10 ms·

In Georgia, a legal battle over electronic vs. paper voting

151 points by danso 8y ago

Y_Y 8y ago
Let's rehash that old argument in the comments shall we?
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Pretty much everyone (i.e. by a margin that would be considered a landslide in a normal election) who works near tech agrees that electronic voting is fine as long as it produces a paper record (or a uses a paper ballot) per vote which provides a mechanism to verify the integrity of the system after the fact and makes tampering hard to scale. There. Done. Edit: changed wording, receipt vs record.
  - ninkendo 8y ago
    An electronic machine that only exists to print a paper ballot makes the most sense IMO. You get the convenience and consistency of a touch screen (no hanging chads), but you get to see the paper that gets printed out and see that it matches what you put in, and the paper is the actual system of record that matters.
    - chasingthewind 8y ago
      Do you see a role for the electronic machine to provide a count as well? My sense is that the switch to electronic machines (and the switch to mechanical booths prior) had to have been driven at least in part to make the preliminary count easier to obtain.
      - Mbioguy 8y ago
        For those of us who want to switch to alternate electoral methods like RCV, approval voting, multimember districting, etc, using machine counting is a big deal. If you are paper only, the increased labor to do repeated tabulations (as is done to an extent in RCV) is significant. It is the reason a bill to implement RCV in a state I used to live failed, after passing the state house and being discussed for some time in the state senate. Whatever counting method you are using and whatever reporting method you are using, it needs to be verifiable. I still can't believe we had ballots from 2016 that were destroyed after brin subpoenaed, without any consequence for those who had charge of their possession and safety.
        beat 8y ago
        I beg to differ. I live in Minneapolis, where we do RCV on paper. It has not caused any of the problems you're talking about.
      - roganartu 8y ago
        Counting paper votes is a solved problem, and nations that use entirely paper ballots don't have slow preliminary counts. Australia, for example, has a somewhat complicated preferential voting system and relies entirely on paper ballots, and yet they are generally able to provide a conclusive result the night of an election (with televised tracking of counts throughout the country). This may not make sense intuitively, but counting paper scales quite well by being distributed to the polling locations and physically sorting the paper ballots. The Australian Electoral Commission documents the counting process quite thoroughly [0]. The only time counting paper takes a long time to get a win/lose result is when results are close enough that every vote needs to be counted. This is surprisingly rare in practice. [0]: https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/index.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/index.htm
      - michaelt 8y ago
        I don't feel we have a track record of responding well to elections where irregularities are suspected. Especially after a winner has been declared, and the loser has conceded. I mean, the 2000 US presidential election had a recount... that was cancelled. The Brexit referendum had a bunch of spending irregularities... but the result stands. The 2016 US presidential election had allegations of Russian interference... but the result stands. It's pointless having an early electronic result and a late paper result if the early result always stands - the late paper result gives you nothing except a false sense of security.
        learc83 8y ago
        >I mean, the 2000 US presidential election had a recount... that was cancelled. The Brexit referendum had a bunch of spending irregularities... but the result stands. The 2016 US presidential election had allegations of Russian interference... but the result stands. In none of those cases was there proof that actual vote counts were altered. There are still ongoing investigations into Russia's interference, but the side that the interference helped is the on that's currently in power, and there's enough ambiguity for them to avoid taking any direct action. If we'd had a paper ballots that proved that Russia hacked voting machines and actually changed 100k or so votes--I'm 100% confident we'd have had a completely different outcome.
        michaelt 8y ago
        In none of those cases was there proof that actual vote counts were altered. I was thinking more of the recounts that were cancelled. If you can't recount to check if vote counts were altered without first having proof that vote counts were altered, what's the point? More broadly, I hoped to illustrate the fact winners oppose fishing expeditions to double-check election integrity. I simply don't believe we have the option of getting the result wrong on the first announcement. It has to be right the first time. And because it has to be right first time, we should apply our most trusted counting method the first time; the addition of an early-but-untrustworthy count is a move in the wrong direction.
        8y ago
      - ninkendo 8y ago
        I think I'd rather just have the paper ballots counted by a separate machine/person. I know it's redundant but it's worth it to have the systems totally independent of one another (and independently upgradable). It's the IRL equivalent of sacrificing some DRYness to achieve loose coupling.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - clarkevans 8y ago
    The use of the word receipt is problematic since people believe that it means they can take it home with them and somehow use it later. It can be a "voter verified paper trail", I suppose. But, what's better is just having paper ballots that are optically scanned. If someone needs assistive software to fill out the paper ballot, so be it. Even with paper ballots (or a vvpt), you still need regular procedures to audit the record to ensure that the counting and down-stream handling of the counts are correct.
    - criddell 8y ago
      A receipt confirming a particular vote could be useful to those that want to pay citizens for their vote.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    Paper ballots are worthless if they're counted electronically.
    - learc83 8y ago
      They're not worthless if you mandate that they're kept around for verification. You can automatically verify some random percentage of them and do a full recount if needed.
    - chapium 8y ago
      You can recount paper ballots on different electronic counters to verify integrity. However, you cannot vote on multiple electronic machines to ensure consistency.
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
        Hell, you can easily recount paper ballots by hand. No need to bring any machines into it. We did this for hundreds of years, and it still works. The ambiguities we had in the 2000 election in Florida were from people improperly marking their ballots (hanging chads, etc.). If the paper ballots are generated by machines, or at least have already been verified as being readable by a machine at the time the ballot was cast, then you will have a much lower margin of error during the manual recount.
  - expathacker 8y ago
    Sure .. As long as everybody who voted takes their receipt, and is willing to go to the government and demand proof that their vote was counted. Let's see, in the USA you get 54% voter turn-out .. a re-count requiring those receipts should get what, 15, maybe 20% of those voters to participate? There. No.
    - smileysteve 8y ago
      > As long as everybody who voted takes their receipt Voters strictly can't take a record of their receipt; this opens up a whole other level of voter intimidation, where, if you voted for the wrong person you lose your job, lose benefits, get beat up, get killed.
      - mtone 8y ago
        Couldn't the receipt of votes be an encrypted result derived from the voter's key for which only the government/district has the private key ? It would not show the vote but only guarantee that your vote has not been modified. You could go to the government to get the vote confirmed privately. Ideally, assuming you would be voting with a key linked to your identity (SIN), both the IDs of voters and their votes could be entirely public and on your receipt. The act of counting votes would be for a set of parties to be work with only the public list and given the private key(s) to generate results. The trust there should be similar to counting paper ballots, especially if independent parties combine subsets and arrive at the same result.
        smileysteve 8y ago
        Yes, that would be possible; but is significantly beyond what people typically mean when they say "just give me receipt" > Ideally, assuming you would be voting with a key linked to your identity (SIN), both the IDs of voters and their votes could be entirely public and on your receipt. What piece of your identity does your employer not have access to? In the U.S. they've typically seen your id, your passport, your pay stubs, your health insurance.
      - expathacker 8y ago
  - monocasa 8y ago
    There's also the question of how the printed ballots get counted. If you put them all into a black box machine (or set of machines) that spits out a total at the end, you've recreated all the same issues.
    - beat 8y ago
      No, you haven't. The issue with touchscreens isn't the machine total, but rather the lack of a mechanism for validating the machine total. Machine-read paper ballots can be and are sometimes hand-counted to validate the machines.
- danso 8y ago
  What's the old argument? This article refers to a current legal case and testimony that happened last week, and a judge is expected to reach a decision today about whether Georgia must change its election system just weeks before voting in 2018 takes place. The debate is more than just paper vs. digital. Georgia is interesting not just because it has gone completely paperless (4 other states have done so), but because it is also the only state in which the system is centralized. Delaware, one of the other states to have gone paperless, have systems too old to connect to the Internet: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/16/check-out-voting-machines-delaware-might-buy-2020-election/1006302002/ https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/1...
