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Excellent! It used to be that the tech community was the most vocal against any scheme to increase the use of tech in voting. That consensus seems to have weake

Excellent! It used to be that the tech community was the most vocal against any scheme to increase the use of tech in voting. That consensus seems to have weakened. So to all the blockchain-proponents etc: remember that it’s not enough for elections to just be safe. They also need to be safe in a way that is obvious to non-cryptographers. Many countries run elections on paper ballots and with public ally-observeable counting of votes. They do so in rural communities as well as cities with millions of voters. They rarely see voters waiting in line for more than a few minutes. And the costs are neglible in the grand scheme of things. That is the gold standard for elections, and it’s actually damn easy to achieve.

denzil_correa 9y ago
> Excellent! It used to be that the tech community was the most vocal against any scheme to increase the use of tech in voting. That consensus seems to have weakened. How? Here's the main conclusion from the report > The monitoring group came into the conclusion that online voting should not be introduced in general elections, because the risks involved are greater than the benefits.
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  I was commenting on the impression I get from reading comments here, on Twitter, blog posts etc. When the topic used to come up, for example in response to the Florida fiasco in the election of 2000, the response was almost universally negative. That seems to have changed somewhat, with many more people willing to advocate complicated technical solutions. This report, and others by professional organizations like the EFF still follow the old consensus, possibly because they are run by people socialized in that environment. But I’m worried what such reports will say in 2030 if the arguments I made above are not universally understood.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
svantana 9y ago
> it’s not enough for elections to just be safe. They also need to be safe in a way that is obvious to non-cryptographers Not as much so in nations where people generally trust experts and government officials, and where conspiracy theories are mostly on the fringe (i.e. not the U.S.). Although I agree that it's preferable if non-techies can understand the mechanisms, and the downside of paper ballots plus mail-in is already pretty small.
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  Although I trust experts and, for the most part, the government, I see that sort of trust breaking in the society I live in (Germany), as well as others I follow (the US, Britain). The power of taking a conspiracy-minded neighbor to witness a transparent process to count the votes is breathtaking, and even a description of the process is a powerful argument. It’s a really easy call in this debate, because the downsides of the process are neglible: the paper and pen process in my country produces results just as fast as what I see in the US. Among the only substantive arguments I can think of is that US elections have a lot more items up for vote (ballot initiatives and the proverbial dog catchers), which makes hand-counting more cumbersome.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > Not as much so in nations where people generally trust experts and government officials The election is where that trust is anchored at. Whether people trust the current government can change. If trust in the election result and thus trust in the next government's legitimacy depends on trust in the current government, you have no safe way out of a situation where trust in the current government is gone--which ultimately is the reason we have elections in the first place: As long as everyone is content with the current government, you don't really need elections at all. The whole point of having elections is that you can change a government that you don't trust, should the need arise.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
Observation of vote counts is only a 1 to 1 relationship. You can't know if the whole election at scale is safe based on watching one person count votes. Perhaps it might feel safe to some, but that doesn't mean it is. Moreover, physical observation doesn't scale. Only a handful of people can observe due to the physical limitations of meatspace. A simple attack could be to "DDoS" the count observations by crowding them out with your agents.
- mixmax 9y ago
  But that's not how vote counting works. Typically there's a member of each party represented in teh election present for the counting, and often they're open to observers from the outside. This means that you'd have to collude with your political enemies to steal their votes....
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Collusion between supposed political enemies has happened frequently throughout history
    - Feniks 9y ago
      There are currently 20 political parties in parliament representing vast ideological differences. They couldn't even agree on what pizza to order if their life depended on it lol.
    - John_KZ 9y ago
      At this point you obviously know you're mistaken. Why keep pushing it?
      - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
        What am I mistaken about?
ttoinou 9y ago
and it’s actually damn easy to achieve And it's very very expensive
- icebraining 9y ago
  How expensive? In my country, where we still use paper ballots dropped into sealed boxes, the whole budget for the election operations is less than 1€/citizen.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    Wow really ? Sounds reasonable. (Should also take into account people transportation to the location, and the opportunity cost of their time)
    - icebraining 9y ago
      My only personal experience is in cities, but my home was never more than 20m on foot from my voting place. I also know that even villages with less than 300 residents have one. We also have many thousands of voting booths, so waiting times are low. One hour is rare.
- pjc50 9y ago
  UK election: £142m for 42m voters, or about £3 each. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39882972 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39882972 The Irish e-voting debacle cost €55m for an electorate of roughly 3 million people: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/54m-voting-machines-scrapped-for-9-each-26870212.html https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/54m-voting-machines-sc...
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    I'm not advocating for e-voting because they don't seem to offer (yet) the same good qualities as regular voting. But you need to take into account people transportation and opportunity cost (if I lose 1 hour going to vote, this time could have been directed at working, thus it cost me ten or twenty the price you just spoke about).
vkou 9y ago
> Excellent! It used to be that the tech community was the most vocal against any scheme to increase the use of tech in voting. That consensus seems to have weakened. What is excellent about this? Paper ballots, with multi-party observers are incredibly secure, auditable, and transparently fair ways of running an election. Yes, you can have shitty ballot designs, and insane voting machines (Florida, 2000), and your entire electoral process may be infiltrated by Reptilians, who take the ballot boxes out into the woods, to use for kindling, but the same can be said for electronic devices. The UX, and security procedures for the Canadian elctions I have voted in was very simple. Shade in the circle by the name of the candidate you want to vote for. Fold your ballot. Drop it in a box. At the end of the night, the box is opened, and the ballots get counted. There are eyes on the ballot box, for the entire duration of the process. Adding a closed-source, opaque electronic voting machine to this process solves a non-problem that nobody has.
- dmckeon 9y ago
  An alternative: Mark ballot, feed to scanner, which either successfully scans a ballot, or returns it to the voter to be re-marked (modulo write-in votes, see link). The scan is the fast & easy result, and the paper ballot can be the separate source of a reproducible result. https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/sequoia/optech-eagle/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/se... Also a note for international HN readers - elections in the USA often have 20+ races on the same ballot - we really like elective offices - and that makes hand counting more difficult.
  - specialist 9y ago
    That's a complimentary tool, not an alternative. Most election integrity activists / experts are fine with precinct-based opscans used to tabulate paper ballots the moment the polls close.
    - dmckeon 9y ago
      The nice thing about scanning either by the voter or while the voter is present is that spoiled ballots - by stray, faint, or partial marks, or overvoting for too many multiple candidates - are reduced to near zero, and are replaced by fresh voter-marked ballots, which simplifies all later tabulation, and reduces confusion and challenges about mis-marked ballots, thus increasing voter confidence in the whole election process. Anyone who is interested in election processes should volunteer to work an election, either helping operate a polling place, or as a poll watcher, or similar. This is one of those areas that looks simple, but has a lot of difficult edge and corner cases. I've been a poll worker and a registrar of voters, and it is not as simple as most people would think.
specialist 9y ago
Until recently, we opponents have been the vocal minority. Shouted down, arrested, ignored. One newspaper called me "a sweaty paranoid kook" for having the audacity to explain, citing the procedures and rules, how central count works. Even today, you'll still see some yahoos pitching Chaum or RSA or Pret-a-Vote (?) based whackadoodle solutions. Completely divorced from how real world election administration works. But someday Tinkerbell will fly, if we all just clap hard enough, so stop interrupting with physics, logic, experience, thank you very much. The crew that played the long game, and moved the needle, are the various members of the Election Verification Network. Unlike me, who burned out early. We all owe the EVN a huge debt of gratitude.

