Comment by rstuart4133 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rstuart4133 | Hacker News Reader

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That's a very first world view. Vote fraud occurs on a massive scale in some countries. It's not just fake votes. Two name two others types of fraud there is also vote buying and coercing people to vote a certain way. An example of the latter in patriarchal societies is the husband handling all worldly matters for his wife, including voting.

What protects Germany and Norway isn't your voting system. As Elon says it's poor. It's the other institutions and social mores you have. In countries without those safety nets, mail-in voting is truly an open invitation to by-pass the democratic process.

So lets turn the question on it's head. If you consider the integrity of the voting system to be critical to maintaining a democracy, why would you risk not having a robust voting system - even if it looks like you don't need it now?

My definition for a good voting system is it makes it impossible to buy a vote. Clearly mail in votes don't meet that. Drop boxes need some pretty good voting place security to prevent the "I give you a filled in ballot slip on your way it, you give me a blank ballot slip on the way out, and then I pay you" caper. Computerised vote casting can make that impossible.

The thing that you're ignoring is how very little voter fraud occurs in the US. The countries you refer to, likely third world backwater banana republics, tend to engage in election fraud rather than voter fraud. Trying to co-ordinate a massive conspiracy with many thousands of voters is highly visible to any sort of intelligence apparatus worth a donut, and requires buy-in from government institutions to pull off. It's simply much easier to skew counts or intercept ballot boxes than to engage in meaningful amounts of voter fraud.

Yes, it's going to be hard to prevent Putin from committing fraud, but there are lots of layers that can perpetrate fraud outside of the federal government. A local government can swing the result in ways that are hard to detect. The vote buying example I quoted above for example is virtually undetectable after the fact - a recount won't catch it. The central government insisting on voting machines that prevent such fraud (like India does) is a good defence. Australia's compulsory voting is a great way to prevent people from voting multiple times undetectably. (If it happens, the number of people voting exceeds the number of eligible voters.) I don't think Germany not needing such a defence right now is a good reason for not having it.

As for the US - it has practices that look close to voter fraud now. Disenfranchising of voters is not uncommon, gerrymander is rife in one house. So unlike Germany and Norway, it institutions don't look particularly robust to me, and worse Trump has demonstrated there are people in power willing to try and get away with it. There was a story posted here that showing but for the acts of a valiant few, he would have convinced some states to find those extra votes. Again, I'd say anything prevents that or hanging chad type problems is worth doing.

Again, there may be opportunity for voter fraud, but despite this, there is remarkably little evidence or even specific allegations of voter fraud within the US.

I think it's also important to distinguish voter fraud, which is perpetrated by individuals and is, by nature, limited to a few dozen extra or lost votes, and is typically only a handful of false or destroyed ballots per instance. Election fraud, on the other hand, is the subversion of electoral mechanisms, processes and assets at key points into the voting process, and is usually carried out by a conspiracy of several entities involved in the electoral process, either through key individuals or whole institutions. Election fraud typically skews the result by an amount many multiples of the number of people involved, in the order of hundreds through to millions.

Your examples of gerrymandering and voter suppression or disenfranchisement are great examples of actual election fraud that happen in public view in the US, and are a far greater threat to democracy than voter fraud. In fact, several measures meant to curb voter fraud (which happens very little anyway) are actually means of voter suppression: voter ID laws, residency proof requirements, exclusion of the criminally convicted, placement of polling stations in "safe" areas (read: less accessible from minority/poor neighbourhoods), etc etc. Taking away ballot drops and mail in ballots is yet another means of voter suppression in this vein, on par with a lack of public holidays for election days for people to actually be able to go to the polls.

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