7 ms·

Why does this keep coming up? What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? There is no need for results to be known immediately, so how does making vo

Why does this keep coming up? What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? There is no need for results to be known immediately, so how does making voting an exercise done by computers make anything better, particularly when computers are much more vulnerable to remote interference?

hansjorg 8y ago
Because paper ballots increase the cost of manipulating elections.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Ironically the one recent confirmed case of a rigged election in the U.S. was rigged through paper absentee ballots.
  - buzzerbetrayed 8y ago
    Is it really ironic when pretty much all voting is done with paper? Of course the rigged voting would have been through paper ballots when that is what we use.
    - Pharmakon 8y ago
      It’s ironic when I’m responding to someone framing the use of paper ballots as a security feature, yes.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    And it was detected. That's a big part of the advantage of paper ballots. The cost of subversion is high because more people need to be in on any conspiracy to subvert the system. More conspirators means more and more incentive to defect against co-conspirators. Electronic systems do not scale subversion cost with electorate size. But they do scale the payoff of subversion.
  - brenschluss 8y ago
    This is survivorship bias. Instead: 1. Assume that there are enough high-powered actors to want to rig an election 2. Note that confirmed case of a rigged election happens through paper absentee ballots 3. Note that there are very few known cases of a rigged election happening through electronic voting machines. 4. One probable conclusion is that election rigging is possible and undetectable through electronic voting machines.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    As opposed to many potential others which were electronic and not confirmed/confirmable? Gimme the paper absentee ballot any day.
- kavalg 8y ago
  Not always true. Where I live, small parties have the problem of not being able to allocate sufficient resources to monitor all voting rooms. Then if it happens that only representatives of two of the biggest political parties are observing the counting, strange things can happen (e.g. the small parties not getting any votes).
therealdrag0 8y ago
Aren't counting ballots always wrong? Like every time there is a recount the number changes... What's wrong with electronic ballots? If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sverige 8y ago
  The numbers change with electronic ballots too, so again, what's the compelling reason?
  - therealdrag0 8y ago
    Why would they change?
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Banking doesn't require ballot secrecy.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  > If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting? There's one major requirement in voting systems that throws a huge wrench in everything, anonymity. In order to prevent vote buying and coercion voters can't be tied to specific votes. So any system that allows a person to check that their vote got counted for their candidate isn't workable because that violates the anonymity requirement. There's a million reasons that votes change as they're counted and recounted. For one in some states absentee ballots can be postmarked up to the day of the election so they can trickle in for a while after the day of. Another is machine breakdowns and just mistakes as the complete numbers are gathered.
  - gervase 8y ago
    The way this (anonymity) is handled in the Estonian system is that votes can be validated out-of-band for 30 minutes after they were cast, then they're locked. Additionally, a voter can overwrite their previous vote at any time during the vote period, so they could always prove their first vote, and then overwrite it privately later. There are several other major problems with their system [0], but I think they should at least get credit for their approach. 0: https://www.aaspring.com/ccs2014/ivoting-paper.pdf https://www.aaspring.com/ccs2014/ivoting-paper.pdf
chapium 8y ago
why cant we just issue paper ballots with a signed sha256 hash?
IshKebab 8y ago
Because of the reasons explained in the article - you can verify that your vote was recorded, and you can calculate the total yourself. There's also no need for recounts, it uses less labour and you know the result immediately. Paper voting isn't perfect.
samirm 8y ago
Paper ballots aren't scalable or transparent. Open source hardware and software can be audited by anyone and every one and can be formally verifiable.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Paper ballots aren't scalable Paper ballot operational complexity scales linearly with the size of the electorate, which makes them adequately scalable for any practical use. (There's maybe an issue with using paper ballots for some esoteric election methods, because of how operational complexity scales with number of candidates for some type of tallying, but absent a decision that use of one of those methods is desirable that's immaterial.)
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  > Paper ballots aren't scalable or transparent. Australia holds elections this way and has done so for a century. Scaling has not been an issue. Neither has transparency.