denzil_correa 9y ago

> Excellent! It used to be that the tech community was the most vocal against any scheme to increase the use of tech in voting. That consensus seems to have weakened. How? Here's the main conclusion from the report > The monitoring group came into the conclusion that online voting should not be introduced in general elections, because the risks involved are greater than the benefits.

shaki-dora 9y ago
I was commenting on the impression I get from reading comments here, on Twitter, blog posts etc. When the topic used to come up, for example in response to the Florida fiasco in the election of 2000, the response was almost universally negative. That seems to have changed somewhat, with many more people willing to advocate complicated technical solutions. This report, and others by professional organizations like the EFF still follow the old consensus, possibly because they are run by people socialized in that environment. But I’m worried what such reports will say in 2030 if the arguments I made above are not universally understood.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

svantana 9y ago

> it’s not enough for elections to just be safe. They also need to be safe in a way that is obvious to non-cryptographers Not as much so in nations where people generally trust experts and government officials, and where conspiracy theories are mostly on the fringe (i.e. not the U.S.). Although I agree that it's preferable if non-techies can understand the mechanisms, and the downside of paper ballots plus mail-in is already pretty small.

shaki-dora 9y ago
Although I trust experts and, for the most part, the government, I see that sort of trust breaking in the society I live in (Germany), as well as others I follow (the US, Britain). The power of taking a conspiracy-minded neighbor to witness a transparent process to count the votes is breathtaking, and even a description of the process is a powerful argument. It’s a really easy call in this debate, because the downsides of the process are neglible: the paper and pen process in my country produces results just as fast as what I see in the US. Among the only substantive arguments I can think of is that US elections have a lot more items up for vote (ballot initiatives and the proverbial dog catchers), which makes hand-counting more cumbersome.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> Not as much so in nations where people generally trust experts and government officials The election is where that trust is anchored at. Whether people trust the current government can change. If trust in the election result and thus trust in the next government's legitimacy depends on trust in the current government, you have no safe way out of a situation where trust in the current government is gone--which ultimately is the reason we have elections in the first place: As long as everyone is content with the current government, you don't really need elections at all. The whole point of having elections is that you can change a government that you don't trust, should the need arise.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

