I work for the municipality of Skanderborg, Denmark. We have what we call digital elections, but what’s digitized is the registration process. Basically every adult gets a voting card with their information + a barcode, we scan those barcodes when they turn up to receive their ballot(is that the right word for voting list?), and then they are registered.
The actual voting takes place on paper, and while it takes time to prepare the ballots and count the votes, the process of voting doesn’t take very longer than a few minutes for the individual citizen. From they enter the voting place till they are done.
I think that’s the way to digitize elections, you make them speedy for the citizens, but safe for democracy.
I can’t for the life of me understand why you would ever do a digital vote. It’s just so risky. I guess you save money by adding effectiveness to the process surrounding an election, preparing ballots and counting votes, but those parts of the process are owned by the public sector and I don’t think the government should ever value the safety of our democracy as less important than money. We count votes by enlisting employees of the municipality, members of political parties and paid help from local NGOs, and everything is monitored and counted a few times. It’s a little taxing, but everyone involved enjoy the process, and financially it’s not that expensive compared to paying a license for voting machines.
> It’s a little taxing, but everyone involved enjoy the process
This is part of the problem in the United States. Voting is a chore, and you're often going to lose money (unpaid time off) to do it. If elections were national holidays and voting was treated as a privilege instead of a chore, we would be much better off.
A couple of weeks before the midterms I'm going to get a packet in the mail containing my ballot, instructions for filling it out, a pamphlet where every candidate on the ballot gets a paragraph or two to make their case, and a prepaid return envelope. I fill out my ballot at my leisure, stuff it in the envelope, sign the envelope underneath the flap, and drop it in a mailbox. There's a receipt with an anonymous serial number in the packet that I can go online and use to verify my ballot has been received. If I'm worried about missing the deadline there are also dropboxes in most government buildings I can drop my ballot in up through the day of the election, along with a few traditional polling places open on election day.
Voter turnout here is about twelve points above the national average.
The state of Oregon has vote by mail. Its awesome. My ballot gets mailed to me a few weeks before the election. I fill it out, and can either mail it back (I have to pay for a postage stamp) or drop it off at a ballot drop box all over town.
there are all sorts of safeguards for things like not getting your ballot in the mail, etc. I was also automatically register to vote as an independent when I got my drivers license. (they mailed me a form I could return/mail to change party, if I wanted to).
My last state, my town was small, had a single polling place, and trying to vote before work meant getting there before they opened at 7am, or else wait 60-90 min to vote, and be late to work. (or come in after work, and wait 60-90 minutes).
Why are elections not held on Sundays ? I assume that on average there are less people working that day that Monday - Friday, so less people would have to take time off from their job.
Edit: Found this
> In 1845, the United States Congress chose a single date for all national elections in all states. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen so that there would never be more than 34 days between Election Day and the first Wednesday in December. Election Day is held on a Tuesday so that voters will not have to vote or travel on Sunday. This was an important consideration at the time when the laws were written and is still so in some Christian communities in the United States.
This seems a pretty dated reason. Why no one is proposing to change it ?
Or you can just do mail in ballots. Washington state, for instance, sends out ballots to all registered voters twoish weeks in advance of each race, and achieved almost 80% turnout for the 2016 election[1], for instance, which we'll probably top this year with the inclusion of pre-paid postage.
I mean, it would help if voting didn't take literally several hours of waiting in line in the sun around here. You can (and some do) get heat-stroke from that kind of thing. It's utterly ridiculous, beyond "chore" and into "this might cause you to lose your job".
Silicon Valley is surprisingly terrible at most things governmental.
For a little bit of context, from what I recall, the real push towards electronic voting in the United States came after the 2000 presidential election and the controversies that happened with paper ballots and the tight recount in Florida (eg "hanging chads"). (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/electronic-voting-...)
Paper isn't perfect and I think the thought at the time was pushing elimination of all of paper's errors. That being said, digital voting of course has far worse problems if you don't do it right (and it's pretty clear it hasn't been done very well in the US). In hindsight, that was a poor push.
I imagine it's actually possible to design a digital voting system that is fairly secure (eg air-gapped voting machines, secure data storage and transmission, integrity verification, redundant security features, thoroughly tested, and -- most critical of all -- paper backups), but it would be very difficult compared to designing a better paper ballot system, and probably quite a bit more expensive.
