17 ms·

Can Our Ballots Be Both Secret and Secure?

51 points by ryandvm 6y ago

henrikschroder 6y ago
> Since 2018, as part of a program called Defending Democracy, Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to solve the problem of trust in secret-ballot elections. No. Stop. Listen, it's possible to write secure voting software that a domain-expert software engineer understands, and a general software engineer can understand. That's not the problem. But for voting, that is not enough. The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And the most important thing to realize is that this process is infinitely parallellizable, so getting election-night preliminary results isn't hard, even though every single vote is manually counted. You just need enough people to count the votes.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  This, plus the inherent blessing and curse of computers -- if you can do something one time, it's usually very easy to do it 1000 times. If you want to tamper with one precinct or one county, you have to write some exploit. If you want to tamper with all of them, still, one exploit. However, if you want to tamper with a whole state of paper ballots, you have to stuff a thousand ballot boxes. The chances of getting caught are far higher.
  - bl0b 6y ago
    I'm under the impression that computerized voting systems are in no way standardized nation-wide (USA, at least). But your point still stands that it seems easier to hack a computerized voting system to commit large-scale fraud than to fraud with paper ballots.
    - jablongo 6y ago
      Yes this is true: federalism being applied to control of elections is probably good for election security. But there’s only a small handful of vendors and if an attacker was able to crack one of them they might be able scale the attack to many deployments of that vendor’s systems.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Not in a two party system. You really still only need to hack just one model of voting machines to steal the election, since the margins are so small.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The same goes for the paper ballots. You don't need to fix the vote everywhere.
        hef19898 6y ago
        Which incredibly difficult to do on scale, unless you rig the whole system. In which case voting is just a fig leave anyway.
        Ma8ee 6y ago
        With paper ballots you must make sure that most people at the voting stations are part of the conspiracy, which is tricky because all major parties will have representatives on each station. It’s possible you will get away with it in a few small places, but even that is hard.
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    It's the same reason why voting via mail is very hard to exploit. Voting functions as a secure handshake (register to vote via mail, government sends confirmation, government sends ballot, you send ballot back, government sends confirmation of vote) and requires you to sign it with some identifying information like a signature. There might be some individuals trying to cheat the system at the family level, but trying to cheat it at a larger scale requires you to do so at a point of collection. It also becomes very easy to find this sort of tampering by sending voters a way of confirming who they voted for.
    - wahern 6y ago
      One of the most egregious incidents of proven voting fraud in recent American history may have been by Leslie McCrae, a hired political operative: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-... He exploited the absentee (mail-in) ballot system. OTOH, he was caught precisely because to exploit the system he had to directly or indirectly expose himself to many people in the county--the people whose absentee ballots he was fraudulently collecting. Eventually someone put 2+2 together and the scheme was discovered. OTOOH, apparently he had been doing it for many years before he got caught. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless
      - fzeroracer 6y ago
        A more traditional voting system would have the same problem. He'd instead just put himself at a polling location and do the same trick there. The fact that he had to pay people to collect individual absentee ballots means this sorta fraud is very hard to scale, easy to beat with some basic education and easily identifiable. Of course a lot of this goes out the window if you're doing it to help a party and that party has zero integrity but at least if one voting individual brings up an issue it can cause a ripple effect. Part of the problem is also that we don't seem to take absentee ballots as serious as we do when we have full vote by mail.
- imustbeevil 6y ago
  No one gets that day off, and voting closes before the line outside is gone. It is disturbing how much voter disenfranchisement is allowed in this system.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Every workplace I've been at allowed you to leave briefly to go cast a vote. Sounds like you worked for some really disenfranchising companies.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      "briefly" and hours long waits for voting don't really mesh up... https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Long_Voting_Lines_Explained.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/L... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-georgia-primary-election-voting-wait https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-geor...
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Ask the cleaning staff, security, or any blue collar workers at your company if they are allowed to leave to vote. You might not be the target for disenfranchisement.
    - cortesoft 6y ago
      A majority of people don't have the luxury of choosing their employer.
      - Fjolsvith 6y ago
        Lincoln abolished slavery years ago.
  - excalibur 6y ago
    Personally I make it a habit to vote first thing in the morning, before going to work. Lines are negligible, and I've never had an employer complain about me showing up a few minutes late wearing an "I voted" sticker. But YMMV.
- mjevans 6y ago
  That, and have an UNOFFICIAL digital count as well, the one that's done quickly for the news and everyone making planning, with the official, double-counting verified recount reaching the same numbers as the electronic and previous hand count (within a very small % for human error). If there's a disagreement the human counts are repeated until within 0.001% and then they're official.
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    Except we are lazy and will come to rely on the digital system, then we will never care to recount unless there's a lot of pressure, and even then it might take so long that we will probably not wait. Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late.
    - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
      do randomly-selected sampling of paper buckets. e.g. you transmit your digital results, on a per-machine level, at t+1 minute to the central precinct. at t+5 minutes the central precinct sends back a random request to have X% of the machines audited by hand. If there is a significant abnormality, we move to a larger recount and withhold electronic results. If things match up, we announce the full electronic results around t+1 hour. Works for me?
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      >Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late. The majority of media "recounts" after the fact showed that Bush did win Florida in 2000.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  How does that work in the middle of a pandemic, where people shouldn't gather at a location like that? How does it handle people who can't leave their home? Or people who are away on the voting day?
  - andreareina 6y ago
