Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.
The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.
It's essentially a modernized, technical jargon couched version of Jim Crow laws.
The Swiss, as the article notes, are doing it for the opposite reason - for secure e-voting for people with disabilities or who are not able to be physically present to vote.
- Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have'
- South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail
I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.
Until we all have government-issued public keys or something, there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if I'm wrong here)
In Canada, at both federal and provincial levels, you walk up to a desk and identify yourself, are crossed off a list, and handed a paper ballot. You go behind a screen, mark an X on the ballot, fold it up, take it back out to another desk, and put it in the box. It's extraordinarily simple.
> At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database.
Well, that kind of fraud is a different issue from someone reading the database and figuring out who someone voted for (you just... don't record identities in the database).
Absolutely. Any time something is centralized it becomes an irresistible target for unlimited numbers of bad actors and the bar to entry for remote anonymous access makes it a much easier target. Anonymous access to paper ballots means someone is going to be on at least a handful of cameras and has to bypass many security systems so if cheating happens it is because the people gathering the votes want it that way.
We have a long and storied history of coming up with extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much higher rates of criminality then now.
Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from the church, etc.
People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to their current decision making. Any consequence that relies on people being able to model a future problem against their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more horrible punishments to overcome the losses in transmission.
I think the goal should be the smallest possible functioning consequence, which is possible by being close to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up, but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am very confident this will prevent then from doing it again much more efficiently then a distant jail sentence. (among all the other ways too, there's never one clean action to take to solve problems on a societal level)
I agree that today there are people that fit this description. Low IQ combined with drugs both prescription and illicit can nullify impulse control but maybe that is OK in this case. It might not hurt society has a whole to remove them from the gene pool, though the benefits may not be measurable for a few generations. Today these people are caught and then released thus allowing them to harm and kill even more poeple. I am only suggesting to release them differently and let their god(s) judge them instead of our inept legal system. We just need to get better at catching them before they reproduce.
Your counterpoint about in-person paper ballots doesn't seem relevant to the thread's article or the gp you're responding to.
The article is about digital electronic voting. The voters are remote and can't walk up to a desk. Quote: >the problem with its e-voting pilot, open to about 10,300 locals living abroad and 30 people with disabilities,
The electronic voting system and database is clearly the context of the gp's quote: >I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, ...
The article also has a further link to another piece about e-vote database manipulation can't be detected: https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/12/swiss_evoting_system_...
isn't that racist? i've heard it repeated but i'm not so sure
It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.
We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.
- Enter queue
- A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer
- They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet
- Go to private booth, fill out scantron
- Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)
The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.
For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted.
As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).
So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale.
In the United States, it hasn't been. The article you link to doesn't even mention the United States. To do it on a large scale requires cooperation from the people running the election, and the US isn't (yet) that corrupt.
The US system isn't completely robust against it, and perhaps some day it will be a problem. But right now there is no evidence that it is a problem, and all of the attempts to "fix" it are clearly aimed at preventing some people from voting.
That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away.
You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate your ID/address/etc later.
You can try voting again at other stations, especially since they don't require ID. You just need the name of somebody assigned to that station, who hasn't already voted. There is a signature check if there is a suspicion, but that's rarely done.
But that's practically never done. The risks are too high, and to have a significant impact would require enough votes to make it certain you'd get caught.
If cheating is difficult to prove then we would expect only minimal evidence even with material amounts of cheating.
When we're not sure how well the TSA is doing, we try to send prohibited items through, and infamously get abysmal results [1]. IMO the reason we don't see more election fraud cases is because *we're not looking for it*, so we just see the obvious cases like when dead people vote or people brag about voting twice publicly.
Until we actually do some "red teaming" of elections, we won't ever know. But the reality is, if we actually did, the results would reduce credibility of numerous prior elections.
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...
Instead, efforts to clean up the voter rolls never cause people to get caught. But they do cause many legitimate voters to lose the ability to vote.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/03/09/ice-arrests-criminal-ill...