Registration for voting varies by the state you live in. In MN, you basically just need to walk in, have someone else who is already registered vouch for you, and you can register + vote on the spot.
Every attempt to firm up voter registration roles (such as proving identity, eligibility, etc) is met with cries of racism.
That's because schemes such as bringing a driver's license are racist when you look at mobility and accessibility to government services. Back in my home country (Canada), voter eligibility was done by bringing evidence of residence in the district, which is roughly the same hurdle as getting a library card. I don't see why it ought to be any harder than that.
As a side note our Politicians in Denmark, just trashed the posibility of using evoting, citing security, and that our current election system, is actually superior. The only thing we would gain, would be fast vote counting. Why sould we trade security for that?
As a fellow European my view changed a little bit, when I understood how US votes differ. I'm used to vote one or two items, sometimes three on one election day. US votes often have dozens of different items. They vote on proprositions for laws, we usually don't do this. US citizens vote for their sheriffs and maybe many more jobs.
I also think, you shouldn't use voting machines. But I understood them better when I found out that their ballots are different from our ballots.
>The actual voting takes place on paper, and while it takes time to prepare the ballots and count the votes, the process of voting doesn’t take very longer than a few minutes for the individual citizen. From they enter the voting place till they are done.
How is the counting done in Denmark? Do they still have to collect all the paper ballots and count them in a central place? If so, how do you avoid all the 'hanging chad' issues?
Because citizens are not required to have ID and those that don't have one are disproportionately racial minorities and/or in lower socioeconomic classes. Democrats would be much more willing to allow ID to be required to vote if there was a national ID card issued to every citizen, but Republicans would be against any system that would try to create a national ID.
The example in the OP notes that every adult gets a voter registration card, by default.
No proposal for voter ID in the US has ever accompanied a serious effort to ensure all citizens have easy access to suitable ID.
Many proposals have been explicitly crafted on the back of data gathering campaigns to determine which forms of ID "unfavorable" groups generally do not have.
We don’t require ID as such. Every citizen is issued a little piece of paper that they can trade in for a ballot for that specific election.
We used to look people up in big books, that are printed for the occasion, to make sure their piece is valid and they haven’t already voted - which took a long time and led to queues. That’s the part we digitized.
But you can vote without ID as long as you have that piece of paper and know your birthdate.
I’m actually not sure how the homeless vote (they can’t receive the piece of paper), but I guess they probably do a mail vote at their local municipality.
We require ID to vote in Ireland (theoretically; it’s a spot check thing). The difference is that practically anything is ID for this purpose; a social services card, bank statement, debit card, birth certificate etc etc. So if you either receive any type of social welfare or have a job you almost certainly have ID.
This doesn’t seem to be the case for most of the proposed American requirements, at all.
Most other countries in Europe have mandatory govt id anyway, so it’s not a major burden.
It sounds like this is done via automatic registration, which solves a major objection that opponents of voter IDs in the USA generally have (i.e., IDs are too hard for some people to get to make them a prerequisite).
Automatic registration is likely controversial in the US for different reasons, as other posters mentioned.
My polling place features first a comparison of photo id to the person and then an amateur attempts and fails to properly frank the voter's signature.
How is it that passing the Real-ID photo-ID hurdle but failing the amateur-verified signature franking is acceptable in this country?
I trust good digital voting systems more than a paper ballot.
Specifically, the system should be auditable in a way that makes it difficult to trace individual votes back to voters, but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly.
There must be a good way to accomplish this while also addressing potential voter fraud. Does anybody know of any research in this area?
With paper ballots, I have no way of knowing whether or not my vote was counted correctly. And I find that really unsettling.
I sat and counted votes just a month ago. In order to cheat I'd have had to managed to destroy the votes sitting around a table with nine other people, none of whom I'd ever met before. The public, of course, is also welcome during the whole proccess. You can sit and watch the counting if you want to.
I prefer a physical thing that somebody has to physically steal, hide, replace, destroy. Something that can be signed for, locked up, and monitored with cameras for years after an election.
Computers are about convenience. Elections are important enough to do things the hard way.
Paper gives you natural decentralization. Computers will tend to be purchased from and serviced by a small number of companies.
We count votes several times, using different people. All counting is done under observation. Everyone on the ballot can demand a recount under their supervision, within reason (you can’t demand infinite recounts).
