Ask Slashdot: How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better?

shanen writes: Regarding politics, is there anything that Americans agree on? If so, it's probably something negative like "The system is broken," or "The leading candidates are terrible," or even "Your state is a shithole." With all our fancy technology, what's going wrong? Our computers are creating problems, not solutions. For example, gerrymandering relies on fancy computers to rig the maps. Negative campaigning increasingly relies on computers to target the attacks on specific voters. Even international attacks exploit the internet to intrude into elections around the world. Here are three of my suggested solutions, though I can't imagine any of today's politicians would ever support anything along these lines:

(1) Guest voting: If you hate your district, you could vote in a neighboring district. The more they gerrymander, the less predictable the election results.
(2) Results-based weighting: The winning candidates get more voting power in the legislature, reflecting how many people actually voted for them. If you win a boring and uncontested election where few people vote, then part of your vote in the legislature would be transferred to the winners who also had more real votes.
(3) Negative voting: A voter could use an electronic ballot to make it explicit that the vote is negative, not positive. The candidate with the most positive or fewest negative votes still wins, but if the election has too many negative votes, then that "winner" would be penalized, perhaps with a half term rather than a full term.

What wild and crazy ideas do you have for using computers to make elections better, not worse?

Comments

Simple

[oldgraybeard]

I would not use computers! Paper ballot feed in to (Yes computer based) non connected totaling systems. Just my 2 cents ;)

Re:Simple

[Motard]

Right. Computers are good at counting shit. Let's just let them do that.

Elections are about people. Until skynet fixes this, this is going to have to do.

Re:Simple

[0100010001010011]

Paper ballot with scanners.

Rather than a mono-culture require that no 2 bordering counties may use the same brand scanner.

After the early election results are in share ballots with 2 neighboring counties to use on their machines.

If the machines report different numbers you hand count them.

Bonus companies for how accurate they are. Those that are more than 1% off get no payment for the machines and the company is not allowed to make machines for the next election cycle.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, exactly. Use the computer to hit people suggesting or continuing to use audit-less, trivially modifiable computer voting systems.

Re:Simple

[networkBoy]

select victor from rand(candidates);

Re:Simple

[GrpA]

The paper system is far to easy to control and rig.

A better solution is to use computers in a way that provides a reasonable amount of certainty.

The way to do this would be via something like blockchain and public keys. Then make the entire voting record public after each election, but in it's encrypted form.

Anyone could check that their vote wasn't tampered with, and the results would still be secret. There would be far less failure to accept the result of an election if people had more certainty that the outcome wasn't tampered with.

This would also allow voting from home via the Internet, so polling places and the associated problems with them would disappear.

After this... Who cares about the mechanics such as how the vote is tallied. That would be something that changes over time based on other factors and cultural drives.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed!

Re: Simple

[Ken_g6]

I would say computers are not incompatible with paper ballots. I gather that for some disabled people a touch screen is easier to use than a paper ballot. The trick is to have a human readable paper ballot in the middle of the process that the voter can review. So the touch screen machines should only be hooked to printers and not to ballot counting.

Re:Simple

[Humbubba]

Blockchain the vote.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly is it too easy to rig? You realize the boxes are watched from empty through counting, right? The poll watchers check every ballot to make sure it isn't pre-marked. The easiest targets are the computerized party, the rolls.

Re:Simple

[wonkavader]

Paper ballots are actually pretty good.

I see what you mean here, and you're RIGHT about how to do it. I think I saw a paper on this.

But to 99.9% of the US, what you've written makes ZERO sense. We need better language, better metaphores, better interfaces to make this sort of thing work.

In the meantime, we need to stop the bleeding. The point where things go south in current paper-less systems is that the votes are tallied into excel files or access databases. Changing those post-hoc is trivial. Those need to GO and be replaced by paper.

Re:Simple

[wonkavader]

Agreed.

Re:Simple

[dryeo]

Paper is pretty secure here, where most anyone and especially members of all parties, can watch the whole process. Equally important is that the process is so simple that the average person can easily understand the process.
With your idea, no matter how secure it actually is, the average person will not understand it and it will appear to be a black box. Trust in the system is as important, if not more so, as having a trustworthy system.

Re:Simple

[doom]

Paper is pretty secure here, where most anyone and especially members of all parties, can watch the whole process.

Yes, that's pretty much it. There are scams you can use with paper ballots, but they're harder to get it to scale [1]. Arguably, a hybrid system (as is common these days) of paper ballots counted electronically could be better than a pure paper system-- then you can use computer techniques to look for problems, and paper hand counts to check afterwards.

Equally important is that the process is so simple that the average person can easily understand the process.

Yeah, exactly. You might have your spooky crypto-magic uncrackable system deployed perfectly, but it's too complicated for citizen's to understand, you could get demagogues whipping up distrust for the system. Counting the vote accurately doesn't help if no one believes you.

[1] One year, the coast guard found the lids of ballot boxes floating around in the San Francisco bay...

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

SELECT candidate AS victor FROM candidates ORDER BY bribe_amount DESC LIMIT 1;

Re:Simple

[Chas]

I simply don't have enough mod points for this post.

Sorry, but computers simply are NOT a trustworthy medium for something like this.

I LIKE computers. And I trust them to work as they're told.

I simply don't trust the assholes who're doing the telling. Nor that someone couldn't subvert them and become the assholes who're doing the telling...

Re:Simple

[AmiMoJo]

A nice idea but I can see two flaws.

It seems to require some kind of voter registration. As we know, registration is one of the most effective voter suppression tools. Any system needs to ensure that everyone eligible can vote.

I'd say that's even more important than detecting small scale fraud or better than human level count accuracy.

The other issue is that people won't trust blockchain. They won't understand it, they will associate it with bitcoin and scams and crime. Sadly the system has to be simple enough for idiots to understand.

An example of this was the alternative vote in the UK. A concept so simple that a child could grasp it instantly, but somehow voters couldn't grasp it. I think it was mostly because they were told that it was confusing, and lacked the will to actually find out for themselves.

Re:Simple

[Pentium100]

I remember this event in my country (we have paper ballots and manual counting).

Votes are coming in, this is the second round of Presidential election (meaning there are only two candidates left). Candidate A has around 60% votes, until there is some "computer trouble", no results updates for a while. When the "computer problem" is fixed, it turns out that candidate B is now winning the election with 55% or so votes.

Re:Simple

[clovis]

The paper system is far to easy to control and rig.

A better solution is to use computers in a way that provides a reasonable amount of certainty.

The way to do this would be via something like blockchain and public keys. Then make the entire voting record public after each election, but in it's encrypted form.

Anyone could check that their vote wasn't tampered with, and the results would still be secret. There would be far less failure to accept the result of an election if people had more certainty that the outcome wasn't tampered with.

My vote and your vote is not going to be tampered with. That's not how election interference is done.
Modern day tampering is done through votes cast by people who do not exist, or cast in the name of people who did not vote, or by people who should not vote.

I can see how a blockchain could help maintain the integrity of vote talleys being transmitted from the polling places to the central location.
I doubt it's necessary, though.
The existing method in my state (probably most states) of ensuring that there's no tampering between polling places, counting places is pretty air-tight, IMHO.
Basically what happens is each individual polling place makes their counts and uploads their counts to a central server. This process is observed by the pollworkers of the political parties participating in the election. Those counts are then posted publically by the state so anyone can do the arithmetic, and each polling place and political party can verify that the votes they counted match the state's total.
The difference between having humans verify counts and computers is that humans are far more paranoid and suspicious than computers.

This would also allow voting from home via the Internet, so polling places and the associated problems with them would disappear.

After this... Who cares about the mechanics such as how the vote is tallied. That would be something that changes over time based on other factors and cultural drives.

Voting from home requires that you can guarantee the integrity of everyone's home computer including those who vote, and especially those who did not intend to vote, as in that case a bot could cast for vote in the name of that person from the home computer.

Polling places are necessary. It's the only way to ensure secret ballots.
The purpose of public voting places is to allow secret ballots and to prevent in-person coercion, and voting by impaired persons. With voting from home, or other such non-regulated places, family members, workers, union members, cults, and so on can be coerced because the person doing the coercion can view the ballot being cast.
A real-world example is that of organizations going into nursing/retirement homes and pseudo-assisting with absentee ballots. However, some states are passing laws to prevent that particular abuse by requiring the use of pollworkers to assist with absentee voting from institutions.

Re:Simple

[Hognoxious]

An example of this was the alternative vote in the UK. A concept so simple that a child could grasp it instantly, but somehow voters couldn't grasp it.

Well yes, if they had been able to grasp it they'd have clearly made the same choice as you, wouldn't they?

Re:Simple

[dryeo]

Another advantage we have here (Canada) is simple elections. Federal is one election, Provincial is a completely different election. For both you vote for one member of the legislature. Municipal are on a different day again, but more complex.
Counting almost always is over, or at least close enough to over to call it, the night of the election.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell is registration a suppression tool? In the US the states that required it offered the requirements for free. Let me guess it's descriminatory to show up to the local dmv for a free picture and plastic card? Can't smile for the camera?

Re:Simple

[ShakaUVM]

Agreed. All digital voting is the biggest threat to democracy ever seen.

Re:Simple

[clovis]

SELECT candidate AS victor FROM candidates ORDER BY bribe_amount DESC LIMIT 1;

I registered to vote as
Clovis'); DROP TABLE candidates;

Re: Simple

[dskoll]

Really? You ever try to rig a paper ballot election? You'll find it almost impossible to commit massive fraud, something that's trivial with computer voting.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Voting is not broken
You have TWO parties to for for, both intent on helping the rich and their donors, and screwing everyone else.

Online voting is really BANNED because the politicians have been told voting 'App''s might be far too helpful in reminding voters who voted against their interests. So a stalling game has begun.

Laziness - voting above the line is their weapon of choice, then cross deals. Any digital voting must randomize the presentation to stop donkey votes. As you hover over the candidate, you should see at a glance age, party and $Funding$ raised,

I would like to see people being able to assign their votes to non-profit special interest
collective. I would assign my vote to EFF, then nothing to those that would vote to defund/abolish Health care budget. Some may assign it to their church.

I could set some Facebook dislikes that would pre-populate 99% of my online vote.
You can bet that will never be offered as an option.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Any process related to voting other than the actual act of voting will deter someone.

You seem to fear illegitimate votes enough that you would send prospective voters to that singular hell-hole (sorry, I guess the term now is "shithole") that is the DMV. Me, I think it's obvious that even in elections where you could CLAIM bad votes altered the outcome like those Virginia statehouse elections, it's far more relevant how many eligible voters bothered. I think it's clear that if you want representative democracy to work and be considered legitimate, you need fewer barriers to voting, even if people like you think a DMV visit is reasonable.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

It suppresses illegal aliens from voting. Democrat supporters can't stand that.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

That is actually not a bad idea.

Here's how I would do it, (combine two ideas)

Create a conventional touch-screen voting machine. This creates the inital blockchain for your vote (but not the election). This prints a human-readable ballot that goes into the "recount box" with the block chain QR code on it, so that when a recount happens, ballots can not be changed, added, duplicated, etc.
On the electronic end, each voting precincts tarts a block chain, and each vote creates their own block chains, every time a vote is counted by the machine, it's "given" to the precinct. When the election closes, the central tabulator is given all the votes of all precinct, and looks for tampering, collisions, etc. If a precinct has an issue, it hands the votes back and says "find the problem with vote #" and the recount box is then processed. If there is a collision (eg a duplicated vote in two different precients, or even the same one) then scrutineers get to decide if the vote is valid, and the "recount box" results is handed to the central tabulator instead.

Thus the only opportunity to tamper with the election is by destroying votes AFTER a recount is requested by the central tabulator.

Now that is just half the problem. The other half of the problem is how to get people to vote in the first place:
1) Register people to vote at tax time, every time, automatically. If there are name/birthdate collisions at this point, notify the voter that their voting eligibility is in question and to please correct their name on their income taxes or ADD a middle name used for tax and voting purposes only.

So if your name is John Henry, and your SSN is 123-45-6789 and birthdate 01-01-1901 and someone else with the name of John Henry wants to vote and their birthdate is 01-01-2001 (yes not likely right now, but bear with me) the collision resolution is to request a middle name, eg John J Henry, or John 'Joey' Henry or whatever nickname they go by as their middle name. On the tax/voting form, that name will be listed as a "unique name for legal/voting purposes" The SSN number should never be used as voter id.

2) Enable guest voting (eg out-of-country/out-of-state/out-of-prescient voting) online/by phone/by mail by creating an "early vote" form that acts exactly the same as voting in person, except:

- You can vote by using a debit card that is registered to your name and address. That is used not to to validate your ID, it's used to validate your voting location. If your bank card address and your current address is different, then this verification step is not used. Only one card will ever be registered, and must be updated every tax season.

and

- You must vote by using your drivers license/state id that is registered to your name and address. This IS used to validate your ID, but you need to use a computer with a camera (eg a laptop or smart phone) and make two different "selfie's" for the computer to compare with your ID.

In the event of a recount, scrutineers will compare photos on ID with photos from the camera.

3) To avoid fraud by guest voting

Internet voting does not replace voting-in-place. They are preliminary. If you vote in place, the voting machine at that place will notify you that you've already voted on X date, by Y (or other voting place) and the scrutineers at the polling place will ask them if they have voted or do not recognize the vote and would like to replace it or change their vote.

If they choose to replace or change their vote, this will be recorded on the blockchain ledger.

In the event of a conflict (eg a vote changed multiple times, or marked "spoiled" after changing a vote) the vote would not be counted and any vote in the recount box would take precedence should a recount happen (eg the first vote, or first change if they had initially voted elsewhere.)

Again, this is not a perfect solution, a corrupt prescient or central tabulator could intentionally "gerrymander" recounts so that more votes are destroyed during recounts,

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

With that sentiment of if there is a barrier then why do anything in life? Why did I do biochemistry and follow aseptic techniqueas well as standardized lab practice to submit? They were barriers, if I abided by your standards I should have just submitted my ideas on outcomes and gave the finger to it being testable or being reviewed and scrutinized so that I may better my research or process of research.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Honduras, a month ago, right?

Re:Simple

[bidule]

The paper system is far to easy to control and rig.

Paper trace is the hardest thing to fake.

Someone is trying to screw a nail because he doesn't like hammers.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Omfg. The stupid is strong with this one.

You want to create a system where voters can be forced to give their voting rights to any other person or entity.

You should just stop voting. You are too dumb to be a citizen of any country with a voting system.

Re:Simple

[AmiMoJo]

I guess we will never know, since that referendum will probably never be run.

It was kind of incredible seeing people interviewed on national TV and happily admitting that they couldn't understand it though. Or even worse, claiming that they understood it but that no one else did so they were voting against it.

Should have seen the warning signs back then.

Re: Simple

[Wycliffe]

The reason the USA bundles elections is because more people get out and vote for the president than for minor issues so you get a higher voter turnout when you vote for everything at once.

Re:Simple

[omnichad]

Unknown column 'victor' in 'field list'

Re: Simple

[Wycliffe]

Yes. Every hurdle causes some drop off in conversion rate whether it is getting an ID, getting to the polling booth, standing in line, etc... and we should try to minimize them but not eliminate them. In some ways, it's a good thing that it takes some minimal effort to vote. It helps ensure that someone actually cares. Personally, I think a proper fair poll test would be a good thing. If you can't name the current vice president and current governor of your state then you have no business voting for the next one.

Re: Simple

[dryeo]

Your State elections are considered minor? Here we get low turnout for municipal, often due to people not being aware of the issues/who is running. Most municipalities, at least here in BC, don't have political parties so harder to blindly vote on tribalism. Seems better to have low turnout then uninformed turnout.

Re:Simple

[filesiteguy]

Which is how our 1969-based tally system works, running on multiple PCs connected via Token Ring to a collection UNIX machine that FTP's the results to the State and internal servers.

Re: Simple

[Wycliffe]

Omfg. The stupid is strong with this one.
You want to create a system where voters can be forced to give their voting rights to any other person or entity.

We already do it every time we elect someone to vote for us for the next 4+ years. I would go one step further. I think every person should be able to vote on every issue on the floor in congress or assign their vote to any other person to vote for them. So if I wanted to assign my voting rights to the EFF this week to vote on net neutrality but next week there is a different issue, I could either vote on it myself pr assign my voting rights to a different individual or organization that I think is qualified to represent my interests.
There is no reason we need to be limited to 435 people. It would be just as easy for everyone to vote on every issue or assign someone to vote by proxy for them. This is similar to how stocks work. If you own a single stock of a company you can vote or you can let someone else vote on your behalf. Most people have no interest in watching 8 hours a day of cpan so would likely keep their vote assigned to a proxy but there is no reason we couldn't design a system where everyone had the option of voting individually if they wanted.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

+1000 anarchist

Re:Simple

[ClickOnThis]

Agreed. All digital voting is the biggest threat to democracy ever seen.

This.

It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes.

Apocryphal, and attributed to many sources (including Joseph Stalin) but in an anti-democracy dystopia, ain't it true?

IMHO, don't let computers have full control over votes. Always, always have a hard-copy ballot. Let computers tally them, but leave it open for humans to examine what happened.

Re: Simple

[ShanghaiBill]

The reason the USA bundles elections is because more people get out and vote

Serious question: Is there any evidence that higher voter turnout is correlated with "better" government?

Higher turnout may just dilute the vote of people that took time and effort to understand the issues.

Voting is mandatory, and thus very high, in Greece, Argentina, Turkey. I don't think many people would consider any of these to be "well governed".

Compulsory voting

Re: Simple

[ClickOnThis]

The reason the USA bundles elections is because more people get out and vote for the president than for minor issues so you get a higher voter turnout when you vote for everything at once.

It's also because the USA has a rigid schedule regarding elections. They happen on certain dates, no matter what happens in the federal and state legislative chambers.

In contrast, parliamentary governments (such as Canada, per the GP) can fall at any time, either by a vote of non-confidence, or the resignation of a government. If neither happens, then the government's mandate is considered to have expired after a certain period of time (typically 5 years) and an election ensues. The result is that elections happen at irregular dates in the calendar, which IMHO, is not entirely a bad thing.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me a blockchain won't scale to 300 million people. 300 million computers to update. A voter's vote in Alaska will have to be recorded on a voter's computer in Florida.

300 million individual transactions will have to be written 300 million times (on each person's computer which contains their ledger).

3e8 squared = 3e16. 30 quadrillion transactions recorded. How long would it take an x86 in Appalachia to do 300 million transactions? How much electricity would 30 quadrillion transactions take?

(there are 200-some million registered voters. The zeroes don't change).

Re:Simple

[vtcodger]

"I would not use computers! Paper"

Agree. Until we get issues like security and privacy straightened out in a century or two, we shouldn't let computers anywhere near the election process except where the computer operation can be manually verified. That includes registration, checking voter legitimacy, the act of voting, counting votes and posting results.

Re:Simple

[swillden]

Arguably, a hybrid system (as is common these days) of paper ballots counted electronically could be better than a pure paper system -- then you can use computer techniques to look for problems, and paper hand counts to check afterwards.

Even better than that. You can apply techniques from cryptography to enable mathematically-provable election results, providing any voter with a receipt they can use to verify that their ballot was counted correctly -- but which they cannot use to prove to any third party who they voted for, and enabling anyone to download the set of files representing the final tally and verify the totals themselves, and trace every ballot back to those printed and verified pre-election.

In that system, computers are used both before and after the balloting. Before to generate all of the codes printed on all of the ballots and to enable integrity-checking of the printed ballots, and after to electronically scan all of the ballots and perform various post-election verification processes. And of course the paper ballots remain if there's a need to check them as well, though honestly the mathematical guarantees are tighter than any recount.

This system exists, has gone through several iterations of improvements to make it more and more practical and cost-effective, and has been tested in real-world elections. It's the brainchild of Ronald Rivest (the "R" in "RSA") and David Chaum (inventor of the first practical digital cash system, which long predated Bitcoin), among other top academic cryptographers and it's called Scantegrity II

Re:Simple

[mridoni]

Paper is pretty secure here, where most anyone and especially members of all parties, can watch the whole process.

Yes, that's pretty much it. There are scams you can use with paper ballots, but they're harder to get it to scale

That's important, but there's more: with paper ballots, literally anyone, on a small scale, even without any formal education at all, can understand the principles involved and monitor the process, before or afterwards. With electronic voting, you need people with experience (and very possibly degrees) in cryptography and security. Not only this severely restricts the number of people who are able to assess if the process is rigged, but also it makes the process "less democratic", given that the greater part of the population, in practice, is hindered from exercising their right to check that the election process was really fair.

Re:Simple

[PingPongBoy]

To make elections better ...

Hmf.

Let the AI parse all the info and then appoint.

Next idea.

AI overlord

Who needs democracy?

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

From your link:
Compulsory Voting Enforced:
Argentina
Australia
Belgium
Brazil
Ecuador
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
North Korea (no secret ballot - only one candidate on ballot)
Nauru
Peru
Singapore
Uruguay
Schaffhausen canton in Switzerland

Compulsory Voting NOT Enforced:
Bolivia
Bulgaria
Costa Rica
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Dominican Republic
Egypt
Gabon
Greece
Guatemala
Honduras
Lebanon
Libya
Mexico
Panama
Paraguay
Thailand
Turkey

Re: Simple

[riverat1]

I tell you, if I were an illegal alien the last thing I'd want to do is potentially call attention to myself by voting when I wasn't eligible to do so.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly again. If you find that to be compelling argument, I wish you HADN'T bothered to do anything: your ignorance proves you to be deadweight. This isn't about whether it's too hard for you, or me, or anyone in particular to vote or whether "hard" is still reasonable. Nor is it about whether the effort justifies the "reward" of casting a ballot.

Any eligibility requirement reduces turnout. Your choices to justify such are 1) fearing the mob; 2) partisan based on current voting patterns; or 3) believing that actual fraudulent votes are more relevant than the millions of non-participants. Which is it?

I suppose you could also take an honest conservative view: we've always suppressed votes, why should we stop now?

Re: Simple

[dougdonovan]

its not the computers. its the users. you cant fix stupid.

Re: Simple

[nospam007]

"How exactly is it too easy to rig? You realize the boxes are watched from empty through counting, right? The poll watchers check every ballot to make sure it isn't pre-marked."

And then comes the old box-switcheroo before the counting.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

My vote and your vote is not going to be tampered with. That's not how election interference is done.
Modern day tampering is done through votes cast by people who do not exist, or cast in the name of people who did not vote, or by people who should not vote.

That sort of vote tampering is marginal and it didn't have much impact on the election.
A much larger problem is voters that got deregistered, people that should have been allowed to vote but weren't.

Neither of them of were really big enough to be a problem. The large issue is that millions voted for a complete asshat that should have gotten a few hundred protest votes at most.
Changing the voting system isn't going to protect against that and even if changing the voting system this would have protected against it this time there would always be a next time.

The big problem is that the voters are uneducated and brainwashed. If you fix that then you won't have to worry that much about election fraud.

Re:Simple

[MoarSauce123]

Not even that! Paper ballot and a pen. Done! Hand count the votes and have all parts of the election process open to public inspection. There is no need to involve computers at all. Yes, results will come in later, but I rather wait a day and have them be trustworthy than be fast and wonder who hacked the system. Paper ballots go into envelopes that get sealed and dropped into a transparent ballot box. That way observers can make sure that there is no ballot box stuffing going on. The only problem is with transporting the ballot boxes to the counting place, but using a bus will take care of that concern. Plenty of space for observers to travel with the ballot boxes to make sure that nobody slips in a bunch of extras.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Implement a ranked choice voting system. We can vote for the candidates we really want without throwing our vote away.

Re:Simple

[Actually, I do RTFA]

You mean impossible to prove to a third party how you voted.... except for the fact that every ballot has a unique serial number. And you have to know that unique serial number to check the system. Someone with access to all the ballots (either in series or in a lump at the end) who had enough power to get you to divulge your serial could easily look up how you voted (think about Putin's representatives asking for your serial.) It's not like you could make one up that (a) voted the right way and (b) you could guess.

Further, all that proves is that the serial number creation process wasn't hacked. The tabulation totally could have been.

Re:Simple

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Why go out of our way to have special "early voting" results if they are not official?

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic comment. That process would definitely ensure accurate counting, and not be overly burdensome.

Re:Simple

[DivineKnight]

We are trying to use technology to fix a social problem. The problem is that we are bred to continue the status quo, of self-selecting candidates who tell the boldest lies and deliver the maximum pain. Tech can't fix stupid...though Apple has proven it can be profitable as hell.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"Any system needs to ensure that everyone eligible can vote."

Just let anyone vote.

If I am physically present in the country/county/state on voting day then I should be allowed to vote - no questions asked.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Secret ballots are not as common as people think. Australia is one of the only democracies in the world with a truly secret ballot.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the correct way to vote requires the voter to write or otherwise mark paper. Using a computer to then count is one thing, but there's already been too much fraud from computer systems without a paper trail for the voter to verify.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not have any requirements and let the party with the biggest cheating budget and dirtiest ethics win.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be curious to see what happened if you required a basic fact check before voting. The problem I see is that some genius will make the test about what the candidate's views are. And then they'll either take the candidate's word for it ("I want to lower taxes", leaving out the "for everyone making more than $100 million / year") or take someone else's word for it ("Democrats want to raise taxes and force you to gay marry").

What's 7 x 9? Is the US in the north or south hemishpere? Point to India on this map. I'd be interested in that kind of thing.

But then you have to randomly sample each question against all sorts of demographics to make sure you aren't accidentally or intentionally disenfranchising people. What if it turns out being gay and transposing 6's and 3's is strongly correlated? The 7x9 question then becomes a political weapon.

Re: Simple

[LifesABeach]

Because why would anyone hack a computer? That would be like sad.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. And eliminate party based primaries. This would encourage moderate candidates to participate who would otherwise not stand a chance in a primary.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

It also suppresses poor people from voting. Republicans can't have tha--oh, wait, no, that's fine.

Re:Simple

[currently_awake]

Vote buying works much better if the people you pay for votes can prove they did. How much would you need to offer the 60% of Americans who don't vote to sell out? You only need 5% to throw an election.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"Modern day tampering is done through votes cast by people who do not exist, or cast in the name of people who did not vote, or by people who should not vote."

[citation needed - and please note that the president can not be considered a reliable source]

Re:Simple

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Your contention is, there are a number of people out there who will (in a verifiable way, since they have to produce a serial number indicating they went to the polls), show up and vote for money. But then will vote for the wrong person because they really care about the outcome?

I'm not sure what you'd be actually worried about.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear god, do you really think you can prevent cheating ONLY through eligibility requirements? Dye an index finger at the polls. Or are you so convinced by voter-suppression paranoia that suddenly the fingerless and roving bandits forceably dyeing fingers are more of a threat to your idea of democracy than people actually voting without barriers?

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly correct. "Shithole" countries handle one person one vote easily with things like cheap dye- their electoral problems come in on the officials stuffing boxes and counting side. But somehow we think literal presence at the voting place isn't enough.

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter if government is "better." Matters if government represents those who are governed. Basic principle of democracy

Re:Simple

[swillden]

You mean impossible to prove to a third party how you voted.... except for the fact that every ballot has a unique serial number. And you have to know that unique serial number to check the system. Someone with access to all the ballots (either in series or in a lump at the end) who had enough power to get you to divulge your serial could easily look up how you voted (think about Putin's representatives asking for your serial.)

Nope. Read the Scantegrity paper.

This system was designed by academic cryptographers who love to pick at tiny potential flaws like that. Where a system they design might fall down is in its practicality; you can be sure that the integrity and security guarantees are airtight. And, actually, they've worked out the practical issues as well.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes.

Apocryphal, and attributed to many sources (including Joseph Stalin) but in an anti-democracy dystopia, ain't it true?

For me it is not apocryphal in the sense of being untrue. I worked election security for a couple of years in southern California up until the point where I discovered that they did not count third party votes. I asked what all of the ballots going into the trash can were and was literally told, "Those are third party votes. We do not count them." Now someone might think that means they would be counted later or that I misunderstood but the third party results were released before that could be done; I specifically checked. Of course the poll workers would also take the ballot boxes home for the evening instead of directly to the counting center and then faux alarm would be raised.

I lost interest in the elections and the election process after that. Everybody involved except for me considered what was going virtuous, aboveboard, and standard operating procedure. I have better things to do than become a target for persecution if it is so unimportant.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Brazil is a good example of that - rampant fraud in electronic voting

Re:Simple

[filesiteguy]

"hand count" - so, who would hand count the roughly 4,000,000 paper ballots we get every major election in LA County?

Re:Simple

[lsatenstein]

Digital voting with paper backup. In order to vote, your ballot has a tear off bar code ticket on it. You mark your choice after you insert your ticket. There is no relationship between your listing on the rolls and the ticket number. The ticket prevents you from using the ticket to vote twice; It does not identify for whom who you voted. It also lets the invigilators to match their "ballot counts" with the tickets used. In does work for residents who vote, but invigilators could cheat the system if they issued more tickets than people on the rolls

At the end of the day, ticket counts match total number of votes, and match the invigilator's counts.
Also, do not use touch screens, as fingerprints tell a story.

Thats my idea

Re: Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's discriminatory. In addition to voter ID, the following apply:

* The three nearest DMV offices are 1 mile, 20 miles, and 30 miles away from you.
* The nearest DMV is only open 4 days a year.
* The DMV that is 20 miles away is open Mondays and Wednesdays.
* The DMV that is 30 miles away is open 3 days a month.

** If you already have a driver's license, getting to the DMV is not a problem - it's a short drive.
If you DON'T have a driver's license, maybe going 20 miles to get an ID might be a problem? Just maybe?

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/john-oliver/office-provides-id-voting-one-wisconsin-burg-open-/

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Citations please, or it never happened.

And I'm not holding my breath. Seriously, ballots going into the trash? Yeah right. I call BS on your whole screed.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

I had my ballot rejected one year by the electronic machine... spit it out because of an errant mark... just a dab of the felt tipped marker on the wrong candidate...
They voided that ballot, gave me a new blank one, and I filled that out, and the machine accepted it.

When I look at some of the "questionable ballots" elsewhere in the country, I know that our voting system in my precinct would have spit that back and not accepted it.

No hanging chads, no crossed out marks, the machine tallies the results, the precinct reports those results and delivers the ballots to the secretary of state for storage in the event a recount is needed. The machine the ballots are fed into remains locked the whole time until it gets to the secretary of state (where it may still remain locked pending a recount, it will be cleared out only once all the election results for those ballots are certified.)

No need for fancy internet connected computers or touch screens, or terminals.

To be fair, I live in Minnesota and after the recount that put franken into office, there was a fair amount of effort put into making sure our ballots were secure (some precincts had their ballots go missing during that recount) and that our ballots are accurate (no hanging chad shit). We should be a model for the country at this point, but we are fly over country, so no one cares.

Parents get extra votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Extra votes for each child under 18.

Re:Parents get extra votes.

[Opportunist]

The more you breed the more you vote?

Re: Parents get extra votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is literally retarded.

Re: Parents get extra votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

So the indigent and Muslims control democracy just long enough to supplant it with a dictatorship or other tyrannical regime. Nice! I love the smell of civil war in the morning!!!

Re: Parents get extra votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Voting on behalf of future voters. It makes complete sense. It is a step toward true universal suffrage.

Re: Parents get extra votes.

[reboot246]

Alas, millions of future voters were murdered before they even had their first breath. So, don't talk to me about your concern for "future" voters. Your insincerity is astounding.

Re:Parents get extra votes.

[Tokolosh]

The bigger your carbon footprint, the more you vote?

Re: Parents get extra votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they haven't reached the age of consent, they aren't fully human.

Re: Parents get extra votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You lose a vote for each child as you and your spawn are a burden on society.

You can breed if you want but you don't get to make decisions for the smart people.

Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

Instead of voting for a candidate, have the electorate vote on a number of issues (combination of recent past issues and issues on the docket). Then take the average, and the candidate of the political party that is closest to the average, wins. Parties can do whatever they want to determine candidates.

Down side is that for those who already feel like voting is like busy homework, this will add to the load.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Kjella]

Down side is that for those who already feel like voting is like busy homework, this will add to the load.

If they think picking red or blue every few years is too much effort, maybe they're better off staying home. And honestly that could actually bring people out to vote primarily on a particular issue they care about rather than vote for Hillary vs Trump. Because I can see how neither would be particularly appealing....

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I'd take it a step further. Create a group of Administrators for policies, remove politicians all together and simply vote on issues.

To ensure that the process is safe I would every 12 months replace the techs responsible for the system, audit the network and ensure that there is no way corruption could take place. Pick a new team that has no connections with the other whatsoever.

SImply put, do what bitcoin does for money, do with politics. Yet as for Bitcoin, which i believe is just a joke, remove the banking system as well. Have a simple database driven network that tracks money, again run by a team of administrators that get paid out after 12 months (handsomely) and MOVE THE FUCK ON.

Computers can be used to make the world a better place, thats certain. The problem with the world isn't computers, its just fucksticks at the top who think they know better. I say just ice those fuckers and put a new team in every 12 months.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[dgatwood]

Better, have the electorate vote to choose which issues matter most to them. Then, let them vote on each issue, and allow the political parties to apportion representatives proportional to the number of people who voted a particular way on those issues. For example, let's say there were three issues (way too small a number, but we'll use it for demonstration purposes): gun control, free speech, and abortion. 75% come out in favor of gun control, 50/50 on abortion, and 90% in favor of free speech. If you had ten legislators, the parties would have to choose at lest 7 who were in favor of gun control, 5 in favor of abortion, and 9 who are pro free speech. The Republicans would be unable to find any in favor of abortion, nor Democrats against, so in practice this would mean five Republicans, at least two of which must support gun control (more if any of the Democrats are against it) and at least four of which are strong free speech advocates (more if any Democrat isn't). In the event that Democrats are able to find anti-abortion candidates or Republicans are able to find pro-choice candidates, then candidates eligible for multiple positions should be chosen at random.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Weirsbaski]

Instead of voting for a candidate, have the electorate vote on a number of issues (combination of recent past issues and issues on the docket). Then take the average, and the candidate of the political party that is closest to the average, wins. Parties can do whatever they want to determine candidates.

Trouble is this doesn't account for some things. Eg-
- I don't believe candidate/party X will do what they claim
- candidate/party Y has the moral fiber of a cup of jello

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Flipside: hold political candidates to their campaign promises. Its ok to promise 100% employment and low taxes but if you don't deliver you forfeit your salary, go to jail, banned from holding a government position etc. Look at recent promises on both sides, Obama was going to close Gitmo day one, Trump build a wall. These aholes get elected for their stupid promises and then aren't held accountable to follow through. Maybe if we knew every dumb idea they through out there was very likely to happen we'd think a bit more rather than say, hey I don't want on 'cans taking my job, that sounds like the guy for me.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

The average voter is white and should be excluded. At best, white voters should be profiled and required to present ID, because they are the most likely to cheat the system as they've done throughout history dissenfranchising everyone else.

Republican area votes should just be dumped and left uncounted. This will be poetic justice.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the entire thing subjective weighing? Don't think so.

the candidate of the political party that is closest to the average, wins

OK, I've changed my mind. But only if I'm the one getting to decide the metrics.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

I don't believe candidate/party X will do what they claim

I guess that does leave a hole where a party is regularly reserving the opposite vote of what they want, but I would think doing so would confuse the members of the party, and would be a self correcting situation.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is going to determine which party best represents the issues-based vote? I do tend to take the Conservative side of most issues, but I don't necessarily want that to be interpreted as support for the next group of pretenders from the Republican Party. It would be a lot more sensible just to vote for parties, apportion power according to votes received, and have the parties appoint officials and confer amongst each other to decide how to govern.

Both Democrats and Republicans might have a hard time retaining power under such a system as they'd have to come up with some decent reasons for their constituents not to ditch them in favor of more closely aligned third parties...

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[omnichad]

Because those platform issues don't even matter in most day to day governing. None of those help you create a balanced budget. None of those help the two parties cooperate - in fact, it just further divides everything on party lines.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[omnichad]

Its ok to promise 100% employment and low taxes but if you don't deliver you forfeit your salary, go to jail, banned from holding a government position

This is not what you vote for. You vote for people who know how to make informed decisions, and you trust them when they get into office because they have access to way more information and resources than you do. If that doesn't work, the problem is your candidate. Campaign promises should not exist outside of general statements.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[shanen]

Interesting idea, but I don't see how the accountability would work. The winners of the elections might fail to live up to the promises they had made.

Also still subject to abuse from the appeal to single-issue voters. That's actually how the GOP is getting a lot of votes these days. Just tell them you agree with THE issue.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you and a few other ignorants in this hilarious thread should read up on Social Choice Theory and Arrow's Theorem.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Actually, I do RTFA]

No candidate is against free speech. However, their definition of free speech may be very different from yours.

Veryfew issues (and none you listed) are binary.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

I don't see how the accountability would work.

Because the party consists of people who actually care about the platform. So the party says "Hey candidate, you're not following the platform. You're not going to be our next candidate. Given that we know what the average voter in our district wants it'll be our candidate that wins." If a politician is found not following his parties platform, that politician isn't going to find a party that wants them.

Also still subject to abuse from the appeal to single-issue voters.

Given that there can be as many parties as there are combinations of all voting choices I don't see how that's a problem. If there are twenty parties registered, and ten of them have registered correctly for THE issue, then it'll be the other issues which determine which of those ten parties win.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

You vote for people who know how to make informed decisions, and you trust them when they get into office because they have access to way more information and resources than you do.

If only that were true. I guess it's a good sign that most people take voting as seriously as voting for high school student body - it doesn't seem like either party is going to screw up a good life - but its still sad. After a debate when most of the conversation is about the candidates hair or outfit, I get really depressed about the outcome of the elections.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[currently_awake]

If we trusted the computers, we could each assign our vote to a politician of our choice. No elections, we can assign our vote at any time. If your politician is campaigning against your wishes, you revoke your vote.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds sorta like delegated voting. The idea is that you can have votes on more things because you have the option (and most people are expected to) choose a person to control your vote (this should be thought of as similar to electing a representative like most legislatures currently work), but they may in turn choose to delegate their vote in turn. I've heard of variants where you would do things like have votes categorized by topic so you could choose a person as your default representative for votes on each separate topic. On the other hand, if you care about a specific vote, then you can vote directly for it.

Unfortunately, I can't really see the system I described working with a secret ballot; I doubt it's really a feasible way to run a country.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you from? Your experiences are very different from mine.

If you want a really revolutionary system, here it is:

Every citizen can propose one bill at a time, co-sponsor an unlimited number of bills, and vote yes or no on any of the top 7 bills for this week.

The top 7 bills are selected once a week based on the number of co-sponsors. Voting goes all week long.

Citizens can also give their proxy to do all of this to another citizen.

Votes and proxies are changeable at any time, over the Internet. All changes are permanently logged, and are at least made available to the citizen. This allows people to track down voter fraud, including finding the IP address where the vote was cast from.

Here's a crazy example: I try direct democracy for two days and vote no on everything for that week. Then I give up on direct democracy and assign my proxy to my favorite politician who voted yes on 1 bill and no on the other 6. 12 hours later I hear a story on the news about him that annoys me so I take my proxy back and assign it to my state's governor. The next day, I reassign my proxy back to my favorite politician. At the end of the week, my vote is a proxy given to my favorite politician, and counts as yes on 1 bill and no on the other 6.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[shanen]

I mostly think I need to think about your ideas some more to understand the implications. In particular, I didn't mention or yet consider the winner-take-all nature of American politics in connection with the voting system you are describing, especially at the presidential level, where it's hard-coded into the Constitution (and the Amendments). Personally I think coalition government is a better system precisely because it splits things up the way your system seems to. On the surface, it seems like your system is a way for a third party candidate to get meaningful votes without dooming the leading party that is most similar to the third party, but if there is only one winner, then it's hard to visualize any stable situations except for two balanced competitors and one permanent winner.

However my general thoughts on the topic went in a completely different direction... I must be nuts? But perhaps you'll find the votemobile idea amusing?

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[nasch]

The problem with that is, there will be extensive private polling of the electorate, and politicians will claim to support whatever it is the majority is in favor of - gun control and free speech in your example.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[nasch]

So the party says "Hey candidate, you're not following the platform. "

The issue is that Bob Politician would say he's in favor of jelly beans because the electorate wants that, but then vote to ban jelly beans after the election. Because, as shanen said, there is no accountability to the voters. "But he'll be voted out next time" you say? How? The voters again express their desire for jelly beans, and Bob says "yep I'm totally in favor of jelly beans!" and gets re-elected. How does your system prevent this?

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[Agripa]

Instead of voting for a candidate, have the electorate vote on a number of issues (combination of recent past issues and issues on the docket). Then take the average, and the candidate of the political party that is closest to the average, wins. Parties can do whatever they want to determine candidates.

Down side is that for those who already feel like voting is like busy homework, this will add to the load.

Or stop using plurality. The down side of this is lack of a two party system as an emergent property and more politicians to own.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

especially at the presidential level

I would like for this averaging system to work at every level, including Presidential. That would require every state to change to an averaging system. Whereas for every position besides President, could be converted over to any voting system state by state.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

How does your system prevent this?

The party prevents it. The members of the party care about the platform of the party, and care out keeping their candidates on that platform. If a politician flipped on a jelly bean type of issue, the party won't let that candidate run for them again. With lots of little parties (because any party can win), the general public will be completely ignorant of primaries. The party won't consider a backsliding politician for the next primary.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[shanen]

Now that sounds sort of like the proposal to eliminate the Electoral College by state-level actions. However, that only requires the commitment of states having more than half of the Electoral College votes, not all of the states.

I'm still trying to understand the implications of my third wild and crazy proposal in the original question... I'm wondering if negative votes would also work to increase the effective power of the minor parties. If the major party candidates attracted lots of negative votes, then their net totals might be so small that a minor party could sneak in and capture the election?

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[nasch]

Bob is a member of the Anti-Jelly Bean Party. He is winning elections and voting the way the party wants. What incentive would they have to stop him?

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[jader3rd]

Bob is a member of the Anti-Jelly Bean Party. He is winning elections and voting the way the party wants. What incentive would they have to stop him?

That's ideal right? Because remember, Bob isn't winning elections. The people aren't voting for parties or candidates, they're voting on issues. So there's no point in having political ads about people; all of the political ads will have to be about the merits of the issues. So if the Anti-Jelly Bean party keeps registering that they're anti jelly bean on the ballot, and they keep winning, they're probably going to pick Bob to be their candidate every time because he keeps correctly voting on the issues the way the party wants. Should he start back sliding, the party will pick a different candidate the next time they win an election.

Re:Take the average of the desires of the voters

[nasch]

But he's voting in a manner opposite the will of the people who elected him.

Computers in elections

[HoomanMiki]

I'd would allow candidates to compete head to head in a series of video games for the amusement of the audience^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvoters.

Ranked voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers would make this easier but are not required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
http://www.fairvote.org/rcv

Re:Ranked voting

[swillden]

Computers would make this easier but are not required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting http://www.fairvote.org/rcv

I used to be big fan of ranked voting, especially with Condorcet evaluation with Schwarz Sequential Dropping. Then I tried to explain it to a few people and changed my mind. Instant-runoff is a little simpler, but still pretty complicated -- and actually a bit tricky to execute correctly since it's inherently multi-pass (Condorcet is simpler to execute). Simplicity matters because what's just as important as having a fair election, is having a fair election that voters can understand and trust.

I think the best scheme overall is approval voting. The mathematical properties of approval voting are almost as good as the best ranked voting schemes. It's a little more vulnerable to strategic voting (which is when voters might have reason to vote other than their true preferences, as is the norm in plurality-rules schemes), but really not very much. In theory it also doesn't capture quite as much nuance of voter intent since it doesn't allow one to express a preference between two acceptable candidates. But it does allow voters to express another important element of intent which ranked ballots don't allow: acceptability. And it's brain-dead simple to understand.

If you don't know how it works, here you go: An approval voting ballot has all of the candidates listed. You mark all of those that are acceptable to you. The candidate with the most marks wins.

Such a system eliminates the strong two-party bias that plurality-rules systems have (Duverger's Law, that bias is called). In very few cases does it ever make sense to vote other than your true preferences. And it encourages parties to field broadly-acceptable candidates.

Tallying is a single-pass process and counts can be provided by sub-regions for totalling (unlike IRV, where the runoff phases require reinterpretation of the ballots at each runoff). If it's desired, you can even specify a minimum win threshold -- if no candidate gets, say, 50% approval then no one wins and you re-run the election with a new slate of candidates. There's an obvious risk of never getting a winner here, so such a system should probably progressively lower the required approval level to be sure that someone eventually wins, but the flip side is that such a system would mean that the 2016 US presidential election would never have put either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on the ballot; both (all) parties would be looking for someone with broader appeal.

However, approval voting can be done with or without computers, so it's not really relevant here. IRV can also be done without computers, though it's kind of tedious without them.

Re:Ranked voting

[Ichijo]

Just explain that you must put a "1" next to your preferred candidate, a "2" next to your second choice, and so on. Or program the ballot counting computer to accept a check mark as a "1" and an empty box as a "2" and then it becomes approval voting.

Re:Ranked voting

[Richard Kirk]

Approval voting gets my vote.

I have considered systems where you could vote for and against people. My local elections usually some up with about 8 candidates, where the best are faceless, and the worst are the nasty sort of nationalist. I can't pick one Iike, but there are certainly ones I hate. People with strong opinions for one person would vote for them and blackball everyone else. So, being able to vote for and against any candidate almost reduces to approval voting.

Approval voting also is easy to understand, and gives a sensible result in one vote. If there is a simpler system without the problems of the single vote for, I can't see it.

Re:Ranked voting

[Anonymous Coward]

What you fools need is Eriksgata

Back when Sweden voted for kings much like you vote for your president they needed a system in place to make sure that the 51% couldn't vote for a king that would screw the 49% over.
To make sure of this the king would have to travel the road of Erik to be accepted by the kingdom. Only if he survived the trip could he become king.
So when Ragnvald Knaphövde got elected despite being hated by the people of Gothia he got his head bashed in by a rock and a new king was elected.

A similar system would probably work well in the US today. Have the newly elected president travel through all states. Only if he gets through without being shot he can become president.
That should make candidates a lot more interested in befriending all groups and prevent too much polarization.

Re:Ranked voting

[Anonymous Coward]

And if approval voting is too simple, you can extend it to range voting (or the variant with a run-off round, which is supposed to greatly reduce the opportunities for strategic voting). Range voting is basically approval voting plus the option to assign fractional votes instead no vote or a whole vote, so it's a bit more expressive of voter preferences without having the issues that come with ranked choice voting algorithms.

Ranked choice variants do seem to be far too complicated and open to difficulty counting the votes and confusion over how to compute the winner.

Re:Ranked voting

[strikethree]

If you don't know how it works, here you go: An approval voting ballot has all of the candidates listed. You mark all of those that are acceptable to you. The candidate with the most marks wins.

A good idea, but the problems are deeper than Approval Voting can fix. There has not ever been a candidate I felt I could approve of in the last 3 decades.

I guess what I am saying is the process for getting candidates needs to be reformed more than the actual voting in elections. Approval Voting only takes care of part of the problem.

Re:Ranked voting

[swillden]

Just explain that you must put a "1" next to your preferred candidate, a "2" next to your second choice, and so on. Or program the ballot counting computer to accept a check mark as a "1" and an empty box as a "2" and then it becomes approval voting.

Explaining the notion of ranking isn't the hard part. Explaining how those ballots are *counted* that's the hard part -- because counting them is complicated!

Re:Ranked voting

[swillden]

If you don't know how it works, here you go: An approval voting ballot has all of the candidates listed. You mark all of those that are acceptable to you. The candidate with the most marks wins.

A good idea, but the problems are deeper than Approval Voting can fix. There has not ever been a candidate I felt I could approve of in the last 3 decades.

Because parties have no incentive to put up broadly-appealing candidates.

I guess what I am saying is the process for getting candidates needs to be reformed more than the actual voting in elections. Approval Voting only takes care of part of the problem.

Obviously. The solution to the rest of the problem is to get involved. You should attend local caucus meetings (for some party) and attempt to shape the selection of state and national convention representatives. Our democracy is and will be as good as we're willing to invest the time and effort to make it.

