5 ms·

I'll add as a reply, since it's a side-tangent: When I moved to California I was really impressed by the way voting is handled here. Specifically two things:

I'll add as a reply, since it's a side-tangent: When I moved to California I was really impressed by the way voting is handled here. Specifically two things: (1) I was able to vote one block away at a neighbors garage. I don't know exactly how this works, but apparently people can volunteer to host a polling place, go through a training program to get certified to do it, and then the state will give them the equipment to do it. These polling places are just about everywhere, and it made voting exceptionally quick and easy. The neighbors who ran it were also very courteous and professional. While there, I saw them handle several questions and problems that people had, and they did an excellent job. I was truly impressed. (2) The ballot system was: you mark a paper ballot with a pen, and then you feed that into a scanner which electronically tallies your vote. It also keeps the paper ballot around as a record. So it would seem to offer the practical efficiency of an electronic system with the auditability of a paper system. I liked it. Having previously voted in three other states, this was the best experience by far. I have my own complaints about California, but I'd love to see this way of handling elections become more widespread.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
So, we know there are vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, both sides are accusing the other of fraud, and now you are making an annecdote in favor of unsecured polling sites? I’m glad you had a good experience, but I’m very skeptical. Edit: it seems lots of people can disagree but no one can make an argument this is safer or more reliable in practice.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I would actually say that the decentralized and distributed nature of the polling places, combined with the well-designed voting machinery, gave me more confidence that orchestrating voter or electoral fraud would be profoundly difficult. From my experiences in other states, I would say it’s very possible to systematically lower voter turnout by making the process laborious, in part by having only a small number of polling places that you need to drive across town to access, and then by having long lines to vote (because so many people have to use the same polling place). Given a choice between the two I personally would favor the decentralized model.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    How would you avoid something like the debacle in Broward County, Florida where boxes of ballots were found post election day? What prevents that when random people are running the show?
    - ianai 8y ago
      Property tracking is a solved problem. Simply chose a model based on budget.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - shereadsthenews 8y ago
      That never happened except in the Fox News alternaverse. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article221484265.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/electio...
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    It is absolutely not decentralized though. It’s spaced out collection, still centralized accounting. All you are doing is allowing for more potential issues between collection and transport by having an insecure position up front.
- kevin_nisbet 8y ago
  I suspect it's missing details, but I think this can be implemented in a fairly trustworthy way, using technology as an aid, but not the primary record of the election. I think in a previous topic on HN, someone described his experience in one of the states way better. I'm describing what I remember, which may not be completely accurate: You take the paper ballots, and you split them into lots. Each lot is passed through at-least two voting counter machines, and a recount is triggered if either machine produces a different result. Random lots are manually hand counted, to ensure they produce the same results as the voting machines. To me, this makes the electronic counting extremely tamper resistant, as tampering with a subset of machines will very likely produce a discrepancy against other machines that is detectable. Or if the entire fleet of machines has been tampered with, this becomes apparent with the manual counts. As for the machine at the poll, the initial scan can just be a best practice, that before the ballot is submitted can indicate to the voter if the ballot scans OK, leaving an opportunity to correct. Of course, this is just on the counting side, all sorts of additional best practices are needed to ensure the paper ballots are transported securely, aren't lost or tampered with, are stored securely if a recount is needed, etc. And each step has scrutineers, even if the polling station is in someone's garage.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Just count all the votes by hand with scrutineers watching the counters. It's really as simple as that. Just count the damn votes by hand.
  - dmckeon 8y ago
    Several mark/sense systems (paper ballot marked by voter, then scanned by/for voter in their presence) have the capability to record vote counts to multiple local magnetic storage devices. At the end of the election period, poll workers would secure the scanned paper ballots and the magnetic cartridges, and mail one set of mag. carts. to the state elections officer, and carry the paper ballots and the other set of mag carts to the local (city or county) elections office. The second set of mag carts provide the “election night” results. A local protocol & set of procedures cross-check the carts and the number of paper ballots and the number of voters who appeared to vote at each location/precinct. The first set of mag carts provide a cross-check and a backup copy. (A small number of exhausted elections officials will incorrectly put both sets of carts in a mail box, and hilarity will ensue.) Election operations in the US have a long and complicated history. Reinventing elections as a greenfield _de novo_ exercise without considering most of the complexities that have grown up around them is appealing, like most big rewrites. Poorly-implemented electronic voting should be viewed with honest suspicion, IMHO.
