12 ms·

Verified Voting

50 points by colinscape 10y ago

known 10y ago
Right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge qz.com/796962
- wlkr 10y ago
  You're being downvoted heavily for this and it's easy to see why. The arguments against an epistocracy are numerous and in my opinion unrefuted, the core point being, who determines the epistocrats [0]? [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-012-9179-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-012-9179-1
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  The US used to be an epistocracy [0], and the result was disenfranchising racial minorities for decades. The testing system was deeply racist, and basically prevented black people from voting. The battle to eliminate the tests was long and hard and continued until a deeply divided Supreme Court upheld the Congressional nationwide ban on literacy tests in 1970, in Oregon v. Mitchell [1]. Although I dislike it when people cast uninformed votes, I would fight for their right to do so if it ever again came into question. Let me guess, although you say "[the] right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge" you did not have sufficient knowledge of the US's past as an epistocracy. Which makes me smile; you definitely wouldn't pass _my_ knowledge test :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_v._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_v._Mitchell
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Suppose everything you say is true, and every single supporter of epistocracy is racist. It does not follow that epistocracy is bad. Consider the possibility that epistocracy is racist but it also produces better governance - e.g., perhaps the racial groups being discriminated against vote for bad governance. (Define "bad" however you like, but strictly in terms of actions taken by the government rather than how those actions were decided on.) If that were true then the racist epistocracy you discuss would be a good thing, in the sense that governments would provide better services to citizens. The main argument against this is that voting rights are a way to express respect, membership and status to humans. But the solution to this conundrum is to stop using voting rights as a status symbol. Here's a nice article that discusses this idea in much greater detail: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/09/expressive-meaning-democracy-plus-philosophers-enamored-semiotic-arguments/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/09/expressive-mean...
    - mcherm 10y ago
      I think what you're saying boils down to "even if it's racist, it is preferable if it produces better outcomes". The weakness of that argument is in the definition of "better outcomes". You say "Define 'bad' however you like, but strictly in terms of actions taken by the government...". Do you really mean this? To pick a topic that is far enough back in history that most agree today - would you be willing to agree that "Brown vs. Board of Education" was a failure of the system because it eliminated the policy of "separate but equal"? After all, segregated schools, buses, bathrooms, and other accommodations clearly did reduce the interactions between the races and thus the opportunities for interracial conflict, while (by definition) offering "equal" facilities to each race. I would not accept that argument and I suspect you would not either. So if it all comes down to the value function we use to assess what outcomes are desired, how should we decide on the this value function? Perhaps we could conduct a sort of a poll of the members of society... we could call it "voting". Actually, with the exception of a few cases of direct democracy in the form of ballot initiatives, that is the system we have today: at least in the US, voters rarely decide policy, they decide WHO will decide policy. Perhaps you can make a case that only those who are "smart enough" or meet some other criteria should be allowed to influence the decision of who decides policy. I would disagree. Simplicity is an important virtue in a system intended to be robust, and "everyone gets one vote" is far simpler than some sort of assessment for voters. ("Everyone older than a certain age gets one vote except if they've been convicted of a felony" isn't quite as clean and simple, but it's what we've got at the moment.)
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        So if it all comes down to the value function we use to assess what outcomes are desired, how should we decide on the this value function? As per my hypothetical, you personally (mcherm) get to define it. Suppose you define it as "segregation is bad" - I gather from your post that you believe this. Suppose further that democracy produces segregation, but epistocracy or dictatorship does not. (On all other policies suppose they produce the same result.) Do you still oppose epistocracy/dictatorship? If so, why?
