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Georgia says switching back to all-paper voting is logistically impossible
- ilaksh 8y agoTo me going back to paper is not the answer to more fairness or security. Maybe having a paper or other physical representation also would be a good measure though. But to me this is largely about a distrust of technology as much as anything. As usual I am ready to accept your hate, downvotes and lectures about how ignorant I am.
- porlune 8y agoI think you're right, that it's not an answer to more fairness or security; but it is one way that will improve confidence among the people you rightly portray as being distrustful of technology. We want them to participate in this process and feel like they can trust it.
- specialist 8y agoThe gold standard for the USA is the Australian Ballot. Private voting, public counting. What makes it work is the one-way hash of dropping your ballot into the ballot box. There is no non-paper system that can match that quality for our form of elections. Anyone who wants to improve election integrity, paper or otherwise, would advocate for simplification. The two biggest wins would be: Switching from winner-takes-all to approval voting would make our elections less brittle. Issuing separate ballots for federal, state, local would simplify ballot processing.
- Spivak 8y ago> There is no non-paper system that can match that quality for our form of elections. Let me take a stab at one: Each precinct has a number of voting machines on a local network. Voting machines print a paper receipt viewable by the voter. When the polls close the precinct has an instant count for a preliminary report that can be verified after the fact by a scanner/humans.
- specialist 8y agoIt's good to think these things thru. Nicely done. There are two holes with respect to our current system of voting. #1 It's not immediately obvious, but the order which voters sign-in is preserved, as is the order the ballots are cast. So it's trivial to identify each voter's ballot. One variant of this idea is some kind of ballot marking device. Mark or print the ballot, tabulate it separately. This can have value for accessibility reasons. But doesn't add anything to the current processes. #2 Your idea is generally known as the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). Research and experience has shown that voters mostly do not review their ballots before casting. Further, there's no reason to believe what you cast is what was recorded. In fact, one of the times I observed a random "audit" of the VVPAT, when administrators encountered a problem (cheap thermal printer shredded the output), they just put the memory card in a new device and reprinted the VVPAT. So the only thing being verified was that the printer worked. A variant of the VVPAT is to give voters some kind of receipt. Then later they could verify that their vote was cast and counted correctly. But just having a receipt allows someone to verify how you voted, destroying the secret ballot. There are proposals for using some kind of crypto to obfuscate the actual votes, but still allow one to see their votes were counted. Suspending disbelief for a second, the reason these systems don't work for our elections is because of information leakage. All the crypto based systems rely on some kind of hash collision, to hide your ballot in the herd of ballots. Unfortunately, with our small precincts and complicated ballots, collisions are rare. So even after hashing your ballot would be uniquely identifiable. To make such systems feasible, we'd have to increase the herd (bigger precincts), or simplify the ballots (perhaps splitting federal, state, local races on to their own ballots).
- cmurf 8y agoIt's not a distrust of technology, it's a distrust of for-profit companies, insisting on using proprietary software, and refusing 3rd party, let alone public, auditing. And that these companies fight against laws that try to bring scrutiny to these products.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoIt is not distrust of technology to know that hacking happens, and that placing this into the targets of hackers is asking for trouble. For this I prefer non-networked technology, or at its simplest--Paper.
- andrewflnr 8y agoIt's definitely distrust of technology, and it's 100% justified in this case. IMO the computer industry is simply not ready to provide the level of security needed for elections. The factors you mention make it ten times worse, but it was bad enough already.
- int_19h 8y agoIt's about distrust of a particular technology in a particular country, that has been thoroughly validated through experience. Is it possible to make electronic voting work safely and securely in principle? Yeah. Would I trust anyone in US to do it today, considering various interest groups, political limitations etc? No.
- samgranieri 8y agobullshit
- ggferghghff 8y agoWhy? Anyways instead of paper ballots, use silver tokens with as many boxes as there are candidates. Then just weigh the boxes and don’t bother counting. (A 1oz silver token would cost $30 to fake)
- IncRnd 8y agoYou should have more than a single threat in your threat model. In addition to counterfeit tokens you may want to take a look at theft of tokens either during or between elections.
- StevenRayOrr 8y agoYou might be interested in reading about the history of the Australian ballot[0] to get a sense of we vote the way with do ("we" being fairly loose in this case, as many places outside the US use the Australian ballot -- and some American don't). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot#United_States
- siruncledrew 8y ago“Logistically impossible” -> it’s more work than it’s worth to us.
- Klathmon 8y agoHow would you prevent a corrupt voting offical giving silver-painted lead tokens to anyone wearing a Democrat hat? How would you verify that the weighing machine isn't tampered with? Paper voting is simple, anyone can check a box. it's easy to secure, you can have hundreds of people who all don't trust one another watching a ballot box all day. And it's easy to verify, those same hundreds of people can all count along when tallying. Rich, poor, white, black, literate, illiterate, young, old. Everyone can participate and can validate with a basic paper system, and you'll never conveniently have broken machines or run out of tokens in some areas that predominantly vote one way or the other.
