9 ms·

Just use paper ballots. The only useful election technology is scantron. We do not need this. It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in

Just use paper ballots. The only useful election technology is scantron. We do not need this. It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in search of a place to explode. A rundown on some of their security: https://mobile.twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1026603800365330432 https://mobile.twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/10266038003653...

theseadroid 7y ago
Many people can't afford to take the day off for voting. And even mail ballots are allowed, making the process easier would encourage more participation. Is this not a problem worth solving?
- jacobush 7y ago
  Yes, it's worth solving. Here's another suggestion - make voting day a holiday.
  - lalaland1125 7y ago
    That's not actually possible in the sense that declaring a day a holiday doesn't actually prevent employers from giving people shifts. If anything, restaurants and stores actually retain more staff during holidays. The only people a holiday would affect would be people working high end jobs that probably wouldn't have issues voting anyways. Vote by mail and extended voting hours are much more effective solutions for people who otherwise couldn't find the time to vote.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Fine, bring out the heavy law-making artillery then. Make it mandatory to give staff time off to go voting with heavy penalties for non-compliance and some kind of nice carrot for compliance.
  - badwolf 7y ago
    As well as early voting, and vote by mail.
- the_snooze 7y ago
  It's not as clear-cut as you would think. https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-elections-increase-turnout/ https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-e...
- jeltz 7y ago
  Sure, but can't that be solved for most people by holding elections on a Sunday and keeping the polls open from 08:00 to 20:00? That way it is only a small percentage who are unable to vote. Sweden has this plus early voting and we have between 85% and 90% participation in our elections. The early voting of course make it easier to manipulate votes.
duxup 7y ago
The optical system in Minnesota is great. I fill out the paper ballot, so no matter what I've voted. It is really clear how to use the system, and I'm not waiting on technology no matter what happens next. Then I roll it into the machine itself and it goes into a locked box attached to the machine. There is always a paper record. The machines and votes are tied together so auditing is straightforward.
- specialist 7y ago
  The system you describe is currently the gold standard for election administration. In "electionese": Ballots issued, marked, and cast at a poll site. Ballots tabulated at poll site the moment the polls close. All materials and gear distributed from and to a central count. All handling done in public in the presence of reps of all significant stake holders, election observers. Receipts, logs, seals for everything. Source: Was a poll inspector for years.
  - duxup 7y ago
    It really seems like it would be hard to have a system that is "better". It's all the security of physical ballots, with the speed of electronic, and very specific / targeted auditing ability that benefits both the electronic and physical domains.
    - specialist 7y ago
      FWIW, learning about this stuff completely burst all my preconceptions. Even as a geek utterly opposed to most all use of computers for tabulation, I came to believe the biggest threat to election integrity is change. We just have to stop shaking the ant farm every few years. Whatever changes are warranted, they need to be slow, deliberate, methodical. Because it all really comes down to the people (admins, voters, candidates, observers, etc), their domain knowledge, expectations, and experience. As Alistair Cockburn wrote, good people can make even bad processes workable. PS- Belatedly response, sorry. Got rate limited yesterday.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I do need this. How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots? It seems like blockchain would allow everyone to be able to check that their vote counted, in an anonymous yet totally transparent and verifiable way.
- newaccoutnas 7y ago
  To a degree you have to put your trust in the system and build enough checks in so that no one part of it can be corrupted. The issue with electronic voting is that it's easy to scale attacks.
- jrumbut 7y ago
  Their backend is printing out PDFs for the county election workers to count. You still have to trust someone, you'll always have to trust someone.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    You could count the results yourself to double check the outcome with a blockchain-based solution
    - InitialLastName 7y ago
      With a paper-based solution, you (or your organization) can also count the votes yourself. With the added advantage that it's harder to manipulate, less prone to failure, and easier for non-technical people to understand.
      - shawnz 7y ago
        Multiple people can't get access to the paper documents at the same time. And when they do get access there's no guarantee that they are getting the actual papers that citizens submitted. Even if you got citizens to individually sign each one with their private key and write the signature on the paper, you still couldn't prove that votes weren't removed
EGreg 7y ago