    Carefully. Singapore just went through a general election, ~2.5M votes cast at 1,100 polling stations. Citizens were assigned a polling station and a 2-hour window to go vote. Masks required, distancing enforced, sanitizer and disposable gloves provided. (Not a citizen so I can't comment on how it actually all went down) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect... https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singapore-polling-stations-added-safety-12918076 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singap...
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  I'm a pretty technical guy. Given enough time I'm confident that regardless of what technology stack/language you wrote the voting system in I could have reasonable confidence it was error-free enough and probably not deliberately backdoored. Do I have that kind of time? No. Am I going to give more than a cursory glance at open source voting software? No. Am I going to catch 100% of accidental bugs? No way! Even if I do, am I going to catch 100% of deliberate and obfuscated bugs? Hell no. Even for me, a very technical person, purely electronic voting is fatally flawed in terms of trust.
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    Or even side channel stuff not related to the voting code itself, or bugs in whatever ui people look at aggregated results in.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    You don't know that the ballot box wasn't switched in transit, nor presumably that the postman in your area didn't switch all the voting papers. Any system that's anonymised seems to require trust.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      That's why you count locally and centrally. And you keep paper records for the counts at each level. And the ballot boxes. With observers from all parties being allowed to witness the counting. Again, paper ballots and mail ballots are solved problem in almost every western democracy. Multitudes of solutions out there. Just pick one. Not having anonymous votes is the first step into totalitarianism, if you ask me.
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        Don't you need a large group prepared to enact revenge on people for voting "wrongly" for non-anonymous voting, in general, to be a problem? That seems like it's not a problem until you've got a large group of fascists/totalitarians already?
- techntoke 6y ago
  > The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Can you tell me how current voting systems work, because it is a black box to me and I can't even verify that my vote counted for the person I picked. From what I can tell, the local election officials can tally the votes however they want.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    GP's critique is not a defense of the status quo. Please do not construe it as such. See https://freeandfair.us/# https://freeandfair.us/# for voting technology that still wisely involves much paper.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      So where is the explanation of how it works, because I could go to a Bitcoin website and learn more about how it works quickly than on that site.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not. But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly. I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once. Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority. Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat. After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history. As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/01/80/3616/index.html https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0... I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret. Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.
- dilap 6y ago
  is there some reason you can't get a random id associated w/ your ballot? then just list all results (by that id) on a website somewhere. you hang onto your id stub, and can tell if your vote was mistallied or left out. this can work w/ a digital or traditional analog system. (maybe need some more work to figure out how to ensure there aren't just extra "ghost" votes padding the results.)
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    That allows vote buying/coercion. You show me your receipt, I verify that you voted the way I wanted, and you get money. Or, if the receipt shows you didn't vote like I told you to, I punch you in the face.
    - dilap 6y ago
      No more so than vote by mail which we already have though (and is all Oregon does), right?
      - akvadrako 6y ago
        Which is why vote by mail is so controversial; it eliminates the secret ballot. This would really hurt Trump, since he seems to have an unusually high percentage of “shy” voters.
        hef19898 6y ago
        Mail voting is totally normal in Germany. And secret. Just because one country didn't solve it, doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
        Spivak 6y ago
        It’s secret but not private. I really don’t care if my name is attached to my vote in a way that the gov’t potentially knows how I vote but it seems a lot of people do.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And it doesn't always work. I assume you're German, so I'm inclined to remind you of Bremen's election 2015 where a group of students change votes to advance one party. When you have a very politicized election, you're going to need more than trust in procedures. I don't know that some software will help there, but "we're doing it on paper" doesn't solve the problem.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Ah, one case out of how many elections? It would also be nice to explain what happened and how. The AfD insisted, together with more right leaning media, on a recount. The happened and gave, initially, one additional seat. The SPD, who lost one seat, challenged that. It went to court, all 33k vote were recounted, roughly 500 corrections were necessary. 13 votes were lost. The AfD lost one seat (they failed to gain more than 5% of the vote). The election was deemed legit, not reelection was necessary. So yeah, we are doing it on paper pretty much solved that problem.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > Ah, one case out of how many elections? One prominent case that was _not_ caught by election officials and analytical measures. We have no way to tell how many others didn't get caught because nobody challenged them and our general systems failed. I'm not arguing that it's a catastrophic failure of the election system. The point is that paper ballots aren't protecting you from manipulation. Had they not challenged the election, the fraud would've gone unnoticed. And, importantly, it doesn't require coordination, there's no huge conspiracy required for this kind of fraud (and this specific instance also wasn't discovered because one of the perpetrators "spilled the beans"), so "large conspiracies are impossible to pull of" doesn't really apply.
      - hef19898 6y ago
        A quick Google search showed alleged voter fraud, always claimed by our right wing AfD. And every time these allegations were investigated, it turned out everything was in order. Last case 2019, Thüringen and Sachsen. So how many cases are there, in your opinion? EDIT: You do know, that there was no voter fraud involved? After an investigation and court rulings one year after the election?
joveian 6y ago
The Oregon vote by mail system lets you get a notification when your ballot is received by the counting center. I'm not sure exactly how it works but the counting might be observable from that point.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  I bet it also tells you when the mail ballot someone swapped for yours was received.