        10y ago
  - michaelkeenan 10y ago
    The USA is still slightly an epistocracy because there's a civics test before long-term residents gain the right to vote[1]. I think this element of epistocracy is fine; it's not deliberately racist like the other tests were. There are many possible epistocracies. Some epistocratic measures could decrease oppression of specific demographics, rather than increase it. We currently ban children from voting, presumably because they'd cast bad votes. But if there was a way to measure ability to vote well, then we could let children vote if they have that capability. If there is legal oppression of children (which seems likely, since there's been oppression every other time a non-voting demographic had laws that specifically target them), then the voting children should be able to decrease that. An example of a bad law oppressing children was the Canadian ban against them carrying asthma inhalers in school. Thankfully, this law has changed, but not before it killed someone[2]. Specifically, my proposal is that we adjust the disenfranchisement of citizens that we currently do (of children, felons in some states, and the mentally incapacitated) with a civics test where they can vote if they pass. The civics test for long-term residents might be fine as it is. It seems really easy to me, but maybe that's desirable. [1] https://my.uscis.gov/prep/test/civics https://my.uscis.gov/prep/test/civics [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ontario-mom-urges-schools-to-let-asthmatic-kids-carry-puffers-1.2455861 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ontario-mom-urges-schoo...
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      A simple test to use is ability to complete a valid ballot. And then you commit to making it as simple as possible to complete a valid ballot.
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    The US was never an epistocracy. While some states did technically have a "literacy" test, it was a literacy test in name only; and designed specifically to disenfranchise black voters. Using that as evidence that epistocracy is bad is like using the present day voter verification attempts as evidence that the concept of secure voting is bad.
    - jdavis703 10y ago
      When I was taking security classes one of the things they kept mentioning is that it's possible to increase security so much your users grow frustrated and wind up installing backdoors for themselves. For example there's a long security review before installing new software, so someone brings in their own device with this software. They're not a hostile attacker, yet have opened your infrastructure up to new attack vectors. The same is true for voting. The more secure you make it the less people will vote. The less people vote the less they trust the system. This then winds up undermining the very thing you were trying to protect. Edit: I'm not arguing for zero security. I'm arguing that some thought goes into what security procedures you implement on voting, and how that enfranchises or disenfranchises people.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  And yet you yourself have in your own profile this quote: "If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed." Also, the article you linked to ends by saying Of course, any epistocratic system would face abuse. and but epistocracy tries to make sure the informed many are not drowned out by the ignorant or misinformed many. But this is why we have multiple levels of government, checks and balances, and civil society.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
The consensus of both high-assurance security and top minds in general INFOSEC is that voting shouldn't be done with computers or shouldn't exclusively rely on them. They're black boxes connecting via black boxes with endless ways to be attacked. I've noticed all the ways that protect them from that just make the process more incomprehensible to both lay people and technical people. The paper ballots or hybrids where electronics spit out a human-verified one are best schemes. Fewer forms of fraud that are easier to detect by massive numbers of people. Better to just improve those systems. Far as hybrids, the Scantegrity scheme was always interesting to me as the human-visible steps are straight-forward: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/CCCEx09.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/CCCEx09.pdf Prior studies showed even it had usability problems. Someone interested in secure voting might want to tackle those for it or other stuff in the related work section.
- echlebek 10y ago
  Not only that, paper ballot voting scales well, creates jobs for people, and leads to increased trust in the system, since people are directly involved. Who does electronic voting benefit?