Edit: But as a comment somewhere else in the tree noted ,,And if it could tell you that then a third party could force you to reveal that you voted "right" as agreed before.`` - I guess everything's trade-offs.
You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that:
1) all valid votes were counted
2) no invalid votes were added
3) the totals for each candidate is correct
And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting
Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard them in the trash?).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-o...
Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the national identity card, which essentially is government issued public/private keys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though, especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-running users of online voting in the world)
https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e9...
In these systems the voter cannot verify that their vote was secret as they cannot understand, and much less verify the voting machine.
> And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for.
Which is good for preventing the sale of votes, but keeps things obscure in a magical and correct box.
How can I tell the machine didn't alter my vote if it cannot tell me, and just me, who I voted for? The global sanity checks are worthless if the machine changed my vote as I entered it.
Paper ballots with mutually suspicious representatives of all parties watching themselves during handling and counting is the only way to go for big things like parliament/presidential elections and national referendums where, in the worst case, the greatest of all matters are at stake. And foolproof method for voting is most needed when the levels of trust are at the lowest.
Isn't that the whole point of having ballot secrecy ? Even with paper vote you cannot tell which ballot is yours (or at least, a recognisable ballot is voided during the counting).
You have to be registered and must vote within your electorate, so your name appears on a certified list for that electorate and each voting location has that list. When you vote, they strike your name from the list.
After the election, the lists from these locations are compared. Anyone who votes twice has their name struck twice, and are investigated for electoral fraud.
Whether people know if you voted or not is immaterial, as voting is mandatory in Australia.
Works pretty well for a paper system.
That's actually pretty common in Europe. The Spanish DNI (national identity card) has a chip these days, which gives you an authenticated key pair for accessing digital services.
In the pilot project for digital voting, that identity is only used to authenticate the user, and then an anonymous key needs generated that can be used to cast the final vote.
This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.
This is true, but its used in other countries as well, as it's a simple, effective, low-tech, affordable process.
Most notably in India https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/style/india-elections-pur...
but also in many other countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink#International_use
It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...
This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.)
Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.
Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.
A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not everybody, but it is much better than any hypothetical digital system
First you must explain to them why the former is not an example of the latter.
> eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones.
I suggest you explain the verifiability of evoting systems to your grandma or your friend with an art degree. Then ask them to explain the same to their peer while you just listen. Then repeat the exercise with paper voting. You will see the difference.
Even I as someone who would have the skillset to understand why it has to be correct would have an easier time verifying a paper ballot process than ensuring that network connected complexity behemoth was running the program I checked for weeks correctly in any moment during an election. And even if you had a way to guarantee that, who tells me this was the case in the whole country or thst evidence wasn't faked a millisecond before I checked?
Meanwhile with paper and poll watchers from each party it is very easy to find actual irregularities and potential tampering — trust is a gradual thing with paper while it is much more binary with digital. If there is a sign for the digital machine being untrustworthy you can throw the whole result into the bin.
There is always, so you would just always count the ballots.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...
The distance between the election and the taking of the office is often months. I just don't understand why electronics need to be involved at all in this system.
Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.
And of course controlled vote or paid vote...
E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.
If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-German, good luck with that :D.
Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.
Technically you don't even need that, you just need to be able to count, i.e. find the successor to a given number.
That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested people voting anyway.
Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of Democracy process.
I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there, but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.
I think this is fine if it also then means that obtaining a qualifying ID is treated as a no-cost and highly-accessible right for all citizens.
This is where such arguments tend to get stuck in the US. If you require proof of citizenship, but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive, then you are effectively restricting voting access for citizens. A measure to place stricter qualifications on voting access needs to also carefully consider and account for providing access to all citizens.
The US is a geographically very large place with worse public transportation options compared to many other countries, and with that comes differences in economic and accessibility considerations for things like "Just go to your county's office and get a qualifying ID."
This is essentially what the Supreme Court said when they upheld Indiana's Voter ID law in 2008 [1]:
> The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies with the requirements of SEA 483. The fact that most voters already possess a valid driver’s license, or some other form of acceptable identification, would not save the statute under our reasoning in Harper, if the State required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. But just as other States provide free voter registration cards, the photo identification cards issued by Indiana’s BMV are also free. For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.
