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New Hampshire set to pilot voting machines that use software everyone can see

200 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

alexb_ 4y ago
There was a voting machine posted here a while back that was literally transparent, as in you would literally be able to see the computer marking off the paper ballot through a transparent box. Is this the same thing, or is this something different? I don't think "computer experts say it's okay" is going to help build trust when people are distrusting of authority in the first place, so I hope it's the transparent one.
- eru 4y ago
  The article says: > “There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.” In any case, I don't think voting machines are a good idea. I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make them secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. Paper voting and traditional election observers work in a nice 'analog' way. It's tangible, and even a 'village idiot' can understand how it works. Most voting systems aren't complicated enough to need a computer to evaluate them. (And those that are should arguable be changed.)
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    IMO secure isn't enough. You also need to make it auditable. As far as I can see, it's pretty much impossible to do this satisfactorily with a digital solution. It also seems entirely unnecessary. Manual counting systems work well, and allow people to feel like they are participating in the democratic process (because they are).
    - johnsbrayton 4y ago
      Ballot boxes that scan ballots are auditable because they keep the paper ballots. In my state, election workers have to ensure that the number of ballots is the same as the number recorded by the ballot box on election night - although we don’t recount who voted for who. The ballots are preserved.
    - frob 4y ago
      Most states use paper ballots that are then run through electronic tallying machines. This process is completely auditable. This is how people lying about the 2020 election were able to do all of their sham audits in Arizona and Wisconsin.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        > This process is completely auditable Presumably the auditing process would involve tallying the votes manually... in case why bother with the electronic process? Unless you only run the audit if there's a complaint. Which I guess works. But personally for something as important as elections I would much more comfortable with a system where the transparent, hard-to-corrupt process is used by default.
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        You are missing the part that somebody could add additional ballots which is a claim that is being made. Supposedly there was a water leak and then people brought in some extra ballots.
  - fredleblanc 4y ago
    I live in New Hampshire, and though I've never voted on a computer where I'm touching a screen, I still feed my paper ballot into a scantron machine that seems to do all the counting. I’ve voted in maybe 20 elections (between local, state, and federal) in my lifetime, and it's always been done this way around here. Maybe we all forget that that's a computer, too. All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    Ranked choice voting systems (e.g. single transferable vote) have a lot of "game theory" advantages over e.g. first-past-the-post, but are hard to implement with manual counting. Edit: I suppose that doesn't mean voting machines are required though, just that the results on each ballot paper need to be inputted to a computer to determine the outcome. A lot of data inputting required, but still auditable.
    - eru 4y ago
      First-past-the-post is pretty horrible. Alas, experience from Australia shows that single transferable vote isn't any better in practice, either. It's more complicated with no benefit in practice. (See https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html for more details on Australia.) If traditional voting is required, I have higher hopes for approval voting or the slightly more complicated range voting. These are quite easy to evaluate completely by hand. Especially the former. If you are happy to go a bit off the beaten track, using sortition amongst volunteers might be a good way to fill up a parliament. (Or any other body big enough for the law of large numbers to kick in.) As a slightly more complicated system, I would have every voter indicate their favourite candidate on a ballot sheet, and then draw enough votes at random to fill up parliament. (Use your favourite mechanism to handle the same candidate being voted for multiple times in your sample. Perhaps give them more weight, or re-draw, or have people write down an ordered list of preferred candidates, and admit the highest ranked one who isn't already in parliament, etc.) Random sampling is surprisingly powerful. It also completely bypasses Arrow's impossibility theorem.
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Does it ?! Wow, that is tempting...
        eru 4y ago
        Well, Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic procedures.
        Vecr 4y ago
  - velcrovan 4y ago
    I’m curious, do you distinguish between ballot counting machines (what the NH SoS is talking about) and voting machines (your term)? I understand “voting machine” to be any mechanism that acts as a substitute for a paper ballot, or that acts as an intermediary between you and a paper ballot. And I would agree that the former are a terrible idea and the latter probably don’t provide much net benefit. But ballot counting machines are a different matter. Here’s the thing: there’s no voting process without a ballot counting machine. It’s just a matter of whether that machine will be a carbon-based one subject to bias, fatigue, boredom and hunger, or an electronic one that excels at stupid-simple repetitive tasks and is subject to none of those things.