The decisions about party platforms and candidates are ultimately made by only a few tens of thousands of people, in many cases fewer, because they're the only ones who show up.

Re:Ranked voting

[nasch]

There has not ever been a candidate I felt I could approve of in the last 3 decades.

Perhaps if we had approval voting there would be different candidates.

Hackable ANYTHING....

[Zurkeyon3733]

Shouldn't be Involved" in our Elections AT ALL!

I would not let computer janitors make the rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? You make a living as a computer janitor and all of a sudden think you can improve upon a process that, while it has some flaws, is tried and true?

Negative votes? Half terms to punish a candidate, whatever that means, since you actually punish the entire governing body? And traveling votes? Holy hell

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

instant runoff voting

Definitely would add to the roster:

[Anonymous Coward]

NONE OF THE ABOVE!!!

Eliminate paper ballots

[Anonymous Coward]

It's far too easy to damage or destroy paper ballots, and we can't trust the machines scanning them, either. All voting should be done electronically, giving people the option to either visit a polling place or vote online. Eliminate voter ID laws in the process and use a separate system to authenticate voters. This will eliminate efforts to disenfranchise minority voters, which is a huge problem.

Re:Eliminate paper ballots

[Anonymous Coward]

Eliminate voter ID laws in the process and use a separate system to authenticate voters.

Go the other way around: establish a single nationwide, unified, mandatory identity document.

Re:Eliminate paper ballots

[Anonymous Coward]

some religionist types would have problems with that, since anything like that is seen as "the mark of the beast"

"Your state is a shithole"

[Hal_Porter]

Dude, it's racist to say places are shitholes!

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

More Republican trolling and deflection. No surprise here.

Trump wants to reduce immigration from 10 countries, which he labeled shitholes. All of these countries are predominantly inhabited by dark-skinned people. He then proceeded to say he wanted more people from places like Norway, which is a country that is predominantly white. He wants fewer dark-skinned people and more white people entering the United States. The sum of those remarks most definitely is racist.

As for the comment about countries being shitholes, it's unbecoming language of a President acting in an official capacity. It's also a foreign relations blunder because it strains foreign relations even more than Trump has already done.

Re:"Your state is a shithole"

[NicknameUnavailable]

Dude, it's racist to say places are shitholes!

Nah, it's only racist to call shitholes shitholes.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Any country that would elect a racist like Donald Trump to be their president is a shithole. Any country that lets itself be ruled by the far right is a shithole.

Re:"Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, it's racist to say places are shitholes!

Except Chicago, Baltimore or Chicago. Anywhere far left sociopaths have governance becomes a shithole. It's all about improving life for the poor people, "dem Democrats care", well isn't that amazing?

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[CarterMeyers]

No... no, it's not. If places in Africa are not shitholes, please enlighten us as to why they aren't.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[c6gunner]

It's inanely racist of you to assume that those countries are shutholes because they have a lot of "dark skinned people". Clearly when you accuse Trump of racism you are massively projecting.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 10 countries from which 10 countries currently receive temporary protected status: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. These are the 10 countries that Trump labeled as shitholes. The 10 countries that Trump wants to reduce immigration from, and labeled as shitholes, are all predominantly inhabited by dark-skinned people. The demographics are not in question. Trump then said he wanted more immigrants from Norway, which is mostly white. The fact is, Trump wants to reduce the dark-skinned people entering the United States, and to increase the white people entering the country. The demographics are not in question.

Trump made a racist comment, one of many. Trump is a racist. You're a racist for defending Trump.

Re:"Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

My toilet says the same thing every day.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Having lived in both Baltimore and Chicago for some time I will agree - Baltimore is a shitstain.

Chicago is actually a rather nice, clean, and affluent city aside from two bad neighborhoods that people generally avoid.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[RedK]

There are 10 countries from which 10 countries currently receive temporary protected status: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. These are the 10 countries that Trump labeled as shitholes. The 10 countries that Trump wants to reduce immigration from, and labeled as shitholes, are all predominantly inhabited by dark-skinned people. The demographics are not in question. Trump then said he wanted more immigrants from Norway, which is mostly white. The fact is, Trump wants to reduce the dark-skinned people entering the United States, and to increase the white people entering the country. The demographics are not in question.

Trump made a racist comment, one of many. Trump is a racist. You're a racist for defending Trump.

Did you just assume Norway is rich and prosper because it is mostly inhabited by whites and that African countries are poor and corrupt because they are predominantly black ?

And you call Trump a racist ? Wow. Project much ?

Also, he didn't call Haiti, Honduras or El Salvador shitholes. Fake News CNN clarified what their source said, after again it seems, pushing out Fake News :

https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/951839755884531712

Also, Hal_Porter, I just want to say I got the sarcasm in your post, since people replying to you missed it.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Another right winger misrepresents the post he's replying to, in the process outing himself as a racist. I'll keep posting as long as it keeps resulting in racists like you exposing your true character.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[ScentCone]

Typical liberal. So busy trying to project some fictional racism onto somebody else (in order to avoid addressing the point he was actually making), that the liberal accidentally displays their own flaming ACTUAL racism. Right on cue! Almost as predictable as liberals displaying the fact that they don't understand the difference between skin pigment and color, or race and country. Of course liberals DO (usually) know the difference, but they play dumb when they act like they don't, since they're talking in their own echo chamber, where they presume that their own liberal audience actually IS dumb. It's quite hilarious, actually.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just assume Norway is rich and prosper because it is mostly inhabited by whites and that African countries are poor and corrupt because they are predominantly black ?

Did you just rape your mom? Did you fuck your dad up the ass? Did you just take a shit in the pool?

And you call Trump a God? Wow. Project much?

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical alt-righter. Thank you for exposing your xenophobia and racism. I'm glad my posts keep getting racists like you to display your true character for everyone to see.

Re:"Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary is a shithole and I'm white... am I racist?

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[ScentCone]

Really? Which words did I use that triggered you? Was it pointing out that culture and race aren't the same thing? I know, that one really stings. Be proud! Proclaim it! Say what you think: that culture and race ARE the same thing. No? I see.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop lying.

1. Parent anon did not assert that Norway was rich or prosperous only you did.
2. Parent anon did not assert that African countries are poor or corrupt only you did.
3. Jake Tapper quoted what Jeff Flake told him.
4. The Washington Post broke this news story and it's been confirmed by Sen. Richard J. Durbin whom was present.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Attila Dimedici]

Trump also wants to increase immigration from Asian countries which are predominantly inhabited by dark-skinned people.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[c6gunner]

There are 10 countries from which 10 countries currently receive temporary protected status: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. These are the 10 countries that Trump labeled as shitholes.

He labeled shitholes as shitholes? That's crazy, man. It's almost as if he doesn't give a shit about your attempts to relabel relativity based on your racist ideology.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

You're white? Yep. Automatically a racist bigot and you must second guess everything you say and believe and give the required amount of praise after each personal opinion to the opposition. "I hate the phrase 'be a man,' but...blah blah feminism is the best...blah blah #blacklivesmatter....things were better with Obama...yaddah yaddah." "I love guns but...[insert terror group] ...think of the children..." It's all shithole California. It's a playground for legislation to see how much bullshit a human can take before forcing legislation on everyone else.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Which words did I use that triggered you?

"Typical liberal. So busy trying to project some fictional racism onto somebody else..."

In short, your mouth is a shithole ScentCone. So, I guess that means you smell shit up your Scent Cone all the time. It's no wonder you can't smell bullshit when it's in front of you. You're bathing in it.

PS - Hint: Claiming a whole content is a shithole is a good sign you're not using critical thinking. Are there shithole countries in Africa? Sure, the Congo comes to mind. There's also plenty of prosperous countries in Africa. The odd thing is, we precisely want to take people in from shithole countries. They're precisely the countries with people in desperate need of escape. The whole notion of only letting in the best and brightest into a country? Not only is not the Christian way, it's also not the American way. It's precisely the notion that every person can reach for the American Dream that we see so many immigrants who do go well beyond what by-birth citizens ever achieve. [Most] Americans are effectively born with a silver spoon in their mouth. That's because we're the land of prosperity.

So, even if at some level we believe a country is a shithole, using that language and mindset as a basis to limit immigration is literally sadistic. But, what do you care if you're sadistic, right? You've got yours and really won't experience any consequences no matter the shit that comes out of your shithole. So, live it up, eh?

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[ScentCone]

Well then, it's a good thing nobody said that, right? Still, let me guess: you're in the camp that says we should NOT deport illegal immigrants back to certain places because those places are ... real shitholes, right? Can't have it both ways. Biasing a visa lottery to favor places that cannot shake off a deep, pervasive criminal culture, instead of doing what, say, Mexico, Canada and the UK do (merit-based immigration) is crazy. Haiti IS a shithole. The local culture there has had decades of opportunities to use offered help (not counting the Clinton Foundation's fraud, of course - that's a special case) to reform their culture and civil institutions. But they still haven't - it's a violent, poorly educated, corrupt place. We should be looking for someone willing to actually work on that, and raining support down on them so that Haitians perhaps could stand a chance of having a real place to live.

Yeah, if I lived there, I'd probably want out. If I lived there, I'd certainly call it a shithole.

The whole notion of only letting in the best and brightest into a country? Not only is not the Christian way, it's also not the American way.

You're right, it's the Canadian way. Or the Swiss way. Why shouldn't we be looking for people who bring something TO the country, rather than people who bring the need for massive entitlement spending, more ESOL teachers, and a generation's (at best) lag time in constructive engagement in the economy?

I'm good friends with African immigrants who showed up here legally, speaking English AND three more languages than I do, who worked three jobs, bought homes, run businesses ... and would be the very first people to tell you that someone from a rural village in Somalia is not going to show up equipped to do any of those things. Exactly the opposite. If your mission is generosity, why are you not advocating for helping to fix what's wrong in Somalia? Or is it too much of a shithole, and you're thinking it's beyond help?

Are there shithole countries in Africa? Sure, the Congo comes to mind.

An almost entirely black country. Racist.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole notion of only letting in the best and brightest into a country? Not only is not the Christian way, it's also not the American way.

Sanctimonious platitudes. Taking in the best and the brightest, the Nobel Laureates, the business founders, the hustlers - that's what's helped make America great. Accepting vast numbers of semi-literate migrants with low intelligence, values antithetical to western values, and unhelpful temperaments, will indeed make America like the rest of the world.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Jesus H Rolle]

There's also plenty of prosperous countries in Africa.

No, there aren't. Wikipedia has an entire article on the subject. Do note that the five least unprosperous nations are either a thousand miles away from the mainland, or formerly part of the Roman Empire. Sub-Saharan Africa is a hellhole.

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then, it's a good thing nobody said that, right?

You're right. Trump is a nobody.

Still, let me guess: you're in the camp that says we should NOT deport illegal immigrants back to certain places because those places are ... real shitholes, right?

Guess again. We should deport illegal immigrants and change immigration laws to make legal immigration a much more viable option for people so illegal immigration is more the exception than the rule.

Can't have it both ways. Biasing a visa lottery to favor places that cannot shake off a deep, pervasive criminal culture, instead of doing what, say, Mexico, Canada and the UK do (merit-based immigration) is crazy.

Having a visa lottery is itself crazy. Merit-based immigration would be great if we, you know, actually did merit-based immigration. No, it's money based immigration. Btw, the standard of trying to exclude places because o a deep, pervasive criminal culture would exclude Americans from immigrating to America. Marijuana use is a pervasive crime. That alone really undermines the whole idea of judging a person by their culture.

Haiti IS a shithole. The local culture there has had decades of opportunities to use offered help (not counting the Clinton Foundation's fraud, of course - that's a special case) to reform their culture and civil institutions. But they still haven't - it's a violent, poorly educated, corrupt place. We should be looking for someone willing to actually work on that, and raining support down on them so that Haitians perhaps could stand a chance of having a real place to live.

You ever heard the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing and expecting different results? It's clearly been shown that you can't "[rain] support down on [someone willing to actually work on [reform [to] their culture and civil institutions]" because money's greatest power is the power to corrupt. You need an actual stable, non-corrupt government to work with to actually build up the economy. That sort of thing can exist with nation building, but the US has never been interested in working towards helping other countries work towards their own independent development. Instead, if anything efforts have consistently been to crush governments whenever they demonstrate any real ability to refuse US influence. The US government wants dependence.

Yeah, if I lived there, I'd probably want out. If I lived there, I'd certainly call it a shithole.

Good for you. So, you acknowledge you're a sadist.

You're right, it's the Canadian way. Or the Swiss way. Why shouldn't we be looking for people who bring something TO the country, rather than people who bring the need for massive entitlement spending, more ESOL teachers, and a generation's (at best) lag time in constructive engagement in the economy?

Tell that to the Irish. Or the Germans. Or the Chinese. Yes, let's just do what all the other non-superpowers do. Why strive for greatness? Why think long-term? We can certainly spot ever Mozart and every Einstein. Oh, right, no. It makes sense to take in people who clearly by merit should be let in. It also makes sense to take in people who are striving to better their lives. It's absurd to bring up entitlement spending precisely because immigrants don't even qualify for entitlements. The one valid argument is the cost of more teachers need to learn English.

I'm good friends with African immigrants who showed up here legally, speaking English AND three more languages than I do, who worked three jobs, bought homes, run businesses ... and would be the very first people to tell you that someone from a rural village in Somalia is not going to show up equipped to do any of those things.

Neither are most Amer

Re: "Your state is a shithole"

[ScentCone]

So to sum things up: you seem to agree that some other places are indeed shitholes, and you consider the people who live there to be incapable of forming (and thus being formed by) a viable society. You seem to think that's places like the Congo. If someone you hate had said that, you'd lazily call them a racist.

If you knew the means to recreate that spark, then perhaps you'd be one to actually fix other countries.

The spark exists everywhere. The chore is in countering the people and cultural inertia that smother it. We've done it before.

It is hubris to think you can fix a whole culture, government, and society.

It took us decades of military occupation and enormous investment to transform a predatory, essentially feudal Japan into a productive, constitutional place run by a proper representative government, with a culture that fully embraces that way of life. No culture that's full of corruption at every level can get past it without a generational shift, and the crushing of those corrupt powers that fight to preserve the corruption. In some places, the culture already has the spark, but has had to live through a generation of attempts to smother it - but when the smothering is forced back, the spark is still there and ready to go: see ... Poland, for example. It took a generation of pushing back against the toxicity of the socialism attacking it from Russia before Poland's spark could operate again, free of that crushing weight.

No, we don't even begin to know why the US was great and plenty of other countries turned out horrible.

What? We know EXACTLY why. See that document that begins with "We The People" and the non-stop fight that's been fought ever since to preserve it. Quit trying to pretend that it wasn't hard work and sacrifice and a dedication to a specific way of life that produced the results we enjoy. Being a classic moral relativist, you're trying to wish away the differences between what allowed colonial America to become something different than present day former-colonial Shitholes that can't get their act together, and which export (via illegal immigration or our witless lottery and chain migration systems) the very culture that has them stagnating or worse, regressing.

And, no, the waves of Irish and German and other immigration earlier in our history are NOT the same. Those groups scrambled to assimilate - culturally, linguistically. We were not then an entitlement nation. If someone who came over couldn't shake off their Irish-ness enough to be an American, it was up to sympathetic fellow Irish or other charities to make up for that deficit on their behalf. This was understood by people getting on that boat in the first place. We still have countless charitable groups willing to help people. But we also have a hugely expensive network of government services that are instantly burdened the moment a non-skilled, non-English-speaking, non-assimilating lottery winner's wife's brother's son and wife arrive with chain migration blessings and no means by which to provide for themselves.

You only know how to belittle others

What? Belittling is your hobby. It's how you make yourself feel important. It's how you begin your participation in almost any conversation. If you DO manage to actually engage on the substance, it's with completely nonsensical, disingenuous, faux-patronizing, factually incorrect crap like your comments above. If you actually talked some sense, your pomposity and snark would be easy enough to shrug off. But when it's simply part of your knowing parade of counter-factual hand waving and projection, it just highlights your hypocrisy.

Re: I would not let computer janitors make the rul

[Anonymous Coward]

The flaw is the system itself, democracy.

Re: I would not let computer janitors make the ru

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasnâ(TM)t the question, but regardless of the question the answer will never be computer janitors

Yeah, fucking seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

a process that is tried and true?

What? You mean the process that has delivered an almost 100% corrupt congress, the utter failure of the drug war, endless military adventurism with zero connection to significant national security issues, abject violation of the constitution by both legislators and the supreme court, Donald Shithole Trump (winner of an election he actually lost by 3m votes)...

Yeah, sure. Let's keep the system that gave us all that. After all, who knows what it'll give us tomorrow!

Re: Yeah, fucking seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

The system is only as good as the immigrants you let in.

Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, lower the voting age to 15. People who have passed a high school civics course will be eligible to vote at the age of 15. With or without passing civics, voting eligibility is granted at the age of 17. Many young people are more than capable of making informed voting decisions. Of course, Republicans will staunchly oppose this and will continue disenfranchising young people, because those votes will lean toward Democrats. That's unfortunate, because we should give young people more of a voice in our democracy.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

No. If you live with your parents, no vote for you.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

That would disenfranchise Slashdot users, virtually all of whom are living in their parents' basements.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[reboot246]

I would go even further. If you live off the taxpayers (and this includes government employees and elected politicians), no vote for you. The only exception would be members of the armed forces.

It would be similar to a person recusing themselves because of a vested interest.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

That would also include people on social security and Medicare. That also includes people on unemployment, who are actively seeking new employment. Why do you want to take their votes away?

Re:Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

those votes will lean toward Democrats. That's unfortunate, because we should give young people more of a voice in our democracy.

Their vote isn't worth much if they won't think beyond the democrats. We need more independents in congress, at least 300 more. The status quo is vile.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[lucasnate1]

How would this account for bailed out bankers or for weapon industry employers?

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically, what you have here is the far right looking to disenfranchise groups who are likely to vote for Democrats. In fact, the only way the far right manages to get elected in any significant amount is by aggressively gerrymandering and disenfranchising voters who would oppose them. Your goal is obviously to exclude voters who are more likely to cast votes for Democrats.

I would prefer to not disenfranchise anyone. Rather, I'd like to encourage people to use their first amendment rights to protest the cancer that the far right has become in the United States. If you support Donald Trump, you're a cancer to this country. If you are a white supremacist, you're a cancer in this country. If you support disenfranchising voters, you're a cancer to this country. It's time for everyone else in the United States to become a doctor and treat the sickness that the far right is inflicting on our country.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[c6gunner]

Basically, what you have here is the far right looking to disenfranchise groups who are likely to vote for Democrats.

Did you just assume that parasites overwhelmingly vote democrat?

That's a bit insulting ...

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Your racism is nauseating. Let's be honest, the people you're upset about are predominantly minorities, who are receiving government aid. If you label people who receive government aid as parasites, go on Amazon and buy yourself a pointy white hat. Then go on down to Home Depot, get some wood, and build a burning cross. Because that's what your attitude leads to.

Re:Lower the voting age to 15

[Stormwatch]

Ending the "winner takes all" system would help too.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[GuB-42]

Go even further: voting power is proportional to the amount you pay in taxes minus how much you taxpayer money you receive... Doesn't sound very democratic... Oh, I forgot the army, give them a vote per kill.

My point is that when you start deviating from the 1 person / 1 vote rule, there is a lot of potential for abuse. What we have now is far from perfect, but it is the least bad we could come up with. A benevolent dictatorship would be ideal, but it practice, it never ends well.

Re:Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's up to voter initiative also. So if they can "fix" that, they're also able to vote for someone worthy of the job... Or do you have another method?

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot users moved out of the basement, grew up to become middle-aged middle managers who never do anything resembling tech anymore, but they still brag about how their six-figure net worth makes them superior to the normals who also never do anything with tech either.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[c6gunner]

Sorry, did you just suggest that minorities are all parasites?

You are one seriously racist mofo.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially since the majority of government handouts go to red states.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[dskoll]

What's so special about members of the armed forces?

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[drjoe1e6]

AC, sorry, but not funny.
My mother lived with me (and my wife, and my two young kids) while she slowly declined due to Alzheimer's disease. At that time, I lived with my only living parent. Is this grounds for denying the right to vote?

Lemme tell you, I sure learned about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as I dealt with her finances.

Re:Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah how dare people hold different views to you. How authoritarian of you.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[shanen]

Not computer-related, but I kind of like it. Unfortunately, the politicians votes are too few to matter in elections. Any manipulation of the elections, with or without computers, can safely ignore the politicians own votes.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Cochonou]

Everyone has a vested interest in the voting results, even not if not a civil servant. The law indeed applies and affects everyone.

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

So the people who work for the get lose their rights? Why? I mean why should the clerk at the DMV not be able to vote?

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[currently_awake]

Guns. You want to keep the people with guns, that you pay to protect you, happy.

Re:Lower the voting age to 15

[currently_awake]

Use Proportional Representation. If you get 20% of the total vote you receive 20% of the seats in government. This eliminates Gerymandering, prevents vote splitting from disenfranchising political groups, and makes every seat in government of equal political weight. It also lets you have a representative for a specific cause (the NRA rep, the corn farmers rep, etc.)

Re: Lower the voting age to 15

[Anonymous Coward]

won't somebody think of the Investment bankers and CxOs?

Based on current results

[Anonymous Coward]

How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better?

More "Russian Hacking", less Soros-backed, Clinton Crime Foundation propaganda!

Smash Them

[NicknameUnavailable]

Seriously. There has yet to be an unhackable computer built, elections are too important to have any electronics involved.

Blockchain Vote Counting

[neurosine]

I think that we could somehow leverage Blockchain technology from top to bottom, weâ(TM)d see a more realistic representation of voters. Votes can still be manipulated through gerrymandering and the like, but at least we would have real and transparent numbers on the other side of the equation.

Re:Blockchain Vote Counting

[JaredOfEuropa]

Blockchain could be useful except that the process of counting and verification is not transparent to the layman. That’s a requirement for democratic elections.

Totally wrong approach

[Anonymous Coward]

Starting with the technology is always wrong. In all cases start with identifying the problem and possible solutions, then choose the best. Or least bad.

Your question as posed is like a doctor choosing a treatment first, then doing the diagnosis.

Easy:

[Pezbian]

Watson For President

Re:Easy:

[Richard Kirk]

This may be one of the more far sighted solutions.

We have seen Google mis-identifying photos, and IBM's chatbot gown Nazi. However, it would be sensible if we were to try and get some AI system, and get it to act as though it was a member of parliament. It should be capable of reading letters from constituents, and political correspondence, and from expert committees, and to understand the differences between them. People could influence it by writing to it. It might be able to ask questions in return. From this we would learn the weakness of such a system. It would have to recognise all forms of influence, and rank them so a lengthy reply from one user might be as influential as a slogan repeated by ten thousand. It should be able to explain why it voted in a particular way, if it knew.

At some point, people will point to the Rt. Hon. Watson M.P, and say that their voting patterns have been consistently sound, and the time has come to award them an actual vote in the Commons. Then two votes...

Re:Easy:

[Pezbian]

What you mention sounds like the AI stuff I'm learning. Computers read faster than people do and can apply fact-finding and logic far more quickly (think tin-foil-hat and pseudoscience).

What would be interesting is having multiple Watson systems with different sets of "leanings". Such systems will eventually fit in a backpack, if not a wristwatch. The output of a group of such systems could then be used as input for a smaller number of more-specialized systems.

As I'm in the USA, each state having their own cluster of such AI machines with faster and faster connections to the vast volumes of knowledge available on the Internet (we now have 10gbps service for USD$300/month in my "city" of 18,000 people), countering the bias of the sometimes-backward-but-mostly-just-overly-specialized old men (Senator Orrin Hatch, for one example) in public office.

If these state Watson clusters could then communicate with a national cluster and even a world-scale cluster, we would have fewer of the costly "didn't know that" problems and would be able to react more quickly to what problems we did have.

Percentage voting

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't require computers but it would be nice to fix the gerrymandering issue by using popular vote. You vote a party instead of a person. Each party ranks their potential candidates. Divide total votes cast by number of seats up for re-election. Each party gets their respective number of seats based on percentage. For example, 100,000 people vote. 38K dem, 38K repub, 24K green in a 10 seat state. So the breakdown becomes 4 dem, 4 repub, 2 green in the congress because of rounding up.