It's the reason why all states with voter ID laws have the option to obtain a no-cost photo ID at the DMV or equivalent.
Even a RealID compliant ID is not direct proof of citizenship.
Others in the comment chain have talked about localities with very few DMV officers per capita in some districts and appointment wait times of over a month. If we are going to require such a step to be eligible to vote, we need to hold states and municipalities to a high standard of providing an adequate level of service for all citizens.
Also, it’s a pretty silly thing anyways. I don’t even drink and I still need my driver’s license quite a few times every year.
The WI constitution enshrines the ability to vote. So you may think it's silly and for 99% of people it may be silly, but if anyone is prevented from voting because there's not a reasonable way for them to get a license, their rights are being infringed.
Coincidental how these might be Democratic leaning areas in Republican states.
But anyway, none of that is the real core issue with the idea of voter ID. The real issue is that there are many living Americans who were born in jurisdictions that steadfastly refused to issue birth certificates to Black people.
It's pretty free. You sit down at your table, fill out your ballot, and drop it in the mailbox. You don't even need a stamp. (In some jurisdictions.)
This sounds made up but limiting access to “free” services is not unheard of. This topic has been litigated to death. There are no new arguments. If you are in favor of voter ID laws you are simply ignorant.
[1] (Though mass disenfranchisement is almost certainly the actual purpose of the law, not security.)
If they can't put up some minimal effort, what was their vote worth? I don't think the laziest folks probably vote in good policy.
I'm not worried about lazy people voting. I'm worried about crazy people voting, and not having enough votes from sensible people to drown them out.
Do you have a source for this because I have seen very few laws like this and runs counter to the overt intention of these laws
https://www.dhs.gov/archive/real-id-public-faqs
For example, DACA recipients, temporary protected status refugees, and citizens of states in free association with the USA (Micronesia/Marshall Islands/Palau) that are in the USA are all eligible for Real ID.
"...based on HSI Special Agent training and experience, REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship."
This is completely unnecessary.
We establish citizenship, very reliably, at time of registration. This is on of the main jobs of the registrar of voters. They have plenty of time to look up the details of the person and establish citizenship (and intentionally lying in this process is a serious crime).
We then establish identity at the time of voting, again, very reliably.
Intentional voter impersonation or voting when not eligible is vanishingly rare in the US.
At no point during that process is there presentation of proof of citizenship.
Source: actually ran a fucking election precinct. Non-citizens aren’t casting ballots illegally.
Also just generally it's a severe federal crime to vote illegally, so people who are here illegally aren't out en masse publicly tying their identity to federal felonies.
There's not been a reliable audit to show the extent to which this happens (probably not enough to affect even local elections), but to say that it isn't happening is just a lie.
He should go to jail and yet his existence is not proof that there are hoards of African deportees voting in state and federal elections.
At that last part, Election Day identification, is not even that important, since the same person can't vote twice. So if you impersonate another person that will be quickly detected. It's not a useful strategy to alter the outcome of an election.
These kind of fundamental changes require years of preparation. Either Trump is an incompetent moron or he has ulterior motives.
Requiring poor people to pay a hefty fee, which they probably don't have, to get a passport seems a fairly competent way to go about making sure poor people don't vote to me.
If I don't want poor people voting, then attaching a fee to voting doesn't mean I'm incompetent. It means I'm smart enough to know poor people don't have money.
By the way, I think all of this is horrible. Everyone should be equal before the law and should have their vote count without having to pay for that right. I'm just pointing out that this is a really good way to eliminate the vote of the poor.
In a functioning democracy, voting is sacred. It must be treated as THEE core, fundamental right of every person under its care.
To violate this sacred tenet should be immediate grounds for exile. If you can't respect the ONE CORE tenet, or are incapable of, then there is not space for you in this society.
I completely agree and I don't think there is a fair argument to suggest otherwise.
I absolutely support ID to vote provided that everyone who is eligible and wants to vote can get such an ID and vote without hassle.