    - eru 4y ago
      There's a third option: a mechanical ballot counter. I know that human beings are fallible. That's why I wrote: > I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make [electronic machines] secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. People are used to the failure modes of other humans. And they trust other humans in a way they don't trust machines. This is similar to how juries still put a lot of stock in eye witnesses.
      - velcrovan 4y ago
        How is “mechanical ballot counter” a third, distinct option from “ballot counting machine”? Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy?
        eru 4y ago
        > Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy? Potentially, yes. Especially if you used off-the-shelf machines that IBM built in 1920. In any case, that's just a distraction. Just use humans.
  - frob 4y ago
    Electronic ballot-tallying machines are necessary to running accurate and speedy elections. As we saw in the Arizona fiasco with the "Cyber Ninjas," hand-counting ballots takes weeks, if not months. Additionally, hand-counting has an error margin of 1-2%. In a era where many races are within a point or two, hand-counting ballots will lead to the wrong person winning office. We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.
    - CHY872 4y ago
      In the UK all ballots are hand counted, and the counting is done within a day. I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
      - eru 4y ago
        Same in Germany.
      - jcranmer 4y ago
        How many races are on your ballot? Next Tuesday, I'll have 11 races to vote for, plus 4 ballot referendums. That's probably a median election ballot in the US.
        whoooooo123 4y ago
        In the UK? Typically just one race: you vote to elect your local MP. You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
        4y ago
- snarf21 4y ago
  Voting machines should only ever be used to automate counting of votes. They should never mark the voting sheet. Having the physical paper lets us easily recount or reverify. If it was marked erroneously, all is lost.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    No, the paper should be marked by a machine, and displayed to the user for confirmation. If you let the user mark the paper, you get 'hanging chad' problems.
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hirundo 4y ago
> Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H. Anyone who cares to will be able to see if the new machines recorded the votes correctly If hand counting paper ballots instills confidence, then at some low level of public confidence in elections, it makes sense to do so routinely, rather than just a demonstration. Vilifying doubters doesn't seem to be very effective. For many of those there is no level of proof that could dent their opinion, so little is lost by simply attacking them. But there are many others that are convincible by sufficient openness. Sure, turning it back into a manual process has its own issues, particularly with efficiency. But with an election efficiency is a minor consideration compared to confidence.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  There have traditionally been ways to mess with a hand count. One example I recall is vote counters wedging a piece of pencil lead under a fingernail. If they see a ballot they don't like, swipe the lead across it and toss the ballot in the "spoiled" pile. Sure, this requires a little bit of blind eye from the county clerk (or whoever), but if the election goes the right way, it's worth it.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    In the UK party candidates and guests are watching the count so would pick that up. It's very rare that the losing candidate plus all spoiled votes makes a difference in any case, and significant numbers of double voting would raise very interesting questions. They simply don't happen.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I do believe audits and observers would catch that pretty quick.
    - puffoflogic 4y ago
      Not when the observers are banned from the room because social distancing.
Simulacra 4y ago
“Software everyone can see“ sounds like window dressing.. You would have to understand how the software works. Open source voting software is a great idea, but the vast majority of people are not gonna have any clue. Is this really transparency?
- eru 4y ago
  It's a small step in the right direction.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > You would have to understand how the software works. No you don't. You have the opportunity to trust someone who understands how the software works, which you wouldn't have if the people you trust weren't allowed to inspect the software. With this kind of logic, you could never trust an election where you didn't physically count all of the votes yourself. Since that doesn't make sense (not scalable when elections get beyond about 20-30 people), we allow voters to send people they trust to observe and participate in the vote count. This is like that.
iso1631 4y ago
In the UK we go to a voting place. We get given a piece of paper. We walk to a little booth, we mark an X next to who we want, we put that piece of paper in a black box. Your name is crossed off on a piece of paper to say you've voted. That black box gathers a few hundred votes over the course of the day. There are multiple people in the room with that black box throughout the day. At the end of the day the number of people who have voted and the number of pieces of paper that have been used, are both counted to ensure they are the same. The box is then sealed (with tamper tape) and transported to a central hall, usually in a car, but sometimes by ferry or helicopter depending on weather and location. Obviously this takes longer for rural areas than for urban areas. When it arrives, it is unsealed in front of many witnesses, and the ballots emptied. They are counted (how many pieces of paper), and this number matches the above paperwork. The ballots are then put into a pile in the middle of the room where all the candidates and their teams can see, and are counted by a team of however many (say a team of 20 for a district of 60k votes - tend to be local council workers being paid overtime). From the counts I've seen, 300-600 an hour is a reasonable speed. Those are bundled into bundles of 100 and put into piles on display. Any ambiguous marking that the person counting or the people watching think is amigious is set aside (the famous "WANK/WANK/NOT WANK" case [0]), and the candidates and their agents get to see and agree on the paper. Urban counts of districts with c. 70,000 voters tend to get the first ballot boxes about 10-15 minutes after polling closes and start counting. Some have large numbers counting in an aim to get the count done first (in an hour or so), others take longer, but the majority of districts are verified, counted, and recounted after about 6 hours. Some places have to wait for the aforementioned ferry etc so don't report to maybe 12 hours after. I don't understand why you need machines to vote or machines to count. Breaking the system above by a few votes is probably possible with a small team of conspirators, but breaking it beyond that doesn't scale. [0] https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-ballot-paper-puts-not-wnk-next-to-greens-deemed-acceptable-as-a-vote-233070 https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-bal...