Re:Percentage voting

[craigminah]

I'd like to see it where candidates running for President, for example, all get voted on. The top vote getter is President, the second most vote-getter is the Vice President, etc.

Re:Percentage voting

[CrimsonAvenger]

I'd like to see it where candidates running for President, for example, all get voted on. The top vote getter is President, the second most vote-getter is the Vice President, etc.

Note that we gave this a try when we first wrote the Constitution.

And note that we then went and wrote the 12th Amendment to stop that....

Re:Percentage voting

[currently_awake]

You want Hillary Clinton to be forced to work with Trump? Would either politician be happy with that? Would the country survive it?

Re:Percentage voting

[Pembers]

But in a two-party system, that would usually give you a president and vice-president from opposite parties, who would be opposed to one another on most or all of the issues that the election was fought over.

Keep it simple or lose control

[Anonymous Coward]

The more complex the process the more potential for the system to be hacked or gamed. The US system is not perfect but that's also why there are 3 branches of government.

Program them to kill...

[MrSavage]

I would program them to recognize and kill humans that try to computerize elections.

Re:Program them to kill...

[shanen]

I'd give it the funny mod if I ever saw a mod point.

Re:Program them to kill...

[Richard Kirk]

I was replying to another post, and the Apple spelling correct automatically replaced 'elections' with 'electric actions'. It may have started already.

Democracy is how you remove a government

[FeelGood314]

The electorate are always going to be emotional, easily fooled and right stupid. Look at the average person and then realize half the people are dumber than him. The best you can hope for is to have a way to remove an incompetent government after 4 or 5 years. The best democracies are ones where people successfully remove a bad party and don't have it return unless it seriously changes it's way. These are countries where new parties can be created and eventually form the government. Poor democracies are ones where the government doesn't change, switches back and forth between two parties with no hope of a third party forming, or countries with endless coalitions where the same people stay in government forever.

Re:Democracy is how you remove a government

[cervesaebraciator]

Look at the [median] person and then realize half the people are dumber than him.

FTFY. Now, if you want to talk about averages, medians, and Gaussian distributions, that's normally all well and good for the population size of the electorate. But I've been on Twitter. The outliers lie really far out.

Re:Democracy is how you remove a government

[nasch]

Now, if you want to talk about averages, medians, and Gaussian distributions, that's normally all well and good for the population size of the electorate.

Good one.

Problem is not the voting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the candidates.
The solution I'd try is this:

1) Select 500 people at random from the population by lottery based on the last census data. Think of it like jury duty, but for 4 years.
These 500 people vote among themselves their new leader who becomes the head of state. The rest fill ministry spots, and a senate-like branch of government as desired/voted on. The senate like branch of government would be responsible to draft legislation, etc.

2) Establish a direct democracy system where each citizen of the country gets one vote in a house-like branch of government. The key thing though, is that this vote is transferable and retractable by you at any time. You agree with political commentator/politician/celebrity X 99% of the time? Add your to theirs. Disagree on a specific topic, retract your vote and give it to the ACLU/EFF/greenpeace/whatever or cast it yourself. Legislation could be proposed through a "we the people" style petitioning system that allows voting. The top votes, and some that are selected by the senate, come up for vote each month.

For legislation to pass, it needs to get through both branches of government and signed by the head of state.

There's a few details that want ironing out, but that's the gist of it.
I think it's the only way to prevent those who seek power (i.e. those that should never have it), away from power.

Youporn

[Anonymous Coward]

what else...

rank voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, if it is computerized it should be open source and open hardware.

For voting I'd like to be able to rank my candidates. That would void 'throwing away votes' and would also allow smaller parties to run more competitively. The downside is it will make the tally process more complicated.

Long Live The Republic

[CarterMeyers]

Go back to a republic - where only land owners get to vote. Then use computers to adjust the weight of each vote based on how much land you own.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[eddeye]

Then use computers to adjust the weight of each vote based on how much land you own.

Awful awful idea. Either you measure land by:
1) Physical size: Farmers, ranchers, and other rural folks run the country. Along with the super rich.
2) Dollar value: City dwellers with tiny apts/condos/houses in high cost of living areas run the country. Along with the super rich.

Either way, congratulations! You just collapsed society.

Re: Long Live The Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. There are too many people today who just don't own land. It would also create perverse incentives to buy and hord land just to increase your vote.

Now weighted on the amount of income tax would be slightly better but would still unfairly penalize people you most want to vote like people working for non profits and sincerely are trying to make the world better.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

But everybody still get to run for an office? One of the issues with the idea is that economic activity in a modern society has become increasingly independent of a particular piece of land owned.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, so one farmer with, let's say, 10 acres of land would significantly out-vote the owner of a high-rise apartment and its thousands of residents in a big city because its footprint is only 2 acres? Gee, that sounds smart...

Re:Long Live The Republic

[hawk]

That really came, though, as a taxation issue.

The rise of the parliament as legislating came from the demands of the English parliament that the king address their grievances before awarding revenue. In time this power of the purse became supreme. It was essentially the case that the king was asking those who would be taxed for payments in excess of their feudal obligations.

It really wasn't so much land *ownership* as the *taxes* from it that led to this. I think even fairly early English usage enfranchised large personal property tax payers, such as merchants.

This system spread to most/all former English possessions, such as the US.
Universal franchise is a fairly modern notion.

One of my own pet schemes is to expand the constitutional guarantee of a republican form of state government such that each state must have a legislative chamber in which *only* net taxpayers vote (and, yes, there's a lot of room to quibble about who that is [personally, I wouldn't include a government salary as a transfer to be deducted]), repeal the idiotic 17th amendment (the worst mistake in the history of the republic, and the proximate cause of the modern centralization of power), and require that the US senators be appointed by the tax-paying chamber of the state legislature--to the point that the Senate would refuse to seat any person who had been chosen in a shadow election and rubber-stamped by that house.

hawk, not a small-d democrat

Re:Long Live The Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to tell you this - the U.S. is a democratically elected REPUBLIC.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

The US is a republic (specifically representative republic) not a democracy. No change needed.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

And slaves count as 3/5 vote don't forget that part!

Re:Long Live The Republic

[shanen]

Can't understand why you didn't get any of the "funny" mods you were fishing for.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[ebvwfbw]

LAND owner, not apartment owner. The guy that owns the land the apartment is on can vote. Those in the apartment can't.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[ebvwfbw]

And slaves count as 3/5 vote don't forget that part!

Yes, at Frederick Douglas' request. He didn't want the southern slave owning states to have as much say as those that weren't slave owning states. Don't misrepresent things.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[ebvwfbw]

No. Only land owners.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[toddestan]

The 3/5 Compromise was part of the 1787 Constitution Convention. Fredrick Douglass wasn't even born until well into the 1800's. So perhaps you shouldn't misrepresent things.

Re:Long Live The Republic

[ebvwfbw]

I should have checked it first. We were told that back in the 1970s, while going over the Frederick Douglas bridge.
Thanks for pointing that out.

However the reasoning is still right. It's not racist, it was practical.

Direct democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

If a system of internet based voting and tabulation can be made secure enough then we could move away from an election of talking heads who spend a certain amount of time siting in state and go to a system of direct democracy where the people themselves actually propose and vote on new laws, taxes, etc. This would bring new meaning to the saying, "In a democracy the people get the government they deserve." Ah, the chaos.

citizens divided

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't bother to read the summary, but I'll answer the question-

The "citizens united" issue is where the democrats need to revise their worldview. The solution to the money in campaigning issue isn't to try to legislate the money out of campaigning. The solution is to use the internet as it was originally hyped to be useful. I.e. make it so that video can be delivered to potential voters with effectively zero cost. Bittorrent is sufficient for this task.

Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[klingens]

Use an algorithm to create congressional districts with census data so each district has approx. the same amount of possible voters and the smallest circumference. No more rigging to create safe districts for either party with ridiculous borders.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Baron_Yam]

The problem is that while you can use mapping data to break districts in somewhat logical ways, we also tend to want to divide voting by 'neighborhoods' when possible. This is both a problem and a solution, since neighborhoods are pretty much by definition clusters of similar people who probably vote similarly.

Nobody wants to see their vote ignored because they're a small neighborhood adjoining a larger but politically different one, and nobody wants to see someone else's vote given more effective weight because the line was bumped to keep their neighborhood distinct.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[jonwil]

Do it like they do in Australia.
Changing the electoral boundaries is done by an independent body (the Australian Electoral Commission).
It is done on a regular basis and is designed to ensure that each state has a suitable number of representatives based on its population and that each electoral district has a similar number of electors.

Generally the AEC will try and keep related areas in the same district (e.g. a specific suburb will all be in one district for the most part) and they also take submissions from people into account when drawing up the boundaries.

Since its done independently and people get to have a proper say, no-one can argue its unfair to them (e.g. they cant say "hey we dont think its fair that our poor black neighborhood is in a district of mostly rich white people" because they had the opportunity to complain/object to that decision and because no-one can argue that the decision was in any way political.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[StormReaver]

Yours has so far been the most intelligent posting to what is otherwise an absurdly ridiculous article. Technology did not create the problem. It merely provided an efficient tool for enhancing analytical abilities. It is the users that determine how to use that ability. The writer of this tripe is promoting the idea that since hammers have been used to hurt people, we should stop making and using hammers.

Any tool that can be used for bad can also be used for good (and vice-versa).

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Tony Isaac]

The trouble with "independent" committees is that nobody is really impartial. Those committees are made up of people who do have political persuasions, because everybody has political persuasions. This leads to political parties doing whatever they can to get their people on the committees.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Tony Isaac]

Make it simple. How about restricting the length of a district boundary to no more than, say, 4x the maximum distance across the district. Maybe there's a better number than 4, but having a clear ratio would limit the number of twists and turns the boundary can make. It's not possible to completely eliminate gerrymandering, but this kind of restriction would at least minimize it.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Wrath0fb0b]

Not Australian, forgive my ignorance, but as far as I can see from Wikipedia, the AEC is answerable to parliament and run by a minister of the government. I don't get how it's reasonable to call it an 'independent body', when presumably the government (with support of parliament) can have it do whatever they please.

It might be run non-partisanly as a matter of tradition, I suppose.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[billyswong]

Are there any objective definition of 'neighborhoods'? If yes, then we can group houses/buildings/estates in census data so they can stay in the same district even with computer district genearation. If there is no objective definition, then your desire to "divide voting by 'neighborhoods'" is just a desire to gerrymandering.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Mashiki]

The same way as in Canada, the CRTC(same as FCC) is an independent body(crown corp) from the government but also run by the government. The CRTC is answerable to parliament, PM and minister of industry. They're independent because the existing laws require that the organizations have to "overstep" massively to be accountable to the governing body. The people who are actually in charge are the hired bureaucrats, the people who keep watch are the ones appointed by the PMO's office or parliament to make sure those bureaucrats aren't stepping over the line either.

Here's an example: In Canada, internet is regulated by the CRTC and "classified" as such. Back oh 7-8 years ago, the current head of the CRTC at the behest of Bell, Rogers, and Telus tried to reclassify "last mile" for TPIA's(third party companies that lease the last mile from them), and up the amount that those TPIA's would have to pay. It would make a 25/1Mbps plan go from $49 to $90-120/mo. The TPIA industry is larger then what most people think in Canada, and it's profitable more or less even when 60% of that $49 goes directly to the last mile operator for the lease. This was a case of the CRTC overstepping it's bounds and breaking one of the foundational rules that they exist to *serve* the public and protect consumers from industry overstep. It basically came down to a staring contest between the CRTC and Parliament. With the PMO's office openly stating that if the CRTC did increase those rates, they'd introduce new laws and regulations stripping the CRTC of regulatory power. The CRTC blinked first, rules remain unchanged, etc, etc.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't do anything like they do here. "Hotswapping" political leaders and closed door discussions to get parties elected is not a process, its a hatchet job.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Use an algorithm to create congressional districts with census data so each district has approx. the same amount of possible voters and the smallest circumference. No more rigging to create safe districts for either party with ridiculous borders.

Why? Congressional districts is based on an outdated idea that I have more in common with my neighbor than with someone on the other side of town.

Get rid of the districts, pool all the votes together and distribute them proportionally.
This will get rid of the whole "wasted" vote crap.
If there are enough of you to get one representative then your opinion will be represented and opens up for more parties to get representation.
This is how you get 5-10 viable parties where one or two represents you well enough.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[fph il quozientatore]

No: geographical electoral boundaries should disappear completely. They are based on the outdated idea that each county needs a representative of its own to "protect the rights" of its population. Today it's no longer true that location is the #1 feature for which we have to ensure fair representation. I'd rather have an electoral district based on my profession or field of study, to ensure that someone with my same background gets elected.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[edgr]

The AEC was set up by the parliament, and presumably could be disbanded by the parliament, but it is run independently. The members of the commission are appointed by the Governor-General (a non-political office). It's about as independent as the judiciary.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Anonymous Coward]

that would create a pro-republican gerrymander, since democrats tend to cluster in cities.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[jader3rd]

Use an algorithm to create congressional districts with census data so each district has approx. the same amount of possible voters and the smallest circumference. No more rigging to create safe districts for either party with ridiculous borders.

You sir are a traitor to the foundations of whatever country you are a citizen of. Turn yourself in to the authorities for re-education.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[SoftwareArtist]

There's already software that does this. It uses census blocks, so it tends to keep neighborhoods intact.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Gerrymandering can be defined as stuffing all your opponent's voters into as few districts/seats/etc as possible. In Wisconsin the Republicans drew as many lines as possible on city boundaries. It might have met your criteria for compact districts, but it had the effect that Democratic voters are underrepresented in the state legislature.

We will see what the US Supreme Court says before long.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[trenobus]

I would definitely support the use of an open-source algorithm (and open-source data) to draw districts, as an improvement over the current methods.

However, I also agree with you that geographical boundaries as a basis for representation are largely obsolete. My thought is that it ought to based on some kind of sanctioned "interest groups", where each person is permitted to be a registered member of a smallish number of groups. An interest group would have representation based on the size of its membership. There might need to be a recurring "open enrollment" period in which people could change their group memberships, in order to provide some stability, but interest groups would be expected to come and go over time. Obviously nothing stops people from forming geographical interest groups, given enough people.

Of course this is a radical departure from the current system, and we should be concerned about whether it would be an improvement. But it could be implemented on a purely advisory basis, where the rules are established, representatives are elected for the interest groups, and these representatives vote on everything the House votes on. Then the voting results are published, and we can have a discussion about which system is better at representing us. This also gives people enough time to become accustomed to the interest group system, which hopefully would avoid some of the instability of its initial implementation.

So we could just do this now. Who's with me?

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Anonymous Coward]

?What argument do you have to suggest that smallest circumference is optimal? Most of the "gerrymandered" districts shown on the news are actually very reasonable groups of communities, and follow river valleys and otehr such topagraphical features that have naturally grouped people.

Ohh ... yeah, I get it. You want dictatorship by plurality, where the minorities have no representation at all. That is what your system is designed for.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[gravewax]

they might have been created by parliament and could be taken down by parliament but they are and do act independently. If they didn't they would already have been destroyed as many of their boundary redrawings have resulted in the government of the day losing seats.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[suutar]

if the folks in the district tend to vote the same way (say, 65-35 split) then 29% of the votes are wasted; the district would come out the same without them. So those 29% had their vote effectively ignored (and quite possibly the entire district was ignored, as "safe"). Divvying by neighborhood doesn't seem like the optimal way to make sure everyone's vote matters.

Re:Abolish gerrymandering by using computers

[Wrath0fb0b]

The people who are actually in charge are the hired bureaucrats ... ...the current head of the CRTC at the behest of Bell, Rogers, and Telus tried to reclassify "last mile" for TPIA's(third party companies that lease the last mile from them), and up the amount that those TPIA's would have to pay. ... It basically came down to a staring contest between the CRTC and Parliament. With the PMO's office openly stating that if the CRTC did increase those rates, they'd introduce new laws and regulations stripping the CRTC of regulatory power. The CRTC blinked first, rules remain unchanged, etc, etc.

I mean, first, that sounds to me like the "right" outcome in the sense that I would prefer it politically (i.e. if I were the CRTC I would not want to do the reclassification).

Second, it sounds like the CRTC is absolutely not "in charge" because as soon as they tried to do something that Parliament didn't like, they smacked them down.

That is, I'm not sure how this works ask example of agency independence when you've actually shown that they have no will they can impose against the political branches.

Election Boundaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Create an open audit able algorithm to create the district boundaries and let the computer make the district boundaries.

We need a mulligan on this one

[burtosis]

We have been letting things slide in the USA to the point some electronic voting systems have no paper trail at all. Some paper records are deleted or destroyed, even illegally. There is talk of needing fancy ID and who the hell knows how/if your vote counted afterward.

Many think what we need is a permenant voting record for all citizens to view on everyone for all elections using something like pseudo-ids that are re-anonymized for each election. We need a tamper proof way to see that our votes were counted right and to ensure transparency. We need a way to secure voting, but don't want to make an ID law. We would even maybe want it open source for auditing and security purposes

We can already do this with blockchain, perhaps it's time to bring voting into the 21st century without fully giving in to a dystopian future.

Re:We need a mulligan on this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Some kind of zero knowledge proof might allow anyone to prove they voted, and that all votes were counted correctly, and that nobody can prove to anyone else which candidate they voted for.

Re:We need a mulligan on this one

[dryeo]

A voting system should be easily understandable by the voters and should not allow extra votes to be injected into the system. Blockchain fails the first and may fail the second as even knowing your vote was correctly counted, you probably don't know if other votes were actually cast by real flesh and blood legal voters.

Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[RhettLivingston]

Add a short set of very simple, objective questions to the start of the ballot and use it to weight results.

The objective would be to test whether a voter is minimally informed, not to test intelligence.

Questions could range from "who is the current President?" (which would be missed by many even today) to "which year had higher violent crime per capita in the US, 1991 or 2014?" (1991 was over double 2014 so though the magnitude might be arguable the fact of a higher crime rate in 1991 is not).

The results could be used to weight the vote. If you don't even know who the current President is, your vote may not even reflect your own idea of your best interest and is likely to be highly vulnerable to manipulation.

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be nice to have more informed voters, but in this scenario, he who writes the questions elects the leader.

While the questions may start out normal at first, they'd soon deteriorate to:

Under Republicans the questions could be questions about Milton Freidman, Rush Limbaugh, passages from the Bible, Guns, monster trucks/nascar,
Under Democrats it would be: stars performing at the DNC national convention, Cuban Health Care, drug use, apple computers, the latest headlines from Hufpo, and Das Capital

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[lucasnate1]

Actually, this may still end up useful. One of the problems in the whole democratic vs republic thing is that both sides barely understand each other.

Re: Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[Wycliffe]

So come up with a fixed set and leave it alone or make it about the specific candidates. Even something simple like name 3 candidates on the ballot would make sure people actually knew what they were voting about before they got there

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[SoftwareArtist]

That would be so easy to abuse depending on what questions you asked. People who think violent crime is a huge problem would probably get it right. People who think climate change is a much bigger deal and don't pay attention to crime statistics would likely get it wrong. It becomes really easy to favor certain groups by asking questions about things they're likely to know.

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[RhettLivingston]

Personally, I think there is nothing that is not easy to abuse but the easiest thing to abuse system is the one that naively doesn't even attempt to limit abuse. For example, not attempting to reduce the influence of the most easily manipulated voters allows the parties most willing to win through completely dishonest manipulation an advantage. Thus, the current system is being easily abused.

On the other hand, I'd agree with you and the other responder to the point that some simple safeguards would need to be instituted. With the goal of reducing the influence of the least informed 1 percenters (enough to swing many recent elections), one might simply require that any question on the ballot be answerable by 95% of a random voter sample beforehand and then throw out the question's influence if it doesn't achieve a 90% threshold during the actual election.

As an interesting side-effect, I'd imagine all parties would suddenly be interested in informing voters.

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[SoftwareArtist]

I'm a firm believer in "one person one vote". People are always giving arguments for why some votes should count more than others, but I just don't buy them. When the country was founded, a lot of people argued that only rich people should be allowed to vote. They payed the taxes that supported the government, after all. But that would just have led to laws that (even more) favored the rich over the poor. A hundred years ago, women weren't allowed to vote. A lot of people firmly believed that was right too. They offered arguments that to themselves seemed really solid. Women were less well educated. They were too busy raising their children to pay proper attention to national affairs. They were inherently less capable of making important decisions. These were all just excuses. They kept the power in the hands of men who (surprise!) made sure the laws favored men over women.

For a present day example, people in small states get more power than people in large states (directly in presidential elections, indirectly by having more senators per capita). And they offer all sorts of reasons for why this is justified. To me, their arguments all sound like nonsense. But they somehow find them convincing, since of course they want to be convinced.

You're saying that uninformed people should have less say than informed people. But uninformed about what? I'll bet those "uninformed" people know a lot more than you do about the problems in their own lives and their own neighborhoods. And anyway, what makes being informed unique? Why is that the one and only thing we should weight people on? Should we also test their logical reasoning ability? That's often more important than raw information. Or should upstanding, moral people get more say than immoral ones? A lot of people probably feel that way.

In the end, the only position I find really defensible is one person, one vote. Anything else ends up as a way of taking power away from people you don't like.

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[Pembers]

How about - each candidate picks one pledge or promise from their campaign or their party's manifesto. The voter then has to match the pledges or promises to the candidates or parties before they're allowed to vote, thus demonstrating some knowledge of the important issues in the election. (Or at least, the issues that the candidates think are important.)

(If there are only two or three candidates, maybe let them pick more than one pledge, so that the chances of a voter guessing the right answers are acceptably low.)

Re:Weight the vote with a knowledge test

[nasch]

one might simply require that any question on the ballot be answerable by 95% of a random voter sample beforehand

With that threshold the questions would have to be along the lines of "what day comes after Tuesday?" Even something as easy as "who is the President of the United States?" or "what state is north of California?" or "which Constitutional amendment protects freedom of speech?" might not be answered correctly by 95% of Americans.

A New Covenant*

[Paleolibertarian]

Program them such that only those measures and candidates that received 100% of the vote could be elected.

http://lneilsmith.org/new-cov....

Private GUIDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone generates a GUID that gets submitted with their vote, you get a paper receipt with your vote. Precincts/districts/counties list votes & GUIDs in a public spreadsheet with GUIDs and votes, with totals. You can compare your vote against your receipt to ensure what you voted was recorded correctly.

Total votes cast needs to be presented by county recorder against registered voter rolls to ensure no vote stuffing. A few other items like polling place or mailed out ballots vs. mailed in ballots should keep numbers "close"

I would use computers...

[hey!]

To look up all the excellent work done by mathematicians, economists, political scientists and cryptographers on (a) how to conduct votes and (b) how to use votes to select candidates, before I bang together my own half-baked proportional representation scheme.

The maybe I'd write an R routine to detect gerrymandered states (actually quite easy if you've taken the first step above) and then hack into politicians' social media accounts so I could blackmail them into outlawing partisan gerrymandering.

Use to stop illegal voters

[AHuxley]

Register all the citizens who can vote legally using photo ID. No illegal migrants, non citizens get to vote.
Use the computers to ensure the citizens can vote once with their registered voter photo ID.
Use paper votes and count them with all party, independent candidate observers looking over the paper court in real time for each vote counted.
Collect each count of the vote by citizens in a town, city, part of the USA.
More party, independent observers to see the final count is correct given their own count from each paper vote counted.
That removes the ability to use illegal migrants presenting as citizens.
Illegal migrants presenting as citizens to vote many times all day.
Citizens getting to vote many times all day.
The use of another citizens "name" to vote.
Gerrymandering would be a problem but the citizen count of actual voters would at least be more correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[doom]

Not that it matters to you, but no one can find any evidence of these hordes of fraudulent voters swaying any recent elections. You've gotta go back decades before you find even half-way plausible stories to that effect.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[SuperKendall]

Not that it matters to you, but in any system that is easily cheated there are lots of cheaters who never get caught. And few things are as easy as voting multiple times, or as a non-citizen, than in some state of the U.S.