The people who count votes are either trusted employees of the muniplacity, members of a politician party or NGOs. I guess in a two party system it’s hard to understand why politician party members are impartial, but when you have several parties they govern each other + they don’t get to count their own votes, and there is at least one recount of only officials.
I’m not sure what system would be safer.
Without a paper trail you have no evidence. I guess you could use blockchain, but realistically, it would never be decentralized and 99% of the voters wouldn’t understand it well enough to know whether or not the software actually did what they intended, making it much unsafer.
That's only possible if you sacrifice some of the stronger anonymity requirements. In theory you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a particular way to ensure you can't be intimidated into changing you vote.
Unless it's good enough to verify whether your vote was counted, that should be fairly easy to do.
'The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
I don't understand these headlines. "After More Than A Decade of Vulnerable Voting Machines, US Still Uses Those Same Voting Machines" would be more accurate.
With all of this discussion in Washington about Russian hacking and Russian voter influencing, why are these demonstrably vulnerable voting machines hardly mentioned? It would seem to me this should be a number one priority to prevent outside interference.
I've wondered about this and also the fact that 'hacking' our election isn't terribly difficult when all you have to do is manipulate a very small number of swing counties. My conclusion thus far has been that even the media must be necessarily complicit in the farce of a free and fair election system. There's a strong incentive for everyone to believe this in order to maintain stability.
That does seem like a logical conclusion. Conveniently, the GOP has made disenfranchisement part of their platform, which of course the Democrats then oppose by supporting zero-id elections, and we end up with a silly stalemate, hackable voting systemc, etc.
Staff up the FEC and then make it their job to seek out and provide ID to every single eligible voter in the country. Kinda like the census, be proactive and don't make disenfranchisement a thing. And then make it so polling places are open for days, maybe a week, including a full weekend, so everyone gets a chance to vote.
Well, when the best way to obfuscate your own voter influencing and voting machine hacking is to keep blaming it on the Russians (based mostly on the language packs installed in the attackers' text editors...), we have to wonder how much they really care about preventing interference in democracy...
The HN consensus seems to be that digital voting is very difficult to do right. I trust the consensus opinion, but this also makes me sad. The bigger picture that I think we’re missing here is the opportunity for huge-scale direct democracy. I know the usual debates against DD, but I think there’s ways to safeguard against those problems. E.g. you can’t vote on an issue without hearing both sides of it and passing a test that demonstrates that you understand the pros and cons of each side. Idealistic, I know, but I’m a firm believer that most people act more responsibly when you give them more responsibility.
Or alternatively, encourage people to delegate their votes to whoever they trust in their local network to understand the problem best, who in-turn can delegate to their favored expert. Basically recursive representative democracy. It can't be worse than picking your representative from a group of 2-5 per region, that you only know about through biased media sources. And in aggregate it weighs expertise and trust much higher.
Voter fatigue is a serious downside to direct democracy. Especially within the context of our attention economy. (Which then leads to additional gaming of the system. Etc...)
I'm a huge proponent of direct democracy. But I also think we are asked to vote on way too many things.
Alas, I only have one idea for reducing the number of elections. (Which would also improve outcomes.)
Replacing our current first-post-the-post (aka winner takes all) with approval voting (for exec positions) or proportional representation (for assemblies) would consolidate our separate primary and general elections into one event.
Some random thoughts, starting with personal experience:
* When my team gives me ownership over a project, I take pride in that project and produce higher-quality work. This is loosely related to "people act more responsibly when you give them more responsibility" in the sense that direct democracy will make people feel like they have more ownership over issues.
* Homeowners tend to take better care of their place of living than renters.
* When people have kids, most tend to mature and act more responsibly in general. Not all, but most. In this case "having a child" is a proxy for "having more responsibility" in general.
In terms of studies, I'm intrigued by experiments [1] where people are assigned leadership roles randomly. They seem to suggest that people tend to make better decisions when given more responsibility. An even more radical idea that is more closely related to this study would be to assign random citizens to be in charge of a certain political issue, say for 6 to 12 months.
>a test that demonstrates that you understand the pros and cons of each side
Then you just moved the controversial part of the process back to what the pros and cons are, or another step further still to who decides what the pros and cons are.
