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Paper ballots, privately filled out and scanned, seems the sweet spot between keeping elections secret and reporting promptly, with suitable audit. I serve as

Paper ballots, privately filled out and scanned, seems the sweet spot between keeping elections secret and reporting promptly, with suitable audit. I serve as an election officer in my county and have yet to hear of a compelling alternative.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
it's 2020 paper ballots, really? when I can apply for a mortgage, car loan, credit card, and all kinds of other financial legally binding contracts online in complete security? I enter my SSN, my credit report is pulled. Why can't I enter my SSN, it gets validated in a database on whether I'm alive/have already voted/am currently a legal citizen eligible to vote, and vote? We have achieved problems way, way, way harder than "securely identify a person based on their SSN and allow them to vote A, B, or C on a subject"
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  > mortgage, car loan, credit card Notably, none of these things require the actual data to remain anonymous like voting does. That's where all complexity comes from.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Right but I’m more than willing to throw away my own anonymity for the ability. Hell, I literally do it every year by voting absentee. Assuming I’m not alone why not give people the choice and increase voter turnout?
    - smitty1e 7y ago
      I just could not agree with you less here, sir. Your idea is a shortcut to tyranny, and must be peacefully opposed by all holding liberty dear.
- pengaru 7y ago
  > when I can apply for a mortgage, car loan, credit card, and all kinds of other financial legally binding contracts online in complete security? I enter my SSN, my credit report is pulled. Why can't I enter my SSN, it gets validated in a database on whether I'm alive/have already voted/am currently a legal citizen eligible to vote, and vote? Come back once only you can do all those things on your behalf, and not anyone else having your SSN or other PII.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    But that’s a standard that even paper ballots don’t meet. In my state you walk into the polling place, give them your name and address, sign your name, and that’s it. Your polling place is even listed publicly online for anyone who knows your name.
- jeromegv 7y ago
  "It's 2020" is not an argument. Show us a better system that stays anonymous, I don't care which year is it. All I can find so far is examples of technologies going wrong for voting.
ineedasername 7y ago
At some point the data hits a computer system, and that will be a vulnerability. You can always go back the the scans, but what if the scanners themselves are compromised? You could require a certain sample size to be manually counted and cross-referenced with the scans to be increase confidence, but I'm not sure there's a clear sweet spot, or maybe it's that I think your sweet spot needs some elaboration: Filled out on paper & scanned, sure, but then every digital link from scanning to tabulation and data storage should be designed to specs similar a similar level of security used in other very high security computing environments.
- gruez 7y ago
  >You can always go back the the scans, but what if the scanners themselves are compromised? [...] I think what the parent poster meant by "scan" was "tabulate". ie. you fill out a paper ballot, you put it into a scanner which scans it and records the result, and the ballot itself drops into a ballot box. It's still possible to hack the scanner to give a fake result, but it's easily auditable/detected since you still have the original ballots. You can even have the tabulators be entirely offline (since all they do is spit out a number), and their results can be easily cross-checked by random sampling.
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    Just so. There can always be tiny nits in the numbers, but the delta between the pollbook, the unused ballots, and the counts will be vanishingly small. With enough people involved, and small enough pollbooks (local county maxes out ~4k per polling place) there is a good tradeoff between: - maximizing participation - keeping the integrity of the process - minimizing fraud As with encrypting data, there really isn't any way to make the process completely bullet proof; the task is to make real fraud infeasible.
cameldrv 7y ago
What’s the big deal if it’s a few extra hours/ overnight to get the result?
lazyant 7y ago
This is how is done in Canada and other countries.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  Indeed, the secret ballot had been called the Australian Ballot: > All of the states replaced these with secret ballots around 1890, popularly called "Australian ballots." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

it's 2020 paper ballots, really? when I can apply for a mortgage, car loan, credit card, and all kinds of other financial legally binding contracts online in complete security? I enter my SSN, my credit report is pulled. Why can't I enter my SSN, it gets validated in a database on whether I'm alive/have already voted/am currently a legal citizen eligible to vote, and vote? We have achieved problems way, way, way harder than "securely identify a person based on their SSN and allow them to vote A, B, or C on a subject"

rootusrootus 7y ago
> mortgage, car loan, credit card Notably, none of these things require the actual data to remain anonymous like voting does. That's where all complexity comes from.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Right but I’m more than willing to throw away my own anonymity for the ability. Hell, I literally do it every year by voting absentee. Assuming I’m not alone why not give people the choice and increase voter turnout?
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    I just could not agree with you less here, sir. Your idea is a shortcut to tyranny, and must be peacefully opposed by all holding liberty dear.
pengaru 7y ago
> when I can apply for a mortgage, car loan, credit card, and all kinds of other financial legally binding contracts online in complete security? I enter my SSN, my credit report is pulled. Why can't I enter my SSN, it gets validated in a database on whether I'm alive/have already voted/am currently a legal citizen eligible to vote, and vote? Come back once only you can do all those things on your behalf, and not anyone else having your SSN or other PII.
- Spivak 7y ago
  But that’s a standard that even paper ballots don’t meet. In my state you walk into the polling place, give them your name and address, sign your name, and that’s it. Your polling place is even listed publicly online for anyone who knows your name.
jeromegv 7y ago
"It's 2020" is not an argument. Show us a better system that stays anonymous, I don't care which year is it. All I can find so far is examples of technologies going wrong for voting.

ineedasername 7y ago

At some point the data hits a computer system, and that will be a vulnerability. You can always go back the the scans, but what if the scanners themselves are compromised? You could require a certain sample size to be manually counted and cross-referenced with the scans to be increase confidence, but I'm not sure there's a clear sweet spot, or maybe it's that I think your sweet spot needs some elaboration: Filled out on paper & scanned, sure, but then every digital link from scanning to tabulation and data storage should be designed to specs similar a similar level of security used in other very high security computing environments.

gruez 7y ago
>You can always go back the the scans, but what if the scanners themselves are compromised? [...] I think what the parent poster meant by "scan" was "tabulate". ie. you fill out a paper ballot, you put it into a scanner which scans it and records the result, and the ballot itself drops into a ballot box. It's still possible to hack the scanner to give a fake result, but it's easily auditable/detected since you still have the original ballots. You can even have the tabulators be entirely offline (since all they do is spit out a number), and their results can be easily cross-checked by random sampling.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  Just so. There can always be tiny nits in the numbers, but the delta between the pollbook, the unused ballots, and the counts will be vanishingly small. With enough people involved, and small enough pollbooks (local county maxes out ~4k per polling place) there is a good tradeoff between: - maximizing participation - keeping the integrity of the process - minimizing fraud As with encrypting data, there really isn't any way to make the process completely bullet proof; the task is to make real fraud infeasible.

cameldrv 7y ago

What’s the big deal if it’s a few extra hours/ overnight to get the result?

lazyant 7y ago

This is how is done in Canada and other countries.

smitty1e 7y ago
Indeed, the secret ballot had been called the Australian Ballot: > All of the states replaced these with secret ballots around 1890, popularly called "Australian ballots." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot