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The attack on paper voting is not flipping votes, it is invalidating votes. In Chicago, election officers counting the votes used to hide a small piece of penci

by agarden 11y ago

The attack on paper voting is not flipping votes, it is invalidating votes. In Chicago, election officers counting the votes used to hide a small piece of pencil lead under their finger nail. If there were too many Republic votes, they would start putting an extra mark on some of them, thus invalidating the vote because of stray marks. I think the solution is to crowd-source verifying the vote. If every ballot were given a unique number or code, and when the ballot was counted each ballot with who it was counted for as available for download on the web, third parties could verify that the numbers were counted correctly. And each voter now has an anonymous number that he can use to look at how the vote was counted and verify that it was counted correctly. If it wasn't, he complains. The political parties would be happy to urge their loyal constituents to check that their vote was correctly counted and to sue should they have a sufficient number of members claim theirs was wrong.

xnxn 11y ago
Wouldn't this allow a bad actor to coerce a voter into disclosing their anonymous number and revealing how they voted?
- agarden 11y ago
  That is the weakness. It wouldn't just be that their vote would be revealed, though, it would be that then the bad actor could contest the vote, claiming that they were the voter and their vote was counted wrong. But if people were in the habit of destroying their unique code immediately after the results are posted, then they at least have plausible deniability. "No, I burned that piece of paper yesterday. Can't remember what the numbers were."
  - kibibu 11y ago
    If you can trace a vote to a person, through force or otherwise, then you can coerce said person to vote however you like. "Vote for this guy or you're fired" type stuff
    - agarden 11y ago
      You are right. I failed to thoroughly think it through. But I think I would rather have a system where you need to intimidate and coerce people en masse in order to change the vote than a system where you just need to coerce the handful of people who are responsible for counting the vote.
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
I think the best way would be to augment paper ballots with an on site machine vision system that permits votes to be reviewed by the voter and then prints a matrix code on the ballot for future auditing.
alextgordon 11y ago
In the UK the count is done under the supervision of: * The candidates themselves * Journalists * TV cameras * Party representatives * Electoral officials * Anybody else who has a good reason to be there The volunteers doing the counting are not going to risk a long stretch in prison with such a high chance of being caught.
hglman 11y ago
Exactly that. The argument you get against this is that you could say sell your vote and verify to a 3rd party you voted as asked. But frankly I think that is not nearly as bad as hidden vote tampering. Not even close.
- vacri 11y ago
  Worse than selling votes is coercing votes. Being fired because you didn't vote the way the boss likes? Terrible. Verifying votes this way turns a secret ballot into an open ballot, with all the attendant problems. Hidden vote tampering of the pencil-under-the-fingernail variety is a solved problem here in Australia. Each vote count is done by an employee of the electoral commission. They're watched by volunteer scrutineers (plural), provided by the major parties, with each scrutineer looking to maximise their own party's response and distrusting all other parties. You effectively have two opposing meatspace inspectors willing to challenge anything that looks shady. Paper voting isn't perfect, but it's far, far better than any electronic voting system that the general public can use. EDIT: to clarify, with any electronic medium, the only way to confirm that your vote was counted as cast is to cryptographically sign it in some way with a key that's under your control. Even us techies have problems doing that, and the general public could never be expected to do it, especially the socially disadvantaged members. Not even security conference attendees keep up to speed with their cryptographic signing, so how can we expect mere mortals to do it? With paper votes, you confirm that your vote goes into the box as you've marked it. You can then opt to be a scrutineer and watch that box travel to the counting area, and confirm the votes are counted correctly. And has the benefit of having the record independently verified if required. Any form of voting which has a "just trust us on this" stage is not good enough.
reagency 11y ago
Modern paper voting involves a thick black markers, OCR computers, and election monitors from both parties. The 1880s are long ago history.
- eterm 11y ago
  Not in the UK it doesn't. All pencil and human counting here.
- jeltz 11y ago
  Not in Sweden. Here it involves paper, pencils and manual counting. Nothing which could not have been done in the 1880s and we still get a preliminary result a few hours after the elections close.
- slasaus 11y ago
  All paper and pencil in The Netherlands after some techies realized black box voting is a dangerous thing. http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English Although some people really want to get the electronics back so it's an ongoing battle of educating people (even most hackers and others in the security industry that did not think a lot about voting in particular).
NickNameNick 11y ago
In NZ we use GIANT orange felt pens to mark our ballots, good luck hiding one anywhere. I've heard that pencils are sometimes used to prevent an attacker from substituting pens at the polling booth, with modified pens containing disappearing ink, but that seems like a problem better controlled by using new, easily identifiable pens each election. As for serialising the ballot-sheets, that enables a third party to check that a person they coerced into voting a certain way actually did as instructed, which undermines the value of a secret ballot.

