And indeed, the way it's done somewhere else on this planet is you show up, vote, get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll and vote a second time, and that's all there is to that.
In places with more modern technology, instead of relying on ink on thumbs, we can just have a computerized system informing all the voting precincts that John Doe has now voted at Precinct X, perhaps with a face photo in case someone alleges fraud.
We just had an election in BC, Canada, and the way it worked here is that everyone has a "home" polling location which is responsible for ensuring that their vote is counted once and only once.
If the distributed system is not partitioned, you can show up to vote anywhere and they tell your home precinct that you've voted; then during vote counting the precinct where you voted tells your home precinct "add the following to your vote totals".
If the system is partitioned -- either from network outages or remote polling locations or mail-in ballots -- then your ballot goes into an envelope and is physically sent to your home precinct in the week following the election, to be verified and included in the count.
If the network is connected, the first time you vote succeeds and marks you as having voted; subsequent attempts fail because they know you've already voted.
If the network is not connected, your three remote ballots go into envelopes marked "dh2022" and in the week following the election they are physically transported to your home polling location, at which point they see that you tried to vote three times, set those ballots aside, and call the police.
In the Netherlands at least, you just get a voting card sent to you by mail, and you have to hand that in to vote. Since you just have a single card, you can only vote once.
How does the electoral commission knows where to send the voting card? Does the voter need to register with some electoral commission (governmental agency)?
Unless you get someone else's card and forge their signature on the back side, which is a permission form indicating that you can vote on their behalf; I don't believe there's enough checks and balances in place for this voting-on-behalf-of system, but then again I don't know what checks and balances there are.
This is what is done in essentially all of the Western world (except USA and the UK) and it works just fine with free and fair elections and peaceful transfers of power.
Why would you assume that actual election ink is as easily washable as that? Surely other people thought about the problem at hand for more than a minute, right?
It actually stains fingernails in such a way that the ink only truly disappears when the nail grows.
From Wikipedia:
> Election stain typically stays on skin for 72–96 hours, lasting 2 to 4 weeks on the fingernail and cuticle area. The election ink used puts a permanent mark on the cuticle area, which only disappears with the growth of the new nail. It can take up to 4 months for the stain to be replaced completely by new nail growth. Stains with concentrations of silver nitrate higher than 18% have been found to have no added effect on stain longevity, as silver nitrate does not have a photosensitive reaction with live skin cells. This means that the stain will fade as new skin grows.
This reminds me of college chemistry lab. The nitric acid was always interesting because when that got on your skin, it turned yellow, permanently. For skin, this would wear off quickly (on fingers at least), but if it got on your fingernails, those would turn yellow and it would never come out, until the nail had grown out.
