Hacker News Reader

Comment by schuyler2d | Hacker News Reader

Article makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous.

Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be filled in. However it's a lot easier to corrupt a ballot undetected. Just fill in more bubbles for your candidate.

View on HN

The argument for "Ballot Simplicity" is misleading too

They seem to have tried to intentionally tried to create a much more complicated ballot paper for IRV

Here's a sample of an Australian IRV voting form:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/20...

And what's great about said form is the order is determined by draw of a hat. Literally.

It's also misleading because the simplicity of the appearance ballot paper disguises the complexity of the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you. (Am I better picking my favourite candidate only or both the candidates I don't find entirely unacceptable in a tight three way race?)

> the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you

With approval voting, you should consider each candidate independently: "Am I okay with this person winning the election?" The number of circles you fill in doesn't matter.

But the number of circles filled in by large segments of the electorate matter hugely, and most people's level of "am I OK with this person winning the election?" varies hugely, especially when there's a candidate they'd be really unhappy with on the ballot paper.

This is definitely a better way to support IRV, except that it depends heavily on people writing numbers that are recognizable by either computers or people when scoring.

Perhaps then each candidate should be marked with either a "0" or a "+". It is difficult to change either of these into the other without signs of tampering.

Unintentional spoilage and intentional tampering are two different things. There's nothing disingenuous about mentioning one of them but not the other.

It's true that, depending on the implementation, approval voting can be subject to tampering. But the key point there is "depending on the implementation". There are any number of anti-tampering measures that are compatible with approval. Other comments here have suggested some of them (such as using "0" vs "+" as marks). Others might rely on technological fixes (such as immediate ballot scans by multiple independent non-networked devices) or social ones (multiple witnesses during all stages of ballot collection and counting).

It may not be possible to be 100% certain of preventing every possibility of ballot-counting fraud, but it seems that >99.9% is possible, and that's basically good enough. In well-administered elections, spoilage is a much bigger problem. Thus, it's reasonable to focus on spoilage.

This is easily prevented by additionally marking the number of candidates chosen.

Yet this would then increase spoilage significantly would it not?

It could be an additional multiple choice field, with N+1 options. Both would need to be filled in for the form to be valid.

I'm not sure I understand, nor how this would combat the problem that I can accidentally spoil my ballot by miscounting the number of choices I've made. An easy mistake to make - even easier if you have a condition like dyslexia.

This seems like the best solution - easy and transparent for voters, and then spoiled numbers can be distinguished from valid ballots.

That's fixable by using voting machines to print the ballots. E.g. fill in the circles but also print the number of filled-in circles for each contest. Or, print only the selected candidate names.

In their example voting form there is a list of candidate names with a bubble next to each.

How can someone “fill in more bubbles for (their) candidate”?

I had the same question, but I think they meant that you can fill in the bubbles for your candidate of choice on other people's ballots without anybody being able to detect it, and without causing the ballot to be discarded.

It's possible that it might be easier to tamper with these than other ballots, but there must already be countermeasures in place to deal with these types of issues in a large scale election.

In Australia, each candidate is able to send a scrutineer to each voting and counting location, and it's not exactly done in privacy where tampering would go undetected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XevjASEgoK8

Reply on news.ycombinator.com