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    Oregonian here! My signature is on file with the state, and both an OCR system and a human look at my signature on the ballot to make sure it matches. Additionally, my ballot has a barcode on it and a security weave, so that a "counterfeit" ballot and envelope would have to have come from inside the ballot-production system; loss-prevention techniques can be used to track down any stolen envelopes. Finally, the attack would have to come from inside the postal system as well, because only post officers and voting officials touch my ballot. In my specific case, I can even drop my ballot directly at a ballot box and not have to post it. If you have any evidence of widespread voting fraud in Oregon, please show it. Otherwise, no, we're not interested in your attempts to denigrate a convenient and reliable voting system; it reeks of antidemocratic sentiment and I don't see why we should tolerate it.
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      Lots of incidents to prevent me from feeling trusting enough, irregardless of your accusing insult: https://www.ktuu.com/content/news/Stolen-Vote-by-Mail-ballot-packages-found-damaged-and-wet-in-the-snow-477165303.html https://www.ktuu.com/content/news/Stolen-Vote-by-Mail-ballot... https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/04/08/city-calls-for-usps-investigation-into-missing-ballots/ https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/04/08/city-calls-for-usps-in... "Even in Oregon, where VBM processes and integration with the postal service are well-tuned, over 1,000 ballots were lost in a January 2010 election." - http://iiisci.org/Journal/CV$/sci/pdfs/HPA468KX.pdf http://iiisci.org/Journal/CV$/sci/pdfs/HPA468KX.pdf
Mindless2112 6y ago
Ballots don't need to be secret, they just need to be anonymous. If you get rid of the secret constraint, it becomes fairly easy to produce a trustworthy voting system: 1. Immediately before identifying at the polling location, each voter takes a nondescript strip of paper out of a large container of numerous strips of paper, each with a unique identifier printed on it. (No one but the voter knows which identifier they took. No one can force a specific identifier.) 2. The voter fills in the identifier on a Scantron-style paper ballot. (Easily digitized, with a paper trail.) The ballot box scans the unique identifier and spits back out out any ballot with an identifier that wasn't generated for that polling location. (Ensuring no one can force a specific identifier.) 3. A list containing the entirety of every ballot is published publicly, including the unique identifier. (The voter can look up their ballot later. It becomes difficult to coerce a voter because they can say any one of the published ballots is theirs.) 4. A list of names of people who voted is published publicly. (Registered voters who didn't vote can check if a ballot was cast in their name. This is already done in many places.) You can also have mail-in ballots with user-generated statistically-unique identifiers (requiring only several rolls of a die, so anyone can do it at home), but you can't prevent voter coercion that way.
- amalcon 6y ago
  > The voter fills in the identifier on a Scantron-style paper ballot. The voter will mess this up a disturbing fraction of the time. It will be rejected. The voter will try again, possibly have it rejected again, give up, and go on Twitter to complain about the new system. Also, I can go to vote, surreptitiously take two strips of paper, use one, pocket the other. I coerce my spouse into using that one, and pocket the one they took. > It becomes difficult to coerce a voter because they can say any one of the published ballots is theirs. Maybe for simple ballots. A question including e.g. a ranking of ten candidates has about 3.6 million possible configurations -- more if undervotes or other ties are permitted. The voter can be coerced to fill this out in a specific way to self-identify, and then vote in a prescribed way on another question. edit: Of course, this vulnerability already exists: the voter could be given that same instruction. An observer of the ballot counting process can tell if the correct ballot was cast.
alex_young 6y ago
Why can't PKI be used? If I sign a vote with my private key, and my public key is used exactly once, and is registered with the electoral body, and a list is printed of signed votes by candidate, I can validate that my key was used to sign a vote for the person / issue I voted for, and we can also know that everyone only voted once. Key distribution could be based on the current registration system we have in place now, and you could use the key they send you to change your key pair so the state can't forge your vote. One could even automate this, even with an open source app we could all inspect. It seems conceptually simple.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Mindless2112 6y ago
  1. Whoever issued you the key pair can know which vote is yours. 2. Someone can coerce you to vote a specific way by forcing you to provide them with your private key.
  - alex_young 6y ago
    1. Can’t the state already know who voted for what right now? That seems like a nonissue. 2. Someone can also force you to give them your mail in ballot. How is this different?
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      > Can’t the state already know who voted for what right now? That seems like a nonissue. No. That is one of the most fundamental features of our system. In the secrecy of the voting booth, you can make your voice heard with no consequences to you.
      - techntoke 6y ago
        And they can flip the vote as soon as you leave the polling booth, or not even record it, and you'll never know. Just "trust the system"
jeffdavis 6y ago
How are mail-in ballots protected from fraud? I keep hearing that fraud is not a problem, but I'm wondering (a) how do we know there is little fraud; and (b) what mechanisms make it safe from fraud?
- edoceo 6y ago
  Maybe the aren't: https://fox8.com/news/mail-carrier-pleads-guilty-to-altering-absentee-ballot-requests-switching-party-affiliations/ https://fox8.com/news/mail-carrier-pleads-guilty-to-altering...
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    "Bored mailman convicted for altering 8 ballot request forms" suggests that they are secure. Even if he wasn't caught, there should have been time for the ballots to be replaced.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      I did say maybe -- I think vote-by-mail is great and all the example are -- but there this very small chance which we should be vigilant about. And eight disrupted votes is much better than thousands of disenfranchised voters. There is also this: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        >There is also this Those claims have been shown to be largely incorrect, with even the foundation retracting the article. An unreturned ballot does not mean fraud, the registered voter may have chosen to vote in person or not vote in that election. Several states send ballots to every registered voter, and that's how the number reached 28 million. https://www.propublica.org/article/a-conservative-legal-group-significantly-miscalculated-data-in-a-report-on-mail-in-voting https://www.propublica.org/article/a-conservative-legal-grou...
Shared404 6y ago
I would write a comment, but this sums it up. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- pbasista 6y ago