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    People who live in states with strict absentee voting laws and who have to work on election day. Now perhaps the solution is to make election day a national holiday (and a real holiday where everyone but safety-critical workers are given the day off -- and no, cashiers at Walmart or car salesmen working for "our big election day sale" won't count as safety critical).
    - echlebek 10y ago
      If polling stations are numerous and accessible enough, an entire day isn't necessary. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e06#BK18 https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e06#BK18 edit: Canada also has advance voting. Polling stations open 5 days before the election day and people can voting during business hours on those days.
pgz 10y ago
I know very little about security but couldn't a system be created like git, where for every vote the voter gets a sha of his vote? That way she can later verify that in his section repository his vote is still there and has been counted. Of course the mapping sha1 <-> voter will be anonymous, but this way everyone can see all the votes. This doesn't solve the problem of some hacker adding votes on top of the legitimate ones though.
- esrauch 10y ago
  There is a practical advantage to being unable to confirm your own vote: if someone tries to buy votes people could just take the money and still vote anyway they choose since there is no way to prove afterwards that you didn't vote that way.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    That minor advantage is outweighed by the disadvantage of not knowing if any of the votes were counted correctly.
  - rosalinekarr 10y ago
    But pgz specifically said that the votes could be kept anonymous.
    - pgz 10y ago
      Yeah but the people corrupting you, would ask you for your sha as confirmation. Here in Italy for example it's forbidden to bring your smartphone into the voting cabin, because the Mafia was asking for photo proofs. So esrauch found a great counter to my idea.
      - ChefDenominator 10y ago
        If parties are corrupt enough to require a picture, and voters willing to engage in this corruption, how do you, realistically, prevent this from happening? Body cavity searches?
jdavis703 10y ago
In California over half of ballots are sent in by regular, old fashioned, snail mail via the USPS. I have no handshake saying my ballot was received, no proof that someone at USPS or with easy access to USPS shipping infrastructure (e.g. the mail trucks that don't get locked when the mail man goes out) doesn't swap in a different ballot, or any assurances that again someone isn't correlating my name and address with the ballot I mailed in. All these problems are mostly solved just by using something like HTTPS. Now the biggest problem is how secure people perceive the voting process to be. And since most people don't really understand how these things works there will be huge room for conspiracy theories to arise about vote hacking. This in turns undermines the democratic system. I've talked to many people who actually feel more secure sending in their credit card details over the POTS or by mail, not understanding that these systems are even less secure, even after explaining to them the vulnerabilities.
ausjke 10y ago
why can't the voting machine print a receipt with a unique random number for each instance? why can't every voter get an alphanumeric-ID that has nothing to do with his last/first names? This way the whole voting record can be listed publicly, searched and verified by all those who voted just like a lottery ticket to some extent. Technically there are so many ways to double-check the election correctness but none is implemented, why? just a dumb machine that my input is going to /dev/null without any way to check the return/error code?
chongli 10y ago
This all seems beside the point. So what if I can verify that my vote is correct? How does that stop somebody with access to the software/machines from tampering with the vote tallies? I have worked as an election scrutineer for a political party. You just can't beat having several people standing there -- each representing a different political party -- watching each ballot be unfolded and counted, confirming the exact count for each candidate, contesting any spoiled or rejected ballots, recording an independent copy of the vote totals for all candidates, and signing off on the official vote total. The fact that each ballot box has multiple eyewitnesses and that all of the counted ballots are sealed in a signed envelope makes the whole process very transparent and easy to audit. None of this is true to anywhere near this extent for electronic voting.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Verified Voting