Even if no-one is cheating now just the fact there is a huge potential to do so means it's hard to rely on election results, and you need those to be very solid in a democracy since so much hinges on electing a representative.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Anonymous Coward]

At the national level, that is mostly because popular vote is not used. Corrupt states would already go for their chosen candidate. So, nothing changes. But if popular vote is used nationally, then a handful of corrupt sanctuary cities could override the votes of the non-corrupt states.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Because nobody's doing any serious investigating, that's why. If you decide to look into it after the election is over, it's too late. There's no way to tie an already cast vote to a specific person by design, so there's nothing to verify. The only thing you can check is if the number of votes exceeds the number of eligible voters in the area, and that DOES happen. So where are the investigations?

Don't say this shit doesn't happen. Officials have admitted to it happening. See youtube for the Project Veritas undercover video on it.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[DNS-and-BIND]

The investigation was repeatedly stonewalled. How are you supposed to find evidence without the means to compel it? You're describing a successful cover-up.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Mashiki]

You've gotta go back decades before you find even half-way plausible stories to that effect.

And yet a simple search and you can find hundreds of stories from the 2016 and 2012 elections where people voted illegally sometimes dozens of times. You can even find cases of pollworkers fraudulently interfering in elections. The real question is, if those are the people getting caught because they're sloppy, how many don't get caught?

As a point, Canada requires voter ID. Requires a few pieces no less to prove that you're voting in the right area too. Even then we have cases of voter fraud. So you tell me, in a country like the US where democrats and progressives fight tooth and nail against any type of ID - something that every other western nation requires, how many cases aren't being caught?

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[shanen]

Why am I wasting time with a troll?

Yeah, a simple search of the fake news. In the REAL world when they investigated the claims of vote fraud, the most partisan investigators the GOP could find just couldn't find the evidence. It's fundamentally impossible to conceal a conspiracy involving lots of people.

Election fraud is quite different. Let's take partisan gerrymandering as an example. The essential trick involves 2 principles: #1: Draw lines so your districts are safe. #2: Waste your opponent's votes are concentrated into the smallest number of sacrificial districts.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Mashiki]

Why am I wasting time with a troll?

You should be asking yourself that question. Are you so upset at the idea of voter-id that you have to throw a hissyfit?

Yeah, a simple search of the fake news. In the REAL world when they investigated the claims of vote fraud, the most partisan investigators the GOP could find just couldn't find the evidence. It's fundamentally impossible to conceal a conspiracy involving lots of people.

You don't need a conspiracy involving "lots of people" you only need individual actors who are swayed by a "community leader" to make something happen. Funny how there's plenty of cases that have ended up in the courts, of course the courts are just fake news too right?

Election fraud is quite different. Let's take partisan gerrymandering as an example. The essential trick involves 2 principles: #1: Draw lines so your districts are safe. #2: Waste your opponent's votes are concentrated into the smallest number of sacrificial districts.

Yeah and both parties should be blasted to shit for it. But both parties do it, and some of the worst examples however just happen to be in the richest democrat held cities too. Though there are a few republican, and surprise when those republicans gain power they immediately flip it. Maybe you could get off your ass instead of whining, and do something proactive about it right? Or would that be too much work?

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[shanen]

No, it's merely that certain levels of stupidity tend to personally offend me. You have adequately answered my question about the troll. I regard this "discussion" as terminated.

Doesn't matter how many time you repeat your lies. The truth value will not change.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that it matters to you, but in any system that is easily cheated there are lots of cheaters who never get caught. And few things are as easy as voting multiple times, or as a non-citizen, than in some state of the U.S.

This narrative is just stupid.

Non-citizens can't just show up and vote. They not only need to fake an identity, they need to fake an identity of a person that is registered to vote otherwise they will just be turned away at the voting booth.
Not only that. The real person that is registered to vote can't show up to vote either because then the scam gets uncovered.
Only a fool would believe that this is somehow common enough to have an impact on election.

There are two kind of cheaters that have been documented. One is where a citizen have registered to vote in two states and traveled the state border to vote in both.
The other one is where voting officials have fraudulently deregistered voters they knew would vote for the "wrong" party so that they couldn't vote when they showed up.
Only the latter is really big enough to have an impact on the election, and it is something that FBI is currently looking into.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Is this a unified national photo ID card you're advocating for?

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Why take the risk? At least check a single valid government issued ID. The argument that this is an unreasonable requirement is silly - you can't even get health insurance without ID and yet the same people who fight against validating a voter's identity are the same ones who forced everyone in the U.S. to purchase health insurance for the last few years.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[nine-times]

Yeah, some of the recent claims of voter fraud actually did come from analyzing voter records: They looked at all the records, and assumed that any two people with the same name and the same birthday (anywhere in the country) were probably the same person. Supposedly, that's where Trump got his claims that there were millions of fraudulent votes.

However, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. First, think about the "[birthday paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)". If you take 23 people at random, there's a >50% chance that two of them will have the same birthday. Now, think about the fact that there are a lot of common names. How many people are there named "John Smith" in the US? More than 23. Put those two facts together, and there's already a >50% chance that there are two people named "John Smith" that share a birthday in the US.

Now, it's more complicated than that. On the one hand, they looked at people who shared the same birthday in the same year, so you'd need more than 23 people to have a >50% chance of two people sharing a birthday. On the other hand, there are a lot more than 23 people named "John Smith". (I googled it quickly and came up with the number 47,193 men named "John Smith" in the US).

And there are other factors, too, like the fact that certain names are in style in certain years. The year that Frozen came out, lots of people named their daughters "Elsa", for example. So people with the same name are often more likely to be born in certain years, increasing the likelihood they'll have the same exact birthday. Also, for example, if you're a woman named "Holly" or "Christine", there's an increased likelihood that you were born on Christmas, or at least in December.

This has all been worked out in a study, and they eventually found there wasn't any sign of fraud.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[AHuxley]

No need for a new unified national photo ID card as that has a new risks in been an easy way to forge just one really useful new ID.
That would allow non citizens a new way to fake a one new federal ID and vote all day again.
State photo ID and other ID thats proves citizenship to a federal standard would be ok to ensure random people did not vote again and again.
That would ensure a citizen had to show a history documents that could be looked into.
Much harder to try and recreate a fake past in a nation with different ID, state, city documents that just create that new unified national photo ID card for a non citizen.
Just use existing city, state, federal ID, banking, work or US gov ID history per person to build up enough ID to show a person is a citizen and has voted once.

Re:Use to stop illegal voters

[Anonymous Coward]

And how, pray tell, do you vote multiple times? In my state, they check your name off at the polling station when you vote. If you go to the wrong one, they direct you to go to the right one -- they don't just let you vote at any old location.

I suppose you could give a fake name, but then you wouldn't be on the rolls. You can register at the polls, but for that you do need ID and/or something like a utility bill -- something to show that, yes, you live in the neighborhood and are thus eligible to vote in that location.

Given that only half the country votes, shouldn't we be looking for ways to increase turnout rather than decrease it?

Participatory democracy

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Easy, have a secure, trusted, i.e. people can identify and authenticate themselves, system for messaging and polling so that voters can ask questions and put forward their views on issues and policies that they care about. It should also keep track of which politician has claimed to support which issues and how well s/he has followed through when elected, i.e. How well did s/he do what s/he said s/he was going to do? It's up to the politicians to listen and respond, or not, and then come election day, the voters can decide on who they'll vote for. It's not a system for voting per se (keep good old fashioned publicly transparent and difficult to cheat paper ballots and human counting), just a way to hear and be heard for everyone involved in the democratic process. Rather than voting for slick ad campaigns and charming, PR-managed political candidates, voters can look at real data and who's a bullshitter and who walks the walk.

Can't be worse than relying on Fox News and MSNBC to find out about parties and candidates, can it?

Re:Participatory democracy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Why is the origin of the question be identifiable a desirable goal? I can think of a lot of questions (e.g. "how will you protect whistleblowers in XYZ industry") where anonymity is vital.

But I have to give you credit for being the first person not to just dick around with voting methods and tabulation to actually make the results better.

Re: My state *IS* a shithole

[Anonymous Coward]

I started making a list of shit hole states, but I quickly realized that it might be easier to make a list of states that aren't total shit holes.

p.s. Why do you think it's racist? Perhaps you mean placist? :)

NEVER use computer polling stations

[N1755L]

Those things will rob you of whatever rights you have left, by always giving the highest vote count to the most corrupt and unethical contenders in the election. These criminals will always figure out a way to "rig" the software. Paper ballot counting, however, though vulnerable, requires many a much greater effort and a great many more people involved in the conspiracy, making it much harder to pull off. It's our best defense.

MrSavage's comment is bang on (see below, or link here ->): https://politics.slashdot.org/...

"I would program them to recognize and kill humans that try to computerize elections."

Obvious

[geoskd]

I would do exactly what Putin is doing to western nations, only I would push a somewhat different agenda...

Re:Obvious

[shanen]

I think I disagree with your comment, but it's obvious that you forgot to include the copyright notice on your sig. Don't you understand the recursive humor of this joke?

©2018 by shanen

Computers can't

[Anonymous Coward]

You fix it this way:
Nobody with an I.Q under 115 can vote unless they serve in the military, do volunteer work for 6 hours a week, are a doctor, nurse, firefighter or Law Enforcement Person above the street cop level .

Ooooh

[Anonymous Coward]

How about voting politicians into a Logan's Run style Carousel event? I bet after one pass 90% of both American parties would be toast.

Apparently the current system is unacceptable

[Anonymous Coward]

Well until the *right* candidate is elected. Whatever you have to do to make it work, right lefties?

suicide cult

[Anonymous Coward]

Voters must pass a computer questionaire that decides if they are fit to vote. The results are confidential and the voters ballot is not counted if they fail the test. Political correctness is a godless, communist religion.

BBC ATM DP

[PopeRatzo]

We need to vote for whichever candidate cheated on his wife with the hottest porn star. I have to say, I'm a little bit disappointed that Benedict Donald decided to choose Stormy Daniels, who has done interracial scenes. I didn't think Trump would like following a black guy.

And at $130,000.00, I think he may have overpaid. I thought he was a better negotiator than that.

Re:BBC ATM DP

[Anonymous Coward]

And at $130,000.00, I think he may have overpaid. I thought he was a better negotiator than that.

That isn't how Donald rolls.

There is no need to negotiate if you don't actually intend to pay.
If he doesn't pay his contractors, why would he pay his hookers?

Use them ...

[CaptainDork]

... as paperweights for the paper ballots.

Re:Use them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... to spy on all the candidates and report publically every word of every conversation they ever have with anybody.

Re:Use them ...

[CaptainDork]

... to people who, statistically, don't even bother to vote.

here is what an expert says about your idea

[oldbox]

So you want to reform democracy?

Https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597

Pre-vote polling analysis to determine tight races

[eric31415927]

Computers are great for predicting where the tight races will be.
Send extra eyes and ears to the tight race locations to help ensure valid procedures are taking place.
Some valid procedures (think gerrymandering) are inherently unfair, but that is not to be dealt with here.
Under no circumstances should a hackable computer (really any computer) be used to register a vote.

Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[crunchygranola]

There are is a very active field of "voting theory" research about how voting systems can be improved, but little of it has to do with computers per se, though they can make implementation of the post-vote processing more convenient. That is to say, it is not the "computer" that is improving anything. Various forms of preferential voting have a lot to recommend them, along with variations like "instant run-off".

In general it is a good idea to identify actual problems (e.g. widely unpopular candidates winning due multiple candidates splitting the vote; spoilers being run to siphon of votes from specific candidates, etc.) and propose actual fixes that are subjected to formal analyses, large scale simulations and such to validate that they are improvements.

The suggestions of the OP mostly sound like "let's just try something different" rather than carefully considered improvement proposals.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

All of OP's suggestions overreward whichever party is the most aggressive and negative. They make it worse. They also all seem to be aimed at helping Democrats, which could just be a coincidence.

(1) "Guest voting" greatly increases the political gamesmanship, and makes any candidate vulnerable to pressure from usually two, but up to five, other areas. This is pretty unfair, because it destroys the idea of actually *representing your constituents*. It also allows gerrymandering to REALLY go into full swing, as you can surround something by the other party with your own. The victor is whomever has the better busing programs for getting voters places- currently the Democrats, due to their outreach to lower income / lower transportation areas.

(2) Making some delegates matter more than others would DRAMATICALLY increase gamesmanship. It would also DEEPLY REWARD voter fraud in ALL districts, with a deeply Democrat district in the city producing a "super representative". Republicans could do this cheating too, but would have a harder time with their more geographically disparate districts. It would also reward very CONTROVERSIAL candidates, who would gain a lot of people watching (and remembering to vote).

(3) is ludicrous because it assumes only two parties. If you want to fuck around with this, use instant runoff or condorcet or something at least the eggheads have studied.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[swillden]

You should look into Scantegrity II. It applies computers before and after the balloting to actually increase the integrity of the vote -- irrespective of what voting system is used.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[shanen]

I deliberately left them brief. If you have any sincere interest, you have to ask more politely than that. I've actually read a lot of the voting theory stuff, especially around the Byzantine generals' problem.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[Actually, I do RTFA]

As I pointed out in the other spot you mentioned scantegrity, the same problems that allow for verification allow anyone who has access to the physical ballots (e.g. recounters, government) to be able to ask you in a verifiable way who you voted for. The secret ballot is too valuable to give up for the microscopic possibility that the scanners cheat and yet it can be detected.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[swillden]

Nope. Read the paper.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[Actually, I do RTFA]

They ask for your serial and sequence of letters. You supply it (administer pipewrench until you do). Odds of being able to supply a fake serial/sequence are vanishly small. They know what sequence correspond to a vote, because they can just find the matching ballot and observe the bubbled circles.

What am I missing?

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[swillden]

The authors offer multiple solutions to your attack. See section 5.2.3 and section 7.

Although they propose some technical countermeasures like encrypting serial numbers, making them not human-readable, or arranging for the codes to disappear after a short time, I think the best countermeasure is one that must be used for any system of paper ballots: tight custodial control of the physical ballots. You're basically assuming a corrupt election official with unlimited access to the cast ballots. If that's the case, the corrupt official has a *much* easier attack, one that doesn't pose any risk of getting caught administering pipewrenches (which is assault, on top of election fraud): Just replace ballots. Assuming you have adequate controls on access to ballots to protect against that, and assuming you don't allow video recording of ballots during recounts, or allow recount officials to bring lists of serial numbers/codes to the recount, your attack is infeasible.

One other very simple countermeasure that occurs to me is that since it's only necessary for a very small percentage of voters to use their receipts in order to verify the election results to very high probability, the system could randomly deny most voters permission to take their receipts. That would limit the kneebreakers to being able to manipulate only a random fraction of the voters, and would offer every voter plausible deniability as to whether or not they were able to take a receipt.

Also, it's worth pointing out that in jurisdictions with reasonably-effective rule of law, vote buying and coercion is more of a theoretical risk than a practical one. Every state in the union has mail-in absentee ballots, which means that kneebreakers can simply fill your ballot out and mail it in for you, and yet we don't see significant problems with absentee ballots -- or with ballots in the three states that only allow voting by mail. Of course in countries with weak rule of law and very corrupt governments, that would be a recipe for disaster. Those countries often conduct their elections under the supervision of the UN or other outside parties, though, so there's an obvious trustworthy party to manage the ballots.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I think I read a different paper than you did. Link to the one you are referring to?

Replacing ballots is, when observed, easily a crime. Memorizing/spotchecking the results as you read them is not. Note that pictures of ballots commonly appear in newspapers (during recounts) so there is no current rule against memorializing them. Also, unless you printed the ballots after knowing what codes were supposed to be filled out for the serial number, either the check on the serial, or the rechecking of ballots to issued codes, would fail.

While your idea of only sometimes issuing serial numbers works, but is vulnerable to no ballots being printed with serials. Or distributing those to precincts that almost always vote the right way. Or, heck, even just only honestly counting those ballots.

Re:Voting Can Be Improved But Not With Computers

[Lserevi]

I agree. Certain voting systems can render gerrymandering irrelevant and eliminate the fear of "throwing away one's vote" while still allowing consensus social opinion to become manifest. In general, these voting systems (e.g., "majority judgement") are more complicated than the "plurality" or "first past the post" system in general use. Computers can help here in tallying the results.

Manufactured difficulty

[grasshoppa]

The only thing that makes computer based ballots exceedingly difficult to implement is politics, not the technology. It's actually quite simple.

A user is assigned a random physical token on registration at the voting place, which "START TRANSACTION"s the process. They take this to the machine, which "unlocks" the voting capability. They make their selections, which the computer stores AND prints out a human AND computer readable receipt ( so no bar codes ), which the user then takes back up to the registration desk for secure storage in case of a recount. They also turn the token back in at this time too, and the agent runs it over the "out" scanner, which effectively issues a "COMMIT" to the vote.

What's the token for? A few different purposes.

1) If the paper ballot is lost before being returned to desk, the user's vote can be eliminated ( ROLLBACK ) and they can vote again. Paper ballots are important.
2) Ensure that only those who should be voting are voting, as verified by the registration desk. Voting machines are not randomly open to anyone who walks up to it. In fact, you can take this a step further and make the secured tokens the only way to unlock the database on disk, cryptographically.

See? Easy. The real question should by; why haven't we done this yet?

Re:Manufactured difficulty

[nasch]

I don't think the token solves enough problems to be worthwhile. I doubt a large number of ballots get lost between the booth and the box. And the problem with in person voter fraud (tiny as it is) isn't from people sneaking a ballot and voting on it without going through the desk personnel, it's people fooling the poll workers in some way. If they would be willing to hand out a ballot now, they'd be willing to hand out a token too.

Re:Manufactured difficulty

[grasshoppa]

The idea is not to eliminate all issues related to voting as it currently stands, but rather to approximate what we currently have while adding in a convenience factor ( faster tallying of votes ).

If we can easily knock out a problem with voting as it currently stands while doing so, great, but that's not entirely my intent here.

Absention gets the seat

[manu0601]

What about this one? If more than 50% of voters abstain,nobody is elected, and we start over the election with new candidates.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[kenwd0elq]

No, no. Add a "None of the Above Candidates Is Acceptable" option. If "None of the Above" wins, then all the listed candidates are prohibited from every running for office again.

In fact, ANY candidate who gets fewer votes than "None of the Above" would be banned from running for any office ever again.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[Mal-2]

That's a good way to keep newcomers and single-issue candidates out. Only the popular would dare to run, and we'd be left with even more of a celebrity shitshow than we have now.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[shanen]

This is actually related to the objective of my third proposal. I think the negative votes are better than your quorum approach. My own thought is that if both candidate have positive totals, then the election is regarded as basically a good one. If one candidate goes negative, you know it was a highly negative election, and even if it might have been deserved, the winner should only get a half term. The interesting case is when both candidates go negative, which may have been the result of the presidential election in 2016 if negative voting had been allowed. Do you let the least negative candidate "win" for a short term, or should you just throw out the election and disqualify those candidates from the redo?

Re:Absention gets the seat

[Actually, I do RTFA]

In fact, ANY candidate who gets fewer votes than "None of the Above" would be banned from running for any office ever again.

That seems silly. Imagine if, e.g. Gary Johnson decided Trump was unacceptable based on the Access Hollywood tape. It being too late to withdraw from the ballot, he urges his supports to vote for Hillary instead of him. He would be punished in that case.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[hawk]

Nevada actually has a None of the Above choice for all statewide offices, including presidential electors.

unfortunately, it does't actually mean anything, and is just a null vote. I"d *love* to have it force a new election banning the current candidates.

In practice, it and the third parties tend to pick up a larger combined share than the margin of victory.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[manu0601]

If one candidate goes negative, you know it was a highly negative election, and even if it might have been deserved, the winner should only get a half term.

Why half a term? The candidate legitimacy is below zero, it should not be elected at all.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[shanen]

Sorry I wasn't clear, but in that case one of the candidates still has a net positive total, while the second candidate has more negative votes than positive. The reason I think that kind of negative election should still penalize the winner is because there is no easy way to distinguish between a legitimately awful candidate who truly deserved the negative votes and character assassination through aggressive negative campaigning. It's essentially another aspect of risk aversion in that it's easier to increase fear.

Of course the desired outcome is positive campaigns based on the REAL issues, not negative ad hominem campaigns. The simple metric of such a campaign would be that both candidates get positive vote totals. My suggestion is actually biased in that direction because voters would have to take an extra step to make the negative vote, but people tend to accept the default. A voter is really going to have to hate a candidate to want to go to the effort of voting negative. (No, I can't even say if I would have bothered to vote negatively in the 2016 presidential election, though I am certain it was an incredibly negative campaign with an even more incredibly negative outcome.)

Actually I think the only time negative voting could (should?) make a major difference would be in a three-way (or multi-way) race. Imagine that the race is almost evenly divided among three candidates, two of whom are equally okay with you and one that you detest. Your hated candidate might win because the other votes are divided so equally, but if many of the voters who dislike that candidate were able to concentrate their negative votes, they would thus make sure the winner will be one of the other candidates.

However I've actually moved on to an even crazier idea. Are you interested in a votemobile?

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Re:Absention gets the seat

[nasch]

You're suggesting if the loser goes negative, the winner is punished? I hope not because that makes no sense. If a terrible racist sexist fascist authoritarian stupid ugly mean candidate runs against someone popular, intelligent, competent, and charismatic, it's likely the first would go very very negative and the latter have a large positive vote. Why would you restrict the winner's term for running against a bad candidate? That would set up some very bad incentives.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[shanen]

I really don't think I write that unclearly, but I do think that some trolls like to play dumb, and I'm beginning to wonder in your case.

No, that is NOT what I am suggesting. I'll try to say it one more time, but I'm hard pressed to understand your confusion. If you understood the problem, then it would be great if you could suggest an idea to fix it. There actually is a deeper problem here, but maybe the real problem is that I'm taking some aspect of the problem for granted because I think it's too obvious. (I included one such possible aspect below.)

Let's try again. There are basically 3 cases here:

(1) Both candidates have net positive votes. This is an indicator that the election was positive, at least as the voters perceived it and that most of them felt there was a candidate they wanted to vote for. No problem and no reason to penalize the winner.

(2) Both candidates have net negative votes. I'm taking that as a strong indicator that the election was perceived as highly negative by most of the voters. Remember that they would still need to take an extra step to express that truth by voting negatively for the worse of the two evils. Many people felt that way about the election of 2016. I think the winner of such a mudslinging contest should still lose something, but I'm not sure what. Throw out the election and try again? However, as a result of another branch of this discussion, I realized that if this kind of thing happens, then it is quite possible one of the minor party candidates will win the election by NOT attracting any negative votes, and that threat alone might stop the negative campaigning. Maybe I need to back up and clarify that negative campaigning is part of the problem?

(3) One candidate is net positive and the other is net negative. The problem here is the question of why the negative. Did one of the major parties really nominate a turd, or did the other candidate "succeed" with an extremely negative campaign? You'd think it should be obvious, but who's going to judge? (In theory it should be the nonpolitical courts, but remember Bush v Gore and the Gorsuch seat?) Therefore it seems the race was tainted and I think one solution is to penalize the suspicious winner with a half-term in office. If the winner does a good job, then it's going to be easy to win reelection. Maybe there should be a penalty for the loser, too, but I'm uncomfortable with that because it might be a hatchet job.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[nasch]

Some initial thoughts:

A) Don't lightly accuse someone of trolling. That can derail a conversation that could otherwise be thoughtful and interesting. Assume the best.
B) Consider not taking things so personally.

No, that is NOT what I am suggesting.

I was talking about "(3) One candidate is net positive and the other is net negative" and it sounds like I correctly understood what you're proposing for that scenario: punish the winner of the election because the loser had a negative total.

Did one of the major parties really nominate a turd, or did the other candidate "succeed" with an extremely negative campaign? ... Therefore it seems the race was tainted and I think one solution is to penalize the suspicious winner with a half-term in office.

Besides the (maybe impossible) problem of determining why one candidate went negative, I think you will run into a problem with the 1st amendment if you try to implement something like this. Political speech is the most highly protected category of speech, and there is no exception for "negative" campaigning. As much as we might detest it, it is, in the end, strongly protected speech that is more or less immune from government sanction.

Maybe there should be a penalty for the loser, too, but I'm uncomfortable with that because it might be a hatchet job.

I would think losing the election would be penalty enough.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[nasch]

By "went negative" I mean ended up with a negative vote tally, not ran a negative campaign. Sorry for the ambiguity.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[shanen]

In your second comment, you directly addressed the main problem I had with interpreting your earlier comment. The normal reference for "goes negative" is for the attacker, not the victim of the attack who is forced into the negative position. However, the creation of such misunderstandings is one of the trolls' favorite tactics. (It seems to me that Slashdot must have nuked some of the trolls recently. At least they seem less intrusive than usual.)

Maybe the crux of the issue is that I think we need to change the incentive system in elections so that negative campaigning and ad hominem attacks are fundamentally counterproductive. (However more than that I think we need to get the big money OUT of politics and now I realize that the entire discussion never veered in that direction. Or did I miss those comments?) It might not be fair to penalize the winner for the turd nomination from the other side, but it bothers me much more when a negative campaign "succeeds". Allowing for negative votes could capture more of the reality of what is going on. I can actually think of some gaming-the-system approaches where nominating a turd might be the best tactic for a turd party, but in that case I think the other candidate is going to be in such an overwhelming position as to even polish the turd a bit just to avoid the negative outcome.

You actually introduce a different problem when you talk about losing the election as a penalty. I actually think that is part of the problem. Someone WANTED to serve his community, someone spent lots of precious time and worked hard trying to get elected, but loses and gets absolutely NOTHING for it. I actually think there should be some way to keep the top two or three candidates IN the government, though I didn't bring it into the discussion of election mechanisms. Or maybe I'm just being too generous, because I also believe that most of the professional politicians are just in it for the money and power. I think the good politicians are amateurs who tend to lose the elections and they never become professional politicians. Too often they lose precisely because they took a principled stand on one or more issues.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[nasch]

Yeah I definitely don't have the solutions to all these problems, and they're tough ones.

Allowing for negative votes could capture more of the reality of what is going on.

I do like that idea and I think it has potential, I just don't think trying to institute legal penalties for political speech is going to fly.

Too often they lose precisely because they took a principled stand on one or more issues.

When the electorate prefers someone who gives them appealing lies over someone who tells the difficult truth, what is to be done?

Re:Absention gets the seat

[shanen]

Pretty sure that this discussion has been helpful to my thinking anyway. For example...

I've thought of a really powerful feature of the negative voting in the case we've been discussing, where one candidate has a net positive total while the other wound up in the red. The very fact that so many voters wanted to make the extra effort to vote AGAINST the other candidate tells us that they did NOT want to vote in favor of the winner. In a sense, that means their negative votes expresses their lack of a positive option, and that in itself is good reason to penalize the winner with a shortened term of office.

I think you're looking at it incorrectly to see negative campaigning as a free speech issue. There's a whole lot of confusion around that notion. People should not be censored, but not all speech is equally valuable. In the case of elections, negative campaigning is psychologically advantageous because it's relatively easy to increase fear and hate and then to get people to vote because of those strong emotions. The big money bastards who are buying the elections evaluate their political advertising in terms of bang for the buck. For example, they actually see it as a kind of sound investment to have spent all that money for decades to demonize Hillary Clinton. That's how they got their YUGE tax cut.

Re:Absention gets the seat

[nasch]

I think you're looking at it incorrectly to see negative campaigning as a free speech issue.

Well I'm certainly not alone.

An Ohio law against false campaign ads struck down on free speech grounds:
https://scholar.google.com/sch...

A position paper on the topic:
https://object.cato.org/pubs/p...

An explanation of the free speech issues surrounding negative campaigning:
https://www.factcheck.org/2004...

Re:Absention gets the seat

[shanen]

Again, you're picking at a nit in a suspicious way. My larger context made it quite clear that the bit you choose to quote is NOT broadly representative of my views, though you could (and did) complain that my summary of your viewpoint was unduly narrow. I see a couple of one-word fixes, but that does not seem to be what you're asking for. Nor are you actually offering clarification of your own viewpoint with your (again suspicious) multiple appeals to external authority.

The substantive parts of my prior comment were obviously ignored, so I'm just going to conclude that this discussion has pretty much run to its conclusion.

I could think of a use...

[Anonymous Coward]

Random multiple choice civics test. 10 questions. Get 5 correct, it prints out a paper ballot for you to complete.

That should get rid of half the republican party and three fourths the democrat voters.

Re:I could think of a use...

[guruevi]

Racist!

Why computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not the cloud, driverless cars, Elon Musk, diversity or whatever else might be trending on Slashdot?

Paper Ballots

[kenwd0elq]

Computer voting is a time that will never come. Too insecure, too subject to tampering, and impossible to recount or validate. I want strictly paper ballots.

Want to computerize things? Scan the paper ballots and use OMR software to read them. The paper ballots remain the actual vote, and can be hand-counted or re-counted if required.

AND fingers dipped in ink to reduce double-voting and voter fraud.

Re:Paper Ballots

[kenh]

If you have computer voting with a paper audit trail, how will you handle when the two have different results? Will paper be considered the official tally? The computer results? If the two never diverge, why have both?

Re:Paper Ballots

[billyswong]

If you have computer voting with a paper audit trail, how will you handle when the two have different results? Will paper be considered the official tally? The computer results? If the two never diverge, why have both?

I think the grandparent post is saying a no to computer voting, i.e. zero computer interaction between voters and ballots and no computers in the booth. Unless a voter is fully paralyzed, he/she can always vote by hand/foot/mouth with pen/stamp. So your concern is invalid.

Re:Paper Ballots

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.elections.on.ca/en... You'll want to read the election act, it's how we deal with it here in Ontario(provincial and municipal elections - federal elections are all paper, all hand counted). It works rather well, doesn't really have many problems. We use paper+electronic counter+manual recount. Canada also requires voter ID, or an oath of declaration(under penalty of perjury) that you're allowed to vote there. The witness also declares under penalty of perjury, that the person they're attesting to is a legitimate voter. Every couple of elections someone is hit with a perjury charge, the last person ended up with 3 years. Anything over 2yrs in Canada means you're automatically sent to a federal prison.

Re:Paper Ballots

[kenwd0elq]

Yes, paper is ALWAYS the official vote. Electronic voting is too easily hackable, too insecure, too subject to fraud.

Eliminate mail in ballots

[ylleKnaD]

I would use computers to eliminate mail in ballots. I firmly believe all voting should be done in a public place where it can be verified nobody knows how you voted. This is the only way to ensure the vote is not coerced.

Long ago, unions operated the presses that printed ballots. Some printed extra ballots and pre-marked them for union members. If you wanted to keep your job, you had to return a blank unmarked ballot as evidence you voted the pre-marked ballot. Any system that allows you to prove how you voted allows coercion in similar ways.

I recognize there are very few convictions for voter fraud. It is nearly impossible to prove. I am not suggesting there is currently wide-spread buying of votes. I think most coercion would more likely be peer pressure. Vote as your group wants or they will "unfriend" you, etc.

With mail-in ballots, including most absentee ballots, allow you to prove how you voted by showing others the ballot before mailing. Someone else could also fill it in for you or vote in your place. Computers could solve this problem by allowing your local district ballot in voting centers that may be out of your districts. It should be possible for someone to vote while on vacation. Of coarse you would also have to ban taking photographs of your marked ballot and have voter ID to make this work. I don't expect these aspects to be popular (I am not trying to troll).

The main way I would change current election system doesn't require computers. I would simply require every office have a "none of the above" selection. If "none of the above" wins, there are several options. My favorite is to just have that office remain vacant for the term. If it is a Governor or President, it means every bill passed by the legislature gets a pocket veto and requires a super majority to override. Another option is to ban all the loosing candidates from running again and go for another round of elections. This would have really helped in 2016 when we had only extraordinarily bad choices for candidates.

Pile them up

[Bing Tsher E]

Instead of recycling old computers, I would pile them up around places where 'journalists' congregate, rendering it impossible for said 'journalists' to get outside their 'centers of journalism' until after the vote, which would occur on paper, has been counted.

Anybody curious enough to know how the election has gone can sit in seats at large auditoriums where the election officials count the paper ballots in public view.

The ballots are agregated from these counting centers at regional centers, and from there to national centers.

If the journalists who are blocked into the 'centers of journalism' starve to death while the vote count is going on, it's a win-win situation for anybody who matters.

How can computers help?

[Anonymous Coward]

By not being involved in the voting process at all. Make anyone that wants to steal an election involve multiple humans in multiple places faking results in paper ballots and counts. Not impossible for them to do but it's easier to catch with traditional audits and investigative techniques. The more people that are required to fix an election the greater chance that one of them will be caught, unraveling the whole plot.

Use AI to elect the candidate

[Anonymous Coward]

We can use AI to elect candidate based on campaign speeches and past work. No need for election. Perfect AI takeover of the country and eventually world.

Fluid democracy

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Look into 'fluid democracy' whereby all issues are voted on, but you can delegate your vote to someone for any or all issues. You might give your vote to someone because you trust them to think things through, or because they pay you, or perhaps you pay them to act as a representative for you. For issues where you feel strongly, you can make the vote yourself. It looks like an interesting mix between representative and direct democracy.

Not the problem

[kenh]

What problem with elections can computers address?

  - Better candidates?

  - Increased voter involvement?

  - Voter education?

Right now the effect of computers on elections in America is to attack your opponent, and to a lesser extent communicate your position on policy questions.

Re:Not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we even need to elect politicians if we have computers that can allow us to vote on countless things? All we need are the issues in front of us with relevant facts and on the whole can decide the fate of our country.

More votes.

[Anonymous Coward]

This would let me penalize a candidate. For instance, I might prefer anyone but candidate X so I should be able to vote for all the others.

People, not computers

[wonkey_monkey]

Our computers are creating problems, not solutions. For example, gerrymandering relies on fancy computers to rig the maps.

That's just computers doing what people tell them to do. Blame the people, not the computers.

Paper ballots and..

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Source control for all legislation and changes to legislation.
2. An elected official must sign off on any changes.
3. All votes, motions, etc, etc are recorded in public source control.
4. Use a computer to redraw districts without political inputs.
5. Use a computer to add up the total votes for president, cause that is way more fair.
6. Establish and fund wiki's with many independent fact checkers that check each other with a focus on not just recording the news, but making it understandable.
7. The previously mentioned source control system should be linked to a popular database, so that anyone can query anything for any reason and provide insight into the workings of democracy. This should be well funded and extremely well designed.
8. In short the previous should be a perfect tool to find the patterns of corruption.
9. Track basic statistics on things like lies, half truths, and things like that using a computer. Include those basic statistics after campaign advertisements.
10. Alternate the previous with statistics about where campaign dollars are coming from. Remember all this is tracked.
11. Use whatever method can be proven mathematically to produce the best results via instant run off or similar methods.
12. In the cases where the algorithm doesn't have enough information, a runoff is required.
13. Scramble the order of questions and choices on most ballots while not including any party information. The electronic scanner can deal with the variations, but if someone can't tell who to vote for without an R or a D next to their names, then I'd rather they picked at random.
14. In real time it may be useful for AIs and similar to cross reference times when a candidate said things that contradict what he has currently saying. The information can appear in the ticker.
15. Failing that, you can bring up other relevant information such as others who support or oppose the decision, or, ideally, what similar proposals and decisions have led to in the past.
16. When a candidate is out and out lying, simply have the Ai note things in the ticker, "Not true, most of this tax cut goes to the rich and corporations."
17. Automatically link one candidates attacks on another with fact checks and additional information relevant such as the good things the candidate or candidates have done. In other words, try to use technology to help give an accurate portrayal of those running.
18. Include inputs from real people that determine information from using the database queries, such as suspicious patterns and such. These inputs can be made available to others to criticize or support. Fact check everything.
19. Include technology to identify bots and other techniques foreign governments use to disrupt elections. Make public news of the intrusions and attempts as soon as reasonable due diligence can be done.
20. Design automatic basic intelligence, memory, and reasoning tests that candidates must pass.
21. Make the scores on those tests public.
22. Let anyone take the same tests and always look to legitimately improve the tests.
23. Automatically show the estimated grade level of speeches candidates make.

That's easy:

[Qbertino]

Keep them as far away from the election process as possible.

Captain Obvious was glad to help.

As a doorstop

[Opportunist]

Or maybe a paperweight.

You MUST NOT use computers for voting purposes. Even if every bit used is open source, even if you open source hardware, software and everything can be audited and everyone can verify that the hash of the binary is the same that a binary you compiled from the source is the same, even if you do EVERYTHING to make sure that anyone is able to audit it, it's a VERY VERY BAD idea.

Not because it can be manipulated. But because you cannot silence the ones claiming it's still fraud and that all the computer savvy people cooperate to overthrow democracy and humanity altogether. Because they can't audit it, because you need to know how computers work and how to audit computers to actually perform one.

Paper and pencil have one key advantage: EVERYONE can audit it. It takes the ability to see and the ability to count. Even reading is entirely optional because all the ballot slips are identical and you can simply go and count the ones with the cross at the same position. Every party can send whoever they want to supervise the election, no special education or skill needed.

It's less about actual election fraud. It's more that nobody can sensibly claim there had been one. We live in a time of fake news and creative reporting. Is it that far fetched that any party who loses an election would start rumors about rigged voting machines that could of course be audited, but only be a select few (aka "the elite")?

With paper and ballot, it's trivial to debunk anything like this. They could have sent literally ANYONE to supervise the election process. They could send ANYONE to recount the ballots. Any claim to fraud would instantly fizzle.

Re:As a doorstop

[Baron_Yam]

I would object to complete exclusion of computers: computer tallying of paper-and-pencil ballots greatly speeds up the initial counts. So long as the paper ballots exist and can be counted should a problem be expected, leaving out the computers is simply an exercise in delay and increasing the average cost of human involvement in the process.

Re:As a doorstop

[Opportunist]

Ok, that we can agree on. Have computers count the paper slips. Fine. But every single vote has to be able to be counted manually. And I mean that literally to mean "by hand".

Re:As a doorstop

[swillden]

Ok, that we can agree on. Have computers count the paper slips. Fine. But every single vote has to be able to be counted manually. And I mean that literally to mean "by hand".

That's fine. But mathematics and computers can also be used to provide integrity guarantees that are actually stronger than the best hand recount (while retaining the possibility of doing the hand recount as desired). Scantegrity II.

Re:As a doorstop

[Opportunist]

And now explain this to the Redneck claiming that them computer geeks stole his beloved candidate's election.

Re:As a doorstop

[strikethree]

You MUST NOT use computers for voting purposes. Even if every bit used is open source, even if you open source hardware, software and everything can be audited and everyone can verify that the hash of the binary is the same that a binary you compiled from the source is the same, even if you do EVERYTHING to make sure that anyone is able to audit it, it's a VERY VERY BAD idea.

Relax. Computers CAN be used without any of the issues you talk about it: You merely have the computer print out the completed ballot and the person voting validates that the ballot actually indicates their votes were cast how they intended. They then fold that piece of paper and take it to a box outside of the voting booth (but still on premises in plain view of everyone) and then deposit that folded piece of paper into a box.

The official voting results would not be complete until a hand count of all ballots is done. You could just count randomized samples of the paper ballots in random and heavily contested districts, but I am concerned that skipping a full hand count has a chance of being gamed at some point.

The reason to use computers in a situation like this is to reduce manual errors (hanging chad, X in an ambiguous location, etc) and provide assistance to people with various disabilities.

I do feel as strongly about computers in voting as you do; however, my ideas slightly differ. Perhaps you might see things in a different light now too.

Re:As a doorstop

[Opportunist]

"But they'll surely manipulate it if someone with disabilities goes to vote, who tells me they print it correctly for the blind?"

Don't underestimate the creativity of people when it comes to wanting to believe in foul play. We already have aids for seeing impaired people in place that can also be audited by everyone.

Re:As a doorstop

[swillden]

And now explain this to the Redneck claiming that them computer geeks stole his beloved candidate's election.

If the redneck wants, we can do a manual recount of the paper ballots. For that matter, as far as the redneck is concerned, the whole thing is just marks on paper ballots that get counted up. Of course, rednecks like me who also happen to be mathematicians and cryptographers can look at the deeper integrity guarantees.

I wouldn't

[rsilvergun]

Just make voting mandatory so you can't get away with voter surpression, eliminate gerrymandering and have a paper trail. Bang, problem solved. I suppose we could use computers to eliminate the electoral college. That'd be nice.

computers and democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

With the recent enlightenment of the serious flaws in processor design, leave alone flash-memory storage includes its own processor, it would be impossible to trust a computer voting system. Much worse than paper ballots.
Secret voting means the results cannot be verified.
The billionaires on this planet has unlimited funds for keeping YOU out of their wallets, democracy is a mirage.
Power is not given, it is taken, since the time of Cain and Able.
It is hopeless.

Re:computers and democracy

[Beeftopia]

The billionaires on this planet has unlimited funds for keeping YOU out of their wallets

This is an important point. Billionaires become billionaires in no small part because of their ability to form social networks with political leaders, who also are highly capable social networkers. This has led to the de facto legalization of bribery for politicians ("if money is speech, corporations and the wealthy have a lot more of it than you"), and selective blindness after the Financial Crisis of 2008, to the crimes of the financial sector (no financial sector executive went to jail for any deceptive and unethical behavior related to the crisis).

It's like that XKCD comic of a crypto-nerd's dream of a secure system. The social engineering aspect of the donor class plus politicians cannot be ignored. They would work, as they do now, to boost each other. And it's no small stretch to consider they would work to undermine any secure voting system, in order to preserve the status quo. That the status quo was preserved after something as cataclysmic as the Financial Crisis, a once in a century event, is a testament to their power.

Or a Condorcet methd.

[robbak]

Instant run off is reasonable, and has the benefit of being easily doable with people and papers, and so is more auditable. Yes, this is a benefit of the IRO method.

But it does lead to some unreasonable decisions when a poll produces 3 close frontrunners, where the voters who voted for candidate #3 essentially decide the vote by their lower preferences. If you are going to put a computer in charge, then there are better ways, ways that find the Condorcet winner - the winner who, based on everyone's preferences, would have won a one-on-one election against any other candidate. (The methods vary when there is no Condorcet winner, when the preferences are circular - a situation that you might think rare, but there are times where the extreme left and right find they have more in common with each other than with the more boring center.)

These methods, however, are complex, and require a computer to work out - although that computer result can often be confirmed in a hand count.

Re:Or a Condorcet methd.

[swillden]

I used to be a fan of Condorcet methods. I've come around to thinking approval voting is better even though it's slightly inferior mathematically. See my https://politics.slashdot.org/... for why.

Hackproof way to use computers in elections:

[rnturn]

Stack computers on top of one another until you have a surface tall enough to fill out a paper ballot.

Re:Hackproof way to use computers in elections:

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you did there. Computers all the way down!

Self-weighting of your vote in per-issue voting

[presidenteloco]

If we have voting directly on individual issues, as in direct democracy, I would allow people be able to give themselves a weight (from 1 to 10 say) that their vote carries in that voting tally.

People would be encouraged to reflect and only give themselves a high weight when they really care about the issue and also really know about it.

To make voluntary down-weighting more likely, People could save up a bit of unused vote weight to be dispensed within say the next 5 issue votes (or it's lost). So you could give yourself a weight of 19 on the next vote if you only used 1 of your 10 on the first.

But if you don't vote at all on 3 consecutive issues, you start losing voting weight for general non-participation in decision making. and you can only slowly build up your weight to 10 per vote again.

So this method both encourages participation, but also encourages judicious spending of each person's opinion on the matters they know and care most about.

The biggest flaw of course is that many people may be persuaded by demagogues to care the most about the issues they actually know the least about. Perhaps the method could be modified by conducting a qualification comprehension-of-the-issue test before each vote, and without passing it, you're limited to 5 of 10 max weight on that vote. Of course, the huge flaw in that is who sets the issue-test (and, the suspicion goes, biases it)? That would probably have to be done eventually by an impartial AI.

 

Re:Self-weighting of your vote in per-issue voting

[LeftCoastThinker]

I am all for a federal referendum process to create legislation and Amendments directly, similar to what California and other states have (150,000 signatures to get on the ballot, and then vote directly on the measure every 2 years). However, for day to day operations of the government, most people are too ill informed to vote with any competence.

That has nothing to do with computers though, paper ballots still work fine for the referendum process.

Use the same they do in schools

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphite scantron with no network connection and guarded under an oath of objectivity punishable as a felony for tampering. Could also just learn to count and take breaks. Move elections back a week to give them time.

Computers have no place in elections to begin with

[LeftCoastThinker]

Keep computers out of elections. They are far too easy to tamper with in ways most elections officials are incapable of detecting.

Paper ballots and any other form are also imperfect, but at least they physically exist and if properly guarded and supervised by election observers, they are reasonably difficult to rig, assuming you get rid of absentee ballots for everyone who is able bodied and require a signed doctors excuse on a prescription pad for the disabled.

Anonymously lending your vote

[presidenteloco]

We can create a system which varies smoothly between direct democracy (issue voting by everyone) and representative democracy.

The general idea is that for a certain time period, you can lend your vote anonymously to another person, who then has a weight of n+1 votes to vote on the issues/legislation that are put up for decision.

Variations of this method are the flexibility of the lending time period, and also whether or not you are allowed to "recall" your representative (withdraw your lent vote) earlier than the originally granted period. If you could, that's better for the lender, but the representatives won't know the voting weight that they have so won't be able to wheel and deal as accurately with other representatives, as US congress people do.

A key technical problem to be resolved is how to prevent forced lending of votes. Imagine a tyrannical "head of the family" husband forcing their wife and a few others for good measure to lend their votes to him. How do you make it impossible for them to know whether such "requested" lending happened or not?
Ideas like a large random noise component in each person's vote weight, and randomization of the timing of lending transaction completion etc come to mind, but this might also be an insurmountable difficulty.

If there were a way of "proving" arms length relationship between lender and lendee, or only allowing pre-qualified (e.g. party-chosen) representatives (i.e. candidates) to receive lent votes, not just "everyone", then that might help with the forced "give me your vote" thing. I don't know. Ideas?

So the basic idea is, lend your vote out when you don't care or want to make the decision yourself. Get your vote back for when you want to decide yourself.

It's not just about electronics though, is it?

[kfsone]

The most obvious change needed in the US is that voting needs to not be optional: Bump individual tax rates by 1-2% and make voting get you it back.

We should also look to make the campaign durations shorter so that they don't have the time to get into mud-slinging and filth and focus on issues.

Blockchain

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a blockchain. Issue private keys to each voter, a card with as QR code, let them vote on the Blockchain. Done. It's what blockchain is for, truly democratic. 1 private key to 1 vote.

I'm right, now go argue with horrendous points and prove it.

derp

[nyet]

My top two:

Condorcet voting, perimeter/area ratio limits for districting.

In Austraila, the paper ballot is extremely secure

[aberglas]

All votes counted in front of scrutineers, every time. And then independently tallied.

The USA's love of machinery combined with the complete lack of independent oversight looks like it has been deliberately designed so that it can be rigged.

Re:In Austraila, the paper ballot is extremely sec

[aberglas]

I might add that it is very quick. Takes about an hour to count all votes in a booth completely by hand. No scanning involved.

Have them as candidates

[wolfheart111]

Us humans can vote for the best AI to rule us. Ya.... no... computers can never be involved in elections :P

I wouldn't

[dskoll]

Computers can only make elections worse, not better.

It's all a shithole

[Anonymous Coward]

Your computer is a shithole
Your website is a shithole
You are a shithole
Shithole

Computers ... make politics better? ... "O RLY?!"

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I disagree with the majority of pretty much any group (whether selected fairly or selected with much shenanigans) regarding how the nation ought to be governed? Suppose I regard a man who is not essentially in lockstep agreement with MY policy as having no legitimate right or reason to claim to be MY representative?

An actual democratic nation would put the policies on the ballot, not the men - "Representative" ought to be at most a party appointment, not someone which people who I DISAGREE with get to vote down or subvert [merely because they happen to reside in the same arbitrarily drawn district as I]. Let the contending representatives in turn contend with each others, draw up compromises and agreements, and vote on what happens.

Bennett Haselton

[drafalski]

Has anyone asked Bennett Haselton? I'll wager he has an idea or three...

