9 ms·

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 thin

by 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.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    The more you do this, the less anonymous the ballots are.
    - jackvalentine 6y ago
      I don't think to any appreciable extent unless you go nuts restricting people to a particular polling place and limit their size severely. In the most recent federal byelection in Australia, 114,000 voters were able to cast their votes at any one of the 86 different polling places, where the votes were counted locally. The smallest polling place had 110 people vote at it, I'm not even sure you could reasonably deanonymise the votes in that. How would you do it? https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-25820-117.htm https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-25820-117.htm
      - notahacker 6y ago
        tbf with an electorate of just 110 people casually acquainted with each other, it might not be too difficult for some to guess who cast the Fringe Party vote. But yes, you're not likely to deanonymise them all.
        pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        You can guess, but you can guess before you know how they voted - you can narrow your error bars, but it seems very unlikely you can out someone that you couldn't already out. Say you see all the votes, one is for an extreme party, there's going to be plenty of people whose politics you don't know in depth - people (IME) will either keep secret their allegiances or be very vocal. Those who are vocal won't care that you "know", those who're secretive ... did it help?
        notahacker 6y ago
        Knowing that somebody in your village definitely voted for the Fringe Party is a piece of information you wouldn't otherwise have. There's a big difference between having your suspicion about someone's voting intent supported by data and not having your suspicion supported by data. This matters if said community is liable to alienate people based on their assumed view; the fact it isn't 100% accurate doesn't make things better...
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  That is not really a problem. The count from all voting stations are public, and they are checked by the people that counted the votes. And it is of course trivial to check that the totals are correct.
kungato 6y ago
The trick is that by using the Dhondt method and gerrymandering you have to manipulate way less votes than one would actually expect. In my country of 5 million people last week 11 votes decided whether someone went into parliament and there were 11 excesss votes at one station which were then deleted and guess whose those were
- jakehop 6y ago
  While an interesting problem to try and solve (in theory, not in practice!), one has to be very much aware of where those 11 votes had to be injected for the “hack” to work. You basically need to have a somewhat precise picture of the proportionality before you could do it I a non-obvious way (= small margin victory). While polling gives you something close to that, I don’t believe that it’s precise enough.
- jzwinck 6y ago
  If the difference is only 11 people, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to say the result doesn't matter, both candidates got the same number of votes within a very small margin of error (which will never be zero). Either you decide the two candidates were both good and there was no clear decision to elect one over the other, or you set up a voting system where such close races result in some totally different outcome, such as both people enter parliament for a shorter time, having a tie breaker of some kind, etc.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    This assumes that voting in the US is a form of collective decision making, that’s the effect sure, but because politics are so tribal it’s actually a game of taking territory. Within a party equal votes implies what you suggest but that doesn’t hold in the actual elections.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    What if the marginal/toss-up victories like this always end up going to one party? Is that still fair?
forty 6y ago
This 100%. I'm French, and I always volunteer to count votes after the ballots. Honestly the system is really robust, it's probably very very hard to cheat without being noticed, everything is done twice, with everyone being able to watch the whole process. No way we can have something even close in term of confidence with something digital. If we really want to use new technologies to make things even safer, we could film and broadcast everything so anyone could check that there was no cheating (and I assume some people would record it so we could check also after the fact)
- williamdclt 6y ago
  You could even still have a counting machine: stick the papers in it, it scans the vote, it spits out the paper and humans do their own manual count. Compare the numbers of the unbiased but hackable machine and the biased but unhackable humans. Not sure it's a step in the good direction, too easy to remove the humans some time later, but if we want to use technology to make counting more secure there's definitely easy ways
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    This is how Massachusetts has been doing it for years. Fast local counts, complete paper trail.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Yup. The Australian Ballot is private voting, public counting. The gold standard implementation is ballots cast at poll sites, tabulated on site, the moment the polls close, all results immediately shared publicly. For better or for worse, many postal balloting implementations are as bad as touchscreen voting, election integrity wise. Much care is needed to preserve voter privacy and ensure physical chain of custody. For example, many jurisdictions process ballots daily, image both signatures and votes, using image processing to recognize votes, and adjudicate voter intent (manually override errors) in the database. One side effect of daily processing is the running daily total. What you and I would call tabulation, but admins claim only the final report is the tabulation. Etc.
badrabbit 6y ago
