Comment by Mbioguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mbioguy | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't going paper-only make it difficult to switch to alternative voting systems like RCV (as Maine is) or multiple-member districting at anything beyond a local level? FPTP is fairly simple to count by hand and other methods can be more labor-intensive as the total number of votes increases.

I am all for having a paper trail, mandatory audits, and secure infrastructure. I agree with those who thing the current private sector systems for voting have huge issues. What I don't understand is what I see as media pushing a false choice between paper or digital.

Estonia has been using e-voting alongside paper ballots for years without serious issues. (Of course, they have national ID and have digitized a lot of their gov't functions, so maybe this is a special case.)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di...

There are a lot of ways to improve our elections, from social engineering (France's media blackout a few days before elections, moving voting day to the weekend, making it multiple days, or just using the mail system) to improved systems like Scantegrity or increased use of optical scanning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

The cynic in me fears this is a push designed to make it harder for us to use things like RCV and entrench FPTP.

Minneapolis has done instant runoff voting for a couple of elections now, on paper ballots, with no problems. I don't think it's making as much of a difference as proponents hoped, but at least we know it's not hard.

How are paper ballots at all an obstacle here? RCV is just a different format for the ballot. You can still input the votes and calculate the runoffs digitally to save time, you just have the benefit of verifiable paper records for the raw data.

Paper ballots are not the obstacle. (I like paper ballots with optical scanning, as in my main post.) The obstacle is that there are some who want there to be no machine involvement in tabulation of results.

Media is hyping the fear of 'election hacking' to the point where people I know personally want everything to be done manually, no machine or computer involvement at all.

>"Media is hyping the fear of 'election hacking' to the point where people I know personally want everything to be done manually, no machine or computer involvement at all."

Whats wrong with this?

It takes time - we wouldn't know who was elected president until several days after the election was over.

I tried to write that in a neutral tone. However you might find it as amusing as me to read it (with required word changes) in different dialects. I think the stereotypical "valley girl" best captures how I feel about it.

That doesn't seem like much of an issue to me when the alternative is nobody trusts the results.

To you. But it is a big deal some someone else. Your task is to figure out who, and why. (why tends to be obvious once you realize who)

Why are you speaking in riddles?

there is more than one correct answer.

I come up with the news media who need to excitement of the vote to not wane.

> Doesn't going paper-only make it difficult to switch to alternative voting systems like RCV

It makes IRV (“RCV” is an annoying name designed specifically to obscure other ranked-choice methods) impractical, particularly for large electorates, if you want to avoid machine tallying, but that's a reason not to use IRV, not a reason to avoid paper ballots and manual tabulation.

A simply tallyable ranked choice method like Bucklin is amenable to manual tabulation. (And, compared to IRV, getting rid of loser elimination reduces the degree to which IRV produces undesirable results and makes the system easier to understand.)

I don't see why paper makes different systems more difficult. Paper is more about how votes are registered and counted, voting systems are more about how they are aggregated and decided.

Re: your comment on social engineering, etc. There has been a ton of effort in arenas in the US electoral system(s), but the goals have not been security or access - sometimes quite the opposite.

I was part of a now-tabled push for RCV in a red state a few years back. While it offered a solution to several issues and had some multiparty support, the big problem arose when the state legislators realized that the current machines used to aid in tabulating and reporting results couldn't do RCV tabulation. This meant either new machines would need to be bought or it would all have to be done by hand. The clerks ran the numbers and the number of volunteers required or increased cost was not viable. The decision was made to table considering RCV use statewide until the machines were scheduled to be replaced in half a decade.

The problem is that an individual ballot in RCV if counted manually, needs to be counted several times if the vote ends up switching to the 2nd, 3rd, or fourth choice etc. As the number of total votes increases from the thousands to hundreds of thousands (or even millions), this can cause a pseudo-exponential growth in the amount of counting labor performed. Large municipalities that have trialed RCV have forged ahead with manual counts and succeeded despite the increased effort, but it has sometimes taken days to report results. That's only after massive amounts of labor from volunteers.

Going statewide with manual-only counts of paper ballots (no optical scanning or other machine-assisted counting) makes RCV or other methods of determining winner much more difficult because of the labor or cost involved.

It should be clear that I quite like RCV, but this is a factor to consider.

That's fair - technology limits will vary place to place. I would think that something like RCV would be best done in a single pass though, so you have all the information up front. But of course I've never tried to implement it! My initial though was it was approx 5x actual counts, but that's far less than 5x labor because you only do the logistical parts once. So I was thinking you could do it with about 2x the labor total, which sounds achievable.

Personally I'm a fan of just committing to doing it by hand and accepting the cost in exchange for robustness against many types of manipulation. The problem is your argument works the other way also, the easier/cheaper it is to tally the votes due to reduced labor and # of people involved, the higher the risk of significant interference, imo.

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