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> Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their sele

• simongr3dal 8y ago
  I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I do agree that the paper trail is a great thing. I'm not fundamentally against electronic voting, but I haven't heard of a system that can really compete with the simplicity and verifiability of the immutablility you get from paper ballots inside ballot boxes being watched over by interested parties on all sides.
  • nathan_long 8y ago
    > I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I don't think that's dismissive at all. That's what it is, and it sounds good to me. Basically the computer is a scribe with perfect handwriting that fills out the paper ballot for the voter while the voter watches. Absolutely any voter is qualified to assert whether the ballot contains the votes they intended to cast. From there, you could have the voter carry the ballot and drop it in a box that's being observed by any number of interested parties, providing old-fashioned accountability. Counting by scanner is an optional time saver, with hand counts as the alternative / double-check.
    • snuxoll 8y ago
      Don't forget that electronic voting machines can have accessibility features that paper ballots lack - having a glorified form printer is actually a sound design that lets us gain these benefits without the negatives.
      • liquidify 8y ago
        There is no reason an electronic count can't be kept along with the paper ballots.
        • jfnixon 8y ago
          How does that help? The paper ballots still need to be counted as they are the authoritative source of the final tally. An electronic tally does nothing useful and adds complexity.
          • Freak_NL 8y ago
            Speed. One of the reasons some politicians want electronic voting is to have the tentative results in as fast as possible, so they can sod off to their respective celebration/mourning shindigs and call it a night. That the actual, lawful count follows in the course of hours or even days is, to them, then acceptable. Having these machines do a preliminary tally gives you a more accurate forecast of the votes cast than exit polls.
            • snuxoll 8y ago
              Optical scan machines solve that issue quite nicely and more robustly, especially when a ballot needs to be spoiled due to error (it can be physically destoryed before tally instead of needing to support deletion or modification of records in the voting machine).
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      This is missing two completely unnecessary failure modes that pen and paper don't have: 1. You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret. Mind you that in addition to an attack inside the device, this can also happen via simple electromagnetic side channels inherent in the device--as has been demonstrated quite a while ago for Nedap voting computers by the dutch campaign against voting computers, where you could distinguish selected candicates by tuning an AM radio to the right frequency. 2. When the device malfunctions, whether due to a defect or sabotage, and only particular candidates can not be selected, that creates a side channel where the voter is effectively forced to unveil who they want to vote for. Neither of those failure modes exist with paper ballots.
      • dragontamer 8y ago
        > Neither of those failure modes exist with paper ballots. Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room? I mean, they really don't. It depends on your threat-model. A lot of things will come down to trust. > 2. When the device malfunctions, whether due to a defect or sabotage, and only particular candidates can not be selected, that creates a side channel where the voter is effectively forced to unveil who they want to vote for. See Butterfly ballots. Paper ballots in USA (Florida specifically) which basically had this flaw. It was confusing to know which circles and lines were going to the correct candidate you wished to vote for. Asking for help on the ballot would leak information on who you wanted to vote for. A poorly done paper-ballot has its own set of issues.
        • beat 8y ago
          And the solution to the flaws of butterfly ballots was the proliferation of insecure, dangerous touchscreen machines. Screw that. Give me a well-designed paper ballot.
        • usrusr 8y ago
          > Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room? And neither do touchscreens. Paper is better if it's not done comically wrong. And even the worst paper ballots have a much smaller attack surface for plain old analog rumors than the best possible electronic system. The most powerful way to undermine a democracy is not flipping some votes to one candidate in perfect secrecy, it's making all candidates/camps believe that the other did. This could destroy a democracy even without a single vote having actually been tampered with. Electronic voting, only understood by experts, is perfect soil for such rumors and no amount of open sourcing can change that. The many human counters involved in a hierarchical paper vote counting scheme are not just an unfortunate inefficiency left over from a time when machines could not count yet, they also serve as witnesses, not only for keeping their peers in check but also for dampening any unfounded rumors that might come up. They increase trust even when they are not actively speaking up against rumors, just by being there, in numbers, as passive dampening elements like the moderator rods in a fission plant.
  • dragontamer 8y ago
    > I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. And I like it. The simpler the design, the better. Sometimes it takes a billion dollars and a couple of smart researchers to invent the "obvious" solution to a problem. We've got butterfly ballots, confusing electronics-only machines, and a variety of bad standards as the basis of our current voting infrastructure. Telling everybody to use a damn PDF + printer would be a gross improvement.
    • on_and_off 8y ago
      or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..
      • dragontamer 8y ago
        The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's benefit to one of the major research institutions of this country telling the rest of the country how things should be done.