At the same time you have parts of a country that actively suppress votes. For example, in many deep south counties that are turning blue, the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. Organized fraud is hard, but if enough people agree that fraud is neccessary, fraud will happen at a large scale. I am not saying digital election is better, but I would like to see a formal securirty/risk assesment of both options against known voter hostile counties. With mail-in ballots for example, what if small groups of mail persons(1-5) manipulate absentee ballott mail when sent to and collected from voters, how does that risk compare to say insecure network connections and poor authentication with digital voting systems. A formal threar model for both approaches and risk assesment that is. Both methods are not secure, as a techie, the vulnerabilities of digital systems is glaring and obvious but they mean little in terms of risk wihout applying a threat model. You said paper ballots make mass fraud hard, that is because of the threat model you had in mind. The chaos of the 2000 presidential election shows a slightly diffrent threat model where organizing large number of people was not needed. Bad guys will always find a way, what I like to do is to take an empirical approach at making thier mischief harder to pull off.
- hef19898 6y ago
  People joked after the Florida disaster, when George W. Bush was elected, that maybe the US needs international election observers. You know, like developing countries. Not sure if that's still a joke now.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. This is the problem. Part of the voting system is dictating who has the right to manipulate the votes at every point in the process, and ideally, after the ballots are sealed, that group should consist of everyone who has an interest; membership in that group should be self-defined. Practically, most people will be happy with a representative rather than showing up personally, but if everybody wants to watch, everyone should be allowed to. If you abandon this principle, no technical solution is possible. It's like trying to make a computer perfectly safe against physical compromise; the only way to do it is to destroy the computer. Honestly, the main problem with digital voting for me is only obliquely related to that objection - there are not enough qualified code auditors for everyone to have an auditor they trust, and massive, system-breaking changes can happen with the change of a semicolon. So the provenance of an individual vote from the voter to the commingled pile of votes is impractical to depend on. It may be possible to get it to the standard of a paper system, but it would be extremely expensive.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Unless the vote is verifiable?
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  But then it can be proven, and therefore directly purchased.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    Not necessarily. For example, see Three Ballot, a paper voting system designed by Ron Rivest. https://www.quantamagazine.org/rsa-cryptographer-ronald-rivest-seeks-secure-elections-20200312/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/rsa-cryptographer-ronald-rive...
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    If it's only personally verifiable with 'something you know' (by being present, see my other post here) would that suffice? You'd have vote verification (that you voted, not how), the system would know your list but not who you chose, but you could check the list was recorded - you could still lie about who you voted for, just as you can now. (This is not a working, nor complete idea, I'm scanning around for inputs. Thanks.)
rkhassen9 6y ago
This. Agreed 100% Really, really smart people, even in technology, who should know often cannot see this. It seems like one of those magic eye pictures https://www.magiceye.com/stwkdisp.htm https://www.magiceye.com/stwkdisp.htm If you don’t see it, you don’t see it. Also - not sure about the implications of Corona virus and social distancing. The in person requirement becomes a potential to die or potentially spread a deadly disease.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  Just voted yesterday: distancing rules in place, the gentleman runnung it didn't touch my driver's license, gloves available, masks required, and one older gentleman wore a face shield. Fairly safe and quick, though I imagine it might be more difficult and crowded on election day.
newacct583 6y ago
> 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. No, all you need to do is play with the distribution of those hundreds of thousands of locations such that "your" voters have an easier time getting to them, on average, than your opponents' voters. Your threat model isn't quite right. A deliberate third party attempt to fabricate votes isn't the only attack vector. You need a system that is robust against untrustworthy insiders too.
gurleen_s 6y ago
The other useful feature is that it keeps the election day from becoming a horse race/fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.
mabbo 6y ago
But this same lack of efficiency allows governments to make it harder to vote. Eliminate voting locations in regions where those who vote against your party are more likely. Move voting to days that the less-powerful can't take off from their jobs. Paper votes "go missing" because there's reason to believe the box of them contained too many that those in power didn't like. Making voting hard makes the system ripe for abuse, and that's exactly what we see happen all the time. What we need is a system that is efficient and safe. There are cryptographic voting systems in which the government publishes the entire result; everyone can see that their own vote (only) was counted appropriately; anyone can see that the overall vote was fairly counted; empowered auditors can randomly audit to ensure all votes are real. That is far superior to the existing, corruptible system. Edit: adding some conditions on the crypto voting systems.
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  There are a couple points I don't think you've considered. 1. From my experience working in the lower class service industry (restaurant worker), Tuesday (federal elections) is usually a pretty easy day to get off. Weekends or government holidays that the middle class gets off, are the days where everyone has to work. My understanding is that this applies to retail as well. 2. You need non-technical people to trust the system. This isn't a technical problem, it's a political problem. Having one person from each party in the room while paper ballots are counted is actually a pretty good solution for this. Showing people who haven't done any advanced math pages and pages of whitepapers and equations that mathematically prove that the system can't be hacked doesn't really give you this. The system will be completely accurate, but rumors will fly and the government is quite likely to lose legitimacy anyway.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Eliminating voting locations has nothing whatsoever to do with paper ballots.
- bpfrh 6y ago
  Why is voting with paper hard? Voting happens on a day where nearly nobody has to work. People who can't leave their home, or are not home on the day you can vote, can still vote, they just request a mail-in vote card.

