E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:06 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: E-vote advocates still don't get it... by Cyberax
Parent article: Cryptography and elections

That's fine. I'm not willing to sell out democracy for $12/person, thanks. That is not a tradeoff I would like our country to make.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:08 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (15 responses)

Democracy? What's that?

Ah, it's like the olden time when all these black people couldn't even get to the voting place.

The US right now has very measurable problems with elections that do need to be solved in some way.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:15 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (13 responses)

Canada is still democratic. There are flaws, sure, but it's still basically a pretty decent democracy.

The US's "measurable problems with elections" won't be solved with e-voting. The entire system is broken and needs foundational change. E-voting, if anything, will make it worse.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 1:04 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (12 responses)

It's an objective fact that e-voting will get rid of the disparate locations and opening hours of polling places.

Foundationally, our system is much like Canada's. I'm curious how the First Nations feel about the Canadian system; the law in the US has promised full enfranchisement since 1924, whereas Canadian law has only offered that since 1960.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:18 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (6 responses)

It's also an objective fact that disparate locations and opening hours have not been a problem (and have not been seen as a problem) in any Canadian election.

The US system is very different from the Canadian system, especially in how electoral boundaries are drawn and who runs the election mechanics.

Yes, First Nations people were disenfranchised in Canada for a long time, and yes, we are not perfect. But that doesn't take away from the fact that our electoral system is far more trusted by citizens than the US one is by Americans.

And if you think the US offers "full enfranchisement" in any meaningful form today, you're dreaming. In many places there are institutional barriers that disenfranchise entire populations of disadvantaged people.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:20 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (5 responses)

> But that doesn't take away from the fact that our electoral system is far more trusted by citizens than the US one is by Americans.

Which hurts your case, IMO. That has nothing to do with ballot boxes and stubs. It has nothing to do with e-voting versus paper ballots. It's all about people and society, and thus completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:41 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Umm, no. One reason our system is more trusted is that the counting procedure is more trustworthy. (It's not the only reason, but it's a reason.)

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 18:33 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (3 responses)

Is it? The printed paper trail of Nevada's voting systems is more trustworthy than putting pencil to paper. I can look on the printed paper roll and see that my vote for Clinton was recorded and there's zero chance that someone is going to be debating whether my pencil mark was clear enough. If it wasn't recorded properly, I can hit the cancel button, it'd void that ballot out, and start over again. I don't know what further precautions are taken, but I doubt that most Canadians know theirs, and I know that most Canadians have no idea how voting is done here in Nevada, so the differences in counting procedure probably have little to no effect.

Oh, and https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-irony-of-the-first-na... , second paragraph:

"But the same cannot be said of the First Nations’ vote. There is good reason why First Nations have traditionally resisted voting in Canadian elections. Regardless of who First Nations vote for in any federal election, their voice makes no actual difference."

I bet the main reasons your system is more trusted is because (a) there have been Americans scare-mongering about the voting system, up to the president claiming that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the last presidential election, and (b) the black community in the US has more political power than the First Nations in Canada.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:45 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

It's objectively the case that our system is more trusted than in the US, by any measure including voter turnout.

The rest of your points are either irrelevant or strawmen.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 31, 2020 0:27 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

How is it relevant that your system is more trusted than in the US? Neither of them use e-voting, and there's absolutely no evidence the differences in trust have anything to do with how the voting is carried out.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 4, 2020 21:28 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

You wrote: "The printed paper trail of Nevada's voting systems is more trustworthy than putting pencil to paper."

And then you wrote: "How is it relevant that your system is more trusted than in the US?"

Do please make up your mind as to what you consider relevant.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:18 UTC (Thu) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (4 responses)

How would e-voting solve "disparate locations and opening hours of polling places" when the voting machines would be places in the very same locations with the exact same opening hours? It's just a change of how the votes are cast and tallied, not a change in the local officials that conduct the vote.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:40 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (3 responses)

That's not what e-voting is. E-voting is about online voting, not having electronic voting machines.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:11 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

E-voting is about electronic voting with no paper-trail. It is about having to trust exclusively the correctness of electronics and software with no means of recounting of physical ballots.

Online voting is the amplification of the problems with e-voting to the n-th degree.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:33 UTC (Sat) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (1 responses)

No it's not. E-voting is Electronic Voting, which for most discussions relate to using electronic voting machines at the voting facility.

Online voting would allow vote buying and vote bullying on a massive industrial scale no matter how you implement it which is why even the die hard e-voting advocates are seeing the problems with that.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Feb 1, 2020 14:00 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

The thing is, it's not "using electronic voting machines" that folks take issue with; it's the so-called DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) ones -- where the official vote only exists in electronic form, making it pretty much impossible to prove that what a voter entered was actually/accurately recorded. And no, spitting out a receipt or audit log is insufficient, as that proves nothing.

Instead, the ones that are considered acceptable are those that print out a completed paper ballot based on the voter's choices. That printed ballot is the actual legal ballot, which the voter can double-check before submitting/stuffing into a ballot box. Even if the ballot is electronically scanned as the next step, the physical ballot still exists and can be audited or manually counted.

E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:47 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The US problems with elections are nothing to do with the technology of voting, and everything to do with the social and political background. Until the US gets to a point where the election authorities aren't trying to swing the elections, by gerrymandering, carefully constructed voter ID laws, insufficient polling stations in areas likely to vote the wrong way etc, no amount of technological change will work.

E-voting, for example, will just encourage the same people who currently think they can get away with cheating in the current rules to stuff the e-voting ballot, or drop half the votes from e-voting, or otherwise mistreat the system with a view to damaging its legitimacy whenever it comes up with the "wrong" result. The idea is that the democratic process must always produce the "right" result (for certain values of "wrong" and "right"), and if it doesn't, the process is broken; there's no acceptance that the "wrong" result can happen because people disagree with you on what is actually "right".

Ultimately, until there's acceptance that sometimes, the democratic result will be "wrong", nothing will change in the US.