  - Y_Y 8y ago
    While you're quite right, if you wanted to see what the old argument was, please look at your sibling comments.
- diminoten 8y ago
  Voting is one of those problems that is, on its face, very simple: write a name down, count how many people wrote each name down, person with most names wins. This seeming simplicity, combined with the fact that no one thus far has seemingly gotten it right, lends itself strongly towards all kinds of armchair opinions from anyone at all related to any of the fields involved. I'm a software engineer, for example. "Design and build me a system that collects votes and produces results." is in the format of the requests I get at my job on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, so I can take it and run with it, as I am trained to do. I can come up with all kinds of additional requirements in my head, tons of edge cases, different scenarios I need to watch out for, etc etc. Basically, as can anyone who does my job, I can turn it from a (immensely vague in this case) business need into a set of technical requirements. However, I am wholly unqualified to design a ballot device, despite the seeming simplicity of the request, and how it seems to fit nicely into my professional intake. Will that stop me or anyone else in my position from offering an opinion? Probably not! Thus, you get the constant "re"hashing of "old" arguments, because people see these problems as "simpler" than they actually are, and "re"voice the same ideas and concepts, because it seems like some obvious problems can be solved with "just a little" modification to the existing systems.
danso 8y ago
> Barnes testified that the server that holds the data that Georgia’s 159 counties use to build their ballots is “air-gapped,” or isolated from the Internet. But he acknowledged that he uses a thumb drive to transfer ballot proofs from the server to his desktop computer, which he uses for email. From there, he moves the data to a Dropbox-like site, where counties can retrieve the ballot data. Anyone know what "ballot proofs" refers to? I hope that's not just a fancy terminology for a tab-delimited text file that contains the voting totals. I wonder what "Dropbox-like" site actually refers to -- a cloud site created in-house by the state government? Or by a contractor that ostensibly specializes and is authorized (i.e. fills out the paperwork and background checks) to sell a file-transfer app that's basically a wrapper around a commercial cloud service?
- xmasgator 8y ago
  In design a "proof" is a preview of the final design. That's probably what he's referring to. A final-ish draft of the ballot for review by the stakeholders.
  - danso 8y ago
    That makes the most sense on the face of it, especially in the preceding context of "Barnes testified that the server that holds the data that Georgia's 159 counties use to build their ballots". It's possible that the reporter conflates this "ballot data" on the "Dropbox-like site" with actual voting tallies. Such a site for the election center to upload ballot proofs sounds reasonable, although I question why such a site would need to be "air-gapped". The data to build ballots would presumably contain entirely public information (e.g. the serialized info of which candidates are running for which parties in which races). But even if these details about ballot proofs isn't relevant to the main point, Mr. Barnes's testimony is still concerning. He's the director of the state's centralized elections system, after all. Last year, when Lamb notified the state of the data breach, Barnes "wrote of blacklisting Lamb from accessing the website before changing his mind and ordering scans of the system". [0] That the vulnerability stemmed from Drupalmageddon is even more troubling, because it's not as if Lamb's claims were hard to verify, given how well-publicized Drupalmageddon had been at that point. It's also worth noting that I haven't seen any read about how the elections center receives the actual vote data. The stories I've read so far -- including this WaPo article -- have only referenced voter registration data. Having this data breached via arbitrary code execution is still a big deal, if the site is used to verify voter eligibility, but AFAIK, it's (hopefully) not the same system and database that holds vote data. (Voter registration data contains personal info, but some states actually publish it online. in machine-readable format even) [0] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article216031450.html https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
uptown 8y ago
This Medium post has another analysis of the Georgia voting issue: https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-mach...
RobertSmith 8y ago
In India, there has been a debate going on for years that EVMs should be replaced with the old paper voting method. People against EVMs say that they can be tampered and results can be altered whereas the other side says it's very safe to use EVMs.
- davchana 8y ago
  There had been live news reports on camera where any button pressed goes to one specific party, but only for n times & m times works normal; n being way bigger than m. Then, other reports say EVMs controlled by Bluetooth etc. Now one faction is asking EVMs with paper trail, one other asking for paper ballots, & ruling party wants only EVMs & all local & federal elections at same time.
- beat 8y ago
  At this point, I'm automatically suspicious of any party that says it's perfectly safe to use paperless voting machines.
maxxxxx 8y ago
It really worries me for US democracy that they don't seem capable of running an election in a way that voters feel confident that their votes are counted correctly. Bush v Gore in 2000 should have been a warning but nothing seems to have improved and now we even have a president who does everything he can to undermine trust in election results. Once people start losing trust in elections and other public institutions the door is wide open for a strongman who claims to clean up the mess by getting rid of the system. Trump is a start ("clean up the swamp") but things may get much worse.
- beat 8y ago
  Bush vs Gore led directly to the idiotic touchscreen machines. Florida's paper ballot mechanism sucked, sure. But touchscreens are far, far worse. People fell for it.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    That particular system sucked (the 'hanging chads' come to mind), could have been easily remedied without going electronic though.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Bush v. Gore was a warning, and the response was to roll out electronic voting everywhere. This solved the very specific problem that was most prominent in the 2000 election: ballots that could be ambiguously marked. Unfortunately, there are far bigger problems to worry about and this change made them far worse.
wolfi1 8y ago
old, but gold: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M#
- Someone1234 8y ago
  As an aside, the original source of this joke, which a lot of people associated with election tampering, was cheap resistive touch screens that were incorrectly calibrated. You'd push a location on the screen, but due to normal wear the location that the press was recorded was wrong, this would get worse the more wear the screen had and the longer between re-calibration. Eventually people got videos of you'd push one candidate and another candidate to the left or right/up or down would receive the vote, often in different races. This was a scandal in the sense that the machines were not fit for purpose, overly cheap, and poorly maintained/serviced. But it wasn't a good example of election tampering (just one that fit what a lot of people expected to see when tampering was occuring).
pjc50 8y ago
> He said that, a decade ago, the threats came primarily from “dishonest insiders or dishonest candidates” or criminals but that “everything changed in 2016.” Russia’s efforts to penetrate states’ and counties’ voter registration systems and to hack manufacturers’ software “presented a substantially new and much more serious form of threat.” In short, as long as the ballot could be reliably corrupted only by the locals who'd been bribed the device manufacturer in the first place, the corruption was stable. But now there's an outside player. Electronic voting is bad, and Ireland gave up on it, but it's not the only issue in election integrity. See also: gerrymandering/redistricting, voter roll purges, etc.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It seems to me that the problem in the US is that a lot of people think it's more important for their party to win than for the election to have integrity.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Well, yes; look at the decades of voter rights litigation. There's a long history of trying to suppress Black voting. So long as that's still going on there will be voting integrity problems coming from within state legislatures.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Here in NY (and I'm sure in many other places), you manually mark up a paper ballot with your vote. You then insert it into a scanner which confirms the ballot's validity and then drops it into a lockbox. The votes can be tallied instantaneously through the electronic system, but if there's any irregularities the lockboxes can be opened and manually counted as verification. And you can open a small number of randomly selected lockboxes every election anyway, even absent any suspected wrongdoing, just as a check to verify that the electronic counts are working as expected. How is this not the standard everywhere? Yes, there's more paper (and thus expense) involved, but surely having a non-hackable paper trail is worth it to protect our democracy? I was at DEF CON the first time they did the voting machine hacking. Those did not fill me with confidence.
- mtgx 8y ago
  How do you tell if something goes wrong? I think what's often missing in these discussions is a need for automatic audits, too, even if not full audits initially but only for a small sample. If there is anything wrong found in that first series of audits, then a full audit should be requiered by law and there should be severe prison punishments for those state officials failing to start and finish those audits in the specified time after the election. Corrupt state officials should not be able to create any sort of delays or use them as an excuse.