pithymaxim 8y ago
There's some cool evidence that even this system led to non-negligible "misvoting" > minor candidates' vote shares almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/misvotes.pdf https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/misvotes.pdf
dmckeon 8y ago
Glad you liked the mark/sense system, but California voting systems are not state-wide, but are county by county. The county I reside in used to have a system like that you describe (perhaps made by Eagle?), but has now moved to a display screen and paper tape system. The nice things about the mark & scan systems are that the voter gets immediate notification of an unscannable ballot: stray marks, mis-marks, overvotes, and similar issues are correctable in real time by the voter, perhaps by exchanging the spoiled ballot for a new one, and destroying the spoiled ballot. The scanned paper ballots are also available to be rescanned for a recount or audit. Creating a voting system for a many-race election that is intrinsically resistant to manipulation is harder that it first appears. I used to (circa 2000) think that electronic voting would supersede paper ballots in a few years. Now I think that paper ballots have a simplicity and durability that outweighs the apparent convenience of electronic approaches. source: elections official in two states, voter registrar in one.
- burlesona 8y ago
  Interesting, I didn’t know that it varied by county. Man what a complicated system we’ve got.
  - mobilefriendly 8y ago
    It is a feature, not a bug. Variation in the system makes it harder for a single exploit or actor to rig the entire system.
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      DOS'ing yourself is also a vulnerability. If doing any kind of repair is so expensive and solutions are blunt, people might just find it so unpalatable to not do it.
    - SkyMarshal 8y ago
      I understand that notion but I’m not sure it’s true. It also may make it easier for large multinationals like Diebold to divide and conquer and sell their unauditable digital voting machines to more of the electorate, piece by piece.
briffle 8y ago
Oregon is vote by mail, statewide. It's much nicer!
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  Are there concerns of vote selling? Or mechanisms to prevent it?
  - jdavis703 8y ago
    In California (which has a lot of vote by mail), it’s also legal to use a camera in the voting area. In this regards, I don’t think there’s particular weaknesses. In general the voting system can guard against false positives or false negatives. By that it can either bar legitimate voters or allow illegitimate voters. Since the USA has a historic tendency of barring the poor, minorities and women from voting; elections officials should take that into account when considering trade offs.
  - specialist 8y ago
    There continue to be election integrity issues with vote by mail. The benefits may outweigh the risks. From an election integrity standpoint, the modern implementations of vote by mail is little different from electronic voting. -- The jurisdictions that I'm aware of scan AND tabulate ballots as they are received. This permits peeking at early results. Citizens expect that votes are not tabulated until polls close on election day. Administrators argue that the pre-scanning and tabulating isn't really a count and that only the final report is a count. -- Until very recently, vote by mail lead to a novelty participation bump followed by a long decline. Explained by losing the culture of voting. Postage is now prepaid in some jurisdictions, which may have lead to a +4% boost in participation, matching prior poll site participation rates. But it's too early to separate the prepaid postage boost from the overall boost in 2018. Time will time. -- The transition to vote by mail is driven solely by appropriations (pork) and administrator's desire for centralization. With vote by mail comes new business models. Whereas with poll sites we'd only pay per ballot to accommodate projected turnout plus 10%, we now pay for every voter every election. Vote by mail ballot packets are ~$2 whereas poll ballots cost ~10c. Additionally, all new tasks like signature verification and ballot tracking are new opportunities for rent seeking. Again, per voter per election, vs time & materials. There's all new gear to buy, of course. One could argue this is no different than any other IT lifecycle. -- Another way vote by mail is like electronic voting is the complete loss of voter privacy (the secret ballot). Elections are administered per precinct. Received ballots are binned. So very likely that your ballot will be the only one from your precinct in the bin. To protect the secret ballot, ballots must be sorted into precincts before processing (opening). This adds considerable effort and expense to the entire process (logistic nightmare). Last time I checked, my jurisdiction still was not doing the legally required precinct presort. -- Because voters are no longer able to fix their own errors (like with the mark sense poll based systems mentioned elsewhere), administrators have to adjudication voter intent. Now that ballots are optically scanned as they are received, like a fax machine vs the mark sense systems, voter intent is adjudicated electronically, meaning there's no paper trail. Makes the manual recounts and audits kind of tricky, if not completely suspect.
75dvtwin 8y ago
I think the majority of the voter fraud in US would occur if the following 3 gates are not enforced a) eligible to vote b) voted only once c) it is the person that voted and not his/her proxy. It would be much better to use some biometric, verified by 3 independently developed databases. As those would be hard hard to fake

