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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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A broken clock etc etc
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/
A classic. By the way electronic with paper trail gives you faster counts, a way to validate the results and recompute them by hand when there’s an issue.
And doing voting over multiple days and/or by mail in ballots gives you time to count everything.
The people pushing for same day and only that day with all votes counted that day just ignore the logistics and practicality of having people vote. Or, I suspect, rather like that it makes it impossible for highly populated areas to have their votes counted while lower populated areas votes are counted.
I’ve seen pushes for mail in ballots to be held and not counted until Election Day and then only those ballots counted by the end of Election Day counted. Which is absurd. Do mail in, count them up to and after. Or count them up to and give people with mail in ballots access to them a lot earlier. So they can be accurately counted leading up to Election Day.
Of course the logistics of having people able to monitor those ballots over a larger period of time is tricky too. Hence why they’re often not counted until day of and so, by extension, result in ballots not being fully counted for a few days.
One day only in person voting is purposeful suppression of votes.
Also, am coder, 100% agree with xkcd. I'm still amazed the Internet itself works.
It is theoretically possible to devise a mathematically secure electronic voting system using cryptography, but only if everyone can follow instructions perfectly and people can understand how it works and why their vote is secure. In other words, not in any way that would work in real life.
The principal benefit of pen-and-paper voting is that it is really easy to convince people that taking a ballot paper into a booth, marking it, and then depositing the ballot into a locked glass box which is later counted in front of a room of independent observers is a secure way to run elections. It is impossible to convince the average voter that cryptographically secure voting schemes are actually immune from tampering.
Edit: I never understood why we have "election days". Why not have an "election week"?
Same here. FWIW, it's built on older, slower, less-reliable tech, which forced ridiculous amounts of resiliency into every layer of the design. It's still amazing, but perhaps slightly less so if we look back 40 years. I'm convinced that some parts are running just fine over infrastructure no better than wet string.