Re:Bennett Haselton

[transporter_ii]

Kind of makes me wish I had some mod points.

Put all candidates in pool

[Maxo-Texas]

Vote for 1st choice, 2nd choice, and 3rd choice candidates.

Candidates with the most votes win.

And term limits given the reality of the power of incumbency.

Re:Put all candidates in pool

[guruevi]

Within the US, there is only 1 choice. The voting stuff is illusion and spectacle as you saw how Clinton "defeated" Sanders, you can also see how "defeated" Clinton feels with her millions of dollars she got to pocket not once but twice for "losing" an election.

Re:Put all candidates in pool

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever hear of David Duke (yes, the KKK leader) in New Orleans?

Ran for state congress every year... but deliberately planning to lose just so he could keep the money from donations. I understand he managed about 30K/year with very little effort.

Make it mandatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Make voting mandatory with a fine if you don't vote.

I would use computer to ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... hack into all email servers of all politicians and inject the word 'shithole' into all the emails within ... change the name of 'Washington D. C.' into 'SHIT HOLE' on Google Earth

Re: I would use computer to ...

[Anonymous Coward]

elections or erections?

Re: I would use computer to ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of places in DC don't need the word shithole added, it's already present.

The only people offended by this are the ones who live in such shitholes, because they know it's accurate.

Re:I would use computer to ...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

People escape shitholes for a reason

Make Voting Great Again!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am almost 50 years old, born in the US. I can say that I never voted in a single election except the prior one. I was so fed up with crap like obamacare and unchecked immigration that for the first time I had enough frustration and voted.... Trump. What about him motivated me to vote? Easy: He wasn't a career politician. I don't like politicians. The fact that Trump is the kind of guy who speaks (some would say yells) his mind without regards to "political correctness" is what I love about him.

Stop giving me politicians for politics. That's as silly as using recruiters to recruit engineers.

 

Make myself the only option

[guruevi]

If I could use computers to make elections better, I would have only 1 option, myself. It's very usable, it's very secure and there would be no doubt that the machine was wrong.

Reduce Fraud!

[RecycledElectrons]

1. Give each voter a unique receipt. number. They can enter it online to verify their vote was counted and who they voted for.

2. Allow online access to voter registration data and records of who voted when and where to make crowdsourced voter fraud detection possible.

3. Allow / requre recording in voting places (so the ballot can not be seen) to lessen fraud.

4. Publish all challenges to ballots and all evidence aubmitted on a web site.

5. Require photo ID and verify it in a database (like they do at traffic stops) when someone votes.

6. Eliminate the ability of big web sites to bias voters - we need a Fairness Doctrine for Silicon Valley and for ISPs that is stronger than Net Nutrality.

7. Count all minor party votes on election night. Permanently ban from public office any member of any political party that (as a party) has refused to count minor parth votes at the same time they count major party votes. Yes, ban from public office every Democrat and Republican on the plannet. They should feel lucky if we do not return their "favors" and count them as 3/5 of a person while auctioning their children.

Duh...

[Ferretman]

...you DON'T.

Hard, primitive, paper ballots is the only way to go. They can be scanned for a fast count and if there's a need for a recount you can do that by hand.....and the parties of the candidates post monies the day before the election so that this can be paid for. If the loser decides not to bother with a recount, the parties get their monies back.

Ferret

to make elections better

[NikeHerc]

We don't need computers to make elections better. What we need are term limits for congress (perhaps six years maximum, irrespective of the house of congress), an absolute prohibition of donations to elections by corporations, an extremely small limit of donations to elections (perhaps $200) by any individual in any given year, a serious reduction in lobbying, and a balanced federal budget. That's not all we need, but it's a good start.

No representation without taxation

[Anonymous Coward]

Each vote given a weighting in proportion to how much the voter paid in tax. You can vote for lowered taxes for yourself but only by handing more electoral power to other sections of the community.

That's an easy one...

[Phydeaux]

Use the computer to verify everyone's citizenship and residency and then print up Voter ID cards for everyone. Vote in person and Bob's your uncle...

A way to avoid buying/selling your vote...

[ClarkMills]

If we were to go computer based voting, make it so you can keep changing your vote right up to the cut-off period. This would be done to minimise the vote-buying that might occur if you only had one [SUBMIT]. Vote buying would be meaningless if the voter could change their vote at a later date.

That would be good, not bad

[raymorris]

Over half of Americans don't know who the vice president is. That's how interested many of us are in policy and the political process. A supermajority can't distinguish the Republican platform from the Democrat platform when it is handed to them with the party name redacted.

I don't have my car fixed by someone who doesn't know what an "engine" is, I don't have dental cavities filled by someone who can't point to my bicuspids, and I don't want national policy decided by people who don't recognize the name "Mike Pence", nor know how many senators there are.

> I think it's clear that if you want representative democracy to work and be considered legitimate, you need fewer barriers to voting, even if people like you think a DMV visit is reasonable.

And that's the reason the founders created a republic, not a democracy. The federal budget isn't American Idol. If you're not interested enough in participating in society to either have a driver's license or swing by and pick up a (free) ID, maybe you're not the person who should be deciding federal law and other national policy, based on "I heard he was born in Africa"or "because she's a woman". Maybe the decisions of national policy SHOULD be made by people who have enough interest to do more than "text your vote to 1-800-bumper-sticker".

Re: That would be good, not bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed- I'm sure the founders thought there should be some arbitrary standards- after all, they certainly had a comparatively tiny eligible electorate- but all your "shoulds" make no more sense than "Maybe we SHOULD go back to being ruled by the King."

If there's no universal natural right to have an equal voice, there's no point to any of this discussion.

Re:That would be good, not bad

[Xyrus]

Well in that case how about a basic test of intelligence as well? Obviously we want to pick the best leaders, and in order to do that you need people making intelligent and well informed decisions.

The test wouldn't be hard. Just some basic math, science, etc. questions to demonstrate people aren't idiots and have a least a basic understanding of the world around them.

Re:That would be good, not bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's annoying to keep seeing this error repeated over and over again. Do not confuse the general term "democracy", which is used to mean power derives from the governed (in some form), with a specific IMPLEMENTATION of democracy, "DIRECT democracy".

The founding fathers did indeed create a representative democracy. You're just confusing people with semantics ("republic" vs "democracy").

Re: That would be good, not bad

[Anonymous Coward]

"Interest" and "ability" to swing by the DMV are different things. If you want that to happen, you have to randomly assign a paid DMV holiday to each person and then force them to prove that they got registered afterward.

If you don't give them the time, they might not have it. If you don't force them to use it to register, they might use it to do other critical tasks that they haven't been able to do. And if your response to that is "too bad, they should have made time," congrats on your comparatively comfortable situation. Your safety net sure looks comfy.

You also need to provide transportation for those who can't afford it or can't get help to leave the house. The guy who can't leave his house without help might be able to get his kid to take him to vote, but if he can't get registered, he's SOL.

Or you register everyone by default. Way cheaper.

Re:That would be good, not bad

[Agripa]

Over half of Americans don't know who the vice president is.

The president of the Senate? Who cares?

A secure solution would be convenient

[Beeftopia]

If I could log into a website securely, I mean as securely as as a bank's business-to-business website with a PGP encryption angle. Like:
* Username
* strong password
* PIN (i.e. second password)
* RSA key-fob token number supplied by the voting office.
* I'm accessing the site from a static IP registered with the voting office.
* I submit a PGP public key to the voting office, and they send me another PIN via email with an attached encrypted text file that I can decrypt with my private key, that I use as part of the login process.

Then I'm in. I'm authenticated. I select the candidates I wish to vote for and click the "submit" button when I'm done.

* The back-end database is physically secured with a police presence. The DBAs have Top Secret clearances with polygraph.
* My vote is stored electronically, but also printed with my name and PGP public key. That is then scanned into a separate database.
* I can, after the election, log in again with the credentials above and see that what's in the database matches my scanned ballot.
* I can easily submit a complaint if they don't match.

THAT kind of a system I'd be comfortable voting online with. If I couldn't log in prior to the election (online voting would only be available prior to election day), then I'd need to do it the old fashioned way, of waiting in line and going to a physical polling place on election day.

BUT: Recall the debacle the federal government had with Healthcare.gov. And then see the OPM hack, where even fingerprints were taken. This database would be under constant, epic, assault by... everyone. So, I have a dim view that even the federal government, much less a state government could implement such a system. And getting staff for this system would be difficult. It would be a relatively mundane job BUT requiring the best people all the time. And those people would be willing to subject themselves to in-depth security clearances, as this is an issue of national security. That kind of staffing is very hit or miss for all but the top tech companies, for multiple reasons. And you add another layer of complexity due to the clearance requirements that even the top tech companies don't have.

So, it comes back to that Gordian Knot of staffing and project management. One can easily conceive of a secure system. The ability to implement it is quite another, different, problem.

Allow voting online with client certificates

[u801e]

When you register to vote, you go through the process of generating a client certificate that's used as your registration. The client certificate need not carry any information that identifies you other than the fact that you're a registered voter. When you vote online, you use that client certificate to connect to the server and vote.

Each vote is counted and associated with a certificate. You can look up your record by providing your certificate to check how your votes were counted.

You Don't Know What You're Talking About

[sudonim2]

#1 is stupid. Why even have districts if you don't have to vote in them? #2 is a fool's description of how Parliamentary elections work. Basically Parliamentary style elections solve the problems #1 & #2 seek to solve but better. Plus we have centuries of practice with Parliamentary elections. #3 is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Negative voting is a surefire way to destroy any possibility of government. Your vote shouldn't get to cancel out someone else's. It's unworkable even in theory.

Re:You Don't Know What You're Talking About

[shanen]

Feel free to ask if you can't understand.

Even better if you have a constructive suggestion to offer.

Excuse me for not wasting the time to see if you've ever written anything worth reading.

If Slashdot had some mechanism to aggregate and display the public reputation that you'd earned, I'd probably consider lowering yours. Oh, wait. If I could filter based on earned public reputation I'm pretty sure that I'd never see your comments in the first place.

Usability Testing

[Hercules Peanut]

Ask them what operating system said computer is running and if they answer: Internet Explorer, then ban them from political office.

Don't

[sudonim2]

Nothing put on a computer is ever secure. Nothing put on a computer is ever anonymous. Considering democracy requires secret ballots and secret ballots require both anonymity and security, the best place for computers in a voting system is as far away from it as possible. Even air-gapping doesn't work. How many articles are on /. about researchers devising new and exciting ways to hack air-gapped computers? At least one a month, it seems.

Re: I would not let computer janitors make the rul

[Wycliffe]

I don't see a problem with traveling votes. Create the districts and the polling stations the normal way and let people vote at any station they want. That person still only gets one vote but if they want to drive two hours to vote in a different district them let them. It's a self limiting problem. It would kill gerrymandering and everyone's vote would be worth more. You could drive to a competitive district where your vote would count more but by doing so you take that vote away from your own district and make your own district more competitive.

Oh mey oh mey....

[no-body]

If anyone thinks this mess can be in anyway improved by changing the very interface on the periphery while the core is utterly rotten (corrupt by design), good luck!

This core - $$-driven up to the wazoo with no other value counting, will always find ways to go by what worked so well and the uncritical mass by a - by design - educational system creating mass-tailored individuals hypnotized by the same cool-aid unable to step aside of their conditioning - who wants to be different and blamed as an outsider or other maroon categorization?

Random Selection - Eliminate Elections

[brian.stinar]

I'd apply a number of filtering criteria (age, criminal conviction, level of education, earned income) to filter out the "best" people according to my elitist standards, and then randomly select them for a draft. If they refused, half of their property would be taken and they'd be imprisoned.

In my community, it is unfortunate that the elected officials tend to be their most successful while in office. It is the best position that many have ever had. I would prefer elected office to be the worst, lowest paying, crappiest job that they have ever had. I do not want to pick someone that desires to be in office. I'd rather draft someone that has many better things to do, and has already proved themselves as a capable, successful, leader.

Re:Random Selection - Eliminate Elections

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I notice your criteria would allow for Donald Trump, but not Bill Gates; Hillary Clinton, but not Ghandi; George W. Bush, but not Obama (assuming the "earned income" level is set where I'm guessing you'll set it). I'm not 100% sure your system works well.

Meet Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

[Solandri]

Before asking what is the best voting system, someone was smart enough to ask if it's even possible to determine what the best voting system is.

The answer is no. If you start by requiring some common sense criteria for what an election should accomplish, it turns out no voting system can meet those requirements. If you rank those criteria in a specific order, it's possible to mathematically calculate which voting system generates "unfair" results more often for that particular ranking of criteria (which is to say, a "worse" system can still sometimes produce a "fairer" result by your predefined standards). But if you change the ranking of the criteria, a different voting system ends up being best and producing a different winner. A clever documentary back in the 1990s even came up with an example where a dozen candidates participated in a mock election whose votes were tallied using a dozen different voting systems, and each voting system produced a different winner (i.e. each candidate won under one voting system).

Re:Meet Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

[RayLutz]

Arrow's impossibility theorem makes a mistake with the concept that there are ever irrelevant alternatives. Of course it matters who else is on the ballot. By making that a requirement, it forces the concept of impossibility, but it is only because of a constraint that is too severe.

Simple

[gargleblast]

None of the above.

I would ask a computer to select the best candidate. Because lately, it is clear that the electorate doesn't know shit.

Shocking...

[Anonymous Coward]

Make all the candidates wear shock collars.
Program the computers to detect lying and activate the shock collars when they do.

Abolish political parties (and other ideas)

[johannesg]

I feel quite strongly about abolishing political parties. They concentrate power in the hands of a few unelected people. Let each politician run on his own merits, and act on his own concience rather than according to some party line.

This is especially urgent because any district-based system (like the US has) automatically leads to it also being a two-party system. Such a system doesn't allow for new ideas and new parties to appear - there is simply no space for new parties to slowly grow into a real, serious, political party.

Without political parties, there will be a much wider pool of candidates for each state. Each candidate will have to convince the voters of the quality of his policies, instead of riding on some abstract national program (and loon candidates can be avoided fairly easily by making them collect some number of signatures before their candidacy is allowed).

Governing would become a matter of negotiation a lot more than it is today, but you'd be rid of the deadlock where one party blocks the other on principle.

I'd also add a few rules about laws only covering one subject at a time (no riders for completely unrelated subjects), add an upper limit to the length of any law, and I'd mandate that any proposed plan must always be accompanied by a detailed description of how much money will be needed, and where it will be taken from.

And perhaps each law must be explained by the politician who proposed it in three separate schools. If the kids don't understand it, start over.

Or alternatively, keep the system as it is today, but send multiple politicians to Washington for each state, with each wielding a fraction of the state vote that is determined by how many people voted for him.

Or do voting on a permanent basis: each citizen receives a token that he can entrust to a politician of his choice. Allow for the token to be recovered and entrusted to another politician at any time. On the first day of every month, replace all politicians that lost the trust of their voters. Instead of having to look great once every four years, let them represent you every single day of their carreer...

Re:Abolish political parties (and other ideas)

[johannesg]

PS. I wouldn't use computers, except for the token thing. That would totally work as a smartphone app.

Best way

[backslashdot]

The only way I can think of to make elections better using a computer is to play Call of Duty while the rest of the suckers are out voting.

All Of OPs Ideas Lead To Rule By Cities

[NicknameUnavailable]

No thanks, city people are incompetent, the founding fathers knew this and planned accordingly.

The USA system it not a democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

In a democracy you have a simple purely proportional voting system,
you do not need to "subscribe" to any party or to any elections and
you do not have any "big" power in single hands.

USA system is designed to advantage some big "families"/their big corps,
is their playground not citizen. Citizens are simply Ford-model workers
grown up in a childish way to avoid they can become independent adults.

This system is substantially adopted after WWII in Europe witch was,
unfortunately, the sole para-democratic country in the world.

Is that the Luddite perspective?

[shanen]

Not sure if you're just taking the Luddite perspective, but I'd like to try to persuade you how the computerized voting could be done in a way that would satisfy me.

The voting screen would be interactive to allow for such things as asking for help, even such specific things as "Show me the 50-word summary submitted by each candidate on the second listed issue." After the voter finished, it would print the ballot with two forms (because redundancy helps). The voter would be able to read how he voted in human-readable form, and the ballot would have something like a QR code for more rapid recounting with machines. The voting machine would also collect totals for fast reporting of the results, but with a safe one-way transfer mechanism, NOT a two-way connection to the Internet. In the even the election is challenged, the paper ballots will be easily recounted and also checked to make sure the QR codes match the text versions.

That actually would help with all three of the specific proposals I suggested, but so far I haven't found any improvements in the comments I've read so far. Mostly I searched by the keywords of my proposals.

However, what I was really looking for was better ideas, and so far I haven't found any with my usual searches. Not sure what keywords will help, but there's a lot of stuff to read here... Evidently a topic of substantial interest, and I have seen a number of thoughtful comments and I would like to thank those people for their efforts.

Re:Is that the Luddite perspective?

[currently_awake]

How do you know the QR code doesn't include your name? How do you know the 2 ballots (human/QR) are identical if nobody demands a recount? How do you know the totals match the votes cast? Electing Government is a huge security risk, you need proof it's working.

Re:Is that the Luddite perspective?

[shanen]

I think I have either answered your questions or the answers are obvious, so I am not sure of the basis of your concerns. You might be trolling me, or perhaps the ideas are too complicated and I will be unable to explain them to your satisfaction. Notwithstanding, I'll make a brief attempt:

The QR code is NOT a secret, but a direct translation of what the ballot shows. You can also test it by recalculating the QR code that the ballot is supposed to represent and making sure that it comes out the same. Your second question is even more obvious, in that the paper ballots are there precisely in case there is a recount for a close election. However I do think that even non-contested elections need to have some auditing to make sure that the data is reasonable. The usual approach is random sampling to make sure there are no gross irregularities that could substantially alter the results. Part of my suggestion was intended to help make the routine auditing much quicker and less expensive.

However my thoughts have already diverged in a crazier direction. I seem to lack focus, but perhaps you will be amused by the "ultimate" votemobile solution?

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Winner for dumbest article ever

[Anonymous Coward]

This is possibly the dumbest article ever posted on Slashdot. Districts exist for local elections, giving a politician a partial vote? WTF?? That's a math nightmare - are we going to have half-politicians to make up the rest? Dumb. And Negative votes? What the HELL is that?? If you are going to count the greatest positive result then it's the SAME THING as not voting. Dumb.

Actual new idea

[shanen]

Seems to be the first actual new idea of interest in the discussion. The progress bar indicates I'm about 1/4 of the way through the visible comments. There have been some comments that might be replies or responses to interesting ideas, but they must be from ACs and I can't see them. (My vote against ACs.)

If I understand your idea, it seems to be a form of direct democracy with delegation. The complexity would clearly require computer support, but even then I think it would be tough to implement. However my main concern would be about reactions triggered by panicked mobs. There is a wisdom in crowds, but it depends on keeping the inputs isolated to prevent mass phenomena such as a panic.

Still, it's kind of interesting to think about. Back to reading the comments...

Adding another dimension to the balance of power

[shanen]

Actually I favor this one, but not the way you're thinking. I think the Senate should be apportioned based on federal taxes paid. The House would be directly responsible to the voters, but the Senate would be based on the distribution of wealth and respond on that basis. Not sure I'd want to go as far as having a senior senator from Amazon, but the basis of power should be different.

The original idea was that the Senate would be more responsible to long-term interests if it were more separated from direct elections. Actually seems like a good idea and the move to direct popular vote without changing the basis of apportionment of the Senate seems to me like a mistake.

Approval voting

[shanen]

Interesting approach, but I doubt that it has been tested in the real world. I think it would become a name recognition game, as long as the name wasn't recognized for something horribly negative. In particular, I think #PresidentTweety could have won in such a system because he had YUGE name recognition and almost no relevant track record (as regards politics).

Re:Approval voting

[swillden]

Interesting approach, but I doubt that it has been tested in the real world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Usage. I was tempted to reply with a lmgtfy link, since it's kind of silly to doubt something like that without doing the trivial search to find out.

I think it would become a name recognition game, as long as the name wasn't recognized for something horribly negative.

This is the case among less-educated voters in every system. This isn't an argument against approval voting, it's an argument against universal, requirement-free suffrage.

I think #PresidentTweety could have won in such a system because he had YUGE name recognition and almost no relevant track record (as regards politics).

Considering that his approval rating on election day was 40%, I strongly doubt it.

Re:Approval voting

[shanen]

Perhaps you're some sort of pure mathematician who regards approval voting as elegant, but your link did NOT seem to prove your case. In fact, I would now cite it as evidence against what seems to be your position and in support of my initial reaction. (Or perhaps I wouldn't, but that's one of those Wikipedia problems.) Of course I can't be sure of a negative, but I have read quite a lot of related material, and I suspected this might be some sort of theoretical bauble, the kind of thing a society of mathematicians might like. One thing I noticed about most of the examples was that they are the kind of professional groups that have lots of "elevated" members and relatively weak interpersonal frictions. In that context, this system might produce pleasant results, especially for the losers. (And yet, even within such constraints I noticed that many of the users dropped the approval voting system.)

Right now sort I'm inclined to question [since you seem to dislike the diplomatic "doubt"] your sincerity, but pure mathematicians of my experience rather often leave such an impression. Not intended as a pointed criticism, just a question. I actually regard myself as a pure solutions researcher in an analogous sense of "pure".

Perhaps we would have a friendlier discussion of the mathematical proofs of the single-decision test-and-decide algorithm? The one where you skip n/e before accepting the next candidate that beats all prior candidates, yielding a 1/e probability of picking the best candidate. (I have run that description past several real mathematicians, and the heavier ones have somehow recognized it.) I've read two proofs of the main result, and have devised a direct proof for a secondary result of the probability of skipping the best candidate. However there's yet one more part, and I have no idea how to prove that 1 - 2/e represents the terminal permutations of unlucky orderings (except by subtraction). It might start with 1/e * (n/e - 1) / n for a base and then ((n - (n/e)) choose 2) / 2 as part of the final chunk?

Re:Approval voting

[swillden]

You said you doubted it had been used. The link says several organizations use it. How in the world is that an argument in support of your position?

Re:Approval voting

[shanen]

Hmm... Since you are misquoting me, that raises a strong suspicion you're a troll, but I see some wiggle room because of the interpretation of the "tested in the real world" phrase I actually used. I do not regard a couple of professional societies as part of the "real world" I was referring to. I know that I was thinking about the "real world" in terms of governments with powers of taxation and police and armies and things like that. Your interpretation of "real world" seems to include "unimportant things that do (or did) exist", which is pretty huge. I'm pretty sure we also interpreted "tested" differently. I could have worded it differently, but I think the meaning in context was sufficiently obvious (and different wording would not matter in the case of an insincere troll).

My initial concern was that the system seemed unlikely to work well. The historical evidence you provided seems to indicate that it does NOT work well. Though the approval voting has been around for some years, it has only been adopted by a few minor organizations, and some of the adopters have already dropped it. Initially I was skeptical simply because I'd never heard of it, but thanks to your link, I now have some evidence that it doesn't work well and can even speculate as to why not. (I actually went back to the link to look for comparisons to corporate board elections and saw the part about known weaknesses.)

You could have responded by strengthening your argument. Your link mentions organizations that played with the approval voting system before dropping it. What were the problems? Do you have any suggestions to fix those problems?

Actually wording it that way made me think the biggest problem is probably just the cognitive load on the voters (and even though I don't recall seeing that mentioned in the Wikipedia article). Most voters don't want to study ALL of the candidates, especially when they are pre-vetted candidates and presumably all worthy and qualified. If so, then the problem is how to motivate that effort, and right now I see no way.

However, I also realized that this system could be seen as logically equivalent to my third suggestion. By voting for all of the other candidates, it is logically equivalent to casting a negative vote against the omitted candidate. I think the explicit negative vote would still be better because (1) It can explicitly capture an important truth about a flawed election, and (2) It only requires one more decision rather than many more decisions.

I note you did not respond in any substantive way to my concerns nor to my hypothesis about why some organizations might like the system.

Variation of guest voting?

[shanen]

Sounds like a variation of my suggestion of guest voting. If I understand you correctly, the main anti-gerrymandering feature is that highly irregular districts would create more convenient opportunities for traveling voters.

