Best comment here.
I don’t know why everyone just lets StevenR posts his political stuff and nobody says stop.
@StevenR: Read your propaganda news but stop spreading them under false pretences of a technical thread. You think you are smarter than 9 well educated judges go ahead and study law. 3 of them were appointed by Trump, 6 Republicans. Not even progressing to the merits of the case just speaks for itself on this matter.
The statements in your video are a hoax. Yes someone was hearing what the justices said only regarding the Texas case because Roberts was screaming. Yeah highly likely…not. The Justices were not meeting in person. They had a videoconference call so it would be higly unlikely that someone heard through the walls what Alito or someone else supposedly said but did not here them talking about other cases.
Furthermore, there are 6 Republican justices so Roberts could not have decided alone.
It is just not half the country or a margin. It is just not close to 50%. Accept that. You will see in 6 months life will just go on in the US. And all the donations Trump sacked up will be used to pay off his debts.
Enterprisy and Donotsellyourfreedom need to get over their sensitive hurt feelings when people write things they do not agree with. We need context to make some points. So to those two individuals here, please take your obviously hurt feelings and piss off if you can’t act like grown-ups when you read things that you want to take offense to, instead of just quietly telling yourself that you disagree. I would rather not discuss the politics here outside of the few examples I gave for context to the salient technical issues which have now been well illustrated. Somebody quite well situated politically is telling some pretty big lies publicly around this election in-general. And it’s not just a few individuals doing it. The lying is clearly institutionalized accross many individuals in high positions. For the purposes of this thread, it doesn’t really matter who is right and who is wrong. I guess now that we can agree about how closed software in polling places causes discord. So point made.
I think the people in the Netherlands may be doing things right. It is interesting to discuss issues like blockchain to speculate about how things might be changed in the future for the better. But then again we haven’t really improved upon the wheel much since someone in the stone age or earlier invented the wheel. Maybe paper ballots and manual tabulation will prevail as the preferred method well in to the future as long as computer systems like Dominion do not destroy our basic freedoms first.
I never heard about any changes in the number of people voting because of the change back to paper and pencil voting. The last graph on the following page is showing the attendance rate since 1946 (opkomstpercentage verkiezingen vanaf 1946):
Regarding the confidence in the process:
I think the majority of the people in the Netherlands would and did trust the voting machines. I have never heard of any fraud with voting machines in the Netherlands. However, more tech savvy people understood the risk of voting computers that could not be fully inspected and that are impossible to check by an average citizen. This is why they started a campaign against voting machines.
Some people are complaining about the manual process, because it takes “so long” before the results are known, or they see the manual voting and vote counting as backwards. In practice the election results are usually known late in the night of election day or the next day.
One political party tried to allow for experimentation with voting machines again, and submitted a law proposal for this in 2012. This proposal was rejected by the parliament in 2016.
For more details (in Dutch), see:
Certain foreign countries are becoming more adventurous in this regard, so I wouldn’t rule it out.
One general consideration is the complexity of the voting system. If the voting system is simple then it can be counted manually in a reasonable amount of time. But then people say that the voting system itself is unfair in some way, so the government makes changes to the voting system with the effect that the voting system becomes more complex, making it more likely that there will be pressure for the votes to be done and/or counted electronically.
You are right Kieran. And I think the reason is political. Typically one side drives for everyone to be more included which is a worthy desire. But in the process of including everyone they want to let literally everyone vote and ideally, more than once in some cases. That includes non-citizens, people without any ID, people who vote late, and sometimes even dead people. The other side wants strict integrity which can make it more difficult for some legitimate voters to cast their votes if too much technology is involved. Technology can be used to insure almost absolute integrity for those who possess a state-issued ID. Every ballot could be issued with a unique bar code on it that doesn’t necessarily need to link back to the individual voter but that prevents fraudulent votes from being counted in the machines. But in the process it is easy to disenfranchise the poor and less educated who do not understand the technology and who fear it. Taken to one extreme we have a free-for-all of egregious cheating from the masses. Taken to the other extreme, maybe the vote might tend to include a disproportionate number of mostly the more educated middle and upper class people. One of our lawmakers here in Arizona said “hell no” when someone proposed putting unique barcodes on each ballot.
I don’t know if this stance is completely fair to everyone or not. But if a person can’t vote on time or if they don’t have a state issued ID, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
A few people made good points earlier about my blockchain idea that I thought were very valid. Blockchain in voting might work well in the short term but might be doomed to failure in the future. Eventually I think that Moores law will kick-in and put a stop to significant growth in the computing power growth needed to keep the cryptography going. In the mean time someone with a quantum computer might be able to hack some elections.