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I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)
Fair. I didn't think you considered voter ID a complete solution either, I just focused on it to dig into one point.
Fixing perceptions/actualities of vote counting unfairness in blue machine run cities is either a coup-complete problem or near enough that it makes no difference. It requires probably allowing/forcing city government to annex suburbs such that the political unit becomes significantly more ethnically and politically balanced, but idk if that is remotely politically or practically possible. Any procedural changes short of that will still leave too much room for unaccountable actors to exercise influence on the process. Certainly it is not achievable by anyone by November.
At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.
I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.
A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)
But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.
I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.
I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.
Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.
This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.
I mean wouldn’t that just be plain old ordinary network security protocols. I’ll agree that you aren’t going to get to 100% trust here, but the point I’m making is that we can do a pretty good job with similar things all the time, yet somehow in the case of securing the election, it’s like there’s a bizarre mental block where it’s not worth trying to do these kinds of things because we won’t get to 100% trust or 100% hack-proof immediately. We trust that kind of technology to get packages around and to validate property transfers and bank transfers all the time. Nobody I know is thinking that UPS is going to lose their packages. The big problem isn’t UPS losing packages, it’s porch pirates.
Now secondly, providing that you keep the original ballots, finding the back door hack is dead easy because you have the data that produced the original count, and if you recount the same ballots, you get the same numbers and if you don’t, there’s a problem. There are also fraud detection techniques that are known in statistics and forensic accounting that would be fairly useful in determining whether the results on the computer are likely fraud. Even if none of that in isolation is enough, if you do good chain of custody, have good network security, have the original ballots, and use forensic accounting and data science, this system would probably be more secure than most other systems that we use daily. At some point, it’s good enough.
And I think a lot of the distrust is exact that nobody is willing to put forth the effort to secure the election to the same standard as even my Amazon order. In fact, when someone tries to add a layer of security, even fairly common sense stuff like government IDs, the resounding answer is NO. And so you can’t shakes the suspicions because it often looks like the government is hostile to the idea of making the system harder to tamper with or vote without having the right to do it.
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Indeed. The problem is that the people who don't want voter fraud discourse just want the people engaged in such discourse to accept fishy procedures and results, and there isn't really a good way of doing that. They've tried everything from jeering them in the media to inventing novel legal theories to imprison advocates of such theories for long periods, as well as disbarring and otherwise cancelling some of them, but while that may silence a few, it doesn't convince very many.
But have they tried them hard enough. If the current level is silencing "a few," then why wouldn't doing more of this silence more people? And thus, intensify the jeering, the cancelling, the jailing as necessary until the problem goes away.
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