6 ms·

Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we h

by pedrocr 10y ago

Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we had to go and screw up by creating extremely insecure voting machines and then come up with crazy schemes like this one to fix them. Do people really think all this complexity is a good thing? Paper elections are very well understood but you can easily come up with various exploits to at least disrupt an election under these systems. Once you give me all this shiny new attack surface I can: - Hack the voting machines to just turn on the "duress" mode for everyone, or do it just in the precincts that tend to vote for my opponent - Use my great new paper receipt to prove I have voted for candidate A and collect my bribe as if the paper receipt doesn't encode the candidate it's useless. I don't care to verify if my vote was counted if I can't verify that it was counted for my candidate - Hack the voting machines to record candidates at random ignoring the key presses, turning the election into disarray - Selectively deny network access at polling places to create longer queues at the sites where my opponent is stronger I'm sure you can cause a riot or two pretty easily. The fact that paper is dumb and paper elections use extremely simple technology, math and process is a feature not a bug.

barnacs 10y ago
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions. I want to be able to recall them. I want to support some bills and oppose others. I want to have votes in my local community about building a playground or whatever. I may even want to propose policies and have other citizens vote or maybe even crowdfund it. While I do not support this specific proposal, I think we should move on from paper elections.
- ianstormtaylor 10y ago
  Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.) I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast. Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made? These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out. I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!
  - barnacs 10y ago
    Initially it would probably be a mess. But I also think more involvement is the only way to build a more responsible, informed, interested citizenry. People need to feel that they can affect things, that they have a say in policies. I think a lot of people are indifferent because it doesn't seem to matter whether they vote for the red or blue team every few years, <insert favorite cause> doesn't seem to be improving. If they had a slider to set their preferred allocation of public spending and they could vote on specific proposals about <their favorite cause>, they would probably be more inclined to participate and do so in a more responsible manner. You can't force people to participate though. Maybe you could optionally delegate your vote, and then it would be effectively the same level of involvement as with the current hands-off representative system. But at least you could still withdraw or reassign the voting power at any time.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      One of the ways to help that feeling is to get people more involved in local government. Local government has a lot more of an impact on them and they have much more power in such matters.
- badsock 10y ago
  Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me). Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fears-jeopardise-e-voting-rollout/41635672 http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear... Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessarily be good. You need a political system that you trust will promote wise decision makers, and then you need to not micromanage them. If the people who get elected can't be trusted to make good decisions on a scale of several years, then the political system needs to be corrected, not expanded.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.
    - nickik 10y ago
      The US also has more people that work on that sort of thing. I don't see why it should not be able to scale. Sure it might get harder with increase scale, but I don't see it as a huge problem.
    - pooper 10y ago
      > Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland. Can we start with the city? Bill de Blasio (bless his heart) won 282,344 votes in the 2013 Democratic Primary. What's worse is Lhota won his primary with just 32,236 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election... I hate to agree with President Obama on this topic but I have to agree with him. The first problem we need to tackle is not to fix the electoral process. The first problem we need to tackle is getting people to actually care enough to show up and show up in large enough numbers so we can effect change.
- kevhito 10y ago