by blhack 6y ago

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.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  The more you do this, the less anonymous the ballots are.
  - jackvalentine 6y ago
    I don't think to any appreciable extent unless you go nuts restricting people to a particular polling place and limit their size severely. In the most recent federal byelection in Australia, 114,000 voters were able to cast their votes at any one of the 86 different polling places, where the votes were counted locally. The smallest polling place had 110 people vote at it, I'm not even sure you could reasonably deanonymise the votes in that. How would you do it? https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-25820-117.htm https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-25820-117.htm
    - notahacker 6y ago
      tbf with an electorate of just 110 people casually acquainted with each other, it might not be too difficult for some to guess who cast the Fringe Party vote. But yes, you're not likely to deanonymise them all.
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        You can guess, but you can guess before you know how they voted - you can narrow your error bars, but it seems very unlikely you can out someone that you couldn't already out. Say you see all the votes, one is for an extreme party, there's going to be plenty of people whose politics you don't know in depth - people (IME) will either keep secret their allegiances or be very vocal. Those who are vocal won't care that you "know", those who're secretive ... did it help?
        notahacker 6y ago
        Knowing that somebody in your village definitely voted for the Fringe Party is a piece of information you wouldn't otherwise have. There's a big difference between having your suspicion about someone's voting intent supported by data and not having your suspicion supported by data. This matters if said community is liable to alienate people based on their assumed view; the fact it isn't 100% accurate doesn't make things better...
Ma8ee 6y ago
That is not really a problem. The count from all voting stations are public, and they are checked by the people that counted the votes. And it is of course trivial to check that the totals are correct.