Yes, the gatekeeper problem is tricky. I ultimately think that each side would submit pros and cons, with no rules around what they can submit. Otherwise we run into the gatekeeper problem. So some sides would submit sensational, false claims. And we’d have to trust the people to decide what’s true and false. We’re already trusting us, the people, to make these decisions when we elect representatives. We might as well directly face the consequences of our choices, rather than shifting blame to a representative.
>”E.g. you can’t vote on an issue without hearing both sides of it and passing a test that demonstrates that you understand the pros and cons...”
I think this would be thoroughly gamed. You’d get “cheat sheets” on how to answer, or more importantly, you’d disenfranchise poorly educated people or people with learning disabilities (who afaik, still have a right to vote.)
I've thought about the gaming aspect. I'll put this idea out there, for any enterprising HN visitor who wants to take up the mantle: I think there's a general need for quiz technology that is difficult to game. I think this is a technology that could be applied in many different domains.
The disenfranchisement angle is important and is something that I haven't thought about. Thank you for pointing out.
Readit News
The actual voting takes place on paper, and while it takes time to prepare the ballots and count the votes, the process of voting doesn’t take very longer than a few minutes for the individual citizen. From they enter the voting place till they are done.
I think that’s the way to digitize elections, you make them speedy for the citizens, but safe for democracy.
I can’t for the life of me understand why you would ever do a digital vote. It’s just so risky. I guess you save money by adding effectiveness to the process surrounding an election, preparing ballots and counting votes, but those parts of the process are owned by the public sector and I don’t think the government should ever value the safety of our democracy as less important than money. We count votes by enlisting employees of the municipality, members of political parties and paid help from local NGOs, and everything is monitored and counted a few times. It’s a little taxing, but everyone involved enjoy the process, and financially it’s not that expensive compared to paying a license for voting machines.
This is part of the problem in the United States. Voting is a chore, and you're often going to lose money (unpaid time off) to do it. If elections were national holidays and voting was treated as a privilege instead of a chore, we would be much better off.
A couple of weeks before the midterms I'm going to get a packet in the mail containing my ballot, instructions for filling it out, a pamphlet where every candidate on the ballot gets a paragraph or two to make their case, and a prepaid return envelope. I fill out my ballot at my leisure, stuff it in the envelope, sign the envelope underneath the flap, and drop it in a mailbox. There's a receipt with an anonymous serial number in the packet that I can go online and use to verify my ballot has been received. If I'm worried about missing the deadline there are also dropboxes in most government buildings I can drop my ballot in up through the day of the election, along with a few traditional polling places open on election day.
Voter turnout here is about twelve points above the national average.
there are all sorts of safeguards for things like not getting your ballot in the mail, etc. I was also automatically register to vote as an independent when I got my drivers license. (they mailed me a form I could return/mail to change party, if I wanted to).
My last state, my town was small, had a single polling place, and trying to vote before work meant getting there before they opened at 7am, or else wait 60-90 min to vote, and be late to work. (or come in after work, and wait 60-90 minutes).
Edit: Found this
> In 1845, the United States Congress chose a single date for all national elections in all states. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen so that there would never be more than 34 days between Election Day and the first Wednesday in December. Election Day is held on a Tuesday so that voters will not have to vote or travel on Sunday. This was an important consideration at the time when the laws were written and is still so in some Christian communities in the United States.
This seems a pretty dated reason. Why no one is proposing to change it ?
How is the timing in the U.S. then?
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/research/voter-turnout-by-e...
Silicon Valley is surprisingly terrible at most things governmental.
We can, that’s what I do since I’m working on election days.
Paper isn't perfect and I think the thought at the time was pushing elimination of all of paper's errors. That being said, digital voting of course has far worse problems if you don't do it right (and it's pretty clear it hasn't been done very well in the US). In hindsight, that was a poor push.
I imagine it's actually possible to design a digital voting system that is fairly secure (eg air-gapped voting machines, secure data storage and transmission, integrity verification, redundant security features, thoroughly tested, and -- most critical of all -- paper backups), but it would be very difficult compared to designing a better paper ballot system, and probably quite a bit more expensive.
Every attempt to firm up voter registration roles (such as proving identity, eligibility, etc) is met with cries of racism.
As a side note our Politicians in Denmark, just trashed the posibility of using evoting, citing security, and that our current election system, is actually superior. The only thing we would gain, would be fast vote counting. Why sould we trade security for that?