  I agree that designing an objectively reliable online voting system is very difficult. But at the same time I think that in principle it can be done. However, in my opinion the current unavailability of such a reliable system is not the largest issue with online voting. Instead, it is its potential for giving the people with power more ability to control and enforce the voting behavior of the people over which they have some kind of influence. For example, a boss can offer a bonus to employees who would verifiably (e.g. under supervision) cast an online vote according to the "company's recommendation". Or a landlord can say that the rent will be raised next month unless the tenant votes under the landlord's supervision and according to the landlord's preferences. Such practices probably exist today as well. But the difference is that in the physical voting system, even the people who are being pressured to vote in a certain way are in the end required to be alone and behind a privacy screen while casting their vote. So, even if they have been forced to promise to vote in a certain way, they eventually have the freedom to vote as they like without having to fear that their actual voting behavior will be revealed. That freedom originates from the requirement to cast a vote in private. Availability of online voting removes such a requirement.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    Then the system should be designed to let you avoid such demands: - you vote once under supervision and another time later in private. Only your last vote counts - you are given multiple private keys and only one of them is real. If you vote using any other one, the system behaves as if your vote was recorded, but actually doesn't count it
    - pbasista 6y ago
      Yes, that would help in theory. But in practice it would only change the way how the people inducing the pressure would verify that the votes have in fact been cast according to their preferences. For instance, if voting multiple times is allowed and only the last vote counts, they would require the people to vote during the last 10 minutes of the polling period and afterwards they would withhold their ID card with the signing capability from them until the polling is closed. If there are multiple private keys to choose from, they would require people to at first prove which one is usable for this particular election by checking it with the issuing authority. The owner must have been given this information in some verifiable form at some time, so the demand will simply extend to include that information as well.
blhack 6y ago
The inefficiency of in person paper voting is a feature. It means that large scale fraud is extremely difficult due to the labor required. This is a good thing. Hundreds of thousands of dispersed voting locations means that to pull off a “hack” you’d need to hack thousands or perhaps 10s of thousands of locations all with their own details. In a digital voting system, you’d need perhaps to find a flaw in 1 system. The centralized one. I don’t want digital voting. I want anonymous, and inefficient in person voting where the issues are small and localized.
- techntoke 6y ago
  They are still counted through a central authority and your vote can't even be tracked. You basically just have to "trust the system" today even though there has been a lot of strange things happening for decades with votes.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    They can certainly be counted locally first, requiring a wide conspiracy of all parties to make a big difference.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      Not really when the parties choose the observers.
      - setr 6y ago
        The larger the conspiracy, the harder it is to keep secret. Ballot counters across multiple states is a pretty wide net, and really only one person needs to defect for the whole thing to unravel
        techntoke 6y ago
        It did unravel in Georgia and nothing was done. We still haven't got the full report of the VR Systems hack as well that spanned 8 states.
noja 6y ago
Aren't they already? Or are we having this efficiency debate again?
Animats 6y ago
That's awfully complicated, compared to systems with backup printers.
s_T_e_v_o 6y ago
German physicist Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be predicted from initial conditions, and vice versa. (Edited Definition from wiki) I want to posit that secrecy and security have the same relationship as the uncertainty principle ascribes to electrons.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Like with a lot of political things in the US I strongly believe that none of the decisions makers really want to have a system that works impartially. They just want to have an advantage for their side because it’s about “winning” at any cost no matter how destructive it is for the country. Otherwise I can’t explain the problems this supposedly developed country has. I am from Germany and have never heard anybody having doubts about the integrity of the system there. If the US wanted to have a system that works they could look around and see how it get countries do to. But it seems they don’t want to have such a system.
spenrose 6y ago
"VotingWorks is a non-partisan non-profit building a secure, affordable, and simple voting system. Our vote-by-mail solution lets you scale vote-by-mail quickly and affordably. Our risk-limiting audit software ensures votes cast on any paper-based system are correctly tabulated. Our voting machine creates paper ballots that voters can directly verify. Our source code is available on GitHub. You can help by making a tax-deductible donation, joining our team, or reaching out." https://voting.works https://voting.works
neverartful 6y ago
As others have pointed out, digital voting systems can be hacked, exploited, or otherwise derailed from centralized location. They also can contain subtle software errors. Paper ballots can have problems like we saw in Florida (hanging chads). When I was growing up, we had big mechanical voting machines. I have no idea how common (or uncommon) these were in different parts of the country. The machine opens up and has a set of retractable curtains. You walk through the open curtains and then pull a big lever that closes the curtains behind you. Then you vote by flipping mechanical switches for the candidate (or yes/no for policy ballot). When you're done voting, you reverse the big lever. This action increments the machine counters based on your votes and opens the curtains for you to exit. Once the polls close, the polling folks simply sum up the counters across all the machines in the polling station. The downside is that the machines are big and heavy to store and move. I'm sure they're not cheap for the initial purchase. However, they're efficient for tallying yet very difficult to hack. In my opinion, they're the best overall voting mechanism.
- specialist 6y ago
  Agree with all. "digital voting systems can be hacked, exploited, or otherwise..." Paper mediated systems have visible failure modes. Missing ballots. Spoiled ballots. Etc. Black box voting systems fail silently.
surewhynat 6y ago
People who say that computers aren't secure are incompetent or selling you a lie. There are many approaches that are unbreakable, and frankly it would give the people more power to have a pre installed app on everyone's phone that gives you the ability to vote. Think about it. Everyone has 1 seat in the election. The only thing you have to record is whether they voted or not. You don't get a second vote. You can distribute secret keys via a physical government location that hands out private keys after proof of identification. The app stores that secret via QR code, bluetooth or some other simple mechanism, and it should be password protected when stored on the device. You're telling me we have patriot missiles, satellites, microtrading on wall street, but we can't get together and think of a secure system? The american system is a joke. The government has had the ability to change this, but, they like keeping it the way it is because majority of the people under the current system are silenced.
deleted 6y ago
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surewhynat 6y ago
test
joann56 6y ago
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51 points by ryandvm 6y ago