  - gregmac 8y ago
    I'm not sure how it's handled now, but what I'd like to see is after the election closes, a random method to select poll locations is used -- such as a lottery ball machine -- and those locations are then required to do a manual recount. No one has advance notice of which poll locations will do this, so there's no opportunity for cheating (eg, turning off a defeat device at the locations that will be audited). If there are any differences in the count then additional locations are required to also do a manual count, and if more than two locations have differences, all electronic numbers are trashed and the whole election is counted manually.
    - 8y ago
nathan_long 8y ago
> “I don’t know any conceivable way you could change Georgia’s election system . . . in a matter of weeks,” said Cathy Cox, a former Georgia secretary of state who oversaw the 2001 study that led to the state’s adoption of DREs. “It would be chaotic beyond belief.” Oh yes, it would be awfully hard to make this switch in a matter of weeks. But this time crisis was created by negligence, since it's now been 2 years since officials were made aware of the problem. > The unsecured server that Lamb exposed in August 2016 is part of an election system — the only one in the country that is centrally run and relies upon computerized touch-screen machines for its voters — that is now at the heart of a legal and political battle with national security implications. > > “I was absolutely stunned,” Lamb said of his discovery of the exposed data. And he was angered when six months later, despite warning officials at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems (CES), which housed the server, the data was still publicly accessible online.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Unfortunately it seems at least one of the people (Cathy Cox) responsible for this system is no longer in a place to be held accountable. She should be tried for negligence, along with the other administrators/politicians that drove deployment of this system.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  If they’re forced to switch, it will be perfect cover for the governor to conduct a voter disenfranchisement campaign. Whoops, there aren’t enough paper ballots in some precincts? I wonder which ones. Boy, we were forced to do this in such a rush I guess we made some mistakes.
samirm 8y ago
Thought this was gonna be about the country :/
beat 8y ago
I've said this before, but I'll say it again because it's always useful in these threads... I believe that a well designed paper ballot system is superior to any paper-free system. Furthermore, I think the concerns of the general public about what is actually problematic in elections (and what solutions can work) are generally wrong. I'm basing this on my experience as an election judge in Minnesota. I'll describe the system, and you can decide for yourself. Minnesota uses paper ballots read by Scantron machines - the sort of bubble-marked sheets you used for tests as a kid. We have same-day registration and provisional ballots available for unregistered or incorrectly registered voters. We do not require ID for ordinary registered voters. There have been two statewide recounts in recent years - the 2010 governor's race, and the national-profile 2008 Franken/Coleman Senate race recount. Now, the process. First and foremost, all activities that require handling ballots, whether marked or unmarked, sealed or open, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties. It is flatly illegal for one party to handle ballots alone. This prevents all sorts of fraud - either adding fraudulent ballots, or removing marked ballots. Second, a simple paper tally is kept of the number of ballots cast in each precinct. At count time, the number of votes counted by the machines must exactly match the number of ballots given to voters. A mismatch triggers a hand recount of the precinct and a bunch of other validation bureaucracy. This checksum also prevents the addition/subtraction of ballots at the precinct level. Voter machine tallies are spot-checked by hand counts of individual machines - not enough to slow down the process, but enough to insure that there was no large-scale alteration of machine behavior. Registered voters are on paper rolls. When a registered voter arrives, their name is marked off the list and they are given their ballot. If someone tries to vote twice as the same person, it's caught (and triggers bureaucracy). Their ID is not checked. Same-day registration requires ID and proof of precinct residency; the valid documents are well specified (utility bills, etc). Political parties are invited to have poll monitors at any and all precincts, to keep an eye on the process. The poll watchers do not touch ballots or participate in the count, but are welcome to observe. They can also challenge individual voters, which makes ballots provisional and may lead to ID requirements. (I remember in 2004, the Democratic poll monitor was convinced the Republican monitor would challenge every single brown-skinned person in the precinct, and the Republican was convinced the Democrats would bring busloads of fake voters in from Wisconsin or something. Needless to say, both were wrong.) The result of all of this is that highly accurate informal counts are available on election night, thanks to machine voting, but manual recounts are always available, thanks to the paper. And the integrity of paper ballots is strongly protected by process. The only even arguable gap is the idea of fraudulent voting by using other people's registrations, or fake registrations. But actually doing this at a scale large enough to matter is difficult and risky. Minnesota presidential elections draw about 1.5M voters. To alter the results by 1% would require 15,000 fraudulent votes. If someone could vote once an hour, they could maybe vote 15 times. You'd need a thousand people, with training, transportation, and written data. It's hard to keep conspiracy at that scale secret. So yeah. This is trustworthy. And it's simple. It doesn't require exotic technology. It's mostly just good bureaucracy.
jguimont 8y ago
I do not understand why paper ballot would be difficult to achieve, that is the easiest to do! I never voted in the US, but the system seems overly complex for such a simple exercice. Here in Canada, we have a paper ballot (http://www.elections.ca/vot/yth/stu/gui/images/dxsmp1-e.jpg http://www.elections.ca/vot/yth/stu/gui/images/dxsmp1-e.jpg), which is pretty simple. The vote is done, the stub is tallied and 2 people need to verify the vote before dropping it in a sealed box. When the polls close, the votes are counted, by multiple persons, by hand. Nothing electronic. ... and there is a single vote at a time, no votes on laws when electing representative, etc. That is just non sense.
ynniv 8y ago
In case you missed this finer point, the Secretary of State who has certified these machines is also the candidate expected to win the election by a small margin. He has refused to recuse himself from the responsibility of ensuring a fair election.
- guelo 8y ago
  Kris Kobach had the same arrangement in Kansas recently, he ran the election and was a candidate. He won very narrowly and many people suspect he stole the election.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    And this is another angle to the problem. Even if everything was on the level, just the perception of corruption increases cynicism and decreases political engagement.
3pt14159 8y ago
I feel like a broken record on this topic. It drives me crazy. ON-SITE OBSERVERS. If any person wants to check the vote they should be able to stand there and watch the whole thing and then demand a manual count on-site immediately afterwards. No bringing ballots somewhere else to be counted. Democracy is how we stop violence from deciding resource allocation. It will be undermined if it is at all possible. Also, I really hate how electronic voting machines instant tally elections. We had that here in Ontario[0] and completely aside from my security concerns over e-voting, having the night end in a single minute ruined the normally fun nail biting as the results came in on CBC. [0] Which, by the way, did not allow me to be an on-site observer. Do I distrust Elections Ontario staff? No, but I shouldn't have to trust people. This is a fucking election. I ran the last federal one as a DRO. All paper ballots are 100% secure. The fucking e-voting lobby is evil.
- beat 8y ago
  In Minnesota, we allow on-site observers. They have to follow the rules, but they can watch, and have certain privileges (such as being able to challenge a voter's registration, turning their ballot into a provisional one).
- ergothus 8y ago
  > I really hate how electronic voting machines instant tally elections. I understand the sentiment, but I dont think entertainment should be any kind of factor in this decision. > I shouldn't have to trust people. Verification systems are great (I fully endorse the electronic-for-convenience-backed-by-paper system), but ALL systems require that you trust people. The key is to have sufficient verification, both instant and later, to make fraud difficult, detectable, and provable.
  - specialist 8y ago
    The only trust worthy system is built on mutual distrust. Please sign up to be a poll worker. Then you'll see first hand how it works.
    - 8y ago
dalbasal 8y ago