Why simply deride electronic voting as a solution in search a problem? There are many problems it solves. 1. How about low voter turnout, so elections aren’t representative of what the people want. An app would increase voter turnout by a lot, especially the younger vote. 2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-because-i-had-to-work https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-bec...) 3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won? Aren’t these important enough problems for a democracy to solve? Instead of simply downvoting, why not actually address what I am saying! I am going to go point by point. Sure, absentee ballots are a thing, but guess what. People like apps. If it’s secure enough for everyone’s banking needs, why not for a vote? You can make the same argument about money — that banking apps are a honeypot for thieves etc. And yet we have made banking apps so so secure that you’d use them to move thousands of dollars. If everyone voted from their phone, it could be anonymous and cryptographically secure. And a Merkle tree would record all results. What is the issue? Every problem you point out with electronics can be done with paper ballots, too. The interface can lie to you? Has been done with butterfly ballots and others. The vote counting process is rigged? Have different groups audit the process. In fact, having cryptographically secure receipts makes it extra easy and fast to verify votes. Al Gore would have won, because they wouldn’t have has to take so much time for a recount: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ Instead of throwing our hands up and saying “oh, X is an issue!” why not simply work on fixing the issue? So let’s run down the issues: 1. Not enough access to phones and computers Fine, people without phones can still vote the old fashioned way. 2. Stealing a phone A very inefficient way to fake a vote 3. Interfaces that lie to you Ignoring the fact that machines already do this (https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M) the interfaces would need to be audited by different groups using each other’s interfaces in an anonymous manner (not like when Uber’s greyball https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secret-program-greyball-resignation-ed-baker https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... ). This is the general problem of the Trusted Computing Base. 4. Anonymity Listen, should we know how every person voted?? We do now! Thanks Government. Best Voting System Ever (https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-of-voter-records-are-for-sale-on-hacker-forums/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-...) Erm sorry. The solution. Token mixing. You get one token per person, but then they go through a cryptographically securd mixer before being used to sign your vote. Kind of like with Monero rings. 5. Accountability How can we prove the votes happened the way you wanted them to? Well, YOU still have your token on YOUR phone (no one else does) so your app can audit the Merkle tree. Zero-Knowledge Proofs would be overkill here because proving how you voted to someone else is important (See #3, above). In addition, ZK proofs are a bit ivory-tower idealistic since most people don’t have the knowhow to “produce a fake alternative vote”. The Merkle Tree can consist of smaller branches, one for each district. The results can be tallied in near real time, and verified by anyone. Results would be known in real-time. 6. But realtime reporting will affect voters! Yes, and it currently already does, with Ohio, Michigan, and so on. The current system makes some states way more important than others: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016 https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016 Why not require all states to have primaries at the same time and not reveal the results til the end? This is a political, not technological, solution. The only one major problem I see with electronic voting is #3, the trusted computing base. I listed the main solution above, but I am sure there will be many improvements on it.
linuxftw 7y ago
Doesn't work either. In some districts, one candidate got more votes than actual ballots because some were 'accidentally scanned more than once.' In those situations, since the counts are off, the original vote stands. So, just make sure you throw out all your extra ballots and you're fine. Edit: 2016 US General
non-entity 7y ago
> It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in search of a place to explode. I won't knock blockchain completely, because I don't believe I'm smart enough to, and it likely has many useful applications, but I feel like half the time I hear about blockchain, this quote is applicable.
specialist 7y ago
This is a solution to the problem of more pork for vendors. Any one wanting to understand why any of these changes occurs will be illuminated by better understanding the business models of the vendors and the appropriations (budgets) of the jurisdictions. During the HAVA bonanza, which brought us the touchscreens, vendors envied high tech valuations, so repackaged themselves as product companies. When that fad went bust (market saturation), vendors repackaged themselves as service companies. With a big difference from their prior incarnation. Changing from time & materials to charging a fee for every task for every voter every election. Before, you'd buy ballots for expected turnout plus 10%. Now, (with vote-by-mail) you buy the whole ballot packet, for every voter every election. Before, you'd pay 10 cents for every voter signature verified. Now, you pay for signature verification services for every voter every election. It's astonishing how each and every step of the process has been monetized (rent seeking). -- Huh. It just now occurs to me there's probably a better way to summarize the business practices of the vendors: Just imagine what IT vendors like Oracle do to maximize revenue applied to election administration.
Shivetya 7y ago
well here is the rub, paper ballots are useless unless you can prove who is voting and yet we have nearly the same people yelling about how unfair it is to require people to prove who they are to vote. you cannot have one without the other if your intent is to protect the system and to be honest you only need paper ballots as a receipt to allow verification in case of suspected interference. we have already seen that some paper ballot designs are more prone to fraud than others.
DrScientist 7y ago
Yep. Paper totally rules here. 1. like paper money, anonymous - my vote should be secret. 2. Hard to do large scale fraud or manipulation - not being efficient or automatable is a feature guys... 3. Physically going to the polls, voting in public, yet private at the end really makes it hard to put pressure on people to vote one way or another. Compare that to voting electronically at home or in church or at work....
- the_snooze 7y ago
  3b. You can spoil paper ballots during in-person voting, which means a photograph of your ballot is insufficient proof that you actually cast that particular ballot.