  It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned. In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled to become qualified, to deal with a lot of the questions that come up. I'm pretty happy to instead vote for a person (or even just a party) to represent me in most cases. I don't want to propose policies. Lots of people in my town are retired and/or seem to have endless time and energy to devote to meddling in town business. It would be exhausting if I had to keep constant vigilance every few weeks or months to make sure these people can't enact policies, rather than just voting every few years to make sure they don't get into office.
  - barnacs 10y ago
    See, that's just it. There's a spectrum of involvement. I may not want to run a campaign, go door to door to collect signatures or spend days in council meetings. At the same time, I do want to vote directly on issues I have a strong opinion about, I'm willing to put in the effort to find different people to delegate my votes to in domains I'm not competent in. Occasionally I may have an idea I would like people to discuss and vote on. If people like the idea, they may even delegate their votes in that specific domain to me and I would be further motivated and empowered to come up with and champion similar ideas. I think technology would allow everyone to find their sweet spot of involvement in this spectrum.
- theptip 10y ago
  An interesting proposal in this area is Google's "Liquid Voting", which implements an idea that I've wanted to see tried for a long time. Essentially votes can be cast on every subject (for the very interested voters), or delegated to another representative (for the less interested voters). This could have some interesting side-effects, not all positive; I'd expect volatility and cult of personality to increase. But then that's the trajectory of politics in general recently, so perhaps there's not much more to lose. Benefits would include the ability for voters to actually enact the legislation that they want, but which no legislators will choose to implement (e.g. anti-corruption/insider trading laws). [edit: link is here: http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=dpubs_series http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&co...]
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I wonder how this compares to the Pirate Parties Liquid Feedback voting system. On first glance they seem similar.
- te_chris 10y ago
  So get involved then. Voting is a blunt instrument.
- walshemj 10y ago
  your missing the point of representative democracy
- pedrocr 10y ago
  Electronic voting is strictly more expensive than paper voting. All those machines are expensive and you still need the voting places and staff. If you're willing to do away with the requirement that you can't prove to someone else who you voted for then you can implement mail-in voting. Still paper and you can have an election every day if you want. Some US states use that. Once you go that route a simple HTTPS website run by the government that you authenticate to is all you need for electronic voting with the same guarantees.
- BeingIncubated 10y ago
  After Brexit, I'm not sure I and many others would be comfortable allowing "greater citizen involvment" such as directly voting on bills or policies. I am politically against such a motion and am a proponent of greater technocracy; letting experts decide what policy is best rather than the masses who can easily be duped by demagogues or other post-truth elements.
brighton36 10y ago
Paper-based elections are not cheap. Blockchain-based elections would have so many advantages, it's not even worth debating it against paper-based.
- grzm 10y ago
  The value in transparency, auditability, and ease-of-understanding by the electorate can't be so easily dismissed. Compare paper currency and bitcoin. What percentage of the public trust and use cash over bitcoin? What kind of public awareness campaign would need to be launched to convince people to trust blockchain-based elections over paper? People who have studied voting in general and applying cryptographic techniques to voting also have questions about using any type of electronic devices in recording votes. It's by no means a settled question.
- pedrocr 10y ago
  Paper based elections are cheaper. You need the same polling places and staff yet paper and ballot boxes are much cheaper than polling machines. Your second sentence is laughable, name a single advantage.
makomk 10y ago
It doesn't matter what election system we have, so long as people are willing to spread and believe questionable claims of vote rigging. For example, there was a claim doing the rounds that Trump won because the GOP systematically purged black voter registrations in the three key swing states in numbers larger than his victory margin - if paper voting was used, that would just be the more prominent claim instead, or conspiracy theories about the paper votes would. (The mechanics of the supposed purge don't work out, none of the organisations monitoring voter suppression saw it, and no-one's been able to find the hundreds of thousands of suppressed voters that would be required - but that doesn't matter. People don't care, and rebuttals don't get the social media spread that shocking allegations do.)
- pedrocr 10y ago
  Paper voting makes this better though. A key feature of the system is that the count is done by representatives of each candidate all counting the paper ballots together and not letting each other cheat. They also all man the voting booths throughout the day verifying that none of them is stuffing the boxes with votes. Anyone can understand and trust this system, whereas a cryptographic construct that <0.01% of the population truly understands is rife for rumors. Voter suppression and other ways to make less people vote are the same in both kinds of voting.
ThomPete 10y ago
Voting machines are not a problem as long as they are note connected to the internet. They are distributed, based on different standards and access to them rely on physical access plus 75% of them have a paper trail. They are as secure as anything out there IMO even if the boxes can be easily hacked.
- pedrocr 10y ago
  >They are as secure as anything out there IMO even if the boxes can be easily hacked. They're much less secure than just dumb paper and pen. That's the point.
carlcortright 10y ago
A lot of non technical people often ask why we can't vote online. Part of our responsibility as computer scientists is to present them with the options.
- pedrocr 10y ago
  This isn't a proposal for online voting, it's for electronic voting in polling places. If you allow online voting you've relaxed your election guarantees (more similar to mail-in votes). If that's what you want a simple HTTPs website run by the government with authentication is all you need.
ph14nix 10y ago
What fascinates me in the electronic voting is not the economical benefits of it or computers being involved, but the guarrantees provided by the cryptography. Not the paper itself, but the handritten signatures are driving me crazy. Of course, the particilar implementation of an electronic voting protocol can be hacked. Also, some cryptographic algorithms are not proven to be completely secure, so there is a chance that someone will learn to break them. We should take those facts into consideration and be aware. What about paper elections? Aren't they fundamentally broken because of their protocol? I go to the election, sign a ballot paper and drop it into a box. Then some people from the government report me the voting result. Why should I trust it? Because I trust all the people who were involved in collecting the ballots, counting them and so on? Why should I trust people at all if the cryptography allows me to verify their actions? You are afraid of voting machines being hacked? No problem, let's use paper. I'm OK with paper certifying my vote as long as my digital signature is printed on it (in hex, QR-code or whatever). Alternatively, the government can publish an open protocol of internet voting so that everyone can use an implementation that he accepts to be secure. Should be noted that I am not very proficient at cryptography. All I know is based on a couple of books and a university course.
- pedrocr 10y ago
  You trust paper voting because voting booths are operated by representatives of the different candidates. When it comes time to count no one will let their opponent steal votes for themselves. And the reason you can't add your digital signature to your vote is that you could then prove to someone you had voted for candidate X and collect your bribe. People that want to propose complex electronic voting systems need to first understand the requirements of an election and how the paper voting achieves them. There's quite a lot of well thought-out systems thinking in paper voting that people just don't know about.
  - ph14nix 10y ago
    > And the reason you can't add your digital signature to your vote is that you could then prove to someone you had voted for candidate X and collect your bribe. I was arguing against treating a blot on a paper as a certification of one's opinion rather than proposing a real electronic voting protocol. Of course, simple digital signature doesn't solve all the problems, it only certifies with known assumptions that I and only I have signed the document.
HashThis 10y ago
When the voting lines require 3 hours to vote, single parents with small kids skip voting. Voting booths are expensive and during cutbacks, people have to travel far and have 3 hour lines. This happened in Arizona and other places in primaries this year. Friction equals far less voting. Vote at home electronically on your phone means far more voters. Far more voters is worth complexity. Security should just something we must engineer and deliver. Maximizing people voting is the real goal, outside of engineering excuses and worries.