I don't support most attempts to pass Voter ID laws because I am wary that they would not actually result in that outcome.
Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier?
What constitutes an ID being expensive?
Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?
In The Matrix (1999) there's a scene where Agent Smith explicitly remarks that Neo has an SSN as proof he's a law-abiding citizen in a white-collar job.
[1] when it was made a requirement to claim tax deductions for dependent children. Even today, if you don't want the tax break, you can opt out at the cost of ruining your child's life!
Most of those nations have a mandatory national ID, so everyone already has proof of citizenship. The US and UK are very much outliers in having vocal and successful resistance to the implementation of a national ID card.
And what are the fees for these IDs, something you conveniently are leaving out (hint: mostly not free)?
In some places like Illinois, an ID is required to exercise the rights of people but not the rights of citizens (FOID required to bear guns, but ID not required for vote).
In places like Arizona, it's the exact opposite. You can bear or conceal guns without an ID but you need an ID to vote.
Vermont is the only state I know of with any consistency on lack of ID requirements that convey non-ID citizens to also have the right of people. You can conceal guns and vote without ID.
Not the OP, but except for passports (and passport cards)... there isn't really any federal-level ID in the US (and passport booklets/cards are expensive, just a bit over $100 IIRC).
The nearest equivalent in the state level are driver's licenses, which are also on the expensive side considering the ancillary costs (because it's a driver's license, not just an identification card). This is also the reason why US-centric companies like PayPal, for this exact reason, accepts a driver's license as proof of identification (obviously where not otherwise prohibited by local laws).
Some (New York for example) do have an ID (called a non-DL ID, that's how embedded driver's license is in the US), but most states do not have a per se ID.
> What constitutes an ID being expensive?
Developing countries, rather ironically, issue their IDs for free? Okay, indirectly paid by taxes, but there's no upfront cost. The above-mentioned identity documents have a clear cost attached to them.
> How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?
Cannot talk about other countries (because there is an ID system and it's not a controversial affair to them), but instead I'll answer with a reflection of the US system.
Unfortunately, American ID politics are hard, mainly due to concerns of surveillance, but I think (only my opinion) because some of them want those historically disenfranchised (even if a fully native-born US citizen) de facto disenfranchised. This means that there is no uniform and freely-issued identification system in the US (or even a requirement to do that at the state level). Unfortunately, this... is a tough nut to crack, politically-speaking.
I haven't researched this thoroughly, but what state will not issue an ID that is equivalent in every way to a driver's license except that it isn't a license to drive? I just checked Mississippi, Wyoming, South Dakota, and West Virginia, all of which do, so clearly being rural, poor, or both isn't enough to stop states from doing it. (The detailed politics are, as you say, a mess.)
Out of curiosity, do you have a source or list for this? My own home state and those around me that I've spot checked all have a state ID available as an alternative to a driver's license. My understanding was that this is the case for most states.
Unless I've misunderstood you and you meant a state ID that is completely separate from a driver's license to the point that people with a DL would have one?
How it works in my country : my electoral card is freely sent to my address when I register to my voting office. I can vote with it, or with an official ID, as long as I'm in the correct place. The only moment I need my ID is to cast a vote on behalf of someone who identified me as a 'surrogate'.
If you're talking about this as a requirement for voting, then anything greater than $0 is too expensive since it smells like a poll tax.
Not everyone has ready access to proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. It gets even more difficult if your current legal name doesn't match your birth name, e.g. if you took your husband's name.
Not every eligible voter has or needs a government issued ID. For example, retired people who don't drive. For them to get to the DMV to get an ID just to vote would be a challenge.
The US has large rural areas where government offices are hours away.
All of this adds up to significant barriers to eligible voters. There's a reason even the GOP isn't bending over backward to pass the SAVE Act.
People in or near poverty are going to be disproportionately affected by those conditions.
And just getting to the DMV does not necessarily mean you can get an ID that counts as proof of citizenship. There is no standard federal citizen ID in the US. A basic state ID or driver's license is not proof of citizenship. Even a RealID compliant ID is not a direct proof of citizenship, so depending on how strict the voting requirements are it may not be adequate.