        • misingnoglic 8y ago
          Give America an idea, and SOMEONE will find a way to exploit it
          • MrQuincle 8y ago
            In this case perhaps paper where you don't see anything, but that will trip up the scanner. You only need to have votes declared invalid. Of course, preferably just a random subset of them. You can choose for districts you don't like and distribute that paper there.
        • 8y ago
  • beat 8y ago
    The part I don't like is the printer. They're woefully unreliable devices. Having been an election judge, handling a bunch of flaky tech in polling places is the last thing the poll workers need. They have a lot to do already. In MN, we use paper ballots with Scantron readers for excellent results. I'm not sure what problem this new system is supposed to solve that the Scantron model doesn't.
    • jfoutz 8y ago
      My grandma has shaky hands. She can’t really fill out a scantron. I have no problem with people filling out their own ballots. The pristine filled out and verified by the voter ballot seems harder to spoil than a hand filled out ballot. My preference is for plenty of machines available to fill out paper ballots, but give voters the option of filling out by hand.
  • Spooky23 8y ago
    Paper ballots are pretty trivial to cheat too, you’re dependent on the honesty of party officials and poll watchers.
    • adestefan 8y ago
      It’s also easy to design paper ballots that are really hard to use.
      • Spooky23 8y ago
        Absolutely. If you live in a place like I do, we’re a one party place where primary elections are the real elections, and you don’t have the competitive pressures that are inherent to a multi-party contest. We also had a huge upsurge in “write in” votes, as the paper forms are difficult to interpret.
    • jfnixon 8y ago
      That’s why anyone should be permitted to watch the process from start to finish. Heck, videotape the collection box from the moment it is shown to be empty and sealed till the ballots are retrieve. Videotape the counting process. Do all this in the public square, televised and streamed.
      • ajurna 8y ago
        This happens in Ireland. results are all hand counted with representatives from all parties and public access to watch the counting. After a vote we get to watch the news go from counting station to station to announce the results. There are usually a few recounts etc but it rarely takes longer than a day or two and tbh which is more important done right or fast?
  • flukus 8y ago
    > I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached. I don't think you're being dismissive enough, it's an expensive pencil and paper.
  • specialist 8y ago
    Poll based opscans are (should be) configured to reject spoiled (or unreadable) ballots. So ballot marking technologies have marginal utility. Expensive fix for a non-problem. For complying with HAVA mandated accessibility, the Automark is slightly less bad than the others. The only solution which actually fulfilled all the requirements and was preferred by the disabled community is a non-electronic protective ballot sleeve called the Vote-PAD. Alas, it hasn't been available for quite some time. Being cost effective, meaning less pork, it didn't have any champions. Fortunately, a new ballot marker, twenty years too late, doesn't help with the increasingly fashionable postal balloting, so there's no danger this latest noble effort will have any benefit.
  • tmaly 8y ago
    seems like it would be easier to print out thousands of ballots to stuff. If you have to fill something out by hand, it makes it hard to do this.
  • wgoodall01 8y ago
    I'd say that the massive investment is necessary because of how uncomplicated this particular system is. Without a large, sprawling, and well-funded project backing it, a simple (and probably far more reliable) solution can lack credibility when compared to more complicated alternatives.
• bdamm 8y ago
  The paper trail is not so wonderful. What we saw in 2016 was that even if a candidate were to contest a result, none of the election committees were willing to commit to a full hand recount; instead, the only options were to retabulate through the very same tabulation processes and machines that had produced the questionable results in the first place. Without low barrier to recount by hand, the electronic systems production of paper trails is worthless. Arguably worse than worthless, because it leaves everyone thinking there is a usable backup, when there isn't.
  • nathan_long 8y ago
    > none of the election committees were willing to commit to a full hand recount I don't see how any system can work if nobody is willing to double-check it.
  • jonahhorowitz 8y ago
    You don't have to recount "by hand". You start with auditing by hand - looking at a sample and seeing if it's accurate. Then you run the original paper ballots through another scanner.
  • mspecter 8y ago
    This is absolute hogwash, there are other methods than a full hand recount if you have a paper trail, some of which only require counting a small number of the ballots by hand. The best example of this is a Risk Limiting Audit (RLA). You only have to re-count a smaller number of ballots until the overwhelming probability is that the vote is confirmed, or that the vote is rejected. Depending on the disparity between the ballot options, this count can actually be very small. See: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf This system is perfect for this kind of an audit -- essentially a ballot marking device written by an organization known for formal verification.
