Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

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I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, where we’ve digitised voter registration to make queues more efficient but kept the actual voting part on paper.

Overall there isn’t a reason to have voting machines, and if you do, they should really just print a piece of paper with your vote so that you can make sure it’s what you picked.

You’ll sometimes hear finance and efficiency as a reason, but unless American licensing for government software/hardware is significantly different from every where else, it’ll always be cheaper to manually count the votes than to buy voting software/hardware.

I mean, we digitised part of the process like I said, but we did it to make citizens wait less not because it was cheaper. It’s actually really expensive compared to doing manual voter registration, but we pay the money because no one likes queues.

Blockchain isn’t really a suitable option. It could be, but in the real world it would never be truly decentralised because no government is ever going to trust that, and if it isn’t, it’s just as easy to change and manipulate as any other database structure. And you still wouldn’t know if the voting machine actually did what you told it to do.

You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them.

I know we live in a time where we want to digitise everything, but the paper vote is probably the safest and most efficient way to run voting in a democracy.

> You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them.

The states that implement vote-by-mail in US (which, coincidentally, uses paper ballots), ensure that the person casting the vote is the person to whom the ballot was mailed by requiring a signature. To implement secret voting, the ballot is enclosed in two envelopes, and only the outer envelope has any personally identifiable information, including said signature. The signature is checked against the one in the voter registration database, and if there's a mismatch, the election department will contact the voter to ensure that the ballot was, in fact, theirs. Once the check is done, the outer envelope is discarded, and the still-sealed ballots are transferred to the people who will actually count them.

This doesn't preclude forcing someone to vote in a certain way, or paying them to vote in a certain way. But that is just as feasible with voting booths with modern tech - you simply demand that the victim records filling the ballot with their smartphone or a similar device. Some countries are banning camera phones from voting booths for this reason, but enforcement is usually impractical.

If you want to mail order in my country you have to go to a voting place and go through the regular process. Exactly to prevent forced voting.

We set these up at libraries and other muniplacity buildings that already offer citizen things (English is my third language sorry).

We also have voting busses that go to low voting neighbourshoods and we obviously setup voting in nursing homes, hospitals and such.

But the process is always you, alone in the booth, with a piece of paper. Unless you have a physical handicap, then two officials will help you vote.

Taking a photo of your ballot is illegal, but as you say, it’s impossibil to enforce. You do have options though, we use pencils in the booth and you can always ask for a replacement ballot until your vote is cast. So you could technically take a photo and still vote another way.

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