Subject: Re: ID Cards, For What?
No foolin'...

In this era where people TYPE all day, purchase groceries with credit / debit cards that require no signature at all or collect it via a completely foreign rubber tipped "pen" on a capacitative screen which bears NO physical resemblance to operating a pen or pencil to paper, signatures are completely worthless. There are times I might have trouble recognzing one of my prior signatures at gunpoint.

From a logical perspective, it makes sense that the public has a right to ensure someone presenting a ballot is a legitimate voter from THAT particlar physical district and that something like a photo ID that can provide a high confidence / rapid confirmation of identity makes sense. But...

It also makes sense that in a world that operates 24x7 and many people WORK during daylight hours, if we aren't going to have a true election DAY (where polls are operated for 24 hours) and there will always be cases where voters must travel and be away from their local community on election day, we will always have "non-present" voting. Once that is recognized, there will always be some uncertainty about the connection between human and ballot. We can ensure a legit ballot is only sent to a contact address associated with a legit voter but it can never be proven with an anonymous ballot that personA filled in ballotA previously sent to personA's address of addressA.

The question is whether the logical or actual risk of fraud with that mechanism OUTWEIGHS the additional number of LEGITIMATE voters who remained able to vote in the election. If absentee ballot mechanisms used in a city of 1,000,000 voters allows 20,00 extra citizens to vote legitimately and results in 500 cases where ballotA is filled in by personB, then them's the breaks. Obviously, the GOAL is for fraud-free ballots. But given the equally prioritized goal of anonymous ballots, CERTAINTY is not possible with "not-present" voting. So the goal is to maximize PARTICIPATION at a MINIMUM risk of fraud. Given the choice between two sets of balloting / voting rules that

A) result in 65% voter turnout with 0.01% fraud
B) result in 69% voter turnout with 0.01% fraud

B is the better choice even though a 0.01% fraud rate against a higher base will result in (GASP) more "actual" fraud in absolute numbers.

YouTuber Tom Scott created a great video for the channel Computerphile back in 2014 explaining the difficulties of designing a PERFECT electronic voting system that could ELIMINATE fraud while still satisfying the requirement of providing an anonymous ballot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Best part of this video at 2:26:

And I know immediately that someone is going to want to comment about checksums or crypto, which is great except now you have to trust the software that's checking that hash. Or, more likely, the one person that's checking it for you. You've just moved the problem. And if you're thinking, "I could verify that", then turn your brain the other way, and think "How could I break that?" because there are trillions of dollars - that's not an exaggeration - trillions riding on the result of big elections, and that's an incredible motivation. If you're coming up with sneaking ways to get around it, believe me, so are lots of other people. It might be one angry techie but it might be and entire political party, or the huge corporations who want one party to win, or entire nation states who want one party to win. And all that is assuming you're even allowed to verify the software that's running, which you never are because plugging in unknown USB sticks into a voting machine is a bad idea.

People are forgetting that aspect of our voting process. You don't have to look far around the world to find places where voting is NOT a private process. Places where a VOTE on a BALLOT can be traced to the VOTER and thus yield a path for subtle or not-so-subtle coercion. By the way, the threat of coercion (via physical threats or bribes) is why it is illegal in most states to take a picture in the voting booth of your completed ballot. The idea is to ensure you are collecting "proof" of your vote to satisfy a prior illegal agreement to sell your vote.

You can even look to caucuses used in many states for "voting" processes that are OVERTLY coercive. Since these are viewed as PARTY functions rather than general elections, they are allowed but you'll get a chance to see in 12 days how truly democratic that process is in Iowa, where party leaders coerce everyone to line up for an indicted con-artist.

Tom Scott also posted a follow-up video in 2020 explaining how NOTHING has improved in this space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The current Republican fixation on voter fraud is an attempt to simply squander available oxygen in the public media that could have gone to discussing other far more sinister problems affecting the country. Of course, one of the problems at the top of the list is gerrymandering, which is the ultimate type of voter fraud where politicians get to pick the citizens allowed to vote for them. THAT'S how you win elections. That's why Republican control of state and federal House bodies exceeds 50% (sometimes by large margins) despite Republican POLICIES being unpopular. And as long as the voting public can be distracted from THAT travesty by a litle theatre regarding voter identification, that theatre will continue.


WTH