theseadroid 7y ago

Many people can't afford to take the day off for voting. And even mail ballots are allowed, making the process easier would encourage more participation. Is this not a problem worth solving?

jacobush 7y ago
Yes, it's worth solving. Here's another suggestion - make voting day a holiday.
- lalaland1125 7y ago
  That's not actually possible in the sense that declaring a day a holiday doesn't actually prevent employers from giving people shifts. If anything, restaurants and stores actually retain more staff during holidays. The only people a holiday would affect would be people working high end jobs that probably wouldn't have issues voting anyways. Vote by mail and extended voting hours are much more effective solutions for people who otherwise couldn't find the time to vote.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Fine, bring out the heavy law-making artillery then. Make it mandatory to give staff time off to go voting with heavy penalties for non-compliance and some kind of nice carrot for compliance.
- badwolf 7y ago
  As well as early voting, and vote by mail.
the_snooze 7y ago
It's not as clear-cut as you would think. https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-elections-increase-turnout/ https://www.eac.gov/documents/2017/02/23/will-vote-by-mail-e...
jeltz 7y ago
Sure, but can't that be solved for most people by holding elections on a Sunday and keeping the polls open from 08:00 to 20:00? That way it is only a small percentage who are unable to vote. Sweden has this plus early voting and we have between 85% and 90% participation in our elections. The early voting of course make it easier to manipulate votes.

duxup 7y ago

The optical system in Minnesota is great. I fill out the paper ballot, so no matter what I've voted. It is really clear how to use the system, and I'm not waiting on technology no matter what happens next. Then I roll it into the machine itself and it goes into a locked box attached to the machine. There is always a paper record. The machines and votes are tied together so auditing is straightforward.

specialist 7y ago
The system you describe is currently the gold standard for election administration. In "electionese": Ballots issued, marked, and cast at a poll site. Ballots tabulated at poll site the moment the polls close. All materials and gear distributed from and to a central count. All handling done in public in the presence of reps of all significant stake holders, election observers. Receipts, logs, seals for everything. Source: Was a poll inspector for years.
- duxup 7y ago
  It really seems like it would be hard to have a system that is "better". It's all the security of physical ballots, with the speed of electronic, and very specific / targeted auditing ability that benefits both the electronic and physical domains.
  - specialist 7y ago
    FWIW, learning about this stuff completely burst all my preconceptions. Even as a geek utterly opposed to most all use of computers for tabulation, I came to believe the biggest threat to election integrity is change. We just have to stop shaking the ant farm every few years. Whatever changes are warranted, they need to be slow, deliberate, methodical. Because it all really comes down to the people (admins, voters, candidates, observers, etc), their domain knowledge, expectations, and experience. As Alistair Cockburn wrote, good people can make even bad processes workable. PS- Belatedly response, sorry. Got rate limited yesterday.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I do need this. How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots? It seems like blockchain would allow everyone to be able to check that their vote counted, in an anonymous yet totally transparent and verifiable way.

newaccoutnas 7y ago
To a degree you have to put your trust in the system and build enough checks in so that no one part of it can be corrupted. The issue with electronic voting is that it's easy to scale attacks.
jrumbut 7y ago
Their backend is printing out PDFs for the county election workers to count. You still have to trust someone, you'll always have to trust someone.
- shawnz 7y ago
  You could count the results yourself to double check the outcome with a blockchain-based solution
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    With a paper-based solution, you (or your organization) can also count the votes yourself. With the added advantage that it's harder to manipulate, less prone to failure, and easier for non-technical people to understand.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      Multiple people can't get access to the paper documents at the same time. And when they do get access there's no guarantee that they are getting the actual papers that citizens submitted. Even if you got citizens to individually sign each one with their private key and write the signature on the paper, you still couldn't prove that votes weren't removed

