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Every county is different so some of my statements may not apply everywhere (I live in San Francisco). I've yet to work a poll (next election) but have gotten

Every county is different so some of my statements may not apply everywhere (I live in San Francisco). I've yet to work a poll (next election) but have gotten to know the system here pretty well through the SF elections commission. Our system is very far from perfect. Many counties do not even audit ballots after every election (let alone use only paper ballots). Epollbook software can be all over the place. Voter verification at polling places is often quite minimal. The penalty for forging a signature on a mail in ballot in CA is only $1000 (I was in the room when the state assembly committee voted not to raise the fine to keep up with inflation). I don't mean to be alarmist - like I said, I don't think these things took place, at least en masse - but it'd be quite naive to suggest there aren't vulnerabilities.

specialist 9y ago
Nicely done. We can certainly compare notes. I still encourage you to work or observe poll sites on election day. Soup to nuts. If you work it, you'll get training, see how the Australian Ballot is supposed to work. It requires many hands, eye balls, proper accounting. I'm not so worried about identity theft for in person voting. Just doesn't (didn't) seen to happen much on the west coast. I vigorously opposed closing our poll sites in favor of all mail postal balloting (WA state). With ballot scanners and electronic adjudication of ballots (changing records in the database per "voter intent"), it's roughly equivalent electronic voting machines, with some new vulnerabilities added (eg tabulating ballots as they arrive, effectively a pre-count). As various members of the election verification network (EVN) determined, auditing elections is infeasible, impractical, and does little or nothing to increase confidence or certainty. The gold standard for our form of elections, which I continue to advocate, is the Australian Ballot. In place of auditing, use physical chain of custody. (As you likely know, election administration is not banking, where they have double entry bookkeeping.) --- To truly fix our election integrity woes, we need to do two things. First, replace our first past the post (FPTP) with a more robust voting system. Like approval voting (for executive races) and proportional representation. Second, adopt universal voter registration, with automatic updates. Were our government to use any one of the number of existing demographic databases (facebook, seisent, choicepoint, NSA, etc) then we'd know in near real-time who was eligible to vote. And save huge money doing it.
- rattray 9y ago
  Certainly agreed re; approval/proportional/similar. I'm not sure what you mean regarding the EVN. They provide auditing services, don't they? Also recommend auditing paper ballots here: > Conduct post-election audits before certification of final results > Without voter-verified paper ballots, effective audits are impossible. From their top ten list: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/electionacademy/2016/09/08/evns-top-ten-list-on-election-security/ http://editions.lib.umn.edu/electionacademy/2016/09/08/evns-... My impression is that SF actually uses a ballot designed for chain of custody accounting, but doesn't use it whatsoever in practice because of the effort involved. I may be wrong on this. But "many hands, eyeballs, proper accounting" is unfortunately not available for our elections in most areas. Happy to chat more about this - email is in my profile!
- ClayShentrup 9y ago
  Even better than Approval Voting. http://www.equal.vote http://www.equal.vote

specialist 9y ago

Nicely done. We can certainly compare notes. I still encourage you to work or observe poll sites on election day. Soup to nuts. If you work it, you'll get training, see how the Australian Ballot is supposed to work. It requires many hands, eye balls, proper accounting. I'm not so worried about identity theft for in person voting. Just doesn't (didn't) seen to happen much on the west coast. I vigorously opposed closing our poll sites in favor of all mail postal balloting (WA state). With ballot scanners and electronic adjudication of ballots (changing records in the database per "voter intent"), it's roughly equivalent electronic voting machines, with some new vulnerabilities added (eg tabulating ballots as they arrive, effectively a pre-count). As various members of the election verification network (EVN) determined, auditing elections is infeasible, impractical, and does little or nothing to increase confidence or certainty. The gold standard for our form of elections, which I continue to advocate, is the Australian Ballot. In place of auditing, use physical chain of custody. (As you likely know, election administration is not banking, where they have double entry bookkeeping.) --- To truly fix our election integrity woes, we need to do two things. First, replace our first past the post (FPTP) with a more robust voting system. Like approval voting (for executive races) and proportional representation. Second, adopt universal voter registration, with automatic updates. Were our government to use any one of the number of existing demographic databases (facebook, seisent, choicepoint, NSA, etc) then we'd know in near real-time who was eligible to vote. And save huge money doing it.

rattray 9y ago
Certainly agreed re; approval/proportional/similar. I'm not sure what you mean regarding the EVN. They provide auditing services, don't they? Also recommend auditing paper ballots here: > Conduct post-election audits before certification of final results > Without voter-verified paper ballots, effective audits are impossible. From their top ten list: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/electionacademy/2016/09/08/evns-top-ten-list-on-election-security/ http://editions.lib.umn.edu/electionacademy/2016/09/08/evns-... My impression is that SF actually uses a ballot designed for chain of custody accounting, but doesn't use it whatsoever in practice because of the effort involved. I may be wrong on this. But "many hands, eyeballs, proper accounting" is unfortunately not available for our elections in most areas. Happy to chat more about this - email is in my profile!
ClayShentrup 9y ago
Even better than Approval Voting. http://www.equal.vote http://www.equal.vote