Observation of vote counts is only a 1 to 1 relationship. You can't know if the whole election at scale is safe based on watching one person count votes. Perhaps it might feel safe to some, but that doesn't mean it is. Moreover, physical observation doesn't scale. Only a handful of people can observe due to the physical limitations of meatspace. A simple attack could be to "DDoS" the count observations by crowding them out with your agents.

mixmax 9y ago
But that's not how vote counting works. Typically there's a member of each party represented in teh election present for the counting, and often they're open to observers from the outside. This means that you'd have to collude with your political enemies to steal their votes....
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Collusion between supposed political enemies has happened frequently throughout history
  - Feniks 9y ago
    There are currently 20 political parties in parliament representing vast ideological differences. They couldn't even agree on what pizza to order if their life depended on it lol.
  - John_KZ 9y ago
    At this point you obviously know you're mistaken. Why keep pushing it?
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      What am I mistaken about?

ttoinou 9y ago

and it’s actually damn easy to achieve And it's very very expensive

icebraining 9y ago
How expensive? In my country, where we still use paper ballots dropped into sealed boxes, the whole budget for the election operations is less than 1€/citizen.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  Wow really ? Sounds reasonable. (Should also take into account people transportation to the location, and the opportunity cost of their time)
  - icebraining 9y ago
    My only personal experience is in cities, but my home was never more than 20m on foot from my voting place. I also know that even villages with less than 300 residents have one. We also have many thousands of voting booths, so waiting times are low. One hour is rare.
pjc50 9y ago
UK election: £142m for 42m voters, or about £3 each. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39882972 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39882972 The Irish e-voting debacle cost €55m for an electorate of roughly 3 million people: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/54m-voting-machines-scrapped-for-9-each-26870212.html https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/54m-voting-machines-sc...
- ttoinou 9y ago
  I'm not advocating for e-voting because they don't seem to offer (yet) the same good qualities as regular voting. But you need to take into account people transportation and opportunity cost (if I lose 1 hour going to vote, this time could have been directed at working, thus it cost me ten or twenty the price you just spoke about).

vkou 9y ago

> Excellent! It used to be that the tech community was the most vocal against any scheme to increase the use of tech in voting. That consensus seems to have weakened. What is excellent about this? Paper ballots, with multi-party observers are incredibly secure, auditable, and transparently fair ways of running an election. Yes, you can have shitty ballot designs, and insane voting machines (Florida, 2000), and your entire electoral process may be infiltrated by Reptilians, who take the ballot boxes out into the woods, to use for kindling, but the same can be said for electronic devices. The UX, and security procedures for the Canadian elctions I have voted in was very simple. Shade in the circle by the name of the candidate you want to vote for. Fold your ballot. Drop it in a box. At the end of the night, the box is opened, and the ballots get counted. There are eyes on the ballot box, for the entire duration of the process. Adding a closed-source, opaque electronic voting machine to this process solves a non-problem that nobody has.

dmckeon 9y ago
An alternative: Mark ballot, feed to scanner, which either successfully scans a ballot, or returns it to the voter to be re-marked (modulo write-in votes, see link). The scan is the fast & easy result, and the paper ballot can be the separate source of a reproducible result. https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/sequoia/optech-eagle/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/se... Also a note for international HN readers - elections in the USA often have 20+ races on the same ballot - we really like elective offices - and that makes hand counting more difficult.
- specialist 9y ago
  That's a complimentary tool, not an alternative. Most election integrity activists / experts are fine with precinct-based opscans used to tabulate paper ballots the moment the polls close.
  - dmckeon 9y ago
    The nice thing about scanning either by the voter or while the voter is present is that spoiled ballots - by stray, faint, or partial marks, or overvoting for too many multiple candidates - are reduced to near zero, and are replaced by fresh voter-marked ballots, which simplifies all later tabulation, and reduces confusion and challenges about mis-marked ballots, thus increasing voter confidence in the whole election process. Anyone who is interested in election processes should volunteer to work an election, either helping operate a polling place, or as a poll watcher, or similar. This is one of those areas that looks simple, but has a lot of difficult edge and corner cases. I've been a poll worker and a registrar of voters, and it is not as simple as most people would think.

specialist 9y ago

Until recently, we opponents have been the vocal minority. Shouted down, arrested, ignored. One newspaper called me "a sweaty paranoid kook" for having the audacity to explain, citing the procedures and rules, how central count works. Even today, you'll still see some yahoos pitching Chaum or RSA or Pret-a-Vote (?) based whackadoodle solutions. Completely divorced from how real world election administration works. But someday Tinkerbell will fly, if we all just clap hard enough, so stop interrupting with physics, logic, experience, thank you very much. The crew that played the long game, and moved the needle, are the various members of the Election Verification Network. Unlike me, who burned out early. We all owe the EVN a huge debt of gratitude.