This is very much an outsider with no skin in the game making suggestions... Considering that the US is a federation, would it not make sense for the federal government to run local elections as a service? This is on the back of another idea that has been floated around for elections in regions where "free and fair" is an aspirational goal. I stead of an international body certifying elections, it might be better to have a 3rd party run the elections, and make all the implementation decisions. ..just to keep a separation of powers between election system and candidates running within that system. Similarly, as referendums are increasingly important in many European locales... we need a more nonpolitical body empowered to finalize the wording. A president perhaps, for "westminster-like" systems.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  > Considering that the US is a federation > fed·er·a·tion > a group of states with a central government but independence in internal affairs. Your conclusion from "Federation" seems off; importantly, this upcoming election is solely for internal affairs (Governor, SOS). Beyond that, it's important to note that each state can have their own way to assign electoral votes for presidential elections, some are winner take all, a few split on percentages.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  The federal system here is fairly weak, by design -- and the ideology of that weakness is still prevalent. Making this shift would probably require more arm-twisting and political capital than the federal government can apply even when federalists are in power. There's a latent suspicion of the federal government in the electorate here that is usually pretty easily activated. I'm also not sure I see the advantage to centralizing this. It's a case of "many hands make light work". There's a lot to do to conduct an election. Breaking the task among lots of basically autonomous units, made up of local individuals instead of some faceless Washington bureaucrats (see, there's that latent suspicion ;) gives some resilience -- and helps voters feel connected to the process. Also worth noting that although the structures of the various intra-state governments are broadly similar, there's plenty of differences that would be a pain in the neck for a federal administration.
lloda 8y ago
Hand counting of paper ballots is a highly parallel process that can be done quickly at any scale. The only reason to introduce counting machines is so that someone can extract money from it.
- RightMillennial 8y ago
  I mostly agree. We should be hand counting all ballots. But also incorporating a counting machine could help improve reliability similarly to a checksum. If the hard counted and machine results are not identical, then recount because there was a mistake somewhere.
- specialist 8y ago
  FWIW, most proponets of hand counting advocate "sort & stack". For elections in the USA, that means a count per race / issue. Some jurisdictions can have over 30 per ballot. Further, each precinct has to be tabulated separately. The poll site I ran for years had 5 precincts, roughly average. We'd have 400-800 ballots per election, depending. One change that would make manual counting more feasible would be to split our ballots into federal, state, local. Every election administrator I've ever met opposed manual counting. Mostly because it's a lot of work. A group of intended to run experiments to determine the effort, cost, accuracy of manual counts. Simulate a real election, eg print up marked ballots where the totals are predetermined but not known to the counters. Alas, we never got our act together before every one burned out. PS- Any tabulation method has to accommodate marking errors, aka adjudicating voter intent.
- dublinben 8y ago
  Electronic voting also makes it easier to manipulate the results of elections.
G4BB3R 8y ago
Paper voting is a waste of resources. And can be frauded the same way as electronic voting.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Ah yes, it's famously easy to remotely change thousands of pieces of paper that are locked in boxes.
kevingrahl 8y ago
I can not access that article, can someone please submit it to archive or has some other mirror of it?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  https://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-georgia-a-legal-battle-over-electronic-vs-paper-voting/2018/09/16/d655c070-b76f-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html https://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat...
  - kevingrahl 8y ago
    Thanks!
solotronics 8y ago
We should also have ICE on hand to prevent any foreign interference with the election! Russian agents can't interfere if everyone is checked for citizenship at the polling place.
- pjc50 8y ago
  You can only do that in countries which issue mandatory national ID to everyone. Otherwise it's a license for ICE to check ID only of nonwhite people.
  - solotronics 8y ago
    who said anything about skin color? what is in place to stop foreign nationals from directly influencing our elections? They should check everyones ID especially white people, we cant have Russians voting in our elections!
- dang 8y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006593 and marked it off-topic.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ulkesh 8y ago
As a Georgia resident, this is highly disconcerting. I would be quite happy, willing, and patient with polling precincts had to switch to all-paper ballots if it meant guaranteeing that my vote was accurate and actually counted. While I almost never vote for a winner, since I'm an outside middle-ground voice in this extremely conservative state (on the whole), I at least want the confidence that my vote wasn't tampered with. Right now, I have no such confidence. Yet I will still vote because it is my right and not voting is not the answer to this problem.
Pxtl 8y ago
Obligatory Xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
luckycharms810 8y ago
I think the onset of election season has caused these types of articles to become in-vogue. I have been surprised by the reactions of what is mostly a tech savvy community. Full disclaimer, I work at a voting tech company as an engineer, and just wanted to give my 2 cents. - Paper ballots and Risk limiting audits do not actually constitute a perfect solution to this problem. They do not constitute what is considered an End to End verifiable voting system. You cannot actually definitively know that your vote was counted in the final tally, and cast as intended. The Risk limiting audits as currently structured can only verify that a computer counted a small sample size of votes as a human would. It cannot confirm all the votes were counted, or that your vote was not tampered with. - Paper ballots also do not address the needs of folks voting over seas, or those affected with disabilities. - When current election systems are often described as easy to hack, the systems referenced are often hardware that is 10-20 years old. If you look at the landscape of the Election's industry, there are only 3 vendors that account for over 90% of the public election market share in America. These system's were put through certification many years ago, and continue to operate through those certifications. The result of an inability to innovate in this space, is that we will continue to use those systems (that many perceive as vulnerable) for the foreseeable future. - Smaller election vendors are encouraging the idea of recurring certification, as well as more stringent certification requirements. Most people who use these forums are very capable of understanding concepts like Asymmetric encryption, checksums, and other tamper proof methodologies for high value data. If you can trust the idea of an Encrypted e-mail server ( e.g. Lavabit ), or encrypted chat servers (Signal), it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet. Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  > it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet It's hard to imagine because it's completely impossible. In most of the world not being able to prove you voted for someone in particular is considered a key characteristic of the vote. No internet based voting guarantees this. > Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election. Throwing around claims of wrong side of history would be just an insult it wasn't so dangerous. Paper voting is not secure because you "observe some votes being cast in your polling station". It's secure because each polling station is staffed by political adversaries that do the count together of every single ballot. This is much better than the level of systematic verification than you can ever even attempt to do to your huge stack of software and hardware. It's also a kind of verification that everyone understands and so it effectively convinces the losing candidates they actually lost. Which is as much of an important characteristic of a voting system as getting good counts. So get off your high horse. Apparently you design these systems and don't understand the actual safety characteristics of the paper count. The kinds of attack surface electronic systems add is huge and yet they provide no actual advantages to properly run elections. The thread is already full of examples so I won't add more but it's telling that in most of the world this isn't an issue at all because we just run our simple, cheap, reliable and fast process like we've always done and forget about it.
cwkoss 8y ago
I found this medium article investigating fishiness in Georgia elections a couple weeks ago. https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-mach... Kathy Rogers was GA election director, now has a golden parachute at the company who manufactures electronic voting machines for GA. She came to my attention for writing a menacing-but-technically-incompetent letter to DEFCON vote hacking village attendees. Skeptical because only published on medium, but seems like Cohn might be onto something.
AngryData 8y ago
The only electronic voting machine I would ever trust wouldn't have any more hardware capabilities than a TI-81 calculator. It doesn't need it, and every bit of extra bullshit and hardware and layers of software is a security vulnerability. The only other problem I see after doing that would be whether or not to publicly release the hardware diagrams. Maybe have the gaming commission verify the machines like they have very successfully done slot machines and electronic gambling machines.
ataturk 8y ago
Everything electronic is subject to manipulation. But paper ballots can be stuffed, too, it's just possibly harder. But the Franken "election" in MN should be a case study in how fraud is done all over. It's kind of poetic justice that Franken got taken down and don't think for a second it's because of some stupid photo that was taken of him pretending to grab some woman's tits. What he really did is way, way worse than that. Think about it. Personally, I don't have a party loyalty and I don't much care what team wins or loses because our system is so trashy anyways, but as someone interested in ethics, I would like to see the issue of election integrity take A LOT more seriously and then maybe, maybe, we start getting out of the swamp of fraud. Part of me thinks election fraud is just as American as apple pie. It's how it's done. It's like cheating in NASCAR--all part of the game.