kungato 6y ago

The trick is that by using the Dhondt method and gerrymandering you have to manipulate way less votes than one would actually expect. In my country of 5 million people last week 11 votes decided whether someone went into parliament and there were 11 excesss votes at one station which were then deleted and guess whose those were

jakehop 6y ago
While an interesting problem to try and solve (in theory, not in practice!), one has to be very much aware of where those 11 votes had to be injected for the “hack” to work. You basically need to have a somewhat precise picture of the proportionality before you could do it I a non-obvious way (= small margin victory). While polling gives you something close to that, I don’t believe that it’s precise enough.
jzwinck 6y ago
If the difference is only 11 people, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to say the result doesn't matter, both candidates got the same number of votes within a very small margin of error (which will never be zero). Either you decide the two candidates were both good and there was no clear decision to elect one over the other, or you set up a voting system where such close races result in some totally different outcome, such as both people enter parliament for a shorter time, having a tie breaker of some kind, etc.
- Spivak 6y ago
  This assumes that voting in the US is a form of collective decision making, that’s the effect sure, but because politics are so tribal it’s actually a game of taking territory. Within a party equal votes implies what you suggest but that doesn’t hold in the actual elections.
- newacct583 6y ago
  What if the marginal/toss-up victories like this always end up going to one party? Is that still fair?

forty 6y ago

This 100%. I'm French, and I always volunteer to count votes after the ballots. Honestly the system is really robust, it's probably very very hard to cheat without being noticed, everything is done twice, with everyone being able to watch the whole process. No way we can have something even close in term of confidence with something digital. If we really want to use new technologies to make things even safer, we could film and broadcast everything so anyone could check that there was no cheating (and I assume some people would record it so we could check also after the fact)

williamdclt 6y ago
You could even still have a counting machine: stick the papers in it, it scans the vote, it spits out the paper and humans do their own manual count. Compare the numbers of the unbiased but hackable machine and the biased but unhackable humans. Not sure it's a step in the good direction, too easy to remove the humans some time later, but if we want to use technology to make counting more secure there's definitely easy ways
- dsr_ 6y ago
  This is how Massachusetts has been doing it for years. Fast local counts, complete paper trail.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Yup. The Australian Ballot is private voting, public counting. The gold standard implementation is ballots cast at poll sites, tabulated on site, the moment the polls close, all results immediately shared publicly. For better or for worse, many postal balloting implementations are as bad as touchscreen voting, election integrity wise. Much care is needed to preserve voter privacy and ensure physical chain of custody. For example, many jurisdictions process ballots daily, image both signatures and votes, using image processing to recognize votes, and adjudicate voter intent (manually override errors) in the database. One side effect of daily processing is the running daily total. What you and I would call tabulation, but admins claim only the final report is the tabulation. Etc.

badrabbit 6y ago

At the same time you have parts of a country that actively suppress votes. For example, in many deep south counties that are turning blue, the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. Organized fraud is hard, but if enough people agree that fraud is neccessary, fraud will happen at a large scale. I am not saying digital election is better, but I would like to see a formal securirty/risk assesment of both options against known voter hostile counties. With mail-in ballots for example, what if small groups of mail persons(1-5) manipulate absentee ballott mail when sent to and collected from voters, how does that risk compare to say insecure network connections and poor authentication with digital voting systems. A formal threar model for both approaches and risk assesment that is. Both methods are not secure, as a techie, the vulnerabilities of digital systems is glaring and obvious but they mean little in terms of risk wihout applying a threat model. You said paper ballots make mass fraud hard, that is because of the threat model you had in mind. The chaos of the 2000 presidential election shows a slightly diffrent threat model where organizing large number of people was not needed. Bad guys will always find a way, what I like to do is to take an empirical approach at making thier mischief harder to pull off.

hef19898 6y ago
People joked after the Florida disaster, when George W. Bush was elected, that maybe the US needs international election observers. You know, like developing countries. Not sure if that's still a joke now.
pessimizer 6y ago
> the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. This is the problem. Part of the voting system is dictating who has the right to manipulate the votes at every point in the process, and ideally, after the ballots are sealed, that group should consist of everyone who has an interest; membership in that group should be self-defined. Practically, most people will be happy with a representative rather than showing up personally, but if everybody wants to watch, everyone should be allowed to. If you abandon this principle, no technical solution is possible. It's like trying to make a computer perfectly safe against physical compromise; the only way to do it is to destroy the computer. Honestly, the main problem with digital voting for me is only obliquely related to that objection - there are not enough qualified code auditors for everyone to have an auditor they trust, and massive, system-breaking changes can happen with the change of a semicolon. So the provenance of an individual vote from the voter to the commingled pile of votes is impractical to depend on. It may be possible to get it to the standard of a paper system, but it would be extremely expensive.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Unless the vote is verifiable?