- Mangalor 8y ago
  So is paper. smacks head.
abecedarius 8y ago
If you could make voting much cheaper and faster, it could be used to decide more things. (If your immediate reaction is "But voting is a terrible way to make decisions!", well, there's considerable evidence in your favor. I think we should be researching collective decision-making a lot more broadly, but voting tech could be one building block.)
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"What is the compelling argument against paper ballots?" Repudiation, verification etc.. I suggest this technology is part of a 'pro democracy' agenda, as opposed to some kind of existential need within the US. The tech might ostensibly be destined for S. America, Africa and parts of Asia.
- ernst_klim 8y ago
  >I suggest this technology is part of a 'pro democracy' agenda The opposite is true, for example Russian government is actively pushing for electronic voting at the moment. No more videos like this [1], only the number "your dictator got 70% of people's votes" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzl2UXV1U_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzl2UXV1U_A
zepearl 8y ago
In Switzerland the swiss Post is implementing something similar => my thoughts are very similar to yours (we can even vote by letter, and an electronic vote might in comparison save me at most 5 seconds out of the avg 3 hours of debate with friends and family & reading & watching debates on TV for each round of voting). The swiss Post organized recently a public review (with awards to identify bugs - see another older thread on HN) for the software that they'll try to launch. On one hand the swiss Post's solution would allow me to actively check if my vote was part of the total, which I think is absolutely fantastic. On the other hand I did access the source repository of the new potential voting system <with sparkling eyes expecting something "special"> but I didn't even start digging into it as soon as I saw that it was written in Java. I thought that such a software, which is the foundation to the future of a nation (voting system), would have as its foundation 1) a language that leaves very little room for technical and functional bugs (e.g. something used in the aerospace industry?), 2) would be structured using an extremely well-known-for-its-reliability workflow-engine and 3) was submitted to testing covering basically ALL possible combinations at ALL levels (not just e.g. "10000 cycles of randomness" but all possible input-values, for all layers). When I saw that it was written in Java (nothing against Java - same thing for e.g. C/C++) I immediately gave up because, even if that SW is made to be absolutely unhackable >>now<<, this won't be true anymore starting from the next releases as the $ and "attention" will inevitably be reduced more and more and the whole tower will start to crumble. Summarized: I'd like such a system, but I would need it to implemented in an extremely strict way that is able to survive times of low budgets and/or bad employees and/or bad management and/or of course corruption, which is when coincidentally a stable solution would be needed the most. I usually (have to) choose between dark- or light-grey when I vote, but in this case, to replace the current system, it's one of the rare occasions for which I would need a "pure white" solution :)
brownbat 8y ago
> What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? To play devil's advocate... Paper is just a medium. With apologies to Claude Shannon, critical properties of information are best ensured through secure protocols, not by picking a particular medium. E.g., if the property you want is security, encryption is more provably secure than invisible ink. The properly encrypted message can be stored on paper, radio, magnets, or neurons, it doesn't matter. The properties we want from ballots are somewhat uncommon and therefore very unintuitive. They are still properties of information. Availability and deniability simultaneously? (So you can personally confirm, but never provably sell your vote). We could design a cryptographic protocol to meet those unique design goals. But not using paper alone, because the math would be too hard. Paper appears to guarantee availability and privacy, just as invisible ink appears to guarantee security. In practice, each often fall short. Ballot boxes disappear. Absentee ballots travel through the postal system, which is a bit like blasting one unencrypted UDP packet and hoping for the best. No individual can take their paper ballot and later confirm how it was counted. You could do these things with electrons though. It would require some fast math, like almost all useful protocols in information theory.
adrianmonk 8y ago
What's wrong with paper as a technology? Nothing. What's wrong with paper as a proposed solution? Education and public perception. People who work with computers understand their limitations. But the average person on the street doesn't seem to see them the same way. They think computers equal modernization equal reliability. True or not, if you want to voting system to be a political reality, you'd have to change public opinion, and we've spent more than a decade trying to but haven't gotten that done.

hansjorg 8y ago

Because paper ballots increase the cost of manipulating elections.