151 points by danso 8y ago

Y_Y 8y ago

Let's rehash that old argument in the comments shall we?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Pretty much everyone (i.e. by a margin that would be considered a landslide in a normal election) who works near tech agrees that electronic voting is fine as long as it produces a paper record (or a uses a paper ballot) per vote which provides a mechanism to verify the integrity of the system after the fact and makes tampering hard to scale. There. Done. Edit: changed wording, receipt vs record.
- ninkendo 8y ago
  An electronic machine that only exists to print a paper ballot makes the most sense IMO. You get the convenience and consistency of a touch screen (no hanging chads), but you get to see the paper that gets printed out and see that it matches what you put in, and the paper is the actual system of record that matters.
  - chasingthewind 8y ago
    Do you see a role for the electronic machine to provide a count as well? My sense is that the switch to electronic machines (and the switch to mechanical booths prior) had to have been driven at least in part to make the preliminary count easier to obtain.
    - Mbioguy 8y ago
      For those of us who want to switch to alternate electoral methods like RCV, approval voting, multimember districting, etc, using machine counting is a big deal. If you are paper only, the increased labor to do repeated tabulations (as is done to an extent in RCV) is significant. It is the reason a bill to implement RCV in a state I used to live failed, after passing the state house and being discussed for some time in the state senate. Whatever counting method you are using and whatever reporting method you are using, it needs to be verifiable. I still can't believe we had ballots from 2016 that were destroyed after brin subpoenaed, without any consequence for those who had charge of their possession and safety.
      - beat 8y ago
        I beg to differ. I live in Minneapolis, where we do RCV on paper. It has not caused any of the problems you're talking about.
    - roganartu 8y ago
      Counting paper votes is a solved problem, and nations that use entirely paper ballots don't have slow preliminary counts. Australia, for example, has a somewhat complicated preferential voting system and relies entirely on paper ballots, and yet they are generally able to provide a conclusive result the night of an election (with televised tracking of counts throughout the country). This may not make sense intuitively, but counting paper scales quite well by being distributed to the polling locations and physically sorting the paper ballots. The Australian Electoral Commission documents the counting process quite thoroughly [0]. The only time counting paper takes a long time to get a win/lose result is when results are close enough that every vote needs to be counted. This is surprisingly rare in practice. [0]: https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/index.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/index.htm
    - michaelt 8y ago
      I don't feel we have a track record of responding well to elections where irregularities are suspected. Especially after a winner has been declared, and the loser has conceded. I mean, the 2000 US presidential election had a recount... that was cancelled. The Brexit referendum had a bunch of spending irregularities... but the result stands. The 2016 US presidential election had allegations of Russian interference... but the result stands. It's pointless having an early electronic result and a late paper result if the early result always stands - the late paper result gives you nothing except a false sense of security.
      - learc83 8y ago
        >I mean, the 2000 US presidential election had a recount... that was cancelled. The Brexit referendum had a bunch of spending irregularities... but the result stands. The 2016 US presidential election had allegations of Russian interference... but the result stands. In none of those cases was there proof that actual vote counts were altered. There are still ongoing investigations into Russia's interference, but the side that the interference helped is the on that's currently in power, and there's enough ambiguity for them to avoid taking any direct action. If we'd had a paper ballots that proved that Russia hacked voting machines and actually changed 100k or so votes--I'm 100% confident we'd have had a completely different outcome.
        michaelt 8y ago
        In none of those cases was there proof that actual vote counts were altered. I was thinking more of the recounts that were cancelled. If you can't recount to check if vote counts were altered without first having proof that vote counts were altered, what's the point? More broadly, I hoped to illustrate the fact winners oppose fishing expeditions to double-check election integrity. I simply don't believe we have the option of getting the result wrong on the first announcement. It has to be right the first time. And because it has to be right first time, we should apply our most trusted counting method the first time; the addition of an early-but-untrustworthy count is a move in the wrong direction.
        8y ago
    - ninkendo 8y ago
      I think I'd rather just have the paper ballots counted by a separate machine/person. I know it's redundant but it's worth it to have the systems totally independent of one another (and independently upgradable). It's the IRL equivalent of sacrificing some DRYness to achieve loose coupling.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- clarkevans 8y ago
  The use of the word receipt is problematic since people believe that it means they can take it home with them and somehow use it later. It can be a "voter verified paper trail", I suppose. But, what's better is just having paper ballots that are optically scanned. If someone needs assistive software to fill out the paper ballot, so be it. Even with paper ballots (or a vvpt), you still need regular procedures to audit the record to ensure that the counting and down-stream handling of the counts are correct.
  - criddell 8y ago
    A receipt confirming a particular vote could be useful to those that want to pay citizens for their vote.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  Paper ballots are worthless if they're counted electronically.
  - learc83 8y ago
    They're not worthless if you mandate that they're kept around for verification. You can automatically verify some random percentage of them and do a full recount if needed.
  - chapium 8y ago
    You can recount paper ballots on different electronic counters to verify integrity. However, you cannot vote on multiple electronic machines to ensure consistency.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      Hell, you can easily recount paper ballots by hand. No need to bring any machines into it. We did this for hundreds of years, and it still works. The ambiguities we had in the 2000 election in Florida were from people improperly marking their ballots (hanging chads, etc.). If the paper ballots are generated by machines, or at least have already been verified as being readable by a machine at the time the ballot was cast, then you will have a much lower margin of error during the manual recount.
- expathacker 8y ago
  Sure .. As long as everybody who voted takes their receipt, and is willing to go to the government and demand proof that their vote was counted. Let's see, in the USA you get 54% voter turn-out .. a re-count requiring those receipts should get what, 15, maybe 20% of those voters to participate? There. No.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    > As long as everybody who voted takes their receipt Voters strictly can't take a record of their receipt; this opens up a whole other level of voter intimidation, where, if you voted for the wrong person you lose your job, lose benefits, get beat up, get killed.
    - mtone 8y ago
      Couldn't the receipt of votes be an encrypted result derived from the voter's key for which only the government/district has the private key ? It would not show the vote but only guarantee that your vote has not been modified. You could go to the government to get the vote confirmed privately. Ideally, assuming you would be voting with a key linked to your identity (SIN), both the IDs of voters and their votes could be entirely public and on your receipt. The act of counting votes would be for a set of parties to be work with only the public list and given the private key(s) to generate results. The trust there should be similar to counting paper ballots, especially if independent parties combine subsets and arrive at the same result.
      - smileysteve 8y ago
        Yes, that would be possible; but is significantly beyond what people typically mean when they say "just give me receipt" > Ideally, assuming you would be voting with a key linked to your identity (SIN), both the IDs of voters and their votes could be entirely public and on your receipt. What piece of your identity does your employer not have access to? In the U.S. they've typically seen your id, your passport, your pay stubs, your health insurance.
    - expathacker 8y ago
- monocasa 8y ago
  There's also the question of how the printed ballots get counted. If you put them all into a black box machine (or set of machines) that spits out a total at the end, you've recreated all the same issues.
  - beat 8y ago
    No, you haven't. The issue with touchscreens isn't the machine total, but rather the lack of a mechanism for validating the machine total. Machine-read paper ballots can be and are sometimes hand-counted to validate the machines.
danso 8y ago
What's the old argument? This article refers to a current legal case and testimony that happened last week, and a judge is expected to reach a decision today about whether Georgia must change its election system just weeks before voting in 2018 takes place. The debate is more than just paper vs. digital. Georgia is interesting not just because it has gone completely paperless (4 other states have done so), but because it is also the only state in which the system is centralized. Delaware, one of the other states to have gone paperless, have systems too old to connect to the Internet: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/16/check-out-voting-machines-delaware-might-buy-2020-election/1006302002/ https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/1...
- Y_Y 8y ago
  While you're quite right, if you wanted to see what the old argument was, please look at your sibling comments.
diminoten 8y ago
Voting is one of those problems that is, on its face, very simple: write a name down, count how many people wrote each name down, person with most names wins. This seeming simplicity, combined with the fact that no one thus far has seemingly gotten it right, lends itself strongly towards all kinds of armchair opinions from anyone at all related to any of the fields involved. I'm a software engineer, for example. "Design and build me a system that collects votes and produces results." is in the format of the requests I get at my job on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, so I can take it and run with it, as I am trained to do. I can come up with all kinds of additional requirements in my head, tons of edge cases, different scenarios I need to watch out for, etc etc. Basically, as can anyone who does my job, I can turn it from a (immensely vague in this case) business need into a set of technical requirements. However, I am wholly unqualified to design a ballot device, despite the seeming simplicity of the request, and how it seems to fit nicely into my professional intake. Will that stop me or anyone else in my position from offering an opinion? Probably not! Thus, you get the constant "re"hashing of "old" arguments, because people see these problems as "simpler" than they actually are, and "re"voice the same ideas and concepts, because it seems like some obvious problems can be solved with "just a little" modification to the existing systems.