    • specialist 8y ago
      During the mid aughts, the consensus of the Election Verification Network (EVN) crowd (academics, election administrators, feds) was that audits were no better than manual recounts and just as expensive. I'll read the paper you linked, but know that it's contrary to the received wisdom, and I'm very skeptical of any claims that auditing elections are feasible or worthwhile. By audit, I mean anything short of a full manual recount. -- Okay. I lightly read that paper. First, it specifically says to only audit the VVPR, meaning the actual ballots, not the VVPAT, which is just what the computer says it recorded. So there might be some miscommunication. I assumed #bdamm was referring to the VVPAT. Second, the meat of the paper is refinements for calculating the confidence that the official result is correct based on recounting a sample. All of the caveats with audits, not within the scope of this paper, remain the same.
• fixermark 8y ago
  Only part I don't care for is the touchscreen. People consistently overestimate the reliability of that solution, especially for older voters with mobility challenges. Pushbuttons or levers that demand macroscopic elbow/shoulder motion are easier for that demographic to use than sensitive screens requiring fine motor control. And that's all to say nothing of what happens when the screens become miscalibrated and accept taps a few pixels off. I'm fairly confident most of the "It switched my vote" reports we hear are actually this category of "user-error" (which should really be counted as "machine malfunction").
  • gatherhunterer 8y ago
    It is still impossible to submit a vote without personally verifying it or deciding that you don't really care enough to review your choices. A peripheral device is one more thing than can break or be tampered with. The user experience issue is up to them to implement. In general, getting elderly people, low-income populations and other late adopters of technology to use touchscreens correctly has been much easier than getting people to use a mouse. The mouse is less physically intuitive than "poke the thing you want." For most of us, though, we hardly notice a difference.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      I'm a poll worker so I have some experience with the problem. I agree with you that a peripheral is one more thing that can break or be tampered with, and I wouldn't recommend a mouse. Here's what I've observed (at least in the iVotronic systems we use in Pennsylvania): - since there's only one screen, and it's all touchscreen, users get consistently confused between pictures of buttons describing what the buttons do and the buttons themselves - the touchscreen is itself a peripheral and prone to wearing out. When it does, the fact it's wearing out is difficult to observe during the election day; there's no cursor indicator, so a poll worker can't check calibration. - users with fine-motor-coordination issues have to brace against the box to steady themselves to touch the tiny targets they want. There's nowhere to brace against a touchscreen that isn't also touch-sensitive input, and the screens don't accept multi-touch. A row of buttons along each side of the screen, not unlike the solution used at many ATMs, would ameliorate all these problems. These boxes are already custom hardware jobs, so switching out touchscreens for a couple of button banks would be cheaper, equally usable for most voters, and more usable for mobility-impaired voters. It would improve all three observed problems. Wishes and horses though; the machines we have are the ones we use.
• cmonnow 8y ago
  Close to a billion people are going to vote using this method in a month's time.
• tivert 8y ago
  > The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. That seems backwards. Touch screens suck. Why not build a validation machine that voters can feed manually-completed optical scan ballots into, before they go to the tabulator? Clear feedback would help catch incorrectly filled out votes before they're cast, no touch screen required. The validation machine could have a very clear and user-friendly display, which candidate pictures are large type. That would definitely be easier to verify than a computer-generated optical scan ballot.
  • 0x00000000 8y ago
    I think they want to simplify the human interaction as much as possible to eliminate things like hanging chads, misreads due to erasures etc. This also requires less importance on the other human step which is reviewing as there are hopefully fewer errors in the first place Although I would favor a screen with physical buttons next to it (not like the garbage you see on ATMs and gas pumps though)
    • notamerican 8y ago
      > not like the garbage you see on ATMs and gas pumps though What don't you like about these buttons? As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this is a proved design that works well for a great number of people. Plus, the elderly / tech averse are likely to already know how it works.
  • specialist 8y ago
    "Why not build a validation machine that voters can feed manually-completed optical scan ballots into, before they go to the tabulator?" That's precisely how poll-based opscans work. Central count (for postal ballots processing) is necessarily different, because that sanity check cannot be done, so voter intent must be adjudicated when ballots (or individual votes) are unreadable. It's a sausage factory.
• tvbusy 8y ago
  The code should be anonymous, so that it can't be used to trace who made the vote, yet still can be used to verify that is counted. This way, anyone can verify that they're vote was actually counted, so the voting system will be verifiable later on.
  • darpa_escapee 8y ago
    If the user can verify their vote, then they can be coerced to verify their vote by, say, their boss, or be bribed into voting a certain way. Does this system address that concern?
• drilldrive 8y ago
  The best thing about it is assuring voter confidence. And this is something I have been looking forward to for years; I hope it will be implemented soon enough.