital and physical ballots are destroyed after a certain time period anyway.
Thing is that is both very complicated, makes a ton of work for civil servants, and means that a person can still check the vote of one person in their area. So a landlord, parent or spouse could still make their tenant/child/spouse give them their ballot barcode slip and then go check how they voted.
Though with postal voting that's possible anyway, I know it's been raised as a possible issue over here that a head of household is just doing everyone's ballots and sending them off.
edited 10th Nov '15 4:42:30 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranCounting ballots and electronic votes is not more about convenience than it is about accuracy.
By keeping them both you can make tampering with the data harder than it is than using a single method of voting.
A database than can only be manually accessed would still need to connect with the other voting machines to store the votes. If the DB can't be remotely connected than an USB or an external hard drive is needed to transfer the data and these can be ridiculously easy to tamper with. If the database can be remotely accessed by a governmental network, you'd still have a massive amount of entry points to work with, specially since the government (both mine and the US govt) have been proven to be completely incompetent when it comes to securing data and protecting itself from internal and external attacks.
Besides the software running those machines can still be a black box, meaning no one but the programmer knows how it works, and thinking that someone before the elections tampered the machines to favor someone else isn't that far off.
Counting both digital and physical votes while not making voting bulletproof would provide a degree of redundancy, allowing to check if the digital results and physical results have any discrepancy beyond the error margin. Since it would be insanely difficult to make a tampered voting machine match with the ballot result, detecting evidences of election fraud would be easier.
Of course the ballot would need to have be printed with the people you voted for and the voter would at least have to check if the name, number and picture of his candidate are showing before depositing his vote on the ballot box.
The recognition software needed to count the votes can't be done through a barcode, intrinsically barcodes can only be read by the machine that wrote them, which means that by using barcodes in a tampered machines it pretty much allows it to print your vote but at the same time registering as voting for someone else other than your candidate.
Meanwhile image recognition software is beyond being capable of recognizing numbers, names and faces on an image. Which would be theoretically hard to deviate from the intended result but still allowing a fast and precise vote count.
I have lived through some issues with voting fraud and dubious election results, even if it is more expensive and time consuming, having a more accurate vote accountability would still be a desirable trade off.
Now just voting through the internet is a ridiculous idea to begin with.
edited 10th Nov '15 5:25:34 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesIn other words, while fully electronic voting is a noble idea, people are too stupid to make it work. Shame.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
Thing is if you count via image recognition software then you're realy just making a second voting machine, the image recognition one. At that point why not just have people log their vote in two machines? You're still having digitised results.
![]()
If both fail, due to still having the physical votes you can call a commission to verify the votes by traditional means.
But just making the software open sourced, which would allow anyone to review it and making sure the reviewed software is the same being used would put the minds of many at ease.
Instead it is a fucking black box no one else really knows how it works.
Verify what? The votes or the software?
edited 10th Nov '15 8:01:44 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesSimple. Vote electronically. Two ballots are printed with the corresponding barcode. One you can keep. The other gets turned in. The electronic results get announced. The paper ones are quietly counted the next day to ensure no wackiness is occurring.
That ore everyone could use mail in ballots...
"War without fire is like sausages without mustard." - Jean Juvénal des Ursins![]()
![]()
To verify the votes manually is a Taking a Third Option since doing that means everything went wrong.
Like one candidate losing by a fairly small margin or the election results being significantly off the vote intention pools or being used as a shut the hell up for any hissy fit candidate unhappy with losing and contesting the results.
Verifying the software is fairly simple, we do it every time where I work. After all this is how Linux Kernel and version updates and patches are made. We'd need to check if the checksums are working, if the encryption is secure and if the vote counting algorithm counts the votes without skewing the results, which by itself would be a simple line of code that counts the votes cast for each candidate, the null votes and the blank votes. Without transferring votes, like declaring all blank and null votes as being sent to one candidate or putting a small % of votes of a candidate on the null votes.