by pedrocr 10y ago

barnacs 10y ago

Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions. I want to be able to recall them. I want to support some bills and oppose others. I want to have votes in my local community about building a playground or whatever. I may even want to propose policies and have other citizens vote or maybe even crowdfund it. While I do not support this specific proposal, I think we should move on from paper elections.

ianstormtaylor 10y ago
Is that actually a good thing though? (I'm honestly not sure.) I would think that as the response time becomes shorter and shorter, the system starts being more and more volatile. One of the benefits of the current system is its stability. It's unfortunate (depending on your point of view) that certain causes don't move faster, but at the same time it also prevents bad ideas from moving fast. Not only that, but as the involvement is more and more frequent, it might have the effect of numbing people more. Right now national elections are a big deal because they are so rare, so it adds a bit of "moral weight" to the whole process. If they are as easy as pulling out your phone and tapping a button from your couch, is that actually going to result in more "correct" (in terms of long-term viability) decisions being made? These things might not actually matter though, because they might have equal and opposite benefits that balance things out. I'm sure many people smarter than me have debated this topic from both sides. If anyone knows of any articles/papers on these ideas I'd love to read them!
- barnacs 10y ago
  Initially it would probably be a mess. But I also think more involvement is the only way to build a more responsible, informed, interested citizenry. People need to feel that they can affect things, that they have a say in policies. I think a lot of people are indifferent because it doesn't seem to matter whether they vote for the red or blue team every few years, <insert favorite cause> doesn't seem to be improving. If they had a slider to set their preferred allocation of public spending and they could vote on specific proposals about <their favorite cause>, they would probably be more inclined to participate and do so in a more responsible manner. You can't force people to participate though. Maybe you could optionally delegate your vote, and then it would be effectively the same level of involvement as with the current hands-off representative system. But at least you could still withdraw or reassign the voting power at any time.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    One of the ways to help that feeling is to get people more involved in local government. Local government has a lot more of an impact on them and they have much more power in such matters.
badsock 10y ago
Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me). Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fears-jeopardise-e-voting-rollout/41635672 http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear... Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessarily be good. You need a political system that you trust will promote wise decision makers, and then you need to not micromanage them. If the people who get elected can't be trusted to make good decisions on a scale of several years, then the political system needs to be corrected, not expanded.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland.
  - nickik 10y ago
    The US also has more people that work on that sort of thing. I don't see why it should not be able to scale. Sure it might get harder with increase scale, but I don't see it as a huge problem.
  - pooper 10y ago
    > Switzerland has a population of 8.4M, about the population of NYC. US has >300M and a land area two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland. Can we start with the city? Bill de Blasio (bless his heart) won 282,344 votes in the 2013 Democratic Primary. What's worse is Lhota won his primary with just 32,236 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election... I hate to agree with President Obama on this topic but I have to agree with him. The first problem we need to tackle is not to fix the electoral process. The first problem we need to tackle is getting people to actually care enough to show up and show up in large enough numbers so we can effect change.
kevhito 10y ago
It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned. In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled to become qualified, to deal with a lot of the questions that come up. I'm pretty happy to instead vote for a person (or even just a party) to represent me in most cases. I don't want to propose policies. Lots of people in my town are retired and/or seem to have endless time and energy to devote to meddling in town business. It would be exhausting if I had to keep constant vigilance every few weeks or months to make sure these people can't enact policies, rather than just voting every few years to make sure they don't get into office.
- barnacs 10y ago
  See, that's just it. There's a spectrum of involvement. I may not want to run a campaign, go door to door to collect signatures or spend days in council meetings. At the same time, I do want to vote directly on issues I have a strong opinion about, I'm willing to put in the effort to find different people to delegate my votes to in domains I'm not competent in. Occasionally I may have an idea I would like people to discuss and vote on. If people like the idea, they may even delegate their votes in that specific domain to me and I would be further motivated and empowered to come up with and champion similar ideas. I think technology would allow everyone to find their sweet spot of involvement in this spectrum.
theptip 10y ago
An interesting proposal in this area is Google's "Liquid Voting", which implements an idea that I've wanted to see tried for a long time. Essentially votes can be cast on every subject (for the very interested voters), or delegated to another representative (for the less interested voters). This could have some interesting side-effects, not all positive; I'd expect volatility and cult of personality to increase. But then that's the trajectory of politics in general recently, so perhaps there's not much more to lose. Benefits would include the ability for voters to actually enact the legislation that they want, but which no legislators will choose to implement (e.g. anti-corruption/insider trading laws). [edit: link is here: http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=dpubs_series http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&co...]
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I wonder how this compares to the Pirate Parties Liquid Feedback voting system. On first glance they seem similar.
te_chris 10y ago
So get involved then. Voting is a blunt instrument.
walshemj 10y ago
your missing the point of representative democracy
pedrocr 10y ago
Electronic voting is strictly more expensive than paper voting. All those machines are expensive and you still need the voting places and staff. If you're willing to do away with the requirement that you can't prove to someone else who you voted for then you can implement mail-in voting. Still paper and you can have an election every day if you want. Some US states use that. Once you go that route a simple HTTPS website run by the government that you authenticate to is all you need for electronic voting with the same guarantees.
BeingIncubated 10y ago
After Brexit, I'm not sure I and many others would be comfortable allowing "greater citizen involvment" such as directly voting on bills or policies. I am politically against such a motion and am a proponent of greater technocracy; letting experts decide what policy is best rather than the masses who can easily be duped by demagogues or other post-truth elements.

brighton36 10y ago

Paper-based elections are not cheap. Blockchain-based elections would have so many advantages, it's not even worth debating it against paper-based.

grzm 10y ago
The value in transparency, auditability, and ease-of-understanding by the electorate can't be so easily dismissed. Compare paper currency and bitcoin. What percentage of the public trust and use cash over bitcoin? What kind of public awareness campaign would need to be launched to convince people to trust blockchain-based elections over paper? People who have studied voting in general and applying cryptographic techniques to voting also have questions about using any type of electronic devices in recording votes. It's by no means a settled question.
pedrocr 10y ago
Paper based elections are cheaper. You need the same polling places and staff yet paper and ballot boxes are much cheaper than polling machines. Your second sentence is laughable, name a single advantage.