danso 8y ago

> Barnes testified that the server that holds the data that Georgia’s 159 counties use to build their ballots is “air-gapped,” or isolated from the Internet. But he acknowledged that he uses a thumb drive to transfer ballot proofs from the server to his desktop computer, which he uses for email. From there, he moves the data to a Dropbox-like site, where counties can retrieve the ballot data. Anyone know what "ballot proofs" refers to? I hope that's not just a fancy terminology for a tab-delimited text file that contains the voting totals. I wonder what "Dropbox-like" site actually refers to -- a cloud site created in-house by the state government? Or by a contractor that ostensibly specializes and is authorized (i.e. fills out the paperwork and background checks) to sell a file-transfer app that's basically a wrapper around a commercial cloud service?

xmasgator 8y ago
In design a "proof" is a preview of the final design. That's probably what he's referring to. A final-ish draft of the ballot for review by the stakeholders.
- danso 8y ago
  That makes the most sense on the face of it, especially in the preceding context of "Barnes testified that the server that holds the data that Georgia's 159 counties use to build their ballots". It's possible that the reporter conflates this "ballot data" on the "Dropbox-like site" with actual voting tallies. Such a site for the election center to upload ballot proofs sounds reasonable, although I question why such a site would need to be "air-gapped". The data to build ballots would presumably contain entirely public information (e.g. the serialized info of which candidates are running for which parties in which races). But even if these details about ballot proofs isn't relevant to the main point, Mr. Barnes's testimony is still concerning. He's the director of the state's centralized elections system, after all. Last year, when Lamb notified the state of the data breach, Barnes "wrote of blacklisting Lamb from accessing the website before changing his mind and ordering scans of the system". [0] That the vulnerability stemmed from Drupalmageddon is even more troubling, because it's not as if Lamb's claims were hard to verify, given how well-publicized Drupalmageddon had been at that point. It's also worth noting that I haven't seen any read about how the elections center receives the actual vote data. The stories I've read so far -- including this WaPo article -- have only referenced voter registration data. Having this data breached via arbitrary code execution is still a big deal, if the site is used to verify voter eligibility, but AFAIK, it's (hopefully) not the same system and database that holds vote data. (Voter registration data contains personal info, but some states actually publish it online. in machine-readable format even) [0] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article216031450.html https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...

uptown 8y ago

This Medium post has another analysis of the Georgia voting issue: https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-mach...

RobertSmith 8y ago

In India, there has been a debate going on for years that EVMs should be replaced with the old paper voting method. People against EVMs say that they can be tampered and results can be altered whereas the other side says it's very safe to use EVMs.

davchana 8y ago
There had been live news reports on camera where any button pressed goes to one specific party, but only for n times & m times works normal; n being way bigger than m. Then, other reports say EVMs controlled by Bluetooth etc. Now one faction is asking EVMs with paper trail, one other asking for paper ballots, & ruling party wants only EVMs & all local & federal elections at same time.
beat 8y ago
At this point, I'm automatically suspicious of any party that says it's perfectly safe to use paperless voting machines.

maxxxxx 8y ago

It really worries me for US democracy that they don't seem capable of running an election in a way that voters feel confident that their votes are counted correctly. Bush v Gore in 2000 should have been a warning but nothing seems to have improved and now we even have a president who does everything he can to undermine trust in election results. Once people start losing trust in elections and other public institutions the door is wide open for a strongman who claims to clean up the mess by getting rid of the system. Trump is a start ("clean up the swamp") but things may get much worse.

beat 8y ago
Bush vs Gore led directly to the idiotic touchscreen machines. Florida's paper ballot mechanism sucked, sure. But touchscreens are far, far worse. People fell for it.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  That particular system sucked (the 'hanging chads' come to mind), could have been easily remedied without going electronic though.
mikeash 8y ago
Bush v. Gore was a warning, and the response was to roll out electronic voting everywhere. This solved the very specific problem that was most prominent in the 2000 election: ballots that could be ambiguously marked. Unfortunately, there are far bigger problems to worry about and this change made them far worse.

wolfi1 8y ago

old, but gold: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M#

Someone1234 8y ago
As an aside, the original source of this joke, which a lot of people associated with election tampering, was cheap resistive touch screens that were incorrectly calibrated. You'd push a location on the screen, but due to normal wear the location that the press was recorded was wrong, this would get worse the more wear the screen had and the longer between re-calibration. Eventually people got videos of you'd push one candidate and another candidate to the left or right/up or down would receive the vote, often in different races. This was a scandal in the sense that the machines were not fit for purpose, overly cheap, and poorly maintained/serviced. But it wasn't a good example of election tampering (just one that fit what a lot of people expected to see when tampering was occuring).

pjc50 8y ago

> He said that, a decade ago, the threats came primarily from “dishonest insiders or dishonest candidates” or criminals but that “everything changed in 2016.” Russia’s efforts to penetrate states’ and counties’ voter registration systems and to hack manufacturers’ software “presented a substantially new and much more serious form of threat.” In short, as long as the ballot could be reliably corrupted only by the locals who'd been bribed the device manufacturer in the first place, the corruption was stable. But now there's an outside player. Electronic voting is bad, and Ireland gave up on it, but it's not the only issue in election integrity. See also: gerrymandering/redistricting, voter roll purges, etc.

maxxxxx 8y ago
It seems to me that the problem in the US is that a lot of people think it's more important for their party to win than for the election to have integrity.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Well, yes; look at the decades of voter rights litigation. There's a long history of trying to suppress Black voting. So long as that's still going on there will be voting integrity problems coming from within state legislatures.

CydeWeys 8y ago

Here in NY (and I'm sure in many other places), you manually mark up a paper ballot with your vote. You then insert it into a scanner which confirms the ballot's validity and then drops it into a lockbox. The votes can be tallied instantaneously through the electronic system, but if there's any irregularities the lockboxes can be opened and manually counted as verification. And you can open a small number of randomly selected lockboxes every election anyway, even absent any suspected wrongdoing, just as a check to verify that the electronic counts are working as expected. How is this not the standard everywhere? Yes, there's more paper (and thus expense) involved, but surely having a non-hackable paper trail is worth it to protect our democracy? I was at DEF CON the first time they did the voting machine hacking. Those did not fill me with confidence.

