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This is why we absolutely do not need electronic voting (or electronic vote counting) in any way. Paper voting (with polling locations distributed to balance l

• tedmiston 10y ago
  And yet we trust software to do things like run our credit card transactions and withdraw money from our bank accounts. The resistance [from several in the industry not just your comment] to making voting happen via software really concerns me.
  • NikolaeVarius 10y ago
    Those systems are made by massive companies with a hugely vested interest in NOT screwing up because screwing up would massively screw up their revenue. Voting systems do not have that.
  • nothrabannosir 10y ago
    That's significantly less important than voting. And the incentives are properly aligned: the bank is responsible for making its systems secure, and if they lose your money they have to refund it. Voting? Not so much. Lost ballots? "Woops :) sorry." If the voting machine vendor executives faced actual personal serious jail time for botched counts, I might be more inclined to trust it. Then again, I bet you a tenner they'd suddenly have a lot more fail safes in place. Aligned incentives is absolutely, 100% required for anything to work in our society. It's what we're built on. Otherwise you will always be swimming upstream.
    • colejohnson66 10y ago
      > If the voting machine vendor executives faced actual personal serious jail time for botched counts, I might be more inclined to trust it. Even with a threat like that, they'd probably still walk free by just using the DMCA to silence the security researcher
      • Animats 10y ago
        Which Diebold tried. They lost.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebold,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebold....
    • csallen 10y ago
      > Aligned incentives is absolutely, 100% required for anything to work in our society. It's what we're built on. I wish more people understood this simple fact of human psychology. It's astonishing how often people will support some system that incentivizes bad behavior, and then act surprised when people behave badly. What's more, when faced with this situation, these same people will resort to shaming the bad actors rather than fixing the broken system.
      • Ntrails 10y ago
        Aligning incentives properly is hard. I think a good example is about how to best incentivise General Practice medical care centres (UK NHS system). Patients seen? Patients in catchment area? Mortality/Morbidity rates? Patient outcomes (how you measure these is a rabbit hole of perverse incentives)... Each and every idea has a logical optimum strategy for the trust to maximise income, and all of them aren't quite what you're trying to achieve. So you really want to blend some of these (and others) together in just the right mix, but without creating hundreds of hours of admin just to support the metrics.
  • dpark 10y ago
    Part of the problem is that the incentives are skewed. Visa has incentives to have a strong auditing trail and to perform constant audits because they bear part of the cost for fraud. Merchants are also heavily incented to carefully manage credit card data, because they are responsible for bearing much of the cost of fraud. What are the incentives for voting machine manufacturers to do a good job? Engineering a trustworthy system is tough, and it's expensive. If the machines cost twice as much, no one will buy them and it won't matter if they're more secure. And the market itself is unhealthy. If you spend 10 million on voting machines, you won't replace them the next year even if a bunch of security issues surface. You'll "demand" the company fix them, they'll issue some half assed patch, and you'll go on using the junk you bought.
  • vilhelm_s 10y ago
    Bank accounts are verifiable: you can look at the list of withdrawals and check if there are any unexpected transaction, and whether the computed account balance corresponds to the sum of transactions. The concern with electronic voting machines is how to provide a way to check their work.
  • dpc59 10y ago
    People steal identities to withdraw money from bank accounts and credit cards every day though, the consequences of fraud really aren't the same. It's easy to go back and fix the numbers in a bank account, and it's also pretty easy to notice there are transactions you didn't make and money is missing from your bank account, it's much harder to notice fraud when it just results in extra votes.
    • colejohnson66 10y ago
      If a national ID (like your SSN) were implemented correctly with multiple verification steps, identity theft wouldn't be a problem. I know that's a fantasy that will never happen, but identity theft shouldn't have to be something people have to worry about. I shouldn't have to think about identity theft protection. Heck, it shouldn't even be a thing. If someone steals my identity, all they did was convince a clerk they were me. That's the business' fault, not mine.
  • colanderman 10y ago
    That's not the same at all. Credit card transactions are auditable; just compare with the receipt. The same is not true of electronic voting machines with no paper trail.