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago

So, we know there are vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, both sides are accusing the other of fraud, and now you are making an annecdote in favor of unsecured polling sites? I’m glad you had a good experience, but I’m very skeptical. Edit: it seems lots of people can disagree but no one can make an argument this is safer or more reliable in practice.

burlesona 8y ago
I would actually say that the decentralized and distributed nature of the polling places, combined with the well-designed voting machinery, gave me more confidence that orchestrating voter or electoral fraud would be profoundly difficult. From my experiences in other states, I would say it’s very possible to systematically lower voter turnout by making the process laborious, in part by having only a small number of polling places that you need to drive across town to access, and then by having long lines to vote (because so many people have to use the same polling place). Given a choice between the two I personally would favor the decentralized model.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  How would you avoid something like the debacle in Broward County, Florida where boxes of ballots were found post election day? What prevents that when random people are running the show?
  - ianai 8y ago
    Property tracking is a solved problem. Simply chose a model based on budget.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - shereadsthenews 8y ago
    That never happened except in the Fox News alternaverse. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article221484265.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/electio...
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  It is absolutely not decentralized though. It’s spaced out collection, still centralized accounting. All you are doing is allowing for more potential issues between collection and transport by having an insecure position up front.
kevin_nisbet 8y ago
I suspect it's missing details, but I think this can be implemented in a fairly trustworthy way, using technology as an aid, but not the primary record of the election. I think in a previous topic on HN, someone described his experience in one of the states way better. I'm describing what I remember, which may not be completely accurate: You take the paper ballots, and you split them into lots. Each lot is passed through at-least two voting counter machines, and a recount is triggered if either machine produces a different result. Random lots are manually hand counted, to ensure they produce the same results as the voting machines. To me, this makes the electronic counting extremely tamper resistant, as tampering with a subset of machines will very likely produce a discrepancy against other machines that is detectable. Or if the entire fleet of machines has been tampered with, this becomes apparent with the manual counts. As for the machine at the poll, the initial scan can just be a best practice, that before the ballot is submitted can indicate to the voter if the ballot scans OK, leaving an opportunity to correct. Of course, this is just on the counting side, all sorts of additional best practices are needed to ensure the paper ballots are transported securely, aren't lost or tampered with, are stored securely if a recount is needed, etc. And each step has scrutineers, even if the polling station is in someone's garage.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Just count all the votes by hand with scrutineers watching the counters. It's really as simple as that. Just count the damn votes by hand.
- dmckeon 8y ago
  Several mark/sense systems (paper ballot marked by voter, then scanned by/for voter in their presence) have the capability to record vote counts to multiple local magnetic storage devices. At the end of the election period, poll workers would secure the scanned paper ballots and the magnetic cartridges, and mail one set of mag. carts. to the state elections officer, and carry the paper ballots and the other set of mag carts to the local (city or county) elections office. The second set of mag carts provide the “election night” results. A local protocol & set of procedures cross-check the carts and the number of paper ballots and the number of voters who appeared to vote at each location/precinct. The first set of mag carts provide a cross-check and a backup copy. (A small number of exhausted elections officials will incorrectly put both sets of carts in a mail box, and hilarity will ensue.) Election operations in the US have a long and complicated history. Reinventing elections as a greenfield _de novo_ exercise without considering most of the complexities that have grown up around them is appealing, like most big rewrites. Poorly-implemented electronic voting should be viewed with honest suspicion, IMHO.