However I think that guest voting accomplishes the same effect, but while still respecting the principle of one-man-one-vote. An electronic ballot could even show the map and let you pick the district you want to vote in, while a paper ballot could just list all the candidates with your district's candidates at the top and the instruction to pick any one. (Might be a long list if the district is highly gerrymandered.)

I didn't mention a more complicated variation. Allow voting in multiple districts, but divide your vote up. Computers are good with fractions, too.

"None of the above"

[dheltzel]

Adding "None of the above" to every list of candidates would solve so many of the problems with the current system. If "None of the above" wins, all candidates are disqualified from that office and each party has to submit a new candidate to run. We would need a faster (online?) voting methodology, because I suspect that "None of the above" would win a whole lot of elections for a while until the parties realized we weren't voting for s*hole candidates as the "least worst" anymore.

If I listed off all the major reasons I don't like voting, this solves nearly all of them. Voting participation would rise tremendously if people felt like they could vote their actual conscience.

Chained ballots

[shanen]

Actually this reminds me of one of the strategies that Putin used to win some of his elections. At certain vulnerable voting places, Putin's goons were positioned between the place where the ballot was given to the voter and the place where it was deposited. They would buy the blank ballot and give the voter a ballot that was marked for Putin. Then they marked the blank ballot for Putin and sold it to the next voter in a kind of daisy chain. I forgot the word for it. Something like caterpillar ballots? (Read Putin's Kleptocracy for details.)

Re: In Austraila, the paper ballot is extremely se

[Anonymous Coward]

if you need to choose who wins, it's an easy problem to solve if you have people monitoring the vote count; in Atlanta, they claim the ballot count watchers are too disruptive, and kick them out of the warehouse; no way for to argue your way back in on the day that it counts;

Have an education quiz...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have an educational quiz randomly selected from 1000 different questions for each item on the agenda.

Then weight the vote based on the score.

Don't start from here

[GerryHattrick]

I'd take a strategic view, and stop trying to 'computerise' the historic systems we happen to have now. How to 'enable' populous opinion on defined issues, retaining balance and preventing manipulation? What 'political' structures needed to give effect to the results? And notice that 'pricing' assets is equivalent to a weighted vote, with the weights (theoretically, (Ha!), based on purchasers' prior contribution to society. So... that doesn't work properly either, what's better with the systems available tomorrow?

I would use Computers

[orlanz]

I really meant technology, but for the following:
-put up a big screen at each center that shows the number/percentage of times a candidate lied, told half truths, and truths.
-their tenure
-the top three things they stand for (1000 chars) and they can't change it per state/ballot.
-how many times they stood up for, didn't take part in, or caved on the prior
-public cameras that allow anyone online to see the voting area and counting.

All of the above has a QR code that points back to the official government website that all this is supposed to stream off of. So that anyone can check for tampering.

Also, all results are withheld from media, candidates, etc till they are ALL in. At which point the winner is stated and then the circus can have their way wasting everyone's time on analyzing the states. This way it provides a bit more confidence that all votes are equal. AND we don't make the elections a damn football game.

Re: I would use Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that the pre result coverage is based on exit polling not counting ballots right?

Too overcomplicated

[Chris Mattern]

Just always provide a "none of the above" choice. If it wins, the election must be rerun, with the previous candidates barred from standing.

Simple

[Shogun37]

Use computers to educate the voters, past the average 3rd grade level. Try to teach people how to vote, based on SOME kind of idea of what's best, rather than the usual. Party Lines, It's (Insert Name)'s Turn, They Give Me Money, or (my personal favorite) Because They Will Let Me Change Places With My (perceived) Oppressor.

Computers are not the only issue in the U.S

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of representatives in the U.S. house is the problem, as is the electoral college. To return to 1:30,000 representation as envisioned (as a minimum) by the founding fathers, we would need about 10,000 representatives. However, if we simply doubled the number of representatives to ~1,000, the effects of Gerrymandering and over representation among States during elections would be halved.

This would minimize both local and national issues, such as one presidential candidate winning by over 3,000,000 votes, yet still losing the electoral college.

Eliminate bipolarism due to primaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving from one district to another would diminish representative govt, so I don't think that is a good path to take.

But a problem that badly needs to be solved is that currently each party votes for a extremist on the far wing in the party, and then the general election has no moderates to choose from. This prevents sending folks who are reasonable and can work together.

A single pass ranked voting process probably doesn't need a computer, but seems in line with the question.

God Help Us...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if any of these fuckers are ever put in charge.

A country run like a fucking SocialMedia start of would be they result.

Millennials are such fucking dumbshits.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Everyone has a RIGHT to vote, or sing. I shouldn't

[raymorris]

> If there's no universal natural right to have an equal voice, there's no point to any of this discussion.

Every citizen has a *right* to vote. They also have the right to sing. I shouldn't sing publicly, because I'm a terrible singer. You would be foolish to encourage me to sing for everyone.

Go one step back and fix Google and Facebook

[humptheElephant]

While fixing the ballot box is needed, we need to protect ourselves from outside actors such as Russia and China. An important article by Roger McNamee who helped with Facebook wrote an article on the attack of our last election in the latest Washington Montly (https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/how-to-fix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us/). by Roger McNamee MAGAZINE. He points out that Facebook and Google use algorithms that can shap our beliefs. This use can allow an inexpensive way to shap public opinion in elections. He also suggests remedies.

End gerrymandering with genetic algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

I would *did* write open-source software to automatically create fair districts by using a genetic algorithm, thus providing a way to end the practice of gerrymandering once and for all. I would *did* publish it for free on github at https://github.com/happyjack27/autoredistrict and make a small website about it at http://autoredistrict.org .

Randomized Drawing Followed by an Exit Poll

[manlygeek]

So, if we are going to use computers in our voting process (I'm against that but I'll go with the idea for a moment) then I think everyone who wants to be President buys a "Lottery" ticket. A winner is picked at random. They hold the office for one term. At the end of that term, the electorate votes on how they did. If the did well they get one more term. Period. If they did OK then they are done and another drawing is held. If they did quite poorly, they are locked up in prison for the rest of their lives. It would cut down on the number of people entering the lottery and we would be voting on results, not broken promises. Also, holding office would have as indelible effect on the office holder as it does on the electorate.

Fixed election dates

[currently_awake]

Fixed election dates are Evil. The length of an election is much longer with fixed election dates because everyone knows when it's happening, where snap elections you have to wait for the election to be called before you spend money on campaigning (don't want to spend all your money and not have an election). Longer elections favour the rich (cost), and nobody likes year long elections.

Re:Fixed election dates

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with snap elections is that it is typically the current government that decides when to call them, and they will time them when they think it is most advantageous to themselves.

Fixed election dates are fairer.

Who wants democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

In phase 1 the politicians will be elected by computers instead of humans, which are fed with big data about the candidates. No more candidates becoming President by mistake. The best one will win.

In phase 2 the politicians will be replaced by computers. Parliament will consist of computers that mostly fix bugs in the government computers. Only a handful humans will still work in IT and government.

Vote by mail

[Anonymous Coward]

It is simple and works.
Using computers for voting is cramming a square peg in a round hole.
KISS.

No more corrupt representation

[seniorcoder]

Instead of voting for a representative, why not use computers to allow any registered voter to directly vote on bills?
We needed representatives long ago when communications were poor.
Quality communications should make these corrupt representatives obsolete.
You could exercise your right to vote on bills that you had a strong opinion about and ignore others that you didn't care about.

Proxy voting

[sigmabody]

In addition to the totally obvious and "duh" ideas (which would already be done if we actually had any ability to improve the election procedure, such as eliminating gerrymandering, ranked voting with instant runoffs, open source software with cryptographic security and a verified paper trail, etc.), I have another thought.

It would be cool if you could arbitrarily proxy your vote to someone else (and/or multiple people). That is, to paraphrase a hypothetical, "I don't want to learn everything about this contest in order to make an informed decision, but I know someone who does, and that person thinks like I do; just count my vote toward his/her choice(s)." I don't think we're ever going to be able to get the average person to vote in an intelligent and informed manner for the best qualified candidate (see: Trump/Oprah), but we _might_ be able to get voters to proxy their vote to people whom they judge to be intelligent, well informed on political topic, and like-minded (eg: Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, etc.). In turn, that just _might_ be able to get the country away from electing the least hated of bad options.

My 2c.

Ethics (or lack thereof), not technology, is issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't computers or technology. It's ethics. The simple one? Lying. We all know it's wrong. And we know that all politicians do it and do not get punished for it. Routinely. Everywhere.

So - my suggestion: Provide politicians a subsistence salary. Rank their performance after their term (e.g. as part of the next election). (E.g. Truthful, Trustworthy, Did as promised. A true leader. Would trust your child in their care.) Then, pay out the balance of their earnings based on pro-rated results.
Make it a REQUIREMENT to rank the current candidate (although you can choose to abstain), before you could proceed to vote for a replacement candidate.

Too many people are ethically challenged. Folks such as that need to have other curbs. The law seems to be failing on this front. (Not unique to the US). So bring in monetary forms of carrots and sticks.

Companies are NOT people !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only citizens WITHIN THE BOUNDARY of an election can donate money to candidates or for political purposes.
No companies, no groups, no organizations --- this means no Exxon, no Sierra Club, no PACs, no New York donations going to California or vice versa.

No money can cross election boundary!!!
Political candidates and elected or appointed officials CANNOT accept ANY gifts, trips, dinners, cannot be paid for giving a lecture, etc.

Return all elections to the local area where the election is supposed to cover.

Why Count Re-Count Re-Recount

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else concerned that when a recount happens the number do not match the original count?
And then if a second re-count is done it doesn't match original of 1st recount?

How can we trust either the recount or the re-recount or even the original-count if they all disagree?

What if they had to re-re-count until 2 counts agreed? i.e. that last recount agrees with any of the previous counts.

If the results from a single ballet can change with less than 5 reads, then something is wrong with the ballet or reader.

I would use them to convict Diaper Donald.

[Anonymous Coward]

We can use computers and a software to locate and evidentiate his treasonous collusion, arrest him, incarcerate him, indict him, prosecute him, convict him and administer a traitor's punishment.

one one thing needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Personal ID.

Ruins the Democrats voter fraud, though, so don't expect a sane discussion.

Voter identification

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the computers to identify each voter and record ballot number each voter used. Some will complain ballots are required to be anonymous but how can we have security and anonymity?
Voters identified as non voters would not be allowed a ballot.
Computers could also in real time (real to meat) identify repeat & dead voters.

it's 2018, we can do better

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wait for election day? You can log in and vote any time. Why limit the "ballot" to a list of names? You can search & click as many phrases you want that you agree with (or type new ones) and go directly to the issues. Why keep your vote a secret? As long as your signing key can't be tied to your identity, let the world count the "votes" any time they want. We are so accustomed to the limitations we've been with for so long that we forget to imagine what's possible.
https://securepollingsystem.org

You know you can register by mail / internet, righ

[raymorris]

All that about voter registration. You know you can register by mail, right?

The topic is showing SOME kind of ID when you vote, so we know how many times you voted. In Texas, any of seven different kinds of evidence of ID are accepted. If a person has some reason that they have nothing with their name on it, they can instead sign an affadavit at the polling place attesting to what their name is. Lying on that affadavit to vote under someone else's name is a crime.

So either bring something with your name on it, or sign a sworn statement of who you are.

SQL to detect gerrymandered states

[Anonymous Coward]

SELECT * FROM States;

NONE OF THE ABOVE

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a '"None of the above" option.

If a majority of voters choose "None of the above" The party's are forced to produce better candidates.

Simple, Take 45

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple. I'd elect a computer to office, just as long as it's an ARM.

Remove humans

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new skynet overlords

Computer elections only exist for fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever wonder how California's government keeps winning elections even after passing every imaginable law attacking its own citizens? Fraud, fraud, and fraud. California Democrats are usurpers. Nancy Pelosi was implicated in Wikileaks e-mails as being someone who goes the fraud route every single time. Paper all across the board, no exceptions.

Digital solutions are easy without a secret ballot

[Paul Fernhout]

The USA did OK without a secret ballot for 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sure, there may be voter intimidation and vote buying and so on without a secret ballot. But will the consequences really be worse than widespread electronic election fraud?

And the fact is, you can find out who many people probably voted for by looking at campaign donation records anyway.
http://classic.fec.gov/finance...

We expect elected representatives to generally vote in a recorded way and to defend their votes. Why do we think that can work but doing the same for individuals won't?

Otherwise, use paper ballots -- ideally counted by a group of humans from different political affiliations like is done in many other countries.

Some bigger issues than technology for the USA:

We could return to the original constitutional number of Representatives so that each vote for one counts 10X more -- which might reduce the role of money in such elections.
https://economix.blogs.nytimes...

And maybe go back to having Senators appointed by State Legislatures.
https://www.senate.gov/artandh...

And also consider a Parliamentary system where Congress selects a Prime Minister instead of a direct election of the President (given what a money-driven circus such elections have become):
https://www.minnpost.com/eric-...

Really Stupid Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Idea #1 completely destroys the concept of representing the people of a given area. The WHOLE POINT is that the person elected represents the people of that area - being allowed to vote in a different district means that someone who doesn't live near you is voting for your candidate. Would you want people from, say, Utah, driving over into your district and picking your representative? Are you really that fucking stupid?

Idea #2 completely destroys the concept of The Great Compromise: the concept that gave us a House and a Senate at the federal level. Do you really want the whole country dominated by the big population centers? Everyone else in the country may as well not vote because they will have zero representation. Are you really that fucking ignorant of history?

Idea #3 is also bad. It is going along the lines of the whole "not my president" and "the resistance" crap where you would rather kick and scream and bitch instead of try to work with what you have. Sorry, but you're never going to get a perfect candidate. They all suck on some level. Don't like them? Run yourself, or find someone you do like and convince them. Don't be a baby who just grabs his ball and goes home. Are you really that fucking childish?

None of these ideas need computers, by the way, so they're all also fucking stupid responses for a question about novel uses for a computer.

Thanks for all the fish and your thoughts, too

[shanen]

I wish that Slashdot had some convenient mechanism whereby I could go back and review the newer comments. I'm going to do one more scan for funny and insightful, but the discussion is too large to read all of it in a reasonable amount of time. Right now there are 244 visible comments, and I read the entire visible discussion around 200. Took me a while...

I found many parts of the discussion quite thought provoking and I hope you enjoyed having your thoughts provoked as much as I did. My thanks to the thoughtful contributors (and I wonder why the trolls seem relatively less visible than usual these days (Or perhaps I've merely gotten better at ignoring them?)).

After I digested the comments, my thoughts seem to have branched onto a different track, but since this story is reaching its natural lifespan, I wrote up my newest and craziest idea in a fresh venue. Perhaps you'll be amused?

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Paper can ge gamed, too

[shanen]

You should read Putin's Kleptocracy to learn about the latest wrinkles (no pun intended) in manipulating paper ballots. I was trying to get the name of the technique that most interested me, but instead found the book Protest in Putin's Russia , where a different version of the same technique is described. Unfortunately, I still couldn't find the amusing name for the technique. Something like caterpillar or daisy chaining.

The way it works is that Putin's henchman goes to vote early. He gets his blank ballot, but he does NOT cast it. He stops in the hallway leading to the ballot boxes, where he marks his ballot for Putin, and waits for the next voter. He asks the next voter if he'd like to make some money (I think the book said about 50 rubles) for his blank ballot. In exchange, he also gets the completed ballot, which he takes down the hall and puts in the box. Lather, rinse, repeat for as many votes as Putin can buy.

Of course there is no secrecy in this, and all of the voters who sold their votes know the election was rigged. Several reasons they don't do anything about it, but I think the main ones are that they know Putin is going to win anyway, so they might as well take the money, too, and if they do make a fuss they know Putin's police are NOT going to do anything about it beyond arresting them for taking the money for their ballot. Actually, it could be worse than that if they make too big a fuss. Making a big fuss about Putin is one way to get whacked in today's Russia.

Hate to remind you, but #PresidentTweety admires Vladimir and wishes he could have so much direct control over the FBI.

Re: You know you can register by mail / internet,

[Anonymous Coward]

It all applies to getting an ID as well. But it sounds like you're proposing that people be allowed to swear under penalty that they are who they say they are. That's the default system in most places. It works fine.

In Illinois they compare your signature to your registration's signature. Also fine, as long as registering is very easy.

rock the chainz

[Anonymous Coward]

Use blockchain for voting, on phones. It's millenial-convenient, it's cryptologically secure, so nobody in Russia could interfere with our elections, and really nothing could go wrong with it. Plus, rebranding "voting" to "blockchain voting" would raise voter participation rates by 120% in one day.

Positive ID

[ebvwfbw]

Use them to make sure the person voting is registered and the one using that vote. There is nothing like going to vote and finding out you already voted. Someone used your registered vote to vote. The officials don't know what to do, they often accuse you of trying to vote twice, it's a mess. All because some asshole stole your vote.

Go back to paper. Electronic is just too easy to hack.

voting improvements

[Denihil]

make a new cryptocoin, call it votecoin. make a website (extremely secure) that gives out 1 coin per election cycle per SSN. SSN has to be from a non deceased person, obviously, with more checks in place to ensure this happens.

voting is just transferring your coin (split in however many ways you wish) to the politicians in the race, whoever has the most coins wins. have specific coins for each election cycle and race, so you could be giving out say 20 types of coins if you're voting in 20 different races, but all managed from same wallet.dat file.

bam. you have a decentralized encrypted voting scheme with a viewable blockchain, so people can verify themself where their vote went. perhaps might have a voting VPN that people transfer from, so peoples IPs aren't revealed to voting preference. no gerrymandering.

Re-open elections

[eric_harris_76]

Automate elections better. Right now, voters face a limited number of pre-selected candidates from a limited number of pre-selected political parties. Allow a broader range of candidate: all who meet the constitutional qualifications. All. Let the voter choose.

There was a time when government didn't decide which political parties were "real" and which ones weren't. The electorate did. There was a time when government didn't decide which candidates were "real" and which ones weren't. The voters did.

And voter turnout was a lot higher.

And the usual plug for _Why America Stopped Voting_, by Mark L. Kornbluh. http://www.worldcat.org/search...

blockchain

[genemang]

tamperproof

Verify voter knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask a few questions which will verify that the voter knows who they are voting for. Have the normal ballet listings but at the end ask about some of the topics that the candidates really hit over and over again. If a voter votes for a person and answers the supporting question correctly then the vote counts.

Example: A candidate that campaigns on getting coal mines opened again for his constituents. The verification question could be something like "I do not support the burning of fossil fuels: Yes/No". If they vote for the person wanting to open coal mines but vote against fossil fuels being burned then they invalidated their vote.

Weight votes by taxes paid

[Anonymous Coward]

You have the option to pay a little more or little less to make your vote count more or less. Also have more of say in what percent of your individual taxes go to defense, social security, roads, research, etc.

Won't ever happen though.

Re:Simple -- too hard to find the problem.

[RayLutz]

Too hard to find the problem if you don't keep track and allow a means to compare ballot by ballot. See http://openballotinitiative.or... The problem is that you WILL have differences between the interpretations.

Consolidate to key-pairs

[Anonymous Coward]

All government IDs are now your issued-at-birth private key (or upon being granted citizenship). You vote with the public key, along with all other government forms--you fill out and memorize the fingerprint, you are the only one who possesses a copy of the private key to sign it. It's not valid unless it's signed.

Select some Law makers via Lottery like in Belgium

[NewYork]

Just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa we should elect some Law makers via lottery
https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Do-you-support-MLAs-MPs-being-selected-via-lottery-like-in-Belgium

How I would use computers to fix the vote

[DrChandra]

Blockchain the votes, so the results are public, and anyone can check their own vote, but no one else can determine how someone voted.

Good enough for money, but not my vote?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but I completely think that digital voting *could* be done in a way where fraud isn't possible, with a paper trail, and securely. Just stick to keeping it extremely simple so it can be extremely hardened, and open-source.

Do all you who think digital would be ripe with fraud understand that just about all of us already trust our money with a computer? We trust prescriptions with computers. We trust nuclear safety with them. We trust just about everything these days to a computer.... but not an election?

Just doesn't smell right to trust a computer with your money but not an election.

Chits

[WeezulDK]

I would use chits with a specific weight, that you write the number of the candidate on the chit, which is then fed through a computerized counter that reads the number on the chit, into a weighed container clearly labelled for the candidate's number. You obtain a chit by verifying your identity using your state-issued ID or other recognized form of identifying information to affirm you are a legal voter in that election. You now have 3 specific ways of security. If the weight is off, you recount the chits by weight and autofeed through a counter like sorting coins. The feeder would sort out the ones that are mis-marked as well, and also can validate against the number of voters who recieved chits. The individuals vote is never recorded to a specific person

Get politicians that don't suck

[foxy19041968]

Use computers the ones connected to fMRI machine and scan the brains of politicians to make sure they aren't Sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies, because as it so happens popularity contests are almost always won by Sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies. They tell you whatever you want to hear and they stab their competitor in the back. Sound like anyone you know????? It's the reason why government is the most hostile work environment on the planet. Alarm bells should be ringing when the people whose job is to take responsibility stop wanting to do their job for fear of being stabbed in the back. Now the only way to fix it is to scan all their brains and kick out all the sociopaths with narcissistic tendencies. Return the work environment to something more sane.

Multiple problems require multiple fixes.

[jd]

1. Gerrymandering.

I'd not use a computer for this. I'd double the number of people elected and divide the seat between the first and second place person in each election in accordance with their percentage of the vote. So someone with 80% of the vote gets 80% of the seat and represents 80% of the people. Since the first two places generally represent 96-99% of the voters, virtually all voters get represented. Fairly. Unlike the present system, when it's quite possible that 45% get represented.

I'd probably also switch to a system where you have ten points and divide those between the candidates, no more than 7 points on any one candidate.

2. Location of voting.

You vote in the election in the State you are registered in, no matter what voting station you are at. That increases accessibility. I'd also allow for mobile voting stations, so people out in the middle of nowhere can vote.

The price for that is that I'd make voting mandatory for anyone in the continental US, optional for any eligible voter elsewhere. Overseas voters would not be using forms, they'd use the same voting system as everyone else and their votes would be counted at the same time. That way, there are no "accidents".

3. Eligibility.

Anyone who is alive and was born in, was naturalized in, or is living in, the US should have the right to vote. The incompetence of State authorities, the destruction of records, etc, are not my concern. If States cannot be trusted to know who is eligible, then make everyone eligible. It is better that ten guilty go free than to have one innocent person suffer.

This makes computer voting essential because the only way to get secure voting stations everywhere is to not rely on heavy physical security.

4. Proof that one person got one vote

Use voting registration cards to hold a 4096-bit "public" key. A central voting computer carries the corresponding private key. A SHA-3 hash is used to identify which vote goes with which decryption key. A second SHA-3 hash of the vote, with a digital signature for the combined whole, will prove the vote has not been tampered with.

Votes would be transmitted in encrypted form from the voting station to a proxy server at the polling station. It cannot be decrypted there, as there's no decryption key present. It is then reliably multicast to the central computer and to independent observers. The reason for the proxy is to break any timing attack that could be used to identify who cast which encrypted vote. Reliable multicast, such as NORM, guarantees all observers and the central machine received the vote.

The voting computers, proxy and central computer would need to be open source software and open source hardware, with the software proven correct in both source and binary form. All would need to be Trusted Computers (A1+) and tamper-proof. The central computer should also be physically inaccessible.

The central computer would generate the cards, retaining the private keys and issuing only the public keys with hash. These would be fed directly into a second computer with the voter details. This would simply print the details onto the card and seal it. This way, the central computer doesn't know who the private key is associated with and the secondary computer doesn't know the private key.

(The decryption key should be printed onto parchment paper using indelible ink, together with the hash. Printouts should be fed directly into a storage bin capable of holding around 500 million pages. This should be in a distinct room that cleared individuals can enter in pairs, for maintenance. Ideally, the server room should not be entered at all, ever, once the machine is running.)

The second computer would have the name and address of every person over the age of 16 (which I'd make the new voting age) either resident in the US or born in the US regardless of where they were resident.

This sealed card would be handed off to the voting officials to mail off. They would need to certify whose card had been s