To see if the machines weren't tampered beforehand, a team of neutral inspectors without partisan affiliations have the published software used and verified to run series of tests in voting machine batches of their choosing and some random batches in order to compare the original source code with the version on the machines.
It isn't 100% fraud proof, but should make voter fraud and voting irregularities way more visible and easier to detect, since you'd need to tamper with 3 different voting counting methods and those 3 would need to be consistent in order to give the desirable result. Something that'd be very hard to successfully to pull.
edited 10th Nov '15 8:35:00 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges
X3 If you have one you can keep then voting stops being anonymous. Not only could it be stolen, but all sorts of people (parents, spouses, landlords, bosses) could start demanding you vote a particular way and prove to them that you did. Sure that would be illegal, but it's a massive Pandora's box to open. It would also make things like bribery easier, as people who do bribing would be able to check if they'd been conned.
Yeah, that's the big problem with electronic voting, it's practically impossible to do reliably while keeping your anonymity.
Fulfilling both criteria, as of now, requires your physical presence and use of a physical, untraceable token placed in a box big enough to get it lost in it.note
edited 10th Nov '15 9:15:34 AM by Medinoc
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."Yeah some of that is possible anyway, each polling station has a box and the people at the count can see the contents of a box being counted. So if a village has say 100 votes cast there a count agent (again not a person doing the counting, a person working for a candidate and watching the person doing the counting) with good eyes that pays proper attention could tell you exactly how the votes from that village went.
Electronic voting can be done anonymously though, you simply don't have any ID tied to your vote that ties back to you. The vote goes in and it's just vote number X, that even works if you also do a paper vote. It's only a problem if there's a time outside of you casting the vote where it can be connected to you, or if it's possible for a person to observe you while you vote.
edited 10th Nov '15 10:26:43 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranIt's only a matter of time before we get something like this:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff500/fv00415.htm
In short, the fact that you voted must be traced back to you, while what you actually voted must not, and yet must not be altered by a man in the middle either. This has been solved-ish by your physical presence at the booth and introducing redundancy in people counting the votes, and even then it's not perfect. Electronic voting would be worse.
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."I think we're using different terms here. Electronic voting is voting done via an electronic machine, so a touch screen thing that logs the vote internally or sends it to another machine (often also with a manual hole punch done at the first machine end as a backup).
What you seem to be talking about is actual internet voting, where you vote from say your home or via a website.
Now that can be secured at least in part, for the Labour Leadership election I revived a physical ballot with two codes on it, the ballot was sealed until I opened it, I could either vote by post the normal way, or I could log onto the Labour website and use my two codes to put my votes in via the internet. Now if the two codes I got were assigned blindly (I don't think they were, deliberately and openly so in this case) then nobody should be able to tie my vote to me, unless they gain access to my ballot and the website/system that I vote via.
However alongside the possibility of digital fraud (someone could hijack the site, they could mess with the data stream, they could intercept the communication, they could hack the servers where the vote data is stored (though if a vote identifier code is not tied to the vote at the other end (which it shouldn't be) then that's no use unless you're able to log the time of each vote coming in and the time of each code being declared used) or simply get a virus on my comp that watches what I do) there are the standard postal voting risks. My mum could swipe my ballot and vote for me, she could demand that I let her watch as I submit my votes.
edited 10th Nov '15 3:22:16 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranSo how has nobody pointed out to Trump that the Great Wall of China had been breached by the Mongols?
And it looks like Kasich is becoming Trump's new enemy. Sad that he hasn't pointed out Trump's record while his own is actually proven.
"Somehow the hated have to walk a tightrope, while those who hate do not."Possibly better suited for the economics thread, but this article gets at exactly what I was thinking at that moment- Ted Cruz calls for return to sensible economic policies which literally caused the Great Depression
.
"In fairness", Cruz presumably believes that over regulation caused the Great Depression and that the economy was recovering but FDR made things worse.
edited 10th Nov '15 7:38:27 PM by Hodor2

"In that case, congratulations, you've just invented the world's most expensive pencil."
"Yup. That tasted purple."