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> Not everyone will use a token or remember it. If even 50% of voters do this 100% accurately, it still isn't statistically helpful. I think this is its main w

> Not everyone will use a token or remember it. If even 50% of voters do this 100% accurately, it still isn't statistically helpful. I think this is its main weakness. Those who don't care enough to use a token would leave the token of zero effort (nothing) open for manipulations. Unless those are few, this system won't make the election more secure. It would however give those who care a way to ensure that their vote was counted, increasing public confidence in the results. For I assume that those who care enough to question the results also care enough to use a token and check it. > It's also worth saying that if there's any problem with this system, it calls the entire election into question, even if the election itself was fine or statistically far from error. > You might look up your vote and think "shenanigans!", and there won't be any way of looking at your original ballot to find out what happened. The token is only needed to identify a vote, so it could be dead simple, like a bitmap that could be a grid to be painted on paper ballot. It can be just added to existing systems. > And even if there were, you still wouldn't have any way of verifying that your vote was included in the count. How is querying the tokens used to vote what you voted, seeing your token in the list, and checking that the tokens make up the reported total not verifying it? > We (especially in tech) focus myopically on election fraud in the US, as though that's the thing that would undermine the legitimacy of an election. I think it's just because it seems like something that could be solved. > I am 100% sure that even if we implemented this system, they would still work just as hard to undermine election legitimacy. It would be a little harder when those who care can just check that their vote was counted. > I think we'd both like to increase the legitimacy of elections -- It seems to me that we have somewhat different aims. You have zeal for democracy and are willing to compromise ballot secrecy to verify the election result. I accept that verifying it is impossible while maintaing the secrecy, unless everyone is willing to check that his vote was counted. In practice I would be content if everyone just had that possibility, as I don't have unrealistic expectations of its popularity.

camgunz 5y ago
>> And even if there were, you still wouldn't have any way of verifying that your vote was included in the count. > How is querying the tokens used to vote what you voted, seeing your token in the list, and checking that the tokens make up the reported total not verifying it? There can still be two separate systems: the system that has your actual vote and the system we use to determine who won the election. One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. Fundamentally, without a way to know all the possible voters and how they voted, you can't defend against that. >> We (especially in tech) focus myopically on election fraud in the US, as though that's the thing that would undermine the legitimacy of an election. > I think it's just because it seems like something that could be solved. Yeah but it's typical, and sorry for the bluntness here, tech arrogance--or maybe tech optimism is nicer. But either way, there's a consistent dynamic of tech people trying to solve things with tech that they really don't know a lot about. I've worked as a Democratic operative specifically on elections on the past few cycles and I'm pretty close to an expert. I'm not making an appeal to authority or anything, and I'm more than happy to talk about ways we can use tech to improve US elections, but it's just that I know these schemes are way, way more trouble than they're worth and either hinder a lot of the techniques we currently use to verify elections, or make political firestorms that make the election process even more fragile than it already is way more likely. It's also worth saying experts get this wrong too! The Iowa caucuses in 2020 had some tech hiccups, and that's, in my opinion, because no one can make sense of a caucus. They're beyond broken, and the more you measure them the more you'll find they're 100% unreliable and indicative of nothing. We certainly shouldn't be showering the person who wins by .5% with millions of dollars of donor money and earned media. But more broadly, it's also that elections are fundamentally messy, and the more you measure the more you find problems. Either we accept that and build solutions that accept that, or we don't and we live with constant allegations that our elections are fraudulent, courtesy of the perspective that we should be able to have 100% certainty. > It seems to me that we have somewhat different aims. You have zeal for democracy and are willing to compromise ballot secrecy to verify the election result. Honestly, I'm not sure what my ideal system is. I think anonymous voting is really important, but I also strongly support compulsory voting, and those two things are in direct tension. I think it's just hard to accept that elections are fuzzy measurements of sentiment and that the role of math in their verification is limited to some basic statistical analysis while the rest is process and politics. And I think it's really easy to be nerd sniped by the verification part, when tech actually could do so much good in the process and politics part. For example, a lot of States have "wet ink" statutes that mean voter registration forms have to be signed by a literal pen. So guess what Democrats did: they built a robot that holds a pen and signs a voter registration form remotely when someone fills out a voter reg form online. Hooray for tech! But also, that cost a lot of money and time. Wouldn't it have been easier if State legislatures just weren't assholes? Anyway, I would say if we're gonna implement a system that costs whatever the cheapest cryptographic verification system costs, we should just fund early voting programs and law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation and misinformation. I know even that is impossible, which is depressing, but c'est la vie.