    • colejohnson66 10y ago
      What if the voting machines printed out a paper copy listing who you voted for that you could compare with a copy online listing who you voted for? It doesn't solve the problem of hacking electronic voting; that can only be solved by using paper votes. Sadly, until there's a mass voter fraud scandal, the majority of the public won't know or care about how vulnerable electronic voting is.
      • belovedeagle 10y ago
        Voters should not be able to prove whom they voted for; enabling them to do so opens up the door to several kinds of fraud (vote buying, coercion, etc.).
        • bajsejohannes 10y ago
          There are some pretty neat solutions to this. One of them involves a double layer ballot+receipt. When viewed on top of each other, they spell out the vote, but alone the receipt will just give you enough information to see if your vote is counted or not: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/voting/papers/Chaum-SecretBallotReceiptsTrueVoterVerifiableElections.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/voting/papers/Chaum-Secr... Not sure it beats paper ballots and hand counting in terms of practicality, though :)
          • VLM 10y ago
            Another scheme is giving away fake receipts in addition to or instead of "I voted" stickers. OK VLM your boss needs a Trump receipt, your communist college professor needs a Clinton receipt, you need another Clinton receipt for facebook and github or they will delete your accounts, that'll be one R, three D, would you like any complimentary green party receipts? OK here's all your receipts thanks for voting see ya in 4 years! Heck hand them out with the bake sale goods. Have a free set of pre-printed fake receipts for ALL the candidates with some delicious chocolate chip cookies that fund this schools PTA. "Could I interest you in this cageless chicken egg gluten free organic soy oil brownie with a complimentary fake green party receipt?"
  • tomohawk 10y ago
    In credit card transactions a certain percentage of theft is expected and accounted for. It's built in to the price of using credit cards and buying goods. There's no way voting for candidates can account for vote theft in the same way.
  • paulsutter 10y ago
    We can see the transaction history and balance in financial accounts, and when there's a mistake we can and do get it corrected. Don't forget that Wells Fargo was able to open millions of accounts without consumer authorization. So maybe financial accounts are less secure than you think. I'm also surprised by blanket assertions that electronic voting is inherently bad. But I'm equally surprised by assertions that electronic voting is inherently good.
  • audeyisaacs 10y ago
    Banking systems are publicly verifiable. If your balance suddenly changes, you're going to know about it. With electronic voting, any method of verifying your vote is incompatible with the principle of a secret ballot. (edit: additionally, with paper ballots and adversarial scrutineers, every vote will certainly be counted properly as the people who stand to benefit(the politicians) can raise an issue if a ballot is being counted the wrong way. It's much less likely that every individual would verify their own vote). The resistance for voting via software may really concern you, but the push for it really really concerns me...
  • DamienSF 10y ago
    The resistance isn't about the use of electronic systems for our elections but about the poor reliability and lack of transparency of the current systems. The vote count should be reliable and transparent. Is it to much to ask?
• drewrv 10y ago
  I think an electronic system that prints a paper receipt which gets stored separately would provide the best of both worlds.
  • dpark 10y ago
    I think that helps, but only if there's a system in place to audit at least some percentage of the votes. When I voted in Mississippi, the voting machine wrote my results onto a roll of receipt paper. I have little confidence that anyone ever audited that paper.
    • grzm 10y ago
      While it may not have been audited, it at least has the potential to be audited, say, if there are questions regarding the validity of the outcome. That said, it would boost confidence if there some verification/auditing going on.
    • ralmeida 10y ago
      As a sibling comment mentioned, the mere potential for auditing increases the cost for a malicious actor to perform manipulations, since the chance of getting caught is higher, and the penalty for getting caught is potentially disastrous.
  • DamienSF 10y ago
    If you can't verify that the printed results have been counted correctly, it does not bring more guarantee. At least, the paper ballots should be kept and audited which is not the case in many States.
  • 24gttghh 10y ago
    So instead of preparing paper ballots starting a month in advance, we try to print paper receipts for the millions of people who vote all on one night?
• Anderkent 10y ago
  Well, the question is whether the increased safety (assuming your neighbour doesn't share your voting preference - I don't know if vote counting is usually done by two people from different parties, or something) is worth the increased cost. It seems unlikely to me.