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  > Your name is crossed off on a piece of paper to say you've voted. In the US, this is racist. > where all the candidates and their teams can see In the US, this is insurrectionist.
falafelite 4y ago
A lot of skepticism and negativity here, with a focus on "open source means something to me, not the layman" as well as mentions of is that really helpful, is it auditable, etc. Valid concerns, but I guess my reaction is hopeful because hey there's at least one group of people who are trying to build something that is more transparent. Maybe it's not perfect, but (at least to me) seems like a step in a good direction. Also for what it's worth the company making the tech has a product for auditing as well. Idk guess I'm feeling more optimistic this morning.
- eru 4y ago
  I wrote some skeptical remarks. But yes: this is definitely progress compared to closed source machines.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  > Maybe it's not perfect, but (at least to me) seems like a step in a good direction. Is it? Provided you have a working democratic state with checks and auditing, what is the problem that voting machines solve? The level of guarantees that you have with a paper vote is hard to surpass and the inconvenience of paper vote is not that big considering how often voting occurs (even in the extreme case of Swiss style referendums).
  - falafelite 4y ago
    Is a paper-vote a reference to literally marking a piece of paper, or a human counting said piece of paper? Sorry if that's a dumb question, just want to make sure I follow. It seems like this tech works with marking a piece of paper that is then read by a machine. I suppose if the paper is kept, perhaps it's nice from the point of view of the election-handling-folks to automate the counting process, but be able to audit the paper ballots?
  - davoneus 4y ago
    >Provided you have a working democratic state with checks and auditing, what is the problem that voting machines solve? It solves the problem of waiting days or weeks for a result. It solves the problem of multiple languages on a ballot. It solves the problem of visually-impaired voters accessing the voting machine, it solves the problem of incorrectly filled out voting sheets (hanging-chat). Hell, that's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure others can contribute more.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Sorry - so how do I ensure that the code running is the code I expect it to at the moment I vote? I "can simply hire a computer expert to examine it and see, in real time"? That doesn't seem feasible while I'm sitting in the voting booth. I see they are using manual vote counting this time around to check, but how is that any guarantee the software will be the same in 2 years time when it happens all over again? Knowing there is software in some git repo somewhere that I can audit doesn't make me trust the machine in front of me any more.
- starkd 4y ago
  True, the average voter is not inclined to hire a computer expert to do an analysis, but if there is widespread suspicion, they will at least have the ability to vent their collective outrage into an actual audit of the code. This transparency can provide some assurance.
  - mFixman 4y ago
    Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests by creating software that did the expected results only during an audit. Doing the same for voting software would be much easier. There's no way for a computer to completely prove it has the right software for a job.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Can it though? If the audit is called for after the election how do we determine the code that the auditor is inspecting is what was run on election day? It's still a black box on election day - it's just got detailed instructions written on it claiming that's what is inside.
  - nyokodo 4y ago
    > audit of the code The OP is talking about the inability to audit the code actually running at the time of voting. You can audit the code in the repo all you like but if the hardware of the voting machine is compromised, or the code you audit is modified or replaced sometime before execution, or there is other malicious code running on the machine interfering with the voting then your audit is useless.
sidewndr46 4y ago
Unless I can take home the voting machine & verify that the software running on the machine is in fact the claimed software this doesn't mean anything. You could just as easily publish one set of software and have the machine run something completely different.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  That's my struggle with this as well - what are you going to do, show me a checksum on the monitor to somehow "prove" that the software is the same?
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    Given that they could just as easily fake the checksum, they might as well use a 1-bit checksum. The security of a 1-bit checksum is just as good as a 256-bit checksum in that scenario.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Yeah, that's why I wrote it "prove" - it's not proving anything. There's absolutely no way they can prove that the code in that box is the same as on the repo, not to mention all the other upstream issues - it has to send that count somewhere to be aggregated, and now we're even further removed from all the possible points of "failure".
- starkd 4y ago
  They can automate the installation of the current code onto the machine, which is in turn also open source.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    They are going to have 24 hour cameras pointed to the machines after the installation, including during shipment right? If not somebody could change the software. Even with cameras somebody could manipulate it probably.
jmyeet 4y ago
I'm glad to see New Hampshire still has paper ballots doing this. Pure electronic voting (IMHO) should be banned. Either you should fill out a ballot that a computer can verify or use a touchscreen that produces a paper (filled-in) ballot. As for open source, I don't think it matters. I mean, even if the software is open soruce, how do you know what the machine is running? Are you going to build it yourself and verify hashes? Can you? Don't get me wrong: open source for something like this is a good idea. Experts should be able to verify this. It just won't stop claims of election fraud because those largely aren't based on a lack of transparency but rather political expeidency.
jmclnx 4y ago
> there’s a paper record to prove it. Well at least NH seems to be doing it right. But if I use that machine, do I get to see the paper record. What I mean, is it printed for me to look at and placed into a sealed ballot box ? If not, then I am glad I do not live in NH.
tomatotomato37 4y ago
Can someone enlighten me why we need a full multipurpose computer that can run custom software just to increment one of two numbers? What's the secret sauce that means we can't run the whole election off of a cluster of 4000-series CMOS's on a breadboard mounted in a plexiglass case in the public somewhere?
- willcipriano 4y ago
  You probably want a record of votes with times and not just a simple counter.
  - yifanl 4y ago
    I'll come off as glib. but... why? So third parties can make a funny youtube infographic timeseries?
    - delecti 4y ago
      So you can demonstrate that votes correspond to people voting. Not on an individual basis, but just to make sure that if you have 100 votes on a machine (or 1000 votes across 10 machines at a location, they happened when there were 100 (or 1000) people at that voting location. It prevents adding votes before or after the fact, like putting a thumb on a scale.
      - yifanl 4y ago
        You'd have to hide the results of the vote if you're collating them with timestamp, otherwise you could pretty easily figure out Bob who showed up early voted for the square. And I'm unsure how adding timestamp helps with the problem you're trying to solve, don't you just need Sum(machine vote count at location X) == voters visiting location X. (Also this hueristic is kinda leaky since how do you account for voters protesting with intentional spoilers?)
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      If you let the government get away with just simple counts they don't have to work as hard to fake an election. A time series can be compared with exit polling for example to highlight irregular patterns.
ecshafer 4y ago
Open Source is not sufficient for voting machines, and frankly I don't think software should be involved at all. How do we know the source code was compiled without a tool chain attack? How can we verify that the software running even is the source code involved? How can we verify there isn't some kind of IME like kernel running somewhere that does something nefarious? How we do know it wasn't tampered with? Even if you remove networking from a machine the whole system is so fragile and there are very high stakes at play.
- lbriner 4y ago
  The same way you verify that manually counted votes haven't been miscounted, discarded or altered. You allow witnesses. Independent examiners will be permitted to verify the source code is actually used as-built, that it has a signature attached and that every machine that is built has the signature checked. Sure, it's not perfect but neither is manual counting (plenty of countries are proving that right now). The question is, I guess, does a software-based system provide notable advantages over manual counting other than cost and speed of a result?
  - sb057 4y ago
    Are you going to have experts examine the hardware of 1 million+ voting machines in the United States? And are all of those witnesses going to be infallible and trusted by the public?
    - mavhc 4y ago
      Don't need to test them all, just enough to probabilistically catch anyone hacking them.
      - Vecr 4y ago
        Yes you would need to test them all, I assume there are school board elections and things like that with only one or a few machines. Not everything is the presidential election.
  - 4y ago
Vvector 4y ago
We need a voter verified paper trail, based on an open standard, that can be read by different tabulator machines running different software, and still be hand counted just in case.
- contravariant 4y ago
  That's basically just pen and paper but with automated counting machines.
  - Vvector 4y ago
    Computer assistance can prevent over-votes and warn of under-votes. It also resolves any "voter intent" questions (i.e. hanging chads). It can also format the printed ballot to increase the speed at which a machine can read them.