- TheMonarchist 5y ago
  > One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. How could you fail to use the totals indicated by the database and not get caught? > I know these schemes are way, way more trouble than they're worth and either hinder a lot of the techniques we currently use to verify elections, or make political firestorms that make the election process even more fragile than it already is way more likely. Don't worry; I'm not going to spend the rest of my life pushing my scheme forward. I might make a toy implementation that people can use for vanity voting with friends. It might gain traction and wider acceptance that way. > I also strongly support compulsory voting That reminds me of Soviet Russia and satellites that always had 90+% turnouts. I can't imagine any reason for compulsory voting beside maintaining a facade of popular support for the system. There's a difference between returning invalid ballot and not voting; in the latter case you shouldn't appear on the list of voters. > law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation I think the hard part isn't agreeing that voter intimidation is bad. The hard part is specifying what constitutes voter intimidation. I doubt that legislation could root it out, and there's a working solution to it: ballot secrecy. Ballot confidentiality isn't good enough, as someone could tell voters that an inside man will check how they voted. > and misinformation Carefulness here is essential to avoid sliding to an Orwellian dystopy. I'm not sure what measures I would be comfortable with, and I don't wonder if legislators feel the same way.
  - camgunz 5y ago
    >> One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. > How could you fail to use the totals indicated by the database and not get caught? Because unless you get enough people to use the token (and use it perfectly), you can fudge the margin enough to win. Let's imagine a town of 10,000 people where 2,000 people use the token, and the margin of victory for the mayor is 3,000 people. You can verify 2,000 of these votes (again, let's say we can do that reasonably accurately, which is already a big lift), but that leaves 8,000 votes the corrupt mayor can play with. Unless you get > 7,000 people to use the token very accurately, this system doesn't help. How would you actually fudge the vote you ask? My answer is that it's extremely, extremely hard to do, and therefore any system making this even harder to do isn't worth it. Someone else's answer is probably a person who wants a verification system like this in the first place; they might say bribery, machine tampering, whatever, all things we've never had even a single instance of ever. Well, there's this Republican County Clerk that maybe did something fishy, we'll see how that pans out, but yeah very very very few instances of. And imagine the downsides. 2,000 people used the token, but 500 of them misremembered it, and when they went looking their vote wasn't there. Shenanigans! Do over! Stop the steal! Etc. etc. And let's add on some other stuff: - Recounts work, and are triggered when small margins matter. Crypto systems almost certainly make recounts much harder. - Most of this system is already in place: the fact that you voted is already public record. - Adding the information of who you voted for is also very easy, but we don't do it to avoid pay-for-votes (I know your argument here is such kingpins would force voters to use new tokens and we'd detect it, but 1 no we wouldn't because we couldn't disambiguate that from population changes or people just being forgetful, and 2 tokens would either be tied to a single election or contain a voting history so you wouldn't need a new one anyway). - Any problems with this system introduce doubt into an election, and since it's very easy for a small number of partisan voters to do this ("hey my vote isn't in the system!"), we're asking for 5,000 diehard Republicans to call shenanigans in every urban Democratic precinct every election. >> I also strongly support compulsory voting > That reminds me of Soviet Russia and satellites that always had 90+% turnouts. I can't imagine any reason for compulsory voting beside maintaining a facade of popular support for the system. There's a difference between returning invalid ballot and not voting; in the latter case you shouldn't appear on the list of voters. You can't imagine reasons for compulsory voting because, and this is gonna sound a little rude but I think that's where we are here, you don't know a lot about elections and voting and haven't spent a lot of time learning and thinking about them. I suggest starting here [1]. >> law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation > I think the hard part isn't agreeing that voter intimidation is bad. The hard part is specifying what constitutes voter intimidation. It's not actually hard at all. There are two major forms of voter intimidation: the cops will lock you up, and someone will beat you up. Generally voters are made aware of these possibilities with phone calls, emails, direct mail, and police/vigilante presence at polling places. These things are easy to outlaw, in fact they're already illegal! We just need cops to enforce the laws. If you're gonna say that'll take more than money, then I'd agree with you. > Ballot confidentiality isn't good enough, as someone could tell voters that an inside man will check how they voted. People assume this is about learning how someone voted, but you can actually just keep certain people from voting and achieve that result. This is actually how voter intimidation works; you tell women that their husbands will find out how they voted, and you tell people of color the cops will be there. It doesn't need to be more complex than that, because it's already super effective. >> and misinformation > Carefulness here is essential to avoid sliding to an Orwellian dystopy This is also pretty easy to tamp down on; this kind of misinformation is usually incorrect polling place information or time--sometimes it's more creative like "drop your ballot off at this (fake) mailbox", but that kind of thing is rare. Again this is also super illegal (the FEC exists for a reason), we just need cops to enforce the laws. [1]: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Br_LIFT_Every_Voice_final.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Br_LIFT...