- rleigh 8y agoIt lacks reasonable audit capability. Paper ballots can be inspected and recounted; tampering and ballot stuffing can be observed. Tokens in a particular bin can't be audited in the same way. And it may also lack anonymity--unlike the folded paper vote, you could be observed putting the token into a particular slot.
- specialist 8y agoGeorgia's election administrators are simply wrong. Printing more ballots is utterly feasible. The artwork is already prepared for absentee ballots. If the current vendor can't or won't, there are plenty of other printers who will happily take Georgia money and get the job done. There are plenty of new ballot scanners. My own jurisdiction uses high speed document scanners and matching software. There are two real logistic issues. Poll site-based tabulators vs central count. The gold standard is paper ballots cast at poll sites and tabulated when the polls close. But election integrity activists would likely prefer paper ballots tabulated downtown (just like postal ballots) over continued use of the touchscreens. Georgia has a lot of work to recover institutional knowledge for handling paper ballots. Procedures, training, and so forth. Fortunately, all but 4 other states have returned to paper ballots. Georgia can just ask Alabama or North Carolina for their play books.
- philips 8y agoWho are the manufacturers making COTS high speed document scanners?
- specialist 8y agoEvery vendor now has a high speed solution. You can call your election administrators (likely the Auditor) and ask what they're using. --- My jurisdiction now uses ClearVote tabulation software, which works with Fujitsu and lbml scanners. https://www.clearballot.com/technology/clearcount https://www.clearballot.com/technology/clearcount https://www.ibml.com/imagetrac-intelligent-scanners-the-brains-of-your-operation https://www.ibml.com/imagetrac-intelligent-scanners-the-brai... http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/ http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scan... Fujitsu will even rent their machines to you.
- andrewflnr 8y ago> Georgia can just ask Alabama or North Carolina for their play books. Not sure about the rest, but this seems naive. I'm guessing other states' procedures will require extensive modification to be applicable in Georgia's particular context. That alone would, realistically, take up the time to the next election. For the election after that, of course, they have absolutely no excuse.
- kazinator 8y agoSomeone in Georgia just learned the word "logistically" and wanted to show it off in a sentence.
- djrogers 8y agoIn the next 60 days, for the November 2018 election. And yes, that sounds somewhat defensible. The decision process that got them here, however, is wholly indefensible.
- sshine 8y agoA society that can't prepare an election with analog ballots -- be it ballots or pebbles -- is a democracy in distress.
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoI disagree. Getting some pieces of paper, pens and people to count them does not require 60 days. We don't need fancy technology to hold elections. People have been able to hold elections successfully for thousands of years.
- lowlevel 8y agoBullshit.
- andrewstuart 8y agoPeople should be able to vote from home using their phone.
- porlune 8y agoI disagree, merely because that sounds like a system ripe(r) for abuse.
- andrewstuart 8y agoOn the contrary I think "we" know a great deal more about how to build secure authentication systems for individuals on phones than we know about how to build once off voting machine systems.
- craftyguy 8y agoDon't assume the government would hire "us" to implement it. There's plenty of terrible security in mobile apps, just as there are examples of good security in mobile apps.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoYou don't know how to prevent coerced voting which is much easier to perform without centralized polling stations. Tech can't solve all social problems.
- Spivak 8y agoAbsentee voting exists. 23 million people voted with a system susceptible to this 'problem' in 2016. I think we'll be fine.
- llukas 8y agoIt doesn't matter that experts know how to do it. Everybody can verify pen & paper ballot and virtually nobody can verify "secure authentication system". We need everybody to trust election outcome.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoI mean these people are supposed to be the guardians of our votes and democracy and they're sounding corrupt. Who watches the watchmen?
- craftyguy 8y ago> Who watches the watchmen? Elected officials, who are elected by the process that the 'guardians' are guarding/implementing. Why would they want to change a system that they succeeded in? It's an unbreakable circle.
- a_imho 8y agoIt's an unbreakable circle. Surely there are referendums before pitchforks to change the election process? A single voting that needs to succeed.
- dash2 8y agoThis comment adds zero information to the discussion. Not hacker news standard, I think.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoWithin the mother lode, Lamb found on the center's website a database containing registration records for the state's 6.7 million voters; multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day; and software files for the state's ExpressPoll pollbooks—electronic devices used by pollworkers to verify that a voter is registered before allowing them to cast a ballot. There also appeared to be databases for the so-called GEMS servers. These Global Election Management Systems are used to prepare paper and electronic ballots, tabulate votes, and produce summaries of vote totals. The files were supposed to be behind a password-protected firewall, but the center had misconfigured its server so they were accessible to anyone, according to Lamb. "You could just go to the root of where they were hosting all the files and just download everything without logging in," Lamb says.