Additionally, just over 1% of adult U.S. citizens do not have any form of government-issued photo identification, which amounts to nearly 2.6 million people.[1]
[1] https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Voter%20I...
This a very is a poor analogy that you have here.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/will-save-act-allo...
Which is why I'm pretty sure it's not gonna pass. Both republicans and democrats depend heavily on mass votes from, let's just say, a lot of people who are, generally speaking, not the sort to have passports.
This would be less of a problem if the US had some sort of national ID issued by right, but we don't, and the same people pushing for requiring ID for voting would be against creating one. They hate the idea of a national ID.
My state does all elections by mail now. How would this even work?
All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?
Trump told Congress to ban most mail ballots.
> All this is on top of the fact that elections are run by the states, not the national government. Would such a law even be constitutional?
Experts said no. But this Supreme Court surprised experts before. And the constitution said Congress could decide elections of Congress. They have the power. They need an explanation enough people would accept.
Elections are run by the several states.
Restricting voting to people with passports and who happen to have a birth certificate handy is going to make the first election with the requirement weird as hell and probably backfire on Republicans if their goal is winning at any cost.
Requiring some form of ID that your state is willing to accept as good enough is a very different beast than proof of citizenship.
I'm not sure how it is in Switzerland, but in Canada I will vote for maybe three candidates in five years. And I don't mean three visits to the polls (though it's usually that), I mean three actual checkbox ticks for people to count. They're paper ballots and the counting is done that night. I think if we were stuck voting for like forty different races every two years it would be a very different story and a lot of what you say would resonate with me more. Except the voter registration stuff.
We're pretty flexible about registration up here and it works. My wife one year showed up with some mail that had her name/address, and me vouching for her. Though I think a lot of the luxuries of democracy are most easily enjoyed with a trusting, cooperative culture that isn't constantly wound up about being cheated by the others.
The problem with e-voting is that it is much harder to validate. My paper ballot rests at a community building where it will be counted on the day of the vote. I can understand the process from start to finish in physical terms. Throw in a USB stick and anything could happen. It is possible we will never know what went wrong here.
Even if it were a holiday, people may not be able to travel or take time off from obligations. There’s no obligation to drive 2 hours to vote, to fly back if you work in another country, or to go get a new birth certificate because Real ID doesn’t prove citizenship even though you provide citizenship documents to it when you get one…
I’ve heard of a lot of takes here about what we should do for voting to make it “more secure” but all of this is actually a solution for a problem we just don’t have.
The appropriate time to verify citizenship is the one that already happens: during registration. Poll workers only need to verify who you are and that you're registered.
Isn't this just a solution in search of a problem though? Multiple investigations have discovered absolutely minuscule amount of non-citizen voting in US elections. It's something that seems reasonable on its face but lacks any purpose and comes with an ulterior motive that it is part of the made up GOP talking points of a "stolen election" and "illegals voting".
But there seems to be either no political will, or some issues with the practical implementations. There were some municipal experiments here and there, and then just… crickets. Anyone knows what happened to those efforts?
https://www.sos.mn.gov/elections-voting/register-to-vote/reg...
When voters are voting for things, for example a tax levy to fund a new school, or for who will be their state or federal congressional representatives, it's important that the voters in that school district or in that congressional district are the ones voting for their representatives or for the bills or initiatives that affect them. This isn't quite as important for national elections, gubernatorial races, or for the senate at the federal level, but it's obviously incredibly important the more local you get.
Without voter registration, that model breaks down. Even mundane things like how much staff and equipment should be at a polling location is not easy to figure out when you don't know how many voters you'll have. If you haven't worked as a poll worker it's really enlightening to learn about how the process works and a great way to meet your neighbors.
Go and try to figure out how to do this from scratch. Imagine your house burned down and you need to start with "nothing".
If your parents are still alive you can use them to bootstrap the process of getting those vital documents (or if you're married that can be another semi viable path).