  • nxc18 10y ago
    It might be possible for aligned individuals to conspire, but it's unlikely. When the community is sufficiently engaged, either you have differing political views and thus don't have to worry about conspiracy, or everyone has the same opinion and the conspiracy would just reinforce the true outcome. Regardless, the possibility of that conspiracy is another great way to encourage participation. Republicans and Democrats both have an interest in the other side not tampering - combined that turns into a pretty strong interest in removing tampering altogether.
• dpark 10y ago
  I'm not opposed to electronic voting but our systems seem to be really broken. There are a number of ways to handle this, all of which require strong transparent auditing. The main reason I want to get sane electronic voting is so we can vote online from home. Given the inability of democrats and republicans to come up with any acceptable method of handling voter ID, though, I'm pretty confident that it won't happen for decades if ever. In the meantime at least my state does vote by mail.
  • DamienSF 10y ago
    Systems aren't broken, they are set-up to enable corruption. The article points to a clear intent of enabling election fraud.
• grzm 10y ago
  I agree that a system that only has electronic records is very problematic. However, a system that includes a physical component (such as a paper ballot receipt) can be used as part of an electronic system to permit something that's auditable and verifiable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
  • Graphon1 10y ago
    ok, a receipt. How is this supposed to facilitate a recount? Not all voters will retain their receipts. Not all voters will retained receipts will re-present them in the event of the need of a recount. Are you saying a recount will be unnecessary if E2E is done properly? I read the linked article but didn't get it.
    • grzm 10y ago
      I misspoke in saying "receipt". You're right that we can't rely on voters keeping their receipts for a recount. I meant a paper record of the vote kept in addition to the electronic record. I'm not sure where I might have given the impression that a recount would not be necessary. A paper record makes a recount possible and the election system auditable. The linked Wikipedia article on end-to-end auditable voting systems provides an overview and links to different methods of making voting systems more trustworthy. There's a lot of thought and details that go into it, and if it's something you're interested in, I suggest following up on some of the links and spending more time. I know it's taken me reading a lot of different articles and implementations, and I still need to look up different parts of it. I did find this slide deck from Ron Rivest helpful: "Auditability and Verifiability of Elections" ACM-IEEE talk March 16, 2016 https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf Were there particular areas that didn't make sense to you?
      • 58 10y ago
        It seems pretty simple to me. Have the machine print a receipt that shows your info and who you voted for, have the voter check it over and sign it, and then have the voter hand it in before leaving the voting station. The receipt is really no different than a paper ballot at that point. That's not to say that other security precautions can be ignored. Ideally I'd think there should be mature open-source software running on secure intranets for each voting station, and transparency at every level of the process, including better transparency in how those physical receipts are transported, handled, and stored.
• ralmeida 10y ago
  One method of avoiding fraud in electronic voting systems is double-voting. It goes as follows: - Wait until all electronic ballots are set up in their zones in election day. - Randomly (this can be even done in a public, audited draw) select a few ballots to test. - Remove those ballots from use and replace them with spares. - Now, somebody publicily double votes on the tested ballot: they publicily vote for candaidate X in the ballot, and on paper (although just showing the vote allows any observer to keep count indefinetely). - At the end of the test, print the count from the tested ballot and verify that it is accurate to the publicily counted votes. What do you think about this? IMO, while not totally fool-proof, this brings the cost of manipulating electronic elections rather close to paper elections, if the following assumptions hold: - The draw is fair, so a malicious actor could not program only the selected ballots to be fair; - The chain of custody of the ballot is solid (easy to do if there are party auditors that never lose sight of the ballots), or that the ballot is not moved out of the sight of the public instead; - There's no available method to make the ballot know it's being tested, and change its behavior (like in the VW emissions scandal). The last point is tougher, although auditable source code, code-signing, and reproduction of as many 'true' conditions as the real election (same duration, same time, same voting frequency, etc, maybe going as far as to randomly select normal voters to participate in the process).
  • Klathmon 10y ago
    My question is why? Why is everyone so eager to replace paper ballots? What problem does electronic voting solve? Paper votes work, and they work well. Besides the obvious downside of needing to wait for them to be counted, they are safe, open, they don't break down, they can't be hacked, anyone can verify them, and they are 100% anonymous. At worst, you'd need many people to collude to stuff a single ballot box in a single district, and even that can be thwarted by a single person watching the ballot box all day. So what's the gain with electronic?