> Since 2018, as part of a program called Defending Democracy, Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to solve the problem of trust in secret-ballot elections. No. Stop. Listen, it's possible to write secure voting software that a domain-expert software engineer understands, and a general software engineer can understand. That's not the problem. But for voting, that is not enough. The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And the most important thing to realize is that this process is infinitely parallellizable, so getting election-night preliminary results isn't hard, even though every single vote is manually counted. You just need enough people to count the votes.

cameldrv 6y ago
This, plus the inherent blessing and curse of computers -- if you can do something one time, it's usually very easy to do it 1000 times. If you want to tamper with one precinct or one county, you have to write some exploit. If you want to tamper with all of them, still, one exploit. However, if you want to tamper with a whole state of paper ballots, you have to stuff a thousand ballot boxes. The chances of getting caught are far higher.
- bl0b 6y ago
  I'm under the impression that computerized voting systems are in no way standardized nation-wide (USA, at least). But your point still stands that it seems easier to hack a computerized voting system to commit large-scale fraud than to fraud with paper ballots.
  - jablongo 6y ago
    Yes this is true: federalism being applied to control of elections is probably good for election security. But there’s only a small handful of vendors and if an attacker was able to crack one of them they might be able scale the attack to many deployments of that vendor’s systems.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Not in a two party system. You really still only need to hack just one model of voting machines to steal the election, since the margins are so small.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The same goes for the paper ballots. You don't need to fix the vote everywhere.
        hef19898 6y ago
        Which incredibly difficult to do on scale, unless you rig the whole system. In which case voting is just a fig leave anyway.
        Ma8ee 6y ago
        With paper ballots you must make sure that most people at the voting stations are part of the conspiracy, which is tricky because all major parties will have representatives on each station. It’s possible you will get away with it in a few small places, but even that is hard.
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  It's the same reason why voting via mail is very hard to exploit. Voting functions as a secure handshake (register to vote via mail, government sends confirmation, government sends ballot, you send ballot back, government sends confirmation of vote) and requires you to sign it with some identifying information like a signature. There might be some individuals trying to cheat the system at the family level, but trying to cheat it at a larger scale requires you to do so at a point of collection. It also becomes very easy to find this sort of tampering by sending voters a way of confirming who they voted for.
  - wahern 6y ago
    One of the most egregious incidents of proven voting fraud in recent American history may have been by Leslie McCrae, a hired political operative: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-... He exploited the absentee (mail-in) ballot system. OTOH, he was caught precisely because to exploit the system he had to directly or indirectly expose himself to many people in the county--the people whose absentee ballots he was fraudulently collecting. Eventually someone put 2+2 together and the scheme was discovered. OTOOH, apparently he had been doing it for many years before he got caught. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless
    - fzeroracer 6y ago
      A more traditional voting system would have the same problem. He'd instead just put himself at a polling location and do the same trick there. The fact that he had to pay people to collect individual absentee ballots means this sorta fraud is very hard to scale, easy to beat with some basic education and easily identifiable. Of course a lot of this goes out the window if you're doing it to help a party and that party has zero integrity but at least if one voting individual brings up an issue it can cause a ripple effect. Part of the problem is also that we don't seem to take absentee ballots as serious as we do when we have full vote by mail.
imustbeevil 6y ago
No one gets that day off, and voting closes before the line outside is gone. It is disturbing how much voter disenfranchisement is allowed in this system.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Every workplace I've been at allowed you to leave briefly to go cast a vote. Sounds like you worked for some really disenfranchising companies.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    "briefly" and hours long waits for voting don't really mesh up... https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Long_Voting_Lines_Explained.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/L... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-georgia-primary-election-voting-wait https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-geor...
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Ask the cleaning staff, security, or any blue collar workers at your company if they are allowed to leave to vote. You might not be the target for disenfranchisement.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    A majority of people don't have the luxury of choosing their employer.
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      Lincoln abolished slavery years ago.
- excalibur 6y ago
  Personally I make it a habit to vote first thing in the morning, before going to work. Lines are negligible, and I've never had an employer complain about me showing up a few minutes late wearing an "I voted" sticker. But YMMV.
mjevans 6y ago
That, and have an UNOFFICIAL digital count as well, the one that's done quickly for the news and everyone making planning, with the official, double-counting verified recount reaching the same numbers as the electronic and previous hand count (within a very small % for human error). If there's a disagreement the human counts are repeated until within 0.001% and then they're official.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  Except we are lazy and will come to rely on the digital system, then we will never care to recount unless there's a lot of pressure, and even then it might take so long that we will probably not wait. Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late.
  - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
    do randomly-selected sampling of paper buckets. e.g. you transmit your digital results, on a per-machine level, at t+1 minute to the central precinct. at t+5 minutes the central precinct sends back a random request to have X% of the machines audited by hand. If there is a significant abnormality, we move to a larger recount and withhold electronic results. If things match up, we announce the full electronic results around t+1 hour. Works for me?
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late. The majority of media "recounts" after the fact showed that Bush did win Florida in 2000.
cortesoft 6y ago
How does that work in the middle of a pandemic, where people shouldn't gather at a location like that? How does it handle people who can't leave their home? Or people who are away on the voting day?