50 points by colinscape 10y ago

known 10y ago

Right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge qz.com/796962

wlkr 10y ago
You're being downvoted heavily for this and it's easy to see why. The arguments against an epistocracy are numerous and in my opinion unrefuted, the core point being, who determines the epistocrats [0]? [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-012-9179-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-012-9179-1
owenversteeg 10y ago
The US used to be an epistocracy [0], and the result was disenfranchising racial minorities for decades. The testing system was deeply racist, and basically prevented black people from voting. The battle to eliminate the tests was long and hard and continued until a deeply divided Supreme Court upheld the Congressional nationwide ban on literacy tests in 1970, in Oregon v. Mitchell [1]. Although I dislike it when people cast uninformed votes, I would fight for their right to do so if it ever again came into question. Let me guess, although you say "[the] right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge" you did not have sufficient knowledge of the US's past as an epistocracy. Which makes me smile; you definitely wouldn't pass _my_ knowledge test :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_v._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_v._Mitchell
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Suppose everything you say is true, and every single supporter of epistocracy is racist. It does not follow that epistocracy is bad. Consider the possibility that epistocracy is racist but it also produces better governance - e.g., perhaps the racial groups being discriminated against vote for bad governance. (Define "bad" however you like, but strictly in terms of actions taken by the government rather than how those actions were decided on.) If that were true then the racist epistocracy you discuss would be a good thing, in the sense that governments would provide better services to citizens. The main argument against this is that voting rights are a way to express respect, membership and status to humans. But the solution to this conundrum is to stop using voting rights as a status symbol. Here's a nice article that discusses this idea in much greater detail: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/09/expressive-meaning-democracy-plus-philosophers-enamored-semiotic-arguments/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/09/expressive-mean...
  - mcherm 10y ago
    I think what you're saying boils down to "even if it's racist, it is preferable if it produces better outcomes". The weakness of that argument is in the definition of "better outcomes". You say "Define 'bad' however you like, but strictly in terms of actions taken by the government...". Do you really mean this? To pick a topic that is far enough back in history that most agree today - would you be willing to agree that "Brown vs. Board of Education" was a failure of the system because it eliminated the policy of "separate but equal"? After all, segregated schools, buses, bathrooms, and other accommodations clearly did reduce the interactions between the races and thus the opportunities for interracial conflict, while (by definition) offering "equal" facilities to each race. I would not accept that argument and I suspect you would not either. So if it all comes down to the value function we use to assess what outcomes are desired, how should we decide on the this value function? Perhaps we could conduct a sort of a poll of the members of society... we could call it "voting". Actually, with the exception of a few cases of direct democracy in the form of ballot initiatives, that is the system we have today: at least in the US, voters rarely decide policy, they decide WHO will decide policy. Perhaps you can make a case that only those who are "smart enough" or meet some other criteria should be allowed to influence the decision of who decides policy. I would disagree. Simplicity is an important virtue in a system intended to be robust, and "everyone gets one vote" is far simpler than some sort of assessment for voters. ("Everyone older than a certain age gets one vote except if they've been convicted of a felony" isn't quite as clean and simple, but it's what we've got at the moment.)
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      So if it all comes down to the value function we use to assess what outcomes are desired, how should we decide on the this value function? As per my hypothetical, you personally (mcherm) get to define it. Suppose you define it as "segregation is bad" - I gather from your post that you believe this. Suppose further that democracy produces segregation, but epistocracy or dictatorship does not. (On all other policies suppose they produce the same result.) Do you still oppose epistocracy/dictatorship? If so, why?
      - 10y ago
- michaelkeenan 10y ago
  The USA is still slightly an epistocracy because there's a civics test before long-term residents gain the right to vote[1]. I think this element of epistocracy is fine; it's not deliberately racist like the other tests were. There are many possible epistocracies. Some epistocratic measures could decrease oppression of specific demographics, rather than increase it. We currently ban children from voting, presumably because they'd cast bad votes. But if there was a way to measure ability to vote well, then we could let children vote if they have that capability. If there is legal oppression of children (which seems likely, since there's been oppression every other time a non-voting demographic had laws that specifically target them), then the voting children should be able to decrease that. An example of a bad law oppressing children was the Canadian ban against them carrying asthma inhalers in school. Thankfully, this law has changed, but not before it killed someone[2]. Specifically, my proposal is that we adjust the disenfranchisement of citizens that we currently do (of children, felons in some states, and the mentally incapacitated) with a civics test where they can vote if they pass. The civics test for long-term residents might be fine as it is. It seems really easy to me, but maybe that's desirable. [1] https://my.uscis.gov/prep/test/civics https://my.uscis.gov/prep/test/civics [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ontario-mom-urges-schools-to-let-asthmatic-kids-carry-puffers-1.2455861 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ontario-mom-urges-schoo...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    A simple test to use is ability to complete a valid ballot. And then you commit to making it as simple as possible to complete a valid ballot.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  The US was never an epistocracy. While some states did technically have a "literacy" test, it was a literacy test in name only; and designed specifically to disenfranchise black voters. Using that as evidence that epistocracy is bad is like using the present day voter verification attempts as evidence that the concept of secure voting is bad.
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    When I was taking security classes one of the things they kept mentioning is that it's possible to increase security so much your users grow frustrated and wind up installing backdoors for themselves. For example there's a long security review before installing new software, so someone brings in their own device with this software. They're not a hostile attacker, yet have opened your infrastructure up to new attack vectors. The same is true for voting. The more secure you make it the less people will vote. The less people vote the less they trust the system. This then winds up undermining the very thing you were trying to protect. Edit: I'm not arguing for zero security. I'm arguing that some thought goes into what security procedures you implement on voting, and how that enfranchises or disenfranchises people.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
And yet you yourself have in your own profile this quote: "If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed." Also, the article you linked to ends by saying Of course, any epistocratic system would face abuse. and but epistocracy tries to make sure the informed many are not drowned out by the ignorant or misinformed many. But this is why we have multiple levels of government, checks and balances, and civil society.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