I also think, you shouldn't use voting machines. But I understood them better when I found out that their ballots are different from our ballots.
How is the counting done in Denmark? Do they still have to collect all the paper ballots and count them in a central place? If so, how do you avoid all the 'hanging chad' issues?
No proposal for voter ID in the US has ever accompanied a serious effort to ensure all citizens have easy access to suitable ID.
Many proposals have been explicitly crafted on the back of data gathering campaigns to determine which forms of ID "unfavorable" groups generally do not have.
We used to look people up in big books, that are printed for the occasion, to make sure their piece is valid and they haven’t already voted - which took a long time and led to queues. That’s the part we digitized.
But you can vote without ID as long as you have that piece of paper and know your birthdate.
I’m actually not sure how the homeless vote (they can’t receive the piece of paper), but I guess they probably do a mail vote at their local municipality.
This doesn’t seem to be the case for most of the proposed American requirements, at all.
Most other countries in Europe have mandatory govt id anyway, so it’s not a major burden.
Automatic registration is likely controversial in the US for different reasons, as other posters mentioned.
Specifically, the system should be auditable in a way that makes it difficult to trace individual votes back to voters, but allows individual voters to verify that their votes are counted correctly.
There must be a good way to accomplish this while also addressing potential voter fraud. Does anybody know of any research in this area?
With paper ballots, I have no way of knowing whether or not my vote was counted correctly. And I find that really unsettling.
Computers are about convenience. Elections are important enough to do things the hard way.
Paper gives you natural decentralization. Computers will tend to be purchased from and serviced by a small number of companies.
Paper please.
If everyone can prove how they voted it becomes much easier to intimidate or incentivize people to vote a certain way.
The people who count votes are either trusted employees of the muniplacity, members of a politician party or NGOs. I guess in a two party system it’s hard to understand why politician party members are impartial, but when you have several parties they govern each other + they don’t get to count their own votes, and there is at least one recount of only officials.
I’m not sure what system would be safer.
Without a paper trail you have no evidence. I guess you could use blockchain, but realistically, it would never be decentralized and 99% of the voters wouldn’t understand it well enough to know whether or not the software actually did what they intended, making it much unsafer.
Unless it's good enough to verify whether your vote was counted, that should be fairly easy to do.
'The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
Same company in 2018, same issues
Staff up the FEC and then make it their job to seek out and provide ID to every single eligible voter in the country. Kinda like the census, be proactive and don't make disenfranchisement a thing. And then make it so polling places are open for days, maybe a week, including a full weekend, so everyone gets a chance to vote.
Or vote-by-mail. We've established it works.
All of them believe it's the Russians based on all the available evidence.
https://markorodriguez.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/master-th...
I'm a huge proponent of direct democracy. But I also think we are asked to vote on way too many things.
Alas, I only have one idea for reducing the number of elections. (Which would also improve outcomes.)
Replacing our current first-post-the-post (aka winner takes all) with approval voting (for exec positions) or proportional representation (for assemblies) would consolidate our separate primary and general elections into one event.
Honestly, I believe the literal opposite. People act irrationally if they believe it's in their own self-interest.
What leads to to think that way? I'm genuinely curious.
* When my team gives me ownership over a project, I take pride in that project and produce higher-quality work. This is loosely related to "people act more responsibly when you give them more responsibility" in the sense that direct democracy will make people feel like they have more ownership over issues.
* Homeowners tend to take better care of their place of living than renters.
* When people have kids, most tend to mature and act more responsibly in general. Not all, but most. In this case "having a child" is a proxy for "having more responsibility" in general.
In terms of studies, I'm intrigued by experiments [1] where people are assigned leadership roles randomly. They seem to suggest that people tend to make better decisions when given more responsibility. An even more radical idea that is more closely related to this study would be to assign random citizens to be in charge of a certain political issue, say for 6 to 12 months.
[1] http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/10/is-it-sometim...
Then you just moved the controversial part of the process back to what the pros and cons are, or another step further still to who decides what the pros and cons are.
I think this would be thoroughly gamed. You’d get “cheat sheets” on how to answer, or more importantly, you’d disenfranchise poorly educated people or people with learning disabilities (who afaik, still have a right to vote.)
The disenfranchisement angle is important and is something that I haven't thought about. Thank you for pointing out.