- andreareina 6y ago
  Carefully. Singapore just went through a general election, ~2.5M votes cast at 1,100 polling stations. Citizens were assigned a polling station and a 2-hour window to go vote. Masks required, distancing enforced, sanitizer and disposable gloves provided. (Not a citizen so I can't comment on how it actually all went down) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect... https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singapore-polling-stations-added-safety-12918076 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singap...
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
I'm a pretty technical guy. Given enough time I'm confident that regardless of what technology stack/language you wrote the voting system in I could have reasonable confidence it was error-free enough and probably not deliberately backdoored. Do I have that kind of time? No. Am I going to give more than a cursory glance at open source voting software? No. Am I going to catch 100% of accidental bugs? No way! Even if I do, am I going to catch 100% of deliberate and obfuscated bugs? Hell no. Even for me, a very technical person, purely electronic voting is fatally flawed in terms of trust.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Or even side channel stuff not related to the voting code itself, or bugs in whatever ui people look at aggregated results in.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  You don't know that the ballot box wasn't switched in transit, nor presumably that the postman in your area didn't switch all the voting papers. Any system that's anonymised seems to require trust.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    That's why you count locally and centrally. And you keep paper records for the counts at each level. And the ballot boxes. With observers from all parties being allowed to witness the counting. Again, paper ballots and mail ballots are solved problem in almost every western democracy. Multitudes of solutions out there. Just pick one. Not having anonymous votes is the first step into totalitarianism, if you ask me.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Don't you need a large group prepared to enact revenge on people for voting "wrongly" for non-anonymous voting, in general, to be a problem? That seems like it's not a problem until you've got a large group of fascists/totalitarians already?
techntoke 6y ago
> The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Can you tell me how current voting systems work, because it is a black box to me and I can't even verify that my vote counted for the person I picked. From what I can tell, the local election officials can tally the votes however they want.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  GP's critique is not a defense of the status quo. Please do not construe it as such. See https://freeandfair.us/# https://freeandfair.us/# for voting technology that still wisely involves much paper.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    So where is the explanation of how it works, because I could go to a Bitcoin website and learn more about how it works quickly than on that site.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not. But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly. I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once. Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority. Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat. After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history. As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/01/80/3616/index.html https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0... I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret. Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.
dilap 6y ago
is there some reason you can't get a random id associated w/ your ballot? then just list all results (by that id) on a website somewhere. you hang onto your id stub, and can tell if your vote was mistallied or left out. this can work w/ a digital or traditional analog system. (maybe need some more work to figure out how to ensure there aren't just extra "ghost" votes padding the results.)
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  That allows vote buying/coercion. You show me your receipt, I verify that you voted the way I wanted, and you get money. Or, if the receipt shows you didn't vote like I told you to, I punch you in the face.
  - dilap 6y ago
    No more so than vote by mail which we already have though (and is all Oregon does), right?
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      Which is why vote by mail is so controversial; it eliminates the secret ballot. This would really hurt Trump, since he seems to have an unusually high percentage of “shy” voters.
      - hef19898 6y ago
        Mail voting is totally normal in Germany. And secret. Just because one country didn't solve it, doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
        Spivak 6y ago
        It’s secret but not private. I really don’t care if my name is attached to my vote in a way that the gov’t potentially knows how I vote but it seems a lot of people do.
luckylion 6y ago
> Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And it doesn't always work. I assume you're German, so I'm inclined to remind you of Bremen's election 2015 where a group of students change votes to advance one party. When you have a very politicized election, you're going to need more than trust in procedures. I don't know that some software will help there, but "we're doing it on paper" doesn't solve the problem.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Ah, one case out of how many elections? It would also be nice to explain what happened and how. The AfD insisted, together with more right leaning media, on a recount. The happened and gave, initially, one additional seat. The SPD, who lost one seat, challenged that. It went to court, all 33k vote were recounted, roughly 500 corrections were necessary. 13 votes were lost. The AfD lost one seat (they failed to gain more than 5% of the vote). The election was deemed legit, not reelection was necessary. So yeah, we are doing it on paper pretty much solved that problem.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Ah, one case out of how many elections? One prominent case that was _not_ caught by election officials and analytical measures. We have no way to tell how many others didn't get caught because nobody challenged them and our general systems failed. I'm not arguing that it's a catastrophic failure of the election system. The point is that paper ballots aren't protecting you from manipulation. Had they not challenged the election, the fraud would've gone unnoticed. And, importantly, it doesn't require coordination, there's no huge conspiracy required for this kind of fraud (and this specific instance also wasn't discovered because one of the perpetrators "spilled the beans"), so "large conspiracies are impossible to pull of" doesn't really apply.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      A quick Google search showed alleged voter fraud, always claimed by our right wing AfD. And every time these allegations were investigated, it turned out everything was in order. Last case 2019, Thüringen and Sachsen. So how many cases are there, in your opinion? EDIT: You do know, that there was no voter fraud involved? After an investigation and court rulings one year after the election?