- jcrawfordor 4y ago
  That's exactly what this system, and the majority of electronic voting systems used in the US for the last decade, provides.
up2isomorphism 4y ago
Voter id voter id voter id, that’s it. It is ridiculous that we are still debating on that , which shows how messed up we are now.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  What do you mean? As someone not in the US, I don't know what you mean if you just write "voter id" three time.
  - Vecr 4y ago
    In some places in the US they don't check your ID before you vote. When I voted this year and last they did not check for any ID whatsoever, and the only information they wanted could be looked up in a phone book or previous voter record (but I did flash a US passport last year just in case, so they know I'm probably not an illegal, this year they probably know who I am, new clerk last year). Without checking IDs it's easier to vote twice (under a false name all but one time, or some bluffing/sneakiness to avoid giving a name, otherwise you would probably get caught). The main thing people appear to be concerned about is people voting where they are not supposed to be, such as US non-citizens on visas/green cards, tourists, and illegals. Another problem would be voting in the wrong state's elections, or the wrong county/schoolboard's.
duxup 4y ago
I always like the mix of the scanning ballots in Minnesota that are paper / filled out by hand, scanned and go into a box tied to a machine for easy auditing.
ilc 4y ago
This is one of the few areas where paper is still king, IMHO. Been filling out paper ballots for years. I don't want to vote on a machine. A machine can count my vote. But there should be a paper that goes in the ballot box, so it can be recounted using multiple methods. Different machines, humans, dogs, cats... whatever. There are real physical artifacts.
- anonym29 4y ago
  +1! But this is still a net positive. Multiple forms of validation and open sourcing the software running on these machines are both components of a "defense in depth" strategy.
- capableweb 4y ago
  So you're for this voting system then? Your messages reads like you're against the system mentioned in the submission, but it seems like the system is actually doing it via paper, just like how you want it? The trial described in the article: > On November 8, VotingWorks machines will be used in a real election in real time. New Hampshire is the second state to use the open-source machines after Mississippi first did so in 2019. Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H. It seems to involve paper ballots, as far as I can understand it. And this is how the authors of the voting system describes it themselves: https://www.voting.works/voting-system https://www.voting.works/voting-system
  - ilc 4y ago
    I'm not sure I like VMDs. They can lead to slippery slopes. IE: Only Fred used the VMD... Or how does the counter interpret the VMD? Are people vigilant about checking their ballots? Pen, paper -> Into Box -> Counting, KISS. I can deal with a scantron. Not much more is needed here. I'd rather we work on chain of custody and figuring out who has voted etc, that are harder to solve. Though honestly, the fraud rates are so low, on double voting, I suspect made up voters, and ballot box stuffing are bigger concerns.
elil17 4y ago
When I voted in this year's election in the US, I used a computer which printed my ballot after I filled it out digitally. That ballot was then scanned by another computer and put in a ballot box for any potential future recounts. That seems like the ideal way to do it to me - I eliminate the risk that my ballot isn't counted due to my admittedly poor scantron filling skills but I still get a paper ballot in a box that a human can count if need be.
schimmy_changa 4y ago
Man, people are really negative about this, but it's a great idea. In the old days, paper ballots would also 'go missing' from districts known to be favorable to the other side (aka be chucked out of trucks on a bridge over a river). The best option seems to be open source voting machines + paper audit. This way you get immediate counts and then an audit trail, so would-be manipulators have to mess with BOTH at the same time which is significantly harder. Think you know a better way HN? Let's hear it.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Yes, that's why we have poll watches / volunteers from both sides.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Brazilian here, we've been using voting machines for quite some time now. We are currently facing nation wide protests at least partly due to suspicion of election fraud. People aren't accepting the election's results. Questioning the legitimacy of the voting machines has also become illegal ("fake news").
  - ufo 4y ago
    (Because of unfounded claims of fraud, according to the losing candidate). It's a shame. There are many ways that the voting machines could be improved but that will be much harder now that the far right has monopolized the discourse on auditable paper trails in their self-serving attempts to overturn valid election results.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      Your argument makes no sense to me. You think there's many ways the system can be improved. In other words, you think it's fallible. At the same time, you think any results produced by such a system are legitimate and should be accepted at face value. Why shouldn't "the far right" question results that are questionable?
