[smitty1e]

12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters.

However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have:

- Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework?

- Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading?

- How significant in improvement is needful to pay for the switching costs? Twice as good? An order of magnitude?

Because I submit that, for all the virtues we informed types can see in RCV, it is prone to malicious attacks, e.g. flooding the ballot with a bunch of relatively unknown candidates.

Furthermore, if there is any sort of contention involved, the complexities are going to lead to (likely unfounded) claims of tinkering.

I'm a huge fan of the ditt-kuh-pow! (DTTCPOW, the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work):

- Make Election Day a federal holiday

- Paper ballots

- In-person voting except in strictly controlled, marginal cases (e.g. deployed military).

Everyone trading security for convenience is misguided, in my opinion. You want to mark a ballot and cast it in secret so that, whatever you have to say to appease the shrieking neighbor, you and your ballot are as physically secure as possible.

Staff the process so that pollbooks are <5k people. We get it done with ~20 people in my county for 13hrs on election day. ~240 precincts in the county. Not cheap, and yes, exhausting to staff. So, what? Staff, equip and support them and elections, can be a positive experience for all involved.

[Spivak]

Even when you use the digital voting machines it spits out a paper ballot that you deposit into the ballot box so the country already agrees with you.

It's not security vs convenience it's security vs turnout. Our turnout is embarrassingly low, especially on non-presidential election years, we should be expending voting access to methods that have even less friction. If we can conduct banking via an app or website we can vote via an app or website too. We can start talking about reigning it in once we don't have a third of the country not voting.

You deal with the abusive spouse problem by letting an in-person vote override the mail-in ballot while everyone else gets an easy way to vote.

[smitty1e]

Turnout is also a problem, but one needs to ensure that knowledge of non-participation doesn't become proxy votes cast by people In The Know.

Rest assured: any workable angle you can think of an many you have not have already been employed to cheat elections.

This is not a partisan dig; rather, simple reality.

[EdwardDiego]

NZ switched from FPP to to MMP [0] after a few elections where a) the government was formed by a party that achieved <40% of the popular vote and b) parties that received 15 - 20% of the popular vote achieved only a tiny modicum of representation in Parliament.

I'm not sure MMP is the ultimate ideal, but I much prefer it to FPP. It's a very rare government that isn't a coalition government, and while we get the occasional tail wagging the dog moment, we also get a more diverse set of parties in power, and also more diverse representation.

Often what voters want to know before voting is who a party is willing to go into coalition with, there's usually no big surprises (e.g., the righter-wing ACT party and the centre-right (by NZ standards, they're still left of the Democrats at least when measured by public healthcare etc.) National always dance together, Labour and the Greens typically get along via a confidence and supply agreement even if the Greens are not formally in coalition) but then you have New Zealand First, who are openly mercenary about their choices, and the original Maori Party that went into coalition with National which doomed them in the next election.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

[exmadscientist]

FWIW, after living in an all-mail voting state (WA), I never want to go back to voting in person. It is amazing having a couple weeks to mark a ballot at my leisure, do as much research as I want, and then just drop it in a box (or mail it, I guess, but the drop boxes have definitely been more reliable for me).

But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.

[seniorivn]

serious question, how do you know your vote is counted and is not intercepted/counterfeited before that?

[smitty1e]

There will be no problems until Washington is under serious party contention.

Then, suddenly, the weak security of the postal system will look dodgy.

When, as in the CA case, ballots roll in after the polls close and magically ALWAYS flip the decision the same direction, there will be Sudden Shock and Awe.

[throw0101d]

> I'm a huge fan of the ditt-kuh-pow! (DTTCPOW, the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work):

This acronym needs to be more widely deployed.