joveian 6y ago

The Oregon vote by mail system lets you get a notification when your ballot is received by the counting center. I'm not sure exactly how it works but the counting might be observable from that point.

Fjolsvith 6y ago
I bet it also tells you when the mail ballot someone swapped for yours was received.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  Oregonian here! My signature is on file with the state, and both an OCR system and a human look at my signature on the ballot to make sure it matches. Additionally, my ballot has a barcode on it and a security weave, so that a "counterfeit" ballot and envelope would have to have come from inside the ballot-production system; loss-prevention techniques can be used to track down any stolen envelopes. Finally, the attack would have to come from inside the postal system as well, because only post officers and voting officials touch my ballot. In my specific case, I can even drop my ballot directly at a ballot box and not have to post it. If you have any evidence of widespread voting fraud in Oregon, please show it. Otherwise, no, we're not interested in your attempts to denigrate a convenient and reliable voting system; it reeks of antidemocratic sentiment and I don't see why we should tolerate it.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Lots of incidents to prevent me from feeling trusting enough, irregardless of your accusing insult: https://www.ktuu.com/content/news/Stolen-Vote-by-Mail-ballot-packages-found-damaged-and-wet-in-the-snow-477165303.html https://www.ktuu.com/content/news/Stolen-Vote-by-Mail-ballot... https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/04/08/city-calls-for-usps-investigation-into-missing-ballots/ https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/04/08/city-calls-for-usps-in... "Even in Oregon, where VBM processes and integration with the postal service are well-tuned, over 1,000 ballots were lost in a January 2010 election." - http://iiisci.org/Journal/CV$/sci/pdfs/HPA468KX.pdf http://iiisci.org/Journal/CV$/sci/pdfs/HPA468KX.pdf

Mindless2112 6y ago

Ballots don't need to be secret, they just need to be anonymous. If you get rid of the secret constraint, it becomes fairly easy to produce a trustworthy voting system: 1. Immediately before identifying at the polling location, each voter takes a nondescript strip of paper out of a large container of numerous strips of paper, each with a unique identifier printed on it. (No one but the voter knows which identifier they took. No one can force a specific identifier.) 2. The voter fills in the identifier on a Scantron-style paper ballot. (Easily digitized, with a paper trail.) The ballot box scans the unique identifier and spits back out out any ballot with an identifier that wasn't generated for that polling location. (Ensuring no one can force a specific identifier.) 3. A list containing the entirety of every ballot is published publicly, including the unique identifier. (The voter can look up their ballot later. It becomes difficult to coerce a voter because they can say any one of the published ballots is theirs.) 4. A list of names of people who voted is published publicly. (Registered voters who didn't vote can check if a ballot was cast in their name. This is already done in many places.) You can also have mail-in ballots with user-generated statistically-unique identifiers (requiring only several rolls of a die, so anyone can do it at home), but you can't prevent voter coercion that way.

amalcon 6y ago
> The voter fills in the identifier on a Scantron-style paper ballot. The voter will mess this up a disturbing fraction of the time. It will be rejected. The voter will try again, possibly have it rejected again, give up, and go on Twitter to complain about the new system. Also, I can go to vote, surreptitiously take two strips of paper, use one, pocket the other. I coerce my spouse into using that one, and pocket the one they took. > It becomes difficult to coerce a voter because they can say any one of the published ballots is theirs. Maybe for simple ballots. A question including e.g. a ranking of ten candidates has about 3.6 million possible configurations -- more if undervotes or other ties are permitted. The voter can be coerced to fill this out in a specific way to self-identify, and then vote in a prescribed way on another question. edit: Of course, this vulnerability already exists: the voter could be given that same instruction. An observer of the ballot counting process can tell if the correct ballot was cast.

alex_young 6y ago

Why can't PKI be used? If I sign a vote with my private key, and my public key is used exactly once, and is registered with the electoral body, and a list is printed of signed votes by candidate, I can validate that my key was used to sign a vote for the person / issue I voted for, and we can also know that everyone only voted once. Key distribution could be based on the current registration system we have in place now, and you could use the key they send you to change your key pair so the state can't forge your vote. One could even automate this, even with an open source app we could all inspect. It seems conceptually simple.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Mindless2112 6y ago
1. Whoever issued you the key pair can know which vote is yours. 2. Someone can coerce you to vote a specific way by forcing you to provide them with your private key.
- alex_young 6y ago
  1. Can’t the state already know who voted for what right now? That seems like a nonissue. 2. Someone can also force you to give them your mail in ballot. How is this different?
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > Can’t the state already know who voted for what right now? That seems like a nonissue. No. That is one of the most fundamental features of our system. In the secrecy of the voting booth, you can make your voice heard with no consequences to you.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      And they can flip the vote as soon as you leave the polling booth, or not even record it, and you'll never know. Just "trust the system"

jeffdavis 6y ago

How are mail-in ballots protected from fraud? I keep hearing that fraud is not a problem, but I'm wondering (a) how do we know there is little fraud; and (b) what mechanisms make it safe from fraud?

edoceo 6y ago
Maybe the aren't: https://fox8.com/news/mail-carrier-pleads-guilty-to-altering-absentee-ballot-requests-switching-party-affiliations/ https://fox8.com/news/mail-carrier-pleads-guilty-to-altering...
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  "Bored mailman convicted for altering 8 ballot request forms" suggests that they are secure. Even if he wasn't caught, there should have been time for the ballots to be replaced.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    I did say maybe -- I think vote-by-mail is great and all the example are -- but there this very small chance which we should be vigilant about. And eight disrupted votes is much better than thousands of disenfranchised voters. There is also this: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      >There is also this Those claims have been shown to be largely incorrect, with even the foundation retracting the article. An unreturned ballot does not mean fraud, the registered voter may have chosen to vote in person or not vote in that election. Several states send ballots to every registered voter, and that's how the number reached 28 million. https://www.propublica.org/article/a-conservative-legal-group-significantly-miscalculated-data-in-a-report-on-mail-in-voting https://www.propublica.org/article/a-conservative-legal-grou...