camgunz 5y ago

>> And even if there were, you still wouldn't have any way of verifying that your vote was included in the count. > How is querying the tokens used to vote what you voted, seeing your token in the list, and checking that the tokens make up the reported total not verifying it? There can still be two separate systems: the system that has your actual vote and the system we use to determine who won the election. One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. Fundamentally, without a way to know all the possible voters and how they voted, you can't defend against that. >> We (especially in tech) focus myopically on election fraud in the US, as though that's the thing that would undermine the legitimacy of an election. > I think it's just because it seems like something that could be solved. Yeah but it's typical, and sorry for the bluntness here, tech arrogance--or maybe tech optimism is nicer. But either way, there's a consistent dynamic of tech people trying to solve things with tech that they really don't know a lot about. I've worked as a Democratic operative specifically on elections on the past few cycles and I'm pretty close to an expert. I'm not making an appeal to authority or anything, and I'm more than happy to talk about ways we can use tech to improve US elections, but it's just that I know these schemes are way, way more trouble than they're worth and either hinder a lot of the techniques we currently use to verify elections, or make political firestorms that make the election process even more fragile than it already is way more likely. It's also worth saying experts get this wrong too! The Iowa caucuses in 2020 had some tech hiccups, and that's, in my opinion, because no one can make sense of a caucus. They're beyond broken, and the more you measure them the more you'll find they're 100% unreliable and indicative of nothing. We certainly shouldn't be showering the person who wins by .5% with millions of dollars of donor money and earned media. But more broadly, it's also that elections are fundamentally messy, and the more you measure the more you find problems. Either we accept that and build solutions that accept that, or we don't and we live with constant allegations that our elections are fraudulent, courtesy of the perspective that we should be able to have 100% certainty. > It seems to me that we have somewhat different aims. You have zeal for democracy and are willing to compromise ballot secrecy to verify the election result. Honestly, I'm not sure what my ideal system is. I think anonymous voting is really important, but I also strongly support compulsory voting, and those two things are in direct tension. I think it's just hard to accept that elections are fuzzy measurements of sentiment and that the role of math in their verification is limited to some basic statistical analysis while the rest is process and politics. And I think it's really easy to be nerd sniped by the verification part, when tech actually could do so much good in the process and politics part. For example, a lot of States have "wet ink" statutes that mean voter registration forms have to be signed by a literal pen. So guess what Democrats did: they built a robot that holds a pen and signs a voter registration form remotely when someone fills out a voter reg form online. Hooray for tech! But also, that cost a lot of money and time. Wouldn't it have been easier if State legislatures just weren't assholes? Anyway, I would say if we're gonna implement a system that costs whatever the cheapest cryptographic verification system costs, we should just fund early voting programs and law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation and misinformation. I know even that is impossible, which is depressing, but c'est la vie.

TheMonarchist 5y ago
> One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. How could you fail to use the totals indicated by the database and not get caught? > I know these schemes are way, way more trouble than they're worth and either hinder a lot of the techniques we currently use to verify elections, or make political firestorms that make the election process even more fragile than it already is way more likely. Don't worry; I'm not going to spend the rest of my life pushing my scheme forward. I might make a toy implementation that people can use for vanity voting with friends. It might gain traction and wider acceptance that way. > I also strongly support compulsory voting That reminds me of Soviet Russia and satellites that always had 90+% turnouts. I can't imagine any reason for compulsory voting beside maintaining a facade of popular support for the system. There's a difference between returning invalid ballot and not voting; in the latter case you shouldn't appear on the list of voters. > law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation I think the hard part isn't agreeing that voter intimidation is bad. The hard part is specifying what constitutes voter intimidation. I doubt that legislation could root it out, and there's a working solution to it: ballot secrecy. Ballot confidentiality isn't good enough, as someone could tell voters that an inside man will check how they voted. > and misinformation Carefulness here is essential to avoid sliding to an Orwellian dystopy. I'm not sure what measures I would be comfortable with, and I don't wonder if legislators feel the same way.