pithymaxim 8y ago

There's some cool evidence that even this system led to non-negligible "misvoting" > minor candidates' vote shares almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/misvotes.pdf https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/misvotes.pdf

dmckeon 8y ago

Glad you liked the mark/sense system, but California voting systems are not state-wide, but are county by county. The county I reside in used to have a system like that you describe (perhaps made by Eagle?), but has now moved to a display screen and paper tape system. The nice things about the mark & scan systems are that the voter gets immediate notification of an unscannable ballot: stray marks, mis-marks, overvotes, and similar issues are correctable in real time by the voter, perhaps by exchanging the spoiled ballot for a new one, and destroying the spoiled ballot. The scanned paper ballots are also available to be rescanned for a recount or audit. Creating a voting system for a many-race election that is intrinsically resistant to manipulation is harder that it first appears. I used to (circa 2000) think that electronic voting would supersede paper ballots in a few years. Now I think that paper ballots have a simplicity and durability that outweighs the apparent convenience of electronic approaches. source: elections official in two states, voter registrar in one.

burlesona 8y ago
Interesting, I didn’t know that it varied by county. Man what a complicated system we’ve got.
- mobilefriendly 8y ago
  It is a feature, not a bug. Variation in the system makes it harder for a single exploit or actor to rig the entire system.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    DOS'ing yourself is also a vulnerability. If doing any kind of repair is so expensive and solutions are blunt, people might just find it so unpalatable to not do it.
  - SkyMarshal 8y ago
    I understand that notion but I’m not sure it’s true. It also may make it easier for large multinationals like Diebold to divide and conquer and sell their unauditable digital voting machines to more of the electorate, piece by piece.

briffle 8y ago

Oregon is vote by mail, statewide. It's much nicer!

evrydayhustling 8y ago
Are there concerns of vote selling? Or mechanisms to prevent it?
- jdavis703 8y ago
  In California (which has a lot of vote by mail), it’s also legal to use a camera in the voting area. In this regards, I don’t think there’s particular weaknesses. In general the voting system can guard against false positives or false negatives. By that it can either bar legitimate voters or allow illegitimate voters. Since the USA has a historic tendency of barring the poor, minorities and women from voting; elections officials should take that into account when considering trade offs.
- specialist 8y ago
  There continue to be election integrity issues with vote by mail. The benefits may outweigh the risks. From an election integrity standpoint, the modern implementations of vote by mail is little different from electronic voting. -- The jurisdictions that I'm aware of scan AND tabulate ballots as they are received. This permits peeking at early results. Citizens expect that votes are not tabulated until polls close on election day. Administrators argue that the pre-scanning and tabulating isn't really a count and that only the final report is a count. -- Until very recently, vote by mail lead to a novelty participation bump followed by a long decline. Explained by losing the culture of voting. Postage is now prepaid in some jurisdictions, which may have lead to a +4% boost in participation, matching prior poll site participation rates. But it's too early to separate the prepaid postage boost from the overall boost in 2018. Time will time. -- The transition to vote by mail is driven solely by appropriations (pork) and administrator's desire for centralization. With vote by mail comes new business models. Whereas with poll sites we'd only pay per ballot to accommodate projected turnout plus 10%, we now pay for every voter every election. Vote by mail ballot packets are ~$2 whereas poll ballots cost ~10c. Additionally, all new tasks like signature verification and ballot tracking are new opportunities for rent seeking. Again, per voter per election, vs time & materials. There's all new gear to buy, of course. One could argue this is no different than any other IT lifecycle. -- Another way vote by mail is like electronic voting is the complete loss of voter privacy (the secret ballot). Elections are administered per precinct. Received ballots are binned. So very likely that your ballot will be the only one from your precinct in the bin. To protect the secret ballot, ballots must be sorted into precincts before processing (opening). This adds considerable effort and expense to the entire process (logistic nightmare). Last time I checked, my jurisdiction still was not doing the legally required precinct presort. -- Because voters are no longer able to fix their own errors (like with the mark sense poll based systems mentioned elsewhere), administrators have to adjudication voter intent. Now that ballots are optically scanned as they are received, like a fax machine vs the mark sense systems, voter intent is adjudicated electronically, meaning there's no paper trail. Makes the manual recounts and audits kind of tricky, if not completely suspect.

75dvtwin 8y ago

I think the majority of the voter fraud in US would occur if the following 3 gates are not enforced a) eligible to vote b) voted only once c) it is the person that voted and not his/her proxy. It would be much better to use some biometric, verified by 3 independently developed databases. As those would be hard hard to fake