mikepurvis 6y ago
But then it can be proven, and therefore directly purchased.
- DennisP 6y ago
  Not necessarily. For example, see Three Ballot, a paper voting system designed by Ron Rivest. https://www.quantamagazine.org/rsa-cryptographer-ronald-rivest-seeks-secure-elections-20200312/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/rsa-cryptographer-ronald-rive...
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  If it's only personally verifiable with 'something you know' (by being present, see my other post here) would that suffice? You'd have vote verification (that you voted, not how), the system would know your list but not who you chose, but you could check the list was recorded - you could still lie about who you voted for, just as you can now. (This is not a working, nor complete idea, I'm scanning around for inputs. Thanks.)

rkhassen9 6y ago

This. Agreed 100% Really, really smart people, even in technology, who should know often cannot see this. It seems like one of those magic eye pictures https://www.magiceye.com/stwkdisp.htm https://www.magiceye.com/stwkdisp.htm If you don’t see it, you don’t see it. Also - not sure about the implications of Corona virus and social distancing. The in person requirement becomes a potential to die or potentially spread a deadly disease.

mmm_grayons 6y ago
Just voted yesterday: distancing rules in place, the gentleman runnung it didn't touch my driver's license, gloves available, masks required, and one older gentleman wore a face shield. Fairly safe and quick, though I imagine it might be more difficult and crowded on election day.

newacct583 6y ago

> 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. No, all you need to do is play with the distribution of those hundreds of thousands of locations such that "your" voters have an easier time getting to them, on average, than your opponents' voters. Your threat model isn't quite right. A deliberate third party attempt to fabricate votes isn't the only attack vector. You need a system that is robust against untrustworthy insiders too.

gurleen_s 6y ago

The other useful feature is that it keeps the election day from becoming a horse race/fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.

mabbo 6y ago

But this same lack of efficiency allows governments to make it harder to vote. Eliminate voting locations in regions where those who vote against your party are more likely. Move voting to days that the less-powerful can't take off from their jobs. Paper votes "go missing" because there's reason to believe the box of them contained too many that those in power didn't like. Making voting hard makes the system ripe for abuse, and that's exactly what we see happen all the time. What we need is a system that is efficient and safe. There are cryptographic voting systems in which the government publishes the entire result; everyone can see that their own vote (only) was counted appropriately; anyone can see that the overall vote was fairly counted; empowered auditors can randomly audit to ensure all votes are real. That is far superior to the existing, corruptible system. Edit: adding some conditions on the crypto voting systems.

ByteJockey 6y ago
There are a couple points I don't think you've considered. 1. From my experience working in the lower class service industry (restaurant worker), Tuesday (federal elections) is usually a pretty easy day to get off. Weekends or government holidays that the middle class gets off, are the days where everyone has to work. My understanding is that this applies to retail as well. 2. You need non-technical people to trust the system. This isn't a technical problem, it's a political problem. Having one person from each party in the room while paper ballots are counted is actually a pretty good solution for this. Showing people who haven't done any advanced math pages and pages of whitepapers and equations that mathematically prove that the system can't be hacked doesn't really give you this. The system will be completely accurate, but rumors will fly and the government is quite likely to lose legitimacy anyway.
hef19898 6y ago
Eliminating voting locations has nothing whatsoever to do with paper ballots.
bpfrh 6y ago
Why is voting with paper hard? Voting happens on a day where nearly nobody has to work. People who can't leave their home, or are not home on the day you can vote, can still vote, they just request a mail-in vote card.