The consensus of both high-assurance security and top minds in general INFOSEC is that voting shouldn't be done with computers or shouldn't exclusively rely on them. They're black boxes connecting via black boxes with endless ways to be attacked. I've noticed all the ways that protect them from that just make the process more incomprehensible to both lay people and technical people. The paper ballots or hybrids where electronics spit out a human-verified one are best schemes. Fewer forms of fraud that are easier to detect by massive numbers of people. Better to just improve those systems. Far as hybrids, the Scantegrity scheme was always interesting to me as the human-visible steps are straight-forward: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/CCCEx09.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/CCCEx09.pdf Prior studies showed even it had usability problems. Someone interested in secure voting might want to tackle those for it or other stuff in the related work section.

echlebek 10y ago
Not only that, paper ballot voting scales well, creates jobs for people, and leads to increased trust in the system, since people are directly involved. Who does electronic voting benefit?
- jdavis703 10y ago
  People who live in states with strict absentee voting laws and who have to work on election day. Now perhaps the solution is to make election day a national holiday (and a real holiday where everyone but safety-critical workers are given the day off -- and no, cashiers at Walmart or car salesmen working for "our big election day sale" won't count as safety critical).
  - echlebek 10y ago
    If polling stations are numerous and accessible enough, an entire day isn't necessary. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e06#BK18 https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e06#BK18 edit: Canada also has advance voting. Polling stations open 5 days before the election day and people can voting during business hours on those days.

pgz 10y ago

I know very little about security but couldn't a system be created like git, where for every vote the voter gets a sha of his vote? That way she can later verify that in his section repository his vote is still there and has been counted. Of course the mapping sha1 <-> voter will be anonymous, but this way everyone can see all the votes. This doesn't solve the problem of some hacker adding votes on top of the legitimate ones though.

esrauch 10y ago
There is a practical advantage to being unable to confirm your own vote: if someone tries to buy votes people could just take the money and still vote anyway they choose since there is no way to prove afterwards that you didn't vote that way.
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  That minor advantage is outweighed by the disadvantage of not knowing if any of the votes were counted correctly.
- rosalinekarr 10y ago
  But pgz specifically said that the votes could be kept anonymous.
  - pgz 10y ago
    Yeah but the people corrupting you, would ask you for your sha as confirmation. Here in Italy for example it's forbidden to bring your smartphone into the voting cabin, because the Mafia was asking for photo proofs. So esrauch found a great counter to my idea.
    - ChefDenominator 10y ago
      If parties are corrupt enough to require a picture, and voters willing to engage in this corruption, how do you, realistically, prevent this from happening? Body cavity searches?

jdavis703 10y ago

In California over half of ballots are sent in by regular, old fashioned, snail mail via the USPS. I have no handshake saying my ballot was received, no proof that someone at USPS or with easy access to USPS shipping infrastructure (e.g. the mail trucks that don't get locked when the mail man goes out) doesn't swap in a different ballot, or any assurances that again someone isn't correlating my name and address with the ballot I mailed in. All these problems are mostly solved just by using something like HTTPS. Now the biggest problem is how secure people perceive the voting process to be. And since most people don't really understand how these things works there will be huge room for conspiracy theories to arise about vote hacking. This in turns undermines the democratic system. I've talked to many people who actually feel more secure sending in their credit card details over the POTS or by mail, not understanding that these systems are even less secure, even after explaining to them the vulnerabilities.

ausjke 10y ago

why can't the voting machine print a receipt with a unique random number for each instance? why can't every voter get an alphanumeric-ID that has nothing to do with his last/first names? This way the whole voting record can be listed publicly, searched and verified by all those who voted just like a lottery ticket to some extent. Technically there are so many ways to double-check the election correctness but none is implemented, why? just a dumb machine that my input is going to /dev/null without any way to check the return/error code?

chongli 10y ago

This all seems beside the point. So what if I can verify that my vote is correct? How does that stop somebody with access to the software/machines from tampering with the vote tallies? I have worked as an election scrutineer for a political party. You just can't beat having several people standing there -- each representing a different political party -- watching each ballot be unfolded and counted, confirming the exact count for each candidate, contesting any spoiled or rejected ballots, recording an independent copy of the vote totals for all candidates, and signing off on the official vote total. The fact that each ballot box has multiple eyewitnesses and that all of the counted ballots are sealed in a signed envelope makes the whole process very transparent and easy to audit. None of this is true to anywhere near this extent for electronic voting.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]