    • philipov 10y ago
      If we presume that the promoters of the idea are intelligent and understand the consequences, then why is it not reasonable to think that the ability to affect elections or otherwise weaken the electoral system is the gain they seek?
• dstroot 10y ago
  This is why we need a national electronic system using open source code. Each citizen of the republic should be assigned a citizen identification number and a second factor (password or fingerprint). We all go to a web site to vote. Voting opens for seven days, and closes at midnight PST the final day. Results are announced immediately afterword. It's time for the electoral college to be retired.
  • Klathmon 10y ago
    I completely disagree. Anyone can count along with a ballot box. Anyone can stand there all day and watch the box to ensure there is no tampering, they can count, recount, and recount again. Anyone can do this. Plumbers, programmers, doctors, the unemployed, the elderly, and even the illiterate. It can be counted by one person, or 100. But when things go electronic, the number of people that can even understand it is cut down to programmers. And the number of those that could accurately vet the security of a program is even smaller. And even a perfect electronic system needs loopholes (you can't just disenfranchise voters because they forgot their password or don't have a computer), which means the ability of fraud is still there. Paper works, and takes a LOT of resources to sway even one precinct (even just the fact that it requires purchase of physical materials ups the amount of cover up required), let alone a county, state, or the federal levels. And because of the number of people involved, if someone did try the chances they would be found out is pretty damn high.
    • torkable 10y ago
      The only people that understand the banking software are programmers and whole world runs on it every second of every day and you're worried about using software to count votes? Anyway, acting like paper voting stop fraud is just... blind. If you think people as well connected and funded (and motivated!) as our politicians can't move the right pieces of paper to the right places with the right people, you're insane. The only people that understand crypto are mathematicians but I'll stick to encrypting my electronic messages. Also, I really like this: "Anyone can count along with a ballot box. Anyone can stand there all day and watch the box to ensure there is no tampering, they can count, recount, and recount again. Anyone can do this. Plumbers, programmers, doctors, the unemployed, the elderly, and even the illiterate. It can be counted by one person, or 100." No voter left behind lol, if not everyone can do it, we can't trust it.
• int_19h 10y ago
  > with polling locations distributed to balance load Better yet, do mail-in voting. It works fine for several states already, and all of them see strong correlation with voter participation, unsurprisingly. It's also cheaper. And keep a few basic polling locations around as a fallback for those unable or unwilling to deal with mail.
  • alistairSH 10y ago
    How do those states that use mail-in ballots deal with the delay that introduces? Must the ballots be post-marked in advance of the election to count? Or, do they defer calling elections until days after the election?
    • int_19h 10y ago
      It varies. In Oregon, any ballot that is received by the post office by the cut-off date (8pm election day) is counted. In Washington, it's as you've described - any ballot postmarked by election day are counted, so it takes a few days to fully count everything.
  • toomanybeersies 10y ago
    Mail in voting can disenfranchise those without a permanent address though, which is an issue to be considered. And then there's the cases of voting papers being dumped rather than delivered to constituents. And the possibility of tampering with the votes in the mailing system. It wouldn't be hard for malicious actors to toss out papers in majority Republican or Democrat areas to attempt to sway the election. And having "a few" polling stations would mean that they are further apart and less accessible for people, especially poorer people who don't have the same means and time for transport.
  • VLM 10y ago
    "all of them see strong correlation with voter participation" Yeah I bet. Your boss will trade your mail in ballot for your paycheck this week. Turn it in with your calculus exam for 5 bonus points. Don't forget to take your ballot to Bible study group this Sunday, we're going to fill them out together to make sure we do it correctly. If you're in a nursing home just hand it to your favorite nurse, after all she's in charge of your medication so you have motivation to keep her happy. Your postman will simply toss it out if he doesn't like your vote but he does have a bid out for $5 if you'd like to sell, because one of the local parties is buying from him for $10 per ballot. On the other hand the gas station clerk down the street is offering $9 because his margins are lower and he paid off the cops like he paid off the health inspector and he's easier to get in touch with. I suppose if all the dollars are concentrating in ever fewer hands, we need some kind of paper currency, and if they'd allow early voting up to perhaps 3 years and 364 days before the next election... Its possibly the only way we'll ever see the government getting a form of currency into the general public's hands to boost economic activity rather than just bailing out the bankers as usual. Mail in is fairly banana republic tier. Its kinda like drug legalization, yeah that stuff isn't good for you, but at least if its above board and semi legalized then at least we can observe and track it, kinda, rather than underground and out of control. Actually its more like a red light district, the only way to make it worse would be to drive it underground. At least looking at vote totals we can tell how corrupt an election is based on level of mail in voting rather than knowing its bad but not how bad in total.