mtgx 8y ago
How do you tell if something goes wrong? I think what's often missing in these discussions is a need for automatic audits, too, even if not full audits initially but only for a small sample. If there is anything wrong found in that first series of audits, then a full audit should be requiered by law and there should be severe prison punishments for those state officials failing to start and finish those audits in the specified time after the election. Corrupt state officials should not be able to create any sort of delays or use them as an excuse.
- gregmac 8y ago
  I'm not sure how it's handled now, but what I'd like to see is after the election closes, a random method to select poll locations is used -- such as a lottery ball machine -- and those locations are then required to do a manual recount. No one has advance notice of which poll locations will do this, so there's no opportunity for cheating (eg, turning off a defeat device at the locations that will be audited). If there are any differences in the count then additional locations are required to also do a manual count, and if more than two locations have differences, all electronic numbers are trashed and the whole election is counted manually.
  - 8y ago

nathan_long 8y ago

> “I don’t know any conceivable way you could change Georgia’s election system . . . in a matter of weeks,” said Cathy Cox, a former Georgia secretary of state who oversaw the 2001 study that led to the state’s adoption of DREs. “It would be chaotic beyond belief.” Oh yes, it would be awfully hard to make this switch in a matter of weeks. But this time crisis was created by negligence, since it's now been 2 years since officials were made aware of the problem. > The unsecured server that Lamb exposed in August 2016 is part of an election system — the only one in the country that is centrally run and relies upon computerized touch-screen machines for its voters — that is now at the heart of a legal and political battle with national security implications. > > “I was absolutely stunned,” Lamb said of his discovery of the exposed data. And he was angered when six months later, despite warning officials at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems (CES), which housed the server, the data was still publicly accessible online.

craftyguy 8y ago
Unfortunately it seems at least one of the people (Cathy Cox) responsible for this system is no longer in a place to be held accountable. She should be tried for negligence, along with the other administrators/politicians that drove deployment of this system.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
If they’re forced to switch, it will be perfect cover for the governor to conduct a voter disenfranchisement campaign. Whoops, there aren’t enough paper ballots in some precincts? I wonder which ones. Boy, we were forced to do this in such a rush I guess we made some mistakes.

samirm 8y ago

Thought this was gonna be about the country :/

beat 8y ago

I've said this before, but I'll say it again because it's always useful in these threads... I believe that a well designed paper ballot system is superior to any paper-free system. Furthermore, I think the concerns of the general public about what is actually problematic in elections (and what solutions can work) are generally wrong. I'm basing this on my experience as an election judge in Minnesota. I'll describe the system, and you can decide for yourself. Minnesota uses paper ballots read by Scantron machines - the sort of bubble-marked sheets you used for tests as a kid. We have same-day registration and provisional ballots available for unregistered or incorrectly registered voters. We do not require ID for ordinary registered voters. There have been two statewide recounts in recent years - the 2010 governor's race, and the national-profile 2008 Franken/Coleman Senate race recount. Now, the process. First and foremost, all activities that require handling ballots, whether marked or unmarked, sealed or open, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties. It is flatly illegal for one party to handle ballots alone. This prevents all sorts of fraud - either adding fraudulent ballots, or removing marked ballots. Second, a simple paper tally is kept of the number of ballots cast in each precinct. At count time, the number of votes counted by the machines must exactly match the number of ballots given to voters. A mismatch triggers a hand recount of the precinct and a bunch of other validation bureaucracy. This checksum also prevents the addition/subtraction of ballots at the precinct level. Voter machine tallies are spot-checked by hand counts of individual machines - not enough to slow down the process, but enough to insure that there was no large-scale alteration of machine behavior. Registered voters are on paper rolls. When a registered voter arrives, their name is marked off the list and they are given their ballot. If someone tries to vote twice as the same person, it's caught (and triggers bureaucracy). Their ID is not checked. Same-day registration requires ID and proof of precinct residency; the valid documents are well specified (utility bills, etc). Political parties are invited to have poll monitors at any and all precincts, to keep an eye on the process. The poll watchers do not touch ballots or participate in the count, but are welcome to observe. They can also challenge individual voters, which makes ballots provisional and may lead to ID requirements. (I remember in 2004, the Democratic poll monitor was convinced the Republican monitor would challenge every single brown-skinned person in the precinct, and the Republican was convinced the Democrats would bring busloads of fake voters in from Wisconsin or something. Needless to say, both were wrong.) The result of all of this is that highly accurate informal counts are available on election night, thanks to machine voting, but manual recounts are always available, thanks to the paper. And the integrity of paper ballots is strongly protected by process. The only even arguable gap is the idea of fraudulent voting by using other people's registrations, or fake registrations. But actually doing this at a scale large enough to matter is difficult and risky. Minnesota presidential elections draw about 1.5M voters. To alter the results by 1% would require 15,000 fraudulent votes. If someone could vote once an hour, they could maybe vote 15 times. You'd need a thousand people, with training, transportation, and written data. It's hard to keep conspiracy at that scale secret. So yeah. This is trustworthy. And it's simple. It doesn't require exotic technology. It's mostly just good bureaucracy.

jguimont 8y ago

I do not understand why paper ballot would be difficult to achieve, that is the easiest to do! I never voted in the US, but the system seems overly complex for such a simple exercice. Here in Canada, we have a paper ballot (http://www.elections.ca/vot/yth/stu/gui/images/dxsmp1-e.jpg http://www.elections.ca/vot/yth/stu/gui/images/dxsmp1-e.jpg), which is pretty simple. The vote is done, the stub is tallied and 2 people need to verify the vote before dropping it in a sealed box. When the polls close, the votes are counted, by multiple persons, by hand. Nothing electronic. ... and there is a single vote at a time, no votes on laws when electing representative, etc. That is just non sense.

ynniv 8y ago

In case you missed this finer point, the Secretary of State who has certified these machines is also the candidate expected to win the election by a small margin. He has refused to recuse himself from the responsibility of ensuring a fair election.

guelo 8y ago
Kris Kobach had the same arrangement in Kansas recently, he ran the election and was a candidate. He won very narrowly and many people suspect he stole the election.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  And this is another angle to the problem. Even if everything was on the level, just the perception of corruption increases cynicism and decreases political engagement.

3pt14159 8y ago

I feel like a broken record on this topic. It drives me crazy. ON-SITE OBSERVERS. If any person wants to check the vote they should be able to stand there and watch the whole thing and then demand a manual count on-site immediately afterwards. No bringing ballots somewhere else to be counted. Democracy is how we stop violence from deciding resource allocation. It will be undermined if it is at all possible. Also, I really hate how electronic voting machines instant tally elections. We had that here in Ontario[0] and completely aside from my security concerns over e-voting, having the night end in a single minute ruined the normally fun nail biting as the results came in on CBC. [0] Which, by the way, did not allow me to be an on-site observer. Do I distrust Elections Ontario staff? No, but I shouldn't have to trust people. This is a fucking election. I ran the last federal one as a DRO. All paper ballots are 100% secure. The fucking e-voting lobby is evil.

beat 8y ago
In Minnesota, we allow on-site observers. They have to follow the rules, but they can watch, and have certain privileges (such as being able to challenge a voter's registration, turning their ballot into a provisional one).
ergothus 8y ago
> I really hate how electronic voting machines instant tally elections. I understand the sentiment, but I dont think entertainment should be any kind of factor in this decision. > I shouldn't have to trust people. Verification systems are great (I fully endorse the electronic-for-convenience-backed-by-paper system), but ALL systems require that you trust people. The key is to have sufficient verification, both instant and later, to make fraud difficult, detectable, and provable.
- specialist 8y ago
  The only trust worthy system is built on mutual distrust. Please sign up to be a poll worker. Then you'll see first hand how it works.
  - 8y ago

dalbasal 8y ago

This is very much an outsider with no skin in the game making suggestions... Considering that the US is a federation, would it not make sense for the federal government to run local elections as a service? This is on the back of another idea that has been floated around for elections in regions where "free and fair" is an aspirational goal. I stead of an international body certifying elections, it might be better to have a 3rd party run the elections, and make all the implementation decisions. ..just to keep a separation of powers between election system and candidates running within that system. Similarly, as referendums are increasingly important in many European locales... we need a more nonpolitical body empowered to finalize the wording. A president perhaps, for "westminster-like" systems.