by agarden 11y ago

xnxn 11y ago

Wouldn't this allow a bad actor to coerce a voter into disclosing their anonymous number and revealing how they voted?

agarden 11y ago
That is the weakness. It wouldn't just be that their vote would be revealed, though, it would be that then the bad actor could contest the vote, claiming that they were the voter and their vote was counted wrong. But if people were in the habit of destroying their unique code immediately after the results are posted, then they at least have plausible deniability. "No, I burned that piece of paper yesterday. Can't remember what the numbers were."
- kibibu 11y ago
  If you can trace a vote to a person, through force or otherwise, then you can coerce said person to vote however you like. "Vote for this guy or you're fired" type stuff
  - agarden 11y ago
    You are right. I failed to thoroughly think it through. But I think I would rather have a system where you need to intimidate and coerce people en masse in order to change the vote than a system where you just need to coerce the handful of people who are responsible for counting the vote.

kevin_thibedeau 11y ago

I think the best way would be to augment paper ballots with an on site machine vision system that permits votes to be reviewed by the voter and then prints a matrix code on the ballot for future auditing.

alextgordon 11y ago

In the UK the count is done under the supervision of: * The candidates themselves * Journalists * TV cameras * Party representatives * Electoral officials * Anybody else who has a good reason to be there The volunteers doing the counting are not going to risk a long stretch in prison with such a high chance of being caught.

hglman 11y ago

Exactly that. The argument you get against this is that you could say sell your vote and verify to a 3rd party you voted as asked. But frankly I think that is not nearly as bad as hidden vote tampering. Not even close.

vacri 11y ago
Worse than selling votes is coercing votes. Being fired because you didn't vote the way the boss likes? Terrible. Verifying votes this way turns a secret ballot into an open ballot, with all the attendant problems. Hidden vote tampering of the pencil-under-the-fingernail variety is a solved problem here in Australia. Each vote count is done by an employee of the electoral commission. They're watched by volunteer scrutineers (plural), provided by the major parties, with each scrutineer looking to maximise their own party's response and distrusting all other parties. You effectively have two opposing meatspace inspectors willing to challenge anything that looks shady. Paper voting isn't perfect, but it's far, far better than any electronic voting system that the general public can use. EDIT: to clarify, with any electronic medium, the only way to confirm that your vote was counted as cast is to cryptographically sign it in some way with a key that's under your control. Even us techies have problems doing that, and the general public could never be expected to do it, especially the socially disadvantaged members. Not even security conference attendees keep up to speed with their cryptographic signing, so how can we expect mere mortals to do it? With paper votes, you confirm that your vote goes into the box as you've marked it. You can then opt to be a scrutineer and watch that box travel to the counting area, and confirm the votes are counted correctly. And has the benefit of having the record independently verified if required. Any form of voting which has a "just trust us on this" stage is not good enough.

reagency 11y ago

Modern paper voting involves a thick black markers, OCR computers, and election monitors from both parties. The 1880s are long ago history.

eterm 11y ago
Not in the UK it doesn't. All pencil and human counting here.
jeltz 11y ago
Not in Sweden. Here it involves paper, pencils and manual counting. Nothing which could not have been done in the 1880s and we still get a preliminary result a few hours after the elections close.
slasaus 11y ago
All paper and pencil in The Netherlands after some techies realized black box voting is a dangerous thing. http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English Although some people really want to get the electronics back so it's an ongoing battle of educating people (even most hackers and others in the security industry that did not think a lot about voting in particular).

NickNameNick 11y ago

In NZ we use GIANT orange felt pens to mark our ballots, good luck hiding one anywhere. I've heard that pencils are sometimes used to prevent an attacker from substituting pens at the polling booth, with modified pens containing disappearing ink, but that seems like a problem better controlled by using new, easily identifiable pens each election. As for serialising the ballot-sheets, that enables a third party to check that a person they coerced into voting a certain way actually did as instructed, which undermines the value of a secret ballot.