Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires *any* expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipulation-proof to a 7 year old, your voting system is untrustworthy.
This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.
I live in Ireland which I think has one of the best voting systems in the world (don't worry we've still got plenty of other serious problems with our electoral system).
It's 100% paper PRSTV & so the counts are slow. Not only is this generally OK (because getting a rapid result is absolutely not a requirement of any well-functioning voting system) but it also has actual benefits.
The main benefit is predicated on the count being engaging in and of itself. Other countries put a lot of effort into jazzing up statistical presentations on constituency predictions, cloropleths aplenty, to engage viewers. In Ireland, count centres are not only manned by trained count staff, they're also flooded with volunteer tallymen who verify the counting in realtime. Count coverage is on the ground, showing a real physical process that's intricate enough to be watchable. The entire process also serves as an education-through-doing in how our voting system works, so you get a more engaged & informed electorate (when it comes to the mechanics of voting - still unfortunately not that informed on policy, that's a worldwide problem).
One of the weird things for computer people about the Irish voting system is that it's non-deterministic! You can count the same ballots in a different order and get a different result (because it depends which votes you choose as "surplus" to redistribute).
In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.
Yeah. I think it's the best voting system in the world because I've yet to encounter one I think is better but you're right, it's far from perfect.
That said, surplus distribution tends to be the main flaw raised time & time again, & whenever improvements are discussed the general conclusion tends to be that the current distribution mechanism goes a very long way toward fair representation of the actual preference distribution. It's notable that the more computationally intensive alternatives to get "fairer" outcomes are pretty recent inventions & it's really hard to justify the effort given the tiny number of cases affected.
True! In The Netherlands, where I live, we still vote on paper ballots. The ballots are counted by hand. The counting is public, anyone can go and observe the counting.
This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.
> there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales
Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all.
Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable.
Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts.
That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
This doesn't make sense. In the same way that police, firefighters, ambulance, farmers, etc, can scale to any country population, so can ballot counting.
Just the fact that there are millions of citizens means you have to trust the process. When I go vote and stamp my votes, you need to trust my county’s counters. I find it strange we focus so much on tampering with an individual vote (machine says you voted for X instead of Y) rather than tampering with aggregation
That's an inquisitive 7 year old. Definitely reward them. Let's explain. A good voting system needs to guarantee
- Secrecy of who voted for whom
- Transparency of everything else. The names of everybody in the process, the process itself and all the statistics should be verifiably public.
Being an observer to your polling station must be a guaranteed voter right. Similarly all participating parties must have the right to send representatives to observe the entire process.
Before opening the polling station all ballots are counted by multiple observers from all sides. This is recorded into files / documentation of each observer. So the number of possible ballot papers that can be voted on is documented.
Then each ballot paper needs to be stamped with a official local seal. This is also observed by every observer. The number of stamped ballots is also counted and documented. The number has to match the original ones.
The number of people who can vote in that voting station is determined by a population survey. In bigger cities each region must have roughly the same number of constituents.
The number of ballots that are stamped must match the number of eligible voters in the polling station. A voter can request to change a damaged ballot paper. The replacement should be done in front of all observers and the voter. The replaced ballot is destroyed in front of everyone.
After putting their ballot into the box, the voter has to sign their name in multiple printouts of the list of eligible voters of that polling station. These printouts of the lists are held by observers from multiple sides. The number of signatures has to match the number of ballots in the box.
Everybody can observe the count. All the numbers are checked against each other.
If you think that this is infeasible, I come from a country of 80 million people and live in a similarly sized one. Both of them use the same system. It works. It scales since it is an almost trivially parallelizable problem. We get the election results in the same day of voting.
That sounds like a solid system! Thanks for explaining!
Is there any way to prevent the observers from knowing who votes? I could see a scenario where a party chooses observers that are likely to intimidate potential voters (e.g. KKK members in a majority black polling station).
That's why participation from opposition and actual members of the public in the area of election is important. If you and your friends / family are afraid of intimidation, you show up. Gather as many people as you can as observers. In my countries (of residence), being there is your unalienable right. Nobody can legally kick you out. If 50 black people show up in a station where KKK tries to intimidate them, KKK will back down given an actual democratic state.
If those people still feel unsafe, they are not living in a democracy but under an authoritarian regime. You cannot really have a non-violent, fair democracy under such regime. Democracy isn't just elections. It is creation of bunch of non-elected institutions that guarantee the fairness of the elected stuff. Judicial branch, expert organizations and regulators are all part of it. This has to come from realization that the alternative is violence. Sometimes needed violence. Most resilient democracies in the world like France are direct results of multiple violent events happened because institutions were not capable of striking the balance. Suppressing large swaths of people is just a powder keg. In true democracies, people from all views should have a good mutual understanding that alternative governance systems exist and may even be viable or more stable, but they will be murdering each other and they themselves will eventually be victims to the violence too.
Representatives from multiple parties are there, and there is at least a police officer nearby in case something happens. The people doing the intimidation could be kindly asked to leave, or not-so-kindly made to leave.
Having elections is in no way enough to have a democracy. You also need a functioning justice system and free media. What you describe is not part of the election system but of the justice system.
If the police does not uphold the laws that guarantee just elections, if they allow intimidations or treat citizens differently, or if the military tries to influence election results, then you do not have a democracy.
You may ask how do you make sure nobody changes the votes in the box somehow?
First the box is in front of everybody. Second, before allowing people to throw votes in, you seal the box with an tamper evident seal. Usually pouring beeswax over a string works. You can have multiple seals for all sides.
Having a mark anywhere else but the box you cross / stamp invalidates the ballot. You put ballots in envelopes. Each envelope must have a single ballot inside.
A voter can replace the ballot if they made a mistake. They need to destroy their ballot in front of everyone.
That's a lot to digest for a 7 years old, and you're still brushing over how you do a population survey, count the constituents and how to make that a trustworthy process.
My point: reality is messy and simplicity isn't a guarantee of reliability. The things hat really work in our societies are pragmatic, not simple.
Sure. Probably you shouldn't dump it at once but let the 7 year old ask questions one at a time. I think you can still explain it one at a time. I am aware that readers of HN are not 7 year olds.
Now try explaining any kind of encryption system that gives the same level of confidence to a high-scholer or even CS students in as many words as I used in that comment.
I'd say you can ELI5 most technical systems, it's a matter of finding the appropriate abstractions and spending enough time (for instance, just explaining the paper ballot system, we're already writing a full page or more)
It reminds me of a youtube channel explaining the Visa/Mastercard duopoly using monkeys and bananas. It doesn't perfectly fit, but works surprisingly well for such a subject.
What signature or stamp? In my country we make any mark, although conventionally a cross is used in illustrations.
Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)
This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.