Pharmakon 8y ago
Ironically the one recent confirmed case of a rigged election in the U.S. was rigged through paper absentee ballots.
- buzzerbetrayed 8y ago
  Is it really ironic when pretty much all voting is done with paper? Of course the rigged voting would have been through paper ballots when that is what we use.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    It’s ironic when I’m responding to someone framing the use of paper ballots as a security feature, yes.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  And it was detected. That's a big part of the advantage of paper ballots. The cost of subversion is high because more people need to be in on any conspiracy to subvert the system. More conspirators means more and more incentive to defect against co-conspirators. Electronic systems do not scale subversion cost with electorate size. But they do scale the payoff of subversion.
- brenschluss 8y ago
  This is survivorship bias. Instead: 1. Assume that there are enough high-powered actors to want to rig an election 2. Note that confirmed case of a rigged election happens through paper absentee ballots 3. Note that there are very few known cases of a rigged election happening through electronic voting machines. 4. One probable conclusion is that election rigging is possible and undetectable through electronic voting machines.
- r00fus 8y ago
  As opposed to many potential others which were electronic and not confirmed/confirmable? Gimme the paper absentee ballot any day.
kavalg 8y ago
Not always true. Where I live, small parties have the problem of not being able to allocate sufficient resources to monitor all voting rooms. Then if it happens that only representatives of two of the biggest political parties are observing the counting, strange things can happen (e.g. the small parties not getting any votes).

therealdrag0 8y ago

Aren't counting ballots always wrong? Like every time there is a recount the number changes... What's wrong with electronic ballots? If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sverige 8y ago
The numbers change with electronic ballots too, so again, what's the compelling reason?
- therealdrag0 8y ago
  Why would they change?
jacques_chester 8y ago
Banking doesn't require ballot secrecy.
rtkwe 8y ago
> If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting? There's one major requirement in voting systems that throws a huge wrench in everything, anonymity. In order to prevent vote buying and coercion voters can't be tied to specific votes. So any system that allows a person to check that their vote got counted for their candidate isn't workable because that violates the anonymity requirement. There's a million reasons that votes change as they're counted and recounted. For one in some states absentee ballots can be postmarked up to the day of the election so they can trickle in for a while after the day of. Another is machine breakdowns and just mistakes as the complete numbers are gathered.
- gervase 8y ago
  The way this (anonymity) is handled in the Estonian system is that votes can be validated out-of-band for 30 minutes after they were cast, then they're locked. Additionally, a voter can overwrite their previous vote at any time during the vote period, so they could always prove their first vote, and then overwrite it privately later. There are several other major problems with their system [0], but I think they should at least get credit for their approach. 0: https://www.aaspring.com/ccs2014/ivoting-paper.pdf https://www.aaspring.com/ccs2014/ivoting-paper.pdf

chapium 8y ago

why cant we just issue paper ballots with a signed sha256 hash?

IshKebab 8y ago

Because of the reasons explained in the article - you can verify that your vote was recorded, and you can calculate the total yourself. There's also no need for recounts, it uses less labour and you know the result immediately. Paper voting isn't perfect.

samirm 8y ago

Paper ballots aren't scalable or transparent. Open source hardware and software can be audited by anyone and every one and can be formally verifiable.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Paper ballots aren't scalable Paper ballot operational complexity scales linearly with the size of the electorate, which makes them adequately scalable for any practical use. (There's maybe an issue with using paper ballots for some esoteric election methods, because of how operational complexity scales with number of candidates for some type of tallying, but absent a decision that use of one of those methods is desirable that's immaterial.)
jacques_chester 8y ago
> Paper ballots aren't scalable or transparent. Australia holds elections this way and has done so for a century. Scaling has not been an issue. Neither has transparency.
Mangalor 8y ago
So is paper. smacks head.

abecedarius 8y ago

If you could make voting much cheaper and faster, it could be used to decide more things. (If your immediate reaction is "But voting is a terrible way to make decisions!", well, there's considerable evidence in your favor. I think we should be researching collective decision-making a lot more broadly, but voting tech could be one building block.)