Pitty if you don't have those resources. Furthermore it might get complicated for any partner who adopts their other partners last name (were talking about getting the documents, before you can get some sort of verified ID).
The reality is we don't have a lot of instances of "voter fraud" committed by people who aren't citizens (see: https://www.facebook.com/Louisianasos/posts/secretary-of-sta... as an example) . And the amount of voter fraud we do have is very small (and ironically committed by citizens see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio... for some examples).
> I am in favor of in-person voting
Again, the size and dispersion of the American population makes this odious. Dense urban areas will face lines (they already do) and many of them (Chicago) have moved to early voting because spreading things out over many days is just more effective. Meanwhile places like Montana (where population density is in people per square mile) make travel to a location burdensome.
I get why you feel the way you do, but the data, the reality of America, makes what you desire unnecessary and impractical. Feelings are a terrible reason to erect this barrier when it makes little sense to do so.
But then they showed how easy it is to hack and we live in a world with evil countries like the US, China and Russia who want to destroy our way of life.
The only thing voter ID prevents is voter impersonation. It prevents you from finding someone else's name and polling place, going there, pretending to be that person, and submitting a vote on their behalf. But that threat doesn't really scale. Even if you assume no one at the polling places notice you coming to vote over and over under different names, a single person could probably only do this a few dozen times on election day. To scale that you would need more people; and every person you add to the scheme increases the odds of someone slipping up or getting caught. But the real issue is if any of the people you are impersonating try to vote! While election officials don't record what people voted for, they do record who voted, and the ballot counting process will automatically note that people voted multiple times. So you would have to figure out some way to gather a database of a large number of people you know aren't going to vote, and get a bunch of people to turn up at a bunch of polling places under those names. It's just not practical to do, when elections are decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes.
> how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)
The devil is in the details. I don't trust that the groups drafting Voter ID legislation are doing so in good faith. For example, North Dakota passed a voter ID law years ago. It stated that you needed a valid state-issued ID that included a street address. Sounds fine, right? The problem is that most homes on Native American reservations don't actually have street addresses. Tribal members use P.O. boxes for mail, and that P.O. box is on their driver's licenses. This was brought up when the law was proposed, but it passed anyway. The Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux tribes had to sue in federal court. They were eventually successful, but it took years, and in the meantime the 2018 midterms were held with many Native Americans literally unable to vote.
See https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806083852/north-dakota-and-na...
Why?
> I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections)
How do other countries run elections to overcome their racially motivated systemic voter suppression?
> and there are certainly things to discuss there
This is a laughable understatement.
> but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society.
I think this is naive. You are attempting to force an outcome without understanding the cause. Systemic racially motivated voter suppression is an undeniable reality in American politics. Voter ID is a clear example of exactly that. It is used to disenfranchise minority voters. This is clear established fact.
There is zero evidence of any voter fraud happening that would be eliminated by additional voter ID.
This is a serious topic that requires you educate yourself on reality. I suggest you take your advice above and touch reality, you are overly digitalized if you think voter ID has any merit at all.
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
From Wikipedia [1]:
> A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project.
You'll get there Switzerland, it can be done. It is safer and faster.
But I think that the main reason is that Brazil's elections were a lot dirtier and a lot more unreliable than Switzerland's.
What I mean is that the push towards e-voting is much stronger in countries with unreliable elections, because e-voting is harder to tamper than the crude ways you can defraud paper ballots.
Switzerland's and other organized countries have elections that are "good enough", so the push towards e-voting is probably not that strong.
Is the "leapfrog" concept. Sometimes it is easier to adopt newer technologies in places where the existing ones are horrible. Other examples: electronic payment systems, solar panels and EVs in India and Africa.
But in continental countries like Brazil it makes a lot of sense. It is cheaper, faster and safer.
> E-voting can be hacked from the other side of the world, because it happens on computers
How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a computer that isn't even online? True, the transmission of computed results is made online, but keeping that safe is trivial, banks do it.
E-voting in this case means that they can vote from their computer, ipad or mobile phone. They are connected to the internet.