makomk 10y ago

It doesn't matter what election system we have, so long as people are willing to spread and believe questionable claims of vote rigging. For example, there was a claim doing the rounds that Trump won because the GOP systematically purged black voter registrations in the three key swing states in numbers larger than his victory margin - if paper voting was used, that would just be the more prominent claim instead, or conspiracy theories about the paper votes would. (The mechanics of the supposed purge don't work out, none of the organisations monitoring voter suppression saw it, and no-one's been able to find the hundreds of thousands of suppressed voters that would be required - but that doesn't matter. People don't care, and rebuttals don't get the social media spread that shocking allegations do.)

pedrocr 10y ago
Paper voting makes this better though. A key feature of the system is that the count is done by representatives of each candidate all counting the paper ballots together and not letting each other cheat. They also all man the voting booths throughout the day verifying that none of them is stuffing the boxes with votes. Anyone can understand and trust this system, whereas a cryptographic construct that <0.01% of the population truly understands is rife for rumors. Voter suppression and other ways to make less people vote are the same in both kinds of voting.

ThomPete 10y ago

Voting machines are not a problem as long as they are note connected to the internet. They are distributed, based on different standards and access to them rely on physical access plus 75% of them have a paper trail. They are as secure as anything out there IMO even if the boxes can be easily hacked.

pedrocr 10y ago
>They are as secure as anything out there IMO even if the boxes can be easily hacked. They're much less secure than just dumb paper and pen. That's the point.

carlcortright 10y ago

A lot of non technical people often ask why we can't vote online. Part of our responsibility as computer scientists is to present them with the options.

pedrocr 10y ago
This isn't a proposal for online voting, it's for electronic voting in polling places. If you allow online voting you've relaxed your election guarantees (more similar to mail-in votes). If that's what you want a simple HTTPs website run by the government with authentication is all you need.

ph14nix 10y ago

What fascinates me in the electronic voting is not the economical benefits of it or computers being involved, but the guarrantees provided by the cryptography. Not the paper itself, but the handritten signatures are driving me crazy. Of course, the particilar implementation of an electronic voting protocol can be hacked. Also, some cryptographic algorithms are not proven to be completely secure, so there is a chance that someone will learn to break them. We should take those facts into consideration and be aware. What about paper elections? Aren't they fundamentally broken because of their protocol? I go to the election, sign a ballot paper and drop it into a box. Then some people from the government report me the voting result. Why should I trust it? Because I trust all the people who were involved in collecting the ballots, counting them and so on? Why should I trust people at all if the cryptography allows me to verify their actions? You are afraid of voting machines being hacked? No problem, let's use paper. I'm OK with paper certifying my vote as long as my digital signature is printed on it (in hex, QR-code or whatever). Alternatively, the government can publish an open protocol of internet voting so that everyone can use an implementation that he accepts to be secure. Should be noted that I am not very proficient at cryptography. All I know is based on a couple of books and a university course.

pedrocr 10y ago
You trust paper voting because voting booths are operated by representatives of the different candidates. When it comes time to count no one will let their opponent steal votes for themselves. And the reason you can't add your digital signature to your vote is that you could then prove to someone you had voted for candidate X and collect your bribe. People that want to propose complex electronic voting systems need to first understand the requirements of an election and how the paper voting achieves them. There's quite a lot of well thought-out systems thinking in paper voting that people just don't know about.
- ph14nix 10y ago
  > And the reason you can't add your digital signature to your vote is that you could then prove to someone you had voted for candidate X and collect your bribe. I was arguing against treating a blot on a paper as a certification of one's opinion rather than proposing a real electronic voting protocol. Of course, simple digital signature doesn't solve all the problems, it only certifies with known assumptions that I and only I have signed the document.

HashThis 10y ago

When the voting lines require 3 hours to vote, single parents with small kids skip voting. Voting booths are expensive and during cutbacks, people have to travel far and have 3 hour lines. This happened in Arizona and other places in primaries this year. Friction equals far less voting. Vote at home electronically on your phone means far more voters. Far more voters is worth complexity. Security should just something we must engineer and deliver. Maximizing people voting is the real goal, outside of engineering excuses and worries.