smileysteve 8y ago
> Considering that the US is a federation > fed·er·a·tion > a group of states with a central government but independence in internal affairs. Your conclusion from "Federation" seems off; importantly, this upcoming election is solely for internal affairs (Governor, SOS). Beyond that, it's important to note that each state can have their own way to assign electoral votes for presidential elections, some are winner take all, a few split on percentages.
wool_gather 8y ago
The federal system here is fairly weak, by design -- and the ideology of that weakness is still prevalent. Making this shift would probably require more arm-twisting and political capital than the federal government can apply even when federalists are in power. There's a latent suspicion of the federal government in the electorate here that is usually pretty easily activated. I'm also not sure I see the advantage to centralizing this. It's a case of "many hands make light work". There's a lot to do to conduct an election. Breaking the task among lots of basically autonomous units, made up of local individuals instead of some faceless Washington bureaucrats (see, there's that latent suspicion ;) gives some resilience -- and helps voters feel connected to the process. Also worth noting that although the structures of the various intra-state governments are broadly similar, there's plenty of differences that would be a pain in the neck for a federal administration.

lloda 8y ago

Hand counting of paper ballots is a highly parallel process that can be done quickly at any scale. The only reason to introduce counting machines is so that someone can extract money from it.

RightMillennial 8y ago
I mostly agree. We should be hand counting all ballots. But also incorporating a counting machine could help improve reliability similarly to a checksum. If the hard counted and machine results are not identical, then recount because there was a mistake somewhere.
specialist 8y ago
FWIW, most proponets of hand counting advocate "sort & stack". For elections in the USA, that means a count per race / issue. Some jurisdictions can have over 30 per ballot. Further, each precinct has to be tabulated separately. The poll site I ran for years had 5 precincts, roughly average. We'd have 400-800 ballots per election, depending. One change that would make manual counting more feasible would be to split our ballots into federal, state, local. Every election administrator I've ever met opposed manual counting. Mostly because it's a lot of work. A group of intended to run experiments to determine the effort, cost, accuracy of manual counts. Simulate a real election, eg print up marked ballots where the totals are predetermined but not known to the counters. Alas, we never got our act together before every one burned out. PS- Any tabulation method has to accommodate marking errors, aka adjudicating voter intent.
dublinben 8y ago
Electronic voting also makes it easier to manipulate the results of elections.

G4BB3R 8y ago

Paper voting is a waste of resources. And can be frauded the same way as electronic voting.

pjc50 8y ago
Ah yes, it's famously easy to remotely change thousands of pieces of paper that are locked in boxes.

kevingrahl 8y ago

I can not access that article, can someone please submit it to archive or has some other mirror of it?

dredmorbius 8y ago
https://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-georgia-a-legal-battle-over-electronic-vs-paper-voting/2018/09/16/d655c070-b76f-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html https://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat...
- kevingrahl 8y ago
  Thanks!

solotronics 8y ago

We should also have ICE on hand to prevent any foreign interference with the election! Russian agents can't interfere if everyone is checked for citizenship at the polling place.

pjc50 8y ago
You can only do that in countries which issue mandatory national ID to everyone. Otherwise it's a license for ICE to check ID only of nonwhite people.
- solotronics 8y ago
  who said anything about skin color? what is in place to stop foreign nationals from directly influencing our elections? They should check everyones ID especially white people, we cant have Russians voting in our elections!
dang 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006593 and marked it off-topic.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ulkesh 8y ago

As a Georgia resident, this is highly disconcerting. I would be quite happy, willing, and patient with polling precincts had to switch to all-paper ballots if it meant guaranteeing that my vote was accurate and actually counted. While I almost never vote for a winner, since I'm an outside middle-ground voice in this extremely conservative state (on the whole), I at least want the confidence that my vote wasn't tampered with. Right now, I have no such confidence. Yet I will still vote because it is my right and not voting is not the answer to this problem.

Pxtl 8y ago

Obligatory Xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

luckycharms810 8y ago

I think the onset of election season has caused these types of articles to become in-vogue. I have been surprised by the reactions of what is mostly a tech savvy community. Full disclaimer, I work at a voting tech company as an engineer, and just wanted to give my 2 cents. - Paper ballots and Risk limiting audits do not actually constitute a perfect solution to this problem. They do not constitute what is considered an End to End verifiable voting system. You cannot actually definitively know that your vote was counted in the final tally, and cast as intended. The Risk limiting audits as currently structured can only verify that a computer counted a small sample size of votes as a human would. It cannot confirm all the votes were counted, or that your vote was not tampered with. - Paper ballots also do not address the needs of folks voting over seas, or those affected with disabilities. - When current election systems are often described as easy to hack, the systems referenced are often hardware that is 10-20 years old. If you look at the landscape of the Election's industry, there are only 3 vendors that account for over 90% of the public election market share in America. These system's were put through certification many years ago, and continue to operate through those certifications. The result of an inability to innovate in this space, is that we will continue to use those systems (that many perceive as vulnerable) for the foreseeable future. - Smaller election vendors are encouraging the idea of recurring certification, as well as more stringent certification requirements. Most people who use these forums are very capable of understanding concepts like Asymmetric encryption, checksums, and other tamper proof methodologies for high value data. If you can trust the idea of an Encrypted e-mail server ( e.g. Lavabit ), or encrypted chat servers (Signal), it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet. Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election.

pedrocr 8y ago
> it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet It's hard to imagine because it's completely impossible. In most of the world not being able to prove you voted for someone in particular is considered a key characteristic of the vote. No internet based voting guarantees this. > Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election. Throwing around claims of wrong side of history would be just an insult it wasn't so dangerous. Paper voting is not secure because you "observe some votes being cast in your polling station". It's secure because each polling station is staffed by political adversaries that do the count together of every single ballot. This is much better than the level of systematic verification than you can ever even attempt to do to your huge stack of software and hardware. It's also a kind of verification that everyone understands and so it effectively convinces the losing candidates they actually lost. Which is as much of an important characteristic of a voting system as getting good counts. So get off your high horse. Apparently you design these systems and don't understand the actual safety characteristics of the paper count. The kinds of attack surface electronic systems add is huge and yet they provide no actual advantages to properly run elections. The thread is already full of examples so I won't add more but it's telling that in most of the world this isn't an issue at all because we just run our simple, cheap, reliable and fast process like we've always done and forget about it.

cwkoss 8y ago

I found this medium article investigating fishiness in Georgia elections a couple weeks ago. https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-mach... Kathy Rogers was GA election director, now has a golden parachute at the company who manufactures electronic voting machines for GA. She came to my attention for writing a menacing-but-technically-incompetent letter to DEFCON vote hacking village attendees. Skeptical because only published on medium, but seems like Cohn might be onto something.

AngryData 8y ago

The only electronic voting machine I would ever trust wouldn't have any more hardware capabilities than a TI-81 calculator. It doesn't need it, and every bit of extra bullshit and hardware and layers of software is a security vulnerability. The only other problem I see after doing that would be whether or not to publicly release the hardware diagrams. Maybe have the gaming commission verify the machines like they have very successfully done slot machines and electronic gambling machines.

ataturk 8y ago

Everything electronic is subject to manipulation. But paper ballots can be stuffed, too, it's just possibly harder. But the Franken "election" in MN should be a case study in how fraud is done all over. It's kind of poetic justice that Franken got taken down and don't think for a second it's because of some stupid photo that was taken of him pretending to grab some woman's tits. What he really did is way, way worse than that. Think about it. Personally, I don't have a party loyalty and I don't much care what team wins or loses because our system is so trashy anyways, but as someone interested in ethics, I would like to see the issue of election integrity take A LOT more seriously and then maybe, maybe, we start getting out of the swamp of fraud. Part of me thinks election fraud is just as American as apple pie. It's how it's done. It's like cheating in NASCAR--all part of the game.