10 ms·
Don't, use pen and paper instead. Previous HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891266
by pedrocr 9y ago
Don't, use pen and paper instead. Previous HN discussion on it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891266
- avelis 9y agoCame here to recommend that. Instead, use open source hardware. Use pen and paper! :-)
- zanny 9y agoWe could also use open source hardware that isn't pen and paper. We just need the open source part.
- benchaney 9y agoVerifying hardware more complicated than a pen and paper is prohibitively difficult.
- simias 9y agoAnd a way to simply audit them. It's a bit difficult to make a fake pen and paper that would trick me into voting for the wrong person (especially at scale).
- rurban 9y agoNope, that would not work. Paper and pen are the best secure methods. Everything digital is insecure.
- Zash 9y agoWhat open source hardware would that be, and how can everyone eligible to vote be able to understand how it works and be able to observe that it really does work?
- amenghra 9y agoEvery single person doesn't understand all the security aspects of today's paper & pen ballots, how they are secured before and after the day of voting, how they are transported from one location to another, how mail-in ballots get handled, etc. There's no reason to require something that everyone can understand when talking about a different voting system. IMHO, we should aim to build something (whether using physical machines or using cryptography/mathematical properties) that the various parties in a government can audit and recognize as secure and that leads to a larger portion of the population voting or a cheaper election process.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoWhether people do understand something is very different from whether people can understand something. While many people maybe aren't aware of the security mechanisms of a pen and paper election, essentially everyone can actually understand them if they feel the need to, and that is extremely important. You cannot resolve widespread distrust by putting a bunch of mathematicians on TV who tell the population that everything is fine.
- jfnixon 9y agoWe already have something that can be made secure, anonymous, and auditable, and yet is easy to understand and relatively inexpensive. It is pencil and paper ballots, with multiple interested parties observing the entire process.
- thanhquanky 9y agoremember the butterfly ballot?
- thrownblown 9y agonever forget the hanging chad!
- jdavis703 9y agoWell then you have issues like "hanging chads," [0] that's why e-voting became big in the US. 0: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/275f00/abc-chads.html https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/275f00/abc-chads.htm...
- mnem 9y agoPen and paper doesn't suffer from hanging chads, surely? That's only if you use paper + hole punch for primitive automated counting?
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoAnd if you want the benefits of computers (fast counting, ability to prove your vote was counted correctly) without sacrificing the secret ballot or the paper audit trail you can use something like punchscan or scantegrity.
- dgudkov 9y agoWe can trust digital money, but we can't trust digital votes?
- mrkrabo 9y agoWho trusts digital money?
- komali2 9y agoWho's "we?" I don't trust digital money :P
- amenghra 9y agoDoes your bank account, credit card, etc. count as digital money? Your account balance is just bits somewhere.
- mixmax 9y agocorrect. The problem with digital voting is that it needs to be anonymous who votes for what. That makes the problem much much harder.
- peterwwillis 9y agoThere are actually elaborate rules and measures on the handling of paper ballots to work around complicated schemes that have been devised to defraud the vote. It's certainly not foolproof. Problems with paper voting: - Fraud - Counting time - Margin of error Problems with electronic voting: - Hacking - Cost - Programming bugs - Machine error - Scalability Actual way voting is handled - Some states use mailed paper ballots - Some states use paper-free voting - Some states use a mixture of electronic and paper voting The biggest risk is not the mechanism, but the way it is implemented: 5,000 independent jurisdictions all have completely independent ways of choosing how to vote, and then completely independent methods of implementing it. [3] This[1] testimony from 2001 includes a good history of the voting process and the reasons why it is handled the way it is. The parent[2] directory contains 16 years of commentary articles. [1] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/congress.html http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/congress.html [2] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/index.html http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/index.html [3] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/PutinTrump.shtml http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/PutinTrump.sht...
- bluejekyll 9y agoPaper ballots can be destroyed easily too: I remember this in San Francisco in 2001, http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Scavenged-ballot-box-lids-haunt-S-F-elections-3302604.php#photo-2450496 http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Scavenged-ballot-box-...