- dj43nq 8y agoSurely some kind of linked list with fancy crypto smarts could make this whole process less sucky?
- thomasfedb 8y agoThis joke isn't bad enough to be funny.
- thomasfedb 8y agoVoting must not only be fair, but also able to be seen to be fair. Without a BSc.
- briandear 8y agoTo be fair, paper ballots also have their problems, Kennedy likely won the election because of ballot stuffing. However, I think it weird that we oppose electronic voting because of security concerns but similarly aligned groups oppose voter ID. If we cared about election integrity, we’d have a 100% photo ID requirement with facial recognition along with using election ink on a finger, along with tamperproor paper ballots. But I don’t think these groups actually care about election integrity — they simply seek to delegitimize election results for candidates and parties they don’t like. If their guy won, there wouldn’t be any challenge. Donna Curling (and her husband,) the lead plaintiff, has given over $48,000 to Democrat candidates, including contributing the maximum to David Scott — a congressman who, despite running unopposed in 2016, spent almost $1,000,000 in campaign funds on fancy DC restaurants and other nonsense — especially ridiculous since he ran unopposed. He literally just had to sit in a chair doing nothing and he would have won his election. But he managed to spend more money than many candidates in contested races. He may not have broken the law, but any reasonable person might have reason to believe that there is even more nonsense inside his tent. And yes, this is relevant because Scott, throughout his career has engaged in highly questionable and potentially illegal campaign activities. Scott is also a member of the highly corrupt Congressional Black Caucus who has featured a veritable rogue’s gallery of unethical at best, illegal at worst members: Corrine Brown (federal prison for fraud,) Chaka Farrah (convicted of 23 charges of racketeering and fraud,) Eddie Bernice Johnson ethics violations,) Maxine Waters (multiple ethics violations due to involvement with OneBank,) Alcee Hastings (impeached as a judge,) Sheila Jackson-Lee (Medicare fraud,) Charlie Rangel (tax evasion,) Gwen Moore (ethical violations.) David Scott also made the list of 25 most corrupt congressmen. And the lead plaintiff is a major fundraiser for Scott. If this Curling person actually cared about election integrity and ethics, then why would she significantly support one of the most corrupt congressmen in office? David Scott, incidentally opposes voter ID laws and yet one of his biggest supporters is worried about election machine hacking? While I am not a fan of electronic voting, this entire case seems designed to deligitimize the election. People like to cite that voter fraud isn’t a real problem, yet election machine hacking also hasn’t been a proven problem either. So if voter ID is unnecessary because “fraud doesn’t happen,” then hacking an election machine seems even more unlikely — there hasn’t been a single proven case that a voting machine has been hacked but there has been multiple occasions of voter fraud. If we were trying to prevent election irregularities, then a paper ballot along with strict voter ID seems completely reasonable; but the Donna Curlings of the country don’t care about that. They care only that their guy wins.
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoWhat is needed is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
- delbel 8y agoIts logistically impossible because they wont be able to rig the outcome as easily if there was a paper trail.
- tempodox 8y ago> ...modifying the voting process would be too expensive, too unwieldy, and, in the end, not worth it. Wow. Government saying that securing a functioning democracy is “not worth it”. Those people need to be voted out of office stante pede.
- Spivak 8y agoSee but you're just putting words in their mouth. Saying that paper ballots are required for a functioning democracy seems like kind of silly. chance of compromised digital ballots * cost of harm < cost of switching + chance of compromised paper ballots * cost of harm Are you really faulting government for being rational and pragmatic?
- mpettitt 8y agoWhy is there a requirement for optical scanners? In other democratic countries, the counting of ballots is still a manual process (e.g. UK https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its-votes-41265 https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its... or Germany https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-volunteers-organize-the-voting-and-count-the-ballots/a-40562388 https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-volunteers-organize-th... ), which, while labour intensive, seems to work. Are there particular reasons why it couldn't work in Georgia?
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoGerrymandering is easier is just easier for the GOP!!
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago> Plus, even if the Peach State somehow could get enough paper ballots, it doesn't have enough optical scanners to read them. I think they are mistaken. Georgia has approximately 20 million optical scanners capable of reading ballots (population of 10.5 million, each averaging a bit less than two working eyeballs).
- Spivak 8y agoGreat! Have everyone scan their own ballot and enter the results into the spreadsheet for tallying -- crap we just invented digital voting. What if voting machines left a paper trail that was audited by the voter before submitting digitally and each precinct asynchronously counted their paper ballots and corrected their digital number after the fact if there's a discrepancy?
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoOr just collect a group of people to count the ballots as has been done for hundreds of years. Third-world countries that have suffered massive destruction in wars manage to conduct elections just fine without the use of any advanced technology. I'm pretty sure Georgia could manage just fine if they cared to do so.