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"What is the compelling argument against paper ballots?" Repudiation, verification etc.. I suggest this technology is part of a 'pro democracy' agenda, as opposed to some kind of existential need within the US. The tech might ostensibly be destined for S. America, Africa and parts of Asia.

ernst_klim 8y ago
>I suggest this technology is part of a 'pro democracy' agenda The opposite is true, for example Russian government is actively pushing for electronic voting at the moment. No more videos like this [1], only the number "your dictator got 70% of people's votes" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzl2UXV1U_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzl2UXV1U_A

zepearl 8y ago

In Switzerland the swiss Post is implementing something similar => my thoughts are very similar to yours (we can even vote by letter, and an electronic vote might in comparison save me at most 5 seconds out of the avg 3 hours of debate with friends and family & reading & watching debates on TV for each round of voting). The swiss Post organized recently a public review (with awards to identify bugs - see another older thread on HN) for the software that they'll try to launch. On one hand the swiss Post's solution would allow me to actively check if my vote was part of the total, which I think is absolutely fantastic. On the other hand I did access the source repository of the new potential voting system <with sparkling eyes expecting something "special"> but I didn't even start digging into it as soon as I saw that it was written in Java. I thought that such a software, which is the foundation to the future of a nation (voting system), would have as its foundation 1) a language that leaves very little room for technical and functional bugs (e.g. something used in the aerospace industry?), 2) would be structured using an extremely well-known-for-its-reliability workflow-engine and 3) was submitted to testing covering basically ALL possible combinations at ALL levels (not just e.g. "10000 cycles of randomness" but all possible input-values, for all layers). When I saw that it was written in Java (nothing against Java - same thing for e.g. C/C++) I immediately gave up because, even if that SW is made to be absolutely unhackable >>now<<, this won't be true anymore starting from the next releases as the $ and "attention" will inevitably be reduced more and more and the whole tower will start to crumble. Summarized: I'd like such a system, but I would need it to implemented in an extremely strict way that is able to survive times of low budgets and/or bad employees and/or bad management and/or of course corruption, which is when coincidentally a stable solution would be needed the most. I usually (have to) choose between dark- or light-grey when I vote, but in this case, to replace the current system, it's one of the rare occasions for which I would need a "pure white" solution :)

brownbat 8y ago

> What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? To play devil's advocate... Paper is just a medium. With apologies to Claude Shannon, critical properties of information are best ensured through secure protocols, not by picking a particular medium. E.g., if the property you want is security, encryption is more provably secure than invisible ink. The properly encrypted message can be stored on paper, radio, magnets, or neurons, it doesn't matter. The properties we want from ballots are somewhat uncommon and therefore very unintuitive. They are still properties of information. Availability and deniability simultaneously? (So you can personally confirm, but never provably sell your vote). We could design a cryptographic protocol to meet those unique design goals. But not using paper alone, because the math would be too hard. Paper appears to guarantee availability and privacy, just as invisible ink appears to guarantee security. In practice, each often fall short. Ballot boxes disappear. Absentee ballots travel through the postal system, which is a bit like blasting one unencrypted UDP packet and hoping for the best. No individual can take their paper ballot and later confirm how it was counted. You could do these things with electrons though. It would require some fast math, like almost all useful protocols in information theory.

adrianmonk 8y ago

What's wrong with paper as a technology? Nothing. What's wrong with paper as a proposed solution? Education and public perception. People who work with computers understand their limitations. But the average person on the street doesn't seem to see them the same way. They think computers equal modernization equal reliability. True or not, if you want to voting system to be a political reality, you'd have to change public opinion, and we've spent more than a decade trying to but haven't gotten that done.