- peterwwillis 9y agoThat's one of the methods of fraud. Many counties have had "lost" ballots. Many voters have not received their absentee ballots. Florida was actually not even close to finishing counting its ballots when Obama claimed victory in 2012. California had the same problem in June 2016. With regard to machines, many machines have recorded thousands of extra votes. Some machines run out of memory, and end up losing thousands of votes (those machines did not have paper trails). There's been plenty of problems with these machines - ones that can be fixed. But the fact that every precinct decides independently what to do and how to do it, there is absolutely no way (in the US) to provide a uniform solution to the problems of paperless voting.
- stephengillie 9y agoThen we can debate whether or not a bubble has been completely filled in. Or if a "hanging Chad" counts as a vote.
- wang_li 9y agoIt seems perfectly reasonable to not count votes that are unclear. It's not a complex procedure to fill in a circle on a scantron, if you can't follow the directions, then too bad for you and your vote and your preferred candidates.
- pedrocr 9y agoYes, the US has been able to screw up even paper elections in an attempt to make counting supposedly faster. Most other countries just use a paper ballot with some squares next to the candidates and you mark with an X. Any deviation from that is a null vote because the voter could try to identify himself otherwise. Our elections run smoothly every time and we have well counted results in a few hours at most, faster than the US is ever able to accomplish from what I've seen.
- nickpeterson 9y agoWhich country is this?
- pedrocr 9y agoI'm in Portugal. Most of Europe is the same, Canada too.
- nickpeterson 9y agoDoesn't Portugal have widespread corruption, especially in regards to political parties and parliament?
- pedrocr 9y agoPerception of corruption is about on par with the US in the studies I've seen. That's mostly unrelated to quality of the election process though. There the US is quite a long way back. The Bush/Gore mess would never happen here.
- sapote 9y agoAgreed. And to add to it, we should switch to a system in which we have: * 100% mail-in paper ballots, like Oregon -- no long lines, no games about which districts get which machines, no polling place intimidation * Mandatory random-sample hand recounts (this has been shown to only need to be on the order of thousands of ballots out of millions for most races, given the statistical confidence you get with it)
- dragonwriter 9y agoMail-in ballots offer far more robust intimidation and coercion opportunities than are available in polling places.
- sapote 9y agoI was expecting that response. The only solution, then, is to ban all mail in ballots. Right now California, for example, has optional mail-in voting. Wouldn't you expect that anyone who can be coerced to vote some way could be coerced whether the mail-in voting is optional or mandatory?
- dragonwriter 9y agoI'm not arguing that mail in ballots don't have benefits that warranted the increase in coercion risk, I'm just arguing that mail in ballots cannot be viewed as a mitigation of coercion risk compared to the way US in-person polling stations are run since they exacerbate, rather than mitigate, that risk.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nxsynonym 9y agoCare to expand? Don't see how that could be the case.
- 9y ago
- hathawsh 9y agoI agree, however, those of us who understand the importance of paper ballots are having a hard time selling it to the public. We're coming across as Luddites. I'm impressed that the New York Times is promoting open source software; it's a small step in the right direction. Perhaps the message we should be spreading is that paper ballots are even more "open source" than any computer software. With paper, poll workers can prevent hacking by simply observing, using physical locks, and communicating with other poll workers. Software (open source or not) only seems to complicate all of that.
- pedrocr 9y agoThat's why I find the HN discussions on this so important. If the actual technology people can't see it the rest of the population has no chance. The rule of thumb, that almost never fails, is that technology always brings advantages and quickly. Sometimes it even steals their jobs. If we can get a broad agreement on the message that "trust me, I implement new technology all day every day and electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem and if your local politician tries to sell you on it he's most likely trying to steal the vote" we can do quite a bit.
- specialist 9y agoVoters know in their bones that the voting computers are bad. Voters are not the problem. Returning to paper ballots means less cheddar for cronies. Happily there's a workaround. Postal balloting (close the poll sites)! Ballots are digitally scanned as they're received at central count. So it has all the downsides of the touchscreens with all new vulnerabilities (undetectable alterations, signature mismatches, preview election counts, voter coercion...). But voters get the comfort of paper and it keeps the cheddar flowing for the cronies.
- sapote 9y agoI remember someone saying here that a key shift in framing in Germany was to call them voting computers rather than voting machines (since the broader public understands that computers can be hacked). I think we might adopt that as well.