EGreg 7y ago

Why simply deride electronic voting as a solution in search a problem? There are many problems it solves. 1. How about low voter turnout, so elections aren’t representative of what the people want. An app would increase voter turnout by a lot, especially the younger vote. 2. How about letting less mobile people to vote. Or people who are not able to take off work that day. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-because-i-had-to-work https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9j85/i-couldnt-vote-bec...) 3. How about being able to count elections in time to call them, instead of things where Bush gets elected because some guys ran out of time, and then it turns put Gore would have won? Aren’t these important enough problems for a democracy to solve? Instead of simply downvoting, why not actually address what I am saying! I am going to go point by point. Sure, absentee ballots are a thing, but guess what. People like apps. If it’s secure enough for everyone’s banking needs, why not for a vote? You can make the same argument about money — that banking apps are a honeypot for thieves etc. And yet we have made banking apps so so secure that you’d use them to move thousands of dollars. If everyone voted from their phone, it could be anonymous and cryptographically secure. And a Merkle tree would record all results. What is the issue? Every problem you point out with electronics can be done with paper ballots, too. The interface can lie to you? Has been done with butterfly ballots and others. The vote counting process is rigged? Have different groups audit the process. In fact, having cryptographically secure receipts makes it extra easy and fast to verify votes. Al Gore would have won, because they wouldn’t have has to take so much time for a recount: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcz6NSyxrfQ Instead of throwing our hands up and saying “oh, X is an issue!” why not simply work on fixing the issue? So let’s run down the issues: 1. Not enough access to phones and computers Fine, people without phones can still vote the old fashioned way. 2. Stealing a phone A very inefficient way to fake a vote 3. Interfaces that lie to you Ignoring the fact that machines already do this (https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M https://youtu.be/EV_c1-YTk8M) the interfaces would need to be audited by different groups using each other’s interfaces in an anonymous manner (not like when Uber’s greyball https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secret-program-greyball-resignation-ed-baker https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... ). This is the general problem of the Trusted Computing Base. 4. Anonymity Listen, should we know how every person voted?? We do now! Thanks Government. Best Voting System Ever (https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-of-voter-records-are-for-sale-on-hacker-forums/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/10/16/millions-...) Erm sorry. The solution. Token mixing. You get one token per person, but then they go through a cryptographically securd mixer before being used to sign your vote. Kind of like with Monero rings. 5. Accountability How can we prove the votes happened the way you wanted them to? Well, YOU still have your token on YOUR phone (no one else does) so your app can audit the Merkle tree. Zero-Knowledge Proofs would be overkill here because proving how you voted to someone else is important (See #3, above). In addition, ZK proofs are a bit ivory-tower idealistic since most people don’t have the knowhow to “produce a fake alternative vote”. The Merkle Tree can consist of smaller branches, one for each district. The results can be tallied in near real time, and verified by anyone. Results would be known in real-time. 6. But realtime reporting will affect voters! Yes, and it currently already does, with Ohio, Michigan, and so on. The current system makes some states way more important than others: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016 https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016 Why not require all states to have primaries at the same time and not reveal the results til the end? This is a political, not technological, solution. The only one major problem I see with electronic voting is #3, the trusted computing base. I listed the main solution above, but I am sure there will be many improvements on it.

linuxftw 7y ago

Doesn't work either. In some districts, one candidate got more votes than actual ballots because some were 'accidentally scanned more than once.' In those situations, since the counts are off, the original vote stands. So, just make sure you throw out all your extra ballots and you're fine. Edit: 2016 US General

non-entity 7y ago

> It isn't even a solution in search of a problem it's a problem in search of a place to explode. I won't knock blockchain completely, because I don't believe I'm smart enough to, and it likely has many useful applications, but I feel like half the time I hear about blockchain, this quote is applicable.

specialist 7y ago

This is a solution to the problem of more pork for vendors. Any one wanting to understand why any of these changes occurs will be illuminated by better understanding the business models of the vendors and the appropriations (budgets) of the jurisdictions. During the HAVA bonanza, which brought us the touchscreens, vendors envied high tech valuations, so repackaged themselves as product companies. When that fad went bust (market saturation), vendors repackaged themselves as service companies. With a big difference from their prior incarnation. Changing from time & materials to charging a fee for every task for every voter every election. Before, you'd buy ballots for expected turnout plus 10%. Now, (with vote-by-mail) you buy the whole ballot packet, for every voter every election. Before, you'd pay 10 cents for every voter signature verified. Now, you pay for signature verification services for every voter every election. It's astonishing how each and every step of the process has been monetized (rent seeking). -- Huh. It just now occurs to me there's probably a better way to summarize the business practices of the vendors: Just imagine what IT vendors like Oracle do to maximize revenue applied to election administration.

Shivetya 7y ago

well here is the rub, paper ballots are useless unless you can prove who is voting and yet we have nearly the same people yelling about how unfair it is to require people to prove who they are to vote. you cannot have one without the other if your intent is to protect the system and to be honest you only need paper ballots as a receipt to allow verification in case of suspected interference. we have already seen that some paper ballot designs are more prone to fraud than others.

DrScientist 7y ago

Yep. Paper totally rules here. 1. like paper money, anonymous - my vote should be secret. 2. Hard to do large scale fraud or manipulation - not being efficient or automatable is a feature guys... 3. Physically going to the polls, voting in public, yet private at the end really makes it hard to put pressure on people to vote one way or another. Compare that to voting electronically at home or in church or at work....

the_snooze 7y ago
3b. You can spoil paper ballots during in-person voting, which means a photograph of your ballot is insufficient proof that you actually cast that particular ballot.