Shared404 6y ago

I would write a comment, but this sums it up. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

pbasista 6y ago
I agree that designing an objectively reliable online voting system is very difficult. But at the same time I think that in principle it can be done. However, in my opinion the current unavailability of such a reliable system is not the largest issue with online voting. Instead, it is its potential for giving the people with power more ability to control and enforce the voting behavior of the people over which they have some kind of influence. For example, a boss can offer a bonus to employees who would verifiably (e.g. under supervision) cast an online vote according to the "company's recommendation". Or a landlord can say that the rent will be raised next month unless the tenant votes under the landlord's supervision and according to the landlord's preferences. Such practices probably exist today as well. But the difference is that in the physical voting system, even the people who are being pressured to vote in a certain way are in the end required to be alone and behind a privacy screen while casting their vote. So, even if they have been forced to promise to vote in a certain way, they eventually have the freedom to vote as they like without having to fear that their actual voting behavior will be revealed. That freedom originates from the requirement to cast a vote in private. Availability of online voting removes such a requirement.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  Then the system should be designed to let you avoid such demands: - you vote once under supervision and another time later in private. Only your last vote counts - you are given multiple private keys and only one of them is real. If you vote using any other one, the system behaves as if your vote was recorded, but actually doesn't count it
  - pbasista 6y ago
    Yes, that would help in theory. But in practice it would only change the way how the people inducing the pressure would verify that the votes have in fact been cast according to their preferences. For instance, if voting multiple times is allowed and only the last vote counts, they would require the people to vote during the last 10 minutes of the polling period and afterwards they would withhold their ID card with the signing capability from them until the polling is closed. If there are multiple private keys to choose from, they would require people to at first prove which one is usable for this particular election by checking it with the issuing authority. The owner must have been given this information in some verifiable form at some time, so the demand will simply extend to include that information as well.

blhack 6y ago

The inefficiency of in person paper voting is a feature. It means that large scale fraud is extremely difficult due to the labor required. This is a good thing. Hundreds of thousands of dispersed voting locations means that to pull off a “hack” you’d need to hack thousands or perhaps 10s of thousands of locations all with their own details. In a digital voting system, you’d need perhaps to find a flaw in 1 system. The centralized one. I don’t want digital voting. I want anonymous, and inefficient in person voting where the issues are small and localized.

techntoke 6y ago
They are still counted through a central authority and your vote can't even be tracked. You basically just have to "trust the system" today even though there has been a lot of strange things happening for decades with votes.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  They can certainly be counted locally first, requiring a wide conspiracy of all parties to make a big difference.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    Not really when the parties choose the observers.
    - setr 6y ago
      The larger the conspiracy, the harder it is to keep secret. Ballot counters across multiple states is a pretty wide net, and really only one person needs to defect for the whole thing to unravel
      - techntoke 6y ago
        It did unravel in Georgia and nothing was done. We still haven't got the full report of the VR Systems hack as well that spanned 8 states.

noja 6y ago

Aren't they already? Or are we having this efficiency debate again?

Animats 6y ago

That's awfully complicated, compared to systems with backup printers.

s_T_e_v_o 6y ago

German physicist Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be predicted from initial conditions, and vice versa. (Edited Definition from wiki) I want to posit that secrecy and security have the same relationship as the uncertainty principle ascribes to electrons.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

Like with a lot of political things in the US I strongly believe that none of the decisions makers really want to have a system that works impartially. They just want to have an advantage for their side because it’s about “winning” at any cost no matter how destructive it is for the country. Otherwise I can’t explain the problems this supposedly developed country has. I am from Germany and have never heard anybody having doubts about the integrity of the system there. If the US wanted to have a system that works they could look around and see how it get countries do to. But it seems they don’t want to have such a system.

spenrose 6y ago

"VotingWorks is a non-partisan non-profit building a secure, affordable, and simple voting system. Our vote-by-mail solution lets you scale vote-by-mail quickly and affordably. Our risk-limiting audit software ensures votes cast on any paper-based system are correctly tabulated. Our voting machine creates paper ballots that voters can directly verify. Our source code is available on GitHub. You can help by making a tax-deductible donation, joining our team, or reaching out." https://voting.works https://voting.works

neverartful 6y ago

As others have pointed out, digital voting systems can be hacked, exploited, or otherwise derailed from centralized location. They also can contain subtle software errors. Paper ballots can have problems like we saw in Florida (hanging chads). When I was growing up, we had big mechanical voting machines. I have no idea how common (or uncommon) these were in different parts of the country. The machine opens up and has a set of retractable curtains. You walk through the open curtains and then pull a big lever that closes the curtains behind you. Then you vote by flipping mechanical switches for the candidate (or yes/no for policy ballot). When you're done voting, you reverse the big lever. This action increments the machine counters based on your votes and opens the curtains for you to exit. Once the polls close, the polling folks simply sum up the counters across all the machines in the polling station. The downside is that the machines are big and heavy to store and move. I'm sure they're not cheap for the initial purchase. However, they're efficient for tallying yet very difficult to hack. In my opinion, they're the best overall voting mechanism.

specialist 6y ago
Agree with all. "digital voting systems can be hacked, exploited, or otherwise..." Paper mediated systems have visible failure modes. Missing ballots. Spoiled ballots. Etc. Black box voting systems fail silently.

surewhynat 6y ago

People who say that computers aren't secure are incompetent or selling you a lie. There are many approaches that are unbreakable, and frankly it would give the people more power to have a pre installed app on everyone's phone that gives you the ability to vote. Think about it. Everyone has 1 seat in the election. The only thing you have to record is whether they voted or not. You don't get a second vote. You can distribute secret keys via a physical government location that hands out private keys after proof of identification. The app stores that secret via QR code, bluetooth or some other simple mechanism, and it should be password protected when stored on the device. You're telling me we have patriot missiles, satellites, microtrading on wall street, but we can't get together and think of a secure system? The american system is a joke. The government has had the ability to change this, but, they like keeping it the way it is because majority of the people under the current system are silenced.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

surewhynat 6y ago

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joann56 6y ago

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