• Houshalter 10y ago
  I hugely support electronic voting. Electronic voting makes it possible to implement superior voting methods, like condorcet systems. These systems are difficult or impossible to implement by hand, but trivial to do with a computer. Properly done, a voting machine doesn't need to do anything more than count and tabulate. You press a button, and it adds a new vote to it's table. The vote could be printed out on paper. It could even be done via punch cards first, and then fed into the voting machine (which makes the process more inspectable by humans.) The voting machine need not know what each candidate even is, what party they are, just assign them numbers. And it doesn't need to receive updates, or have any method of input other than reading punched cards or a voter pressing a button. It certainly doesn't need to be based on windows XP and have usb inputs. It certainly shouldn't send votes over wifi.
  • pjc50 10y ago
    What would you prefer, a Condorcet election which nobody believes is fair or FPTP election where everyone can count the ballots? I think pushing for "superior voting systems" is really allowing the best to be the enemy of the good here. STV is perfectly doable by hand. AMS is only fractionally more complicated than FPTP. But most US elections (and the UK parliamentary ones, although none of the other kinds of election in the UK) are FPTP. Let's not allow the desire for better voting systems to be tied to untrustworthy technology. Edit: the barrier for getting a system adopted has to be "can you explain this to a partisan of the opposing faction with a high school education, and get them to agree that it's fair?"
    • Houshalter 10y ago
      If you read my comment, you see I don't believe these are mutually exclusive at all. There's no reason a voting machine could be made reasonably tamper proof. Or at the very least, air gapped and uncaring of the names of the candidate. It literally only needs to be a tabulating machine for punched cards, or something similar. I really dislike instant runoff voting and similar systems like STV. They are better than FPTP, but not by much. One big issue is discussed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8 But my main concern is they might tend to elect more extreme candidates, because they quickly drop candidates that don't have enough first votes, even if they are everyone's second vote.
• kwhitefoot 10y ago
  Of course it is doable, it is how most of the world does it.
  • deleted 10y ago
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• noonespecial 10y ago
  Any electronic voting system needs one simple feature. While it may be impossible to hand check all of the voting machines, it must be possible to hand check any given voting machine with absolute certainty.
• devopsproject 10y ago
  We trust computers to: * Count and record our money * Operate and monitor medical equipment * Monitor and control planes, trains, ships, and cars * etc To think that we cannot use a computer to record votes is insane.
  • talmand 10y ago
    >> Count and record our money I think recent history has shown this hasn't worked out quite that well in many cases, and that in other cases was easily manipulated for purposes of fraud. There are entire sections of various law enforcement agencies that focus on this very topic. >> Operate and monitor medical equipment What would be the benefit of manipulating this? >> Monitor and control planes, trains, ships, and cars What would be the benefit of manipulating this? I would second guess anything that uses a computer to keep a record of something that someone would have a direct benefit if manipulated. It's not a matter of whether it works or not, it's a matter of how easy is it to manipulate for a particular goal.
    • devopsproject 10y ago
      > What would be the benefit of manipulating this? Killing people. Imagine a StuxNet type attack that targets medical equipment or an attack that can drop planes from the sky (https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-plane/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-com...) > I would second guess anything that uses a computer to keep a record of something that someone would have a direct benefit if manipulated Then you better move to the woods. Basic economic principals (scarcity) mean that every resource has value to an interested party.
      • talmand 10y ago
        >> Killing people. I can only see the benefit of a targeted assassination for a very specific subset of a subset of a subset of people, not large scale killing of people. Warfare maybe? For fun? Not as obvious as fraud for monetary gain, there is a scale issue to consider. I worry more over bugs that kill people on the operating table or in the air as opposed to someone manipulating the equipment for some unknown benefit. >> Then you better move to the woods. I think you're exaggerating just a bit.