- camgunz 5y ago
  >> One of the (many) issues I have with cryptographic vote verification systems is that they don't prove there isn't a "second set of books" that all checks out, meanwhile we use the crooked books to determine who won. > How could you fail to use the totals indicated by the database and not get caught? Because unless you get enough people to use the token (and use it perfectly), you can fudge the margin enough to win. Let's imagine a town of 10,000 people where 2,000 people use the token, and the margin of victory for the mayor is 3,000 people. You can verify 2,000 of these votes (again, let's say we can do that reasonably accurately, which is already a big lift), but that leaves 8,000 votes the corrupt mayor can play with. Unless you get > 7,000 people to use the token very accurately, this system doesn't help. How would you actually fudge the vote you ask? My answer is that it's extremely, extremely hard to do, and therefore any system making this even harder to do isn't worth it. Someone else's answer is probably a person who wants a verification system like this in the first place; they might say bribery, machine tampering, whatever, all things we've never had even a single instance of ever. Well, there's this Republican County Clerk that maybe did something fishy, we'll see how that pans out, but yeah very very very few instances of. And imagine the downsides. 2,000 people used the token, but 500 of them misremembered it, and when they went looking their vote wasn't there. Shenanigans! Do over! Stop the steal! Etc. etc. And let's add on some other stuff: - Recounts work, and are triggered when small margins matter. Crypto systems almost certainly make recounts much harder. - Most of this system is already in place: the fact that you voted is already public record. - Adding the information of who you voted for is also very easy, but we don't do it to avoid pay-for-votes (I know your argument here is such kingpins would force voters to use new tokens and we'd detect it, but 1 no we wouldn't because we couldn't disambiguate that from population changes or people just being forgetful, and 2 tokens would either be tied to a single election or contain a voting history so you wouldn't need a new one anyway). - Any problems with this system introduce doubt into an election, and since it's very easy for a small number of partisan voters to do this ("hey my vote isn't in the system!"), we're asking for 5,000 diehard Republicans to call shenanigans in every urban Democratic precinct every election. >> I also strongly support compulsory voting > That reminds me of Soviet Russia and satellites that always had 90+% turnouts. I can't imagine any reason for compulsory voting beside maintaining a facade of popular support for the system. There's a difference between returning invalid ballot and not voting; in the latter case you shouldn't appear on the list of voters. You can't imagine reasons for compulsory voting because, and this is gonna sound a little rude but I think that's where we are here, you don't know a lot about elections and voting and haven't spent a lot of time learning and thinking about them. I suggest starting here [1]. >> law enforcement initiatives against voter intimidation > I think the hard part isn't agreeing that voter intimidation is bad. The hard part is specifying what constitutes voter intimidation. It's not actually hard at all. There are two major forms of voter intimidation: the cops will lock you up, and someone will beat you up. Generally voters are made aware of these possibilities with phone calls, emails, direct mail, and police/vigilante presence at polling places. These things are easy to outlaw, in fact they're already illegal! We just need cops to enforce the laws. If you're gonna say that'll take more than money, then I'd agree with you. > Ballot confidentiality isn't good enough, as someone could tell voters that an inside man will check how they voted. People assume this is about learning how someone voted, but you can actually just keep certain people from voting and achieve that result. This is actually how voter intimidation works; you tell women that their husbands will find out how they voted, and you tell people of color the cops will be there. It doesn't need to be more complex than that, because it's already super effective. >> and misinformation > Carefulness here is essential to avoid sliding to an Orwellian dystopy This is also pretty easy to tamp down on; this kind of misinformation is usually incorrect polling place information or time--sometimes it's more creative like "drop your ballot off at this (fake) mailbox", but that kind of thing is rare. Again this is also super illegal (the FEC exists for a reason), we just need cops to enforce the laws. [1]: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Br_LIFT_Every_Voice_final.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Br_LIFT...