TrevorJ 4y ago
The fact that at some point over the last 6 years, a huge bipartisan majority of people expressed doubts about the security of our elections (One party in 2016, another in 2020) and yet very little real change has been accomplished is pretty telling. Fact is, if you are in power, there's very little motivation to mess with or risk a change to the system that got you into power.
ensignavenger 4y ago
It is worth noting that Windham New Hampshire had a case of actual vote miscounting in the 2020 election- though not the presidential election- and the miscounts did not change the results. The Democrat who lost the race is the one who requested the recount (and the recount favored the Republican candidates who won). See https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-new-hampshire-voting-machines-election-2020-campaign-2016-7bd52410b91c65a1922141d8a7af626f https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-new-hampshire-voting... https://www.concordmonitor.com/voting-machines-nh-new-hampshire-43907947 https://www.concordmonitor.com/voting-machines-nh-new-hampsh... The news of this has of course been buried under all of the false claims of voter fraud from the 2020 presidential election. So it is not surprising that New Hampshire would be looking at a new approach to voting machine technology.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Wow, those error rates are actually much higher than I'd have expected. I wonder if the cause is something like a difference in how humans vs machines deem ballots invalid?
  - jandrese 4y ago
    You can change a lot of votes by altering the rules as to what is considered a valid vote. Read into the details of the 2000 election and you'll see just how much of a leg up George W Bush got from party control of the vote counting. There are plenty of scenarios where he would have lost if the rules were decided differently during the counting process. Had the decisions been made neutrally Bush would have lost in Florida.
  - ensignavenger 4y ago
    The audit found that the ballots had been folded "incorrectly" (Is there a right way to fold the ballots?) and if the crease went through the mark for a candidate, it would count the crease as a mark. This meant if the voter had marked another candidate, it would think it was double voted and not count it, and if they had not marked a candidate, it would count it as a vote. I am not sure having the source code of the machines be open source would help, but maybe make it easier to audit and detect that the crease would lead to a miscounted ballot.
upofadown 4y ago
Wait, you mean that there is currently non-inspectable software in a path that could allow that software to switch around votes? How could that possibly work?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  That's been the case since the dawn of voting machines.
cakeface 4y ago
You can see the source code on github https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite Looks to be TypeScript running on node. They have an embedded kiosk browser.
- ElijahLynn 4y ago
  Thank you, I was skimming the article for a link to the source code but was having trouble finding it.
Stevvo 4y ago
"the Python and Linux programming languages are all open-source"
ElijahLynn 4y ago
I'm having a tough time finding the link to the source code in the article. Am I missing it?
ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
No matter how transparent the voting software and machines are, nothing can fix election between candidates who all hatch from the same incubator.
sgc 4y ago
"that everyone can see" makes me want to see completely analogue tabulators that tally the vote using only mechanical means, inside glass cases that are being recorded and streamed. Less seriously, add random dry ice steam, fire, and whirling gears for best effect.
constantcrying 4y ago
Voting machines should not exist. Even if they are just printers. Computerized vote counting is a ridicolously bad idea on every imaginable level. Especially if there is any amount of centralization. Computerized ballot printing "just" makes it very easy to deanonymize people. Here where I live your name is crossed of a list after you have shown your ID card. Then you get a piece of paper which is thrown into a box. Given the incentives, anything less rigorous seems quite ridicolous.
- wewtyflakes 4y ago
  Given the incentives, why does that make you trust humans more?
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    Because corrupting one hunan likely has negible effects. Corrupting one machine is equivalent to being able to corrupt all similar machines. Voting machines have attack vectors which can not work on humans.
cosmojg 4y ago
I don't get why we don't just print receipts with anonymous hashes at polling stations, publish all counted votes with those hashes, and allow people to independently verify that their vote was counted. This would be so easy to implement. It's truly depressing that it hasn't.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  You'll still have people saying there were extra votes or that the votes weren't counted correctly. It'd have almost no effect on complaints about election integrity, just like... every other indication they're barking up the wrong tree hasn't had an effect.
aksss 4y ago
Twenty years ago, we could count on results the same night of the election, and in our town/city election night was always a party night - everybody involved in the campaigns would gather in a convention center where the local news orgs would live broadcast, the surrounding bars would be packed, and usually by 10-11pm, winners would be known. Somehow, twenty years in the future, we don't know results until weeks after the election, and auditability/transparency sucks.
halffaday 4y ago
> the Python and Linux programming languages are all open-source. Yikes
bkmeneguello 4y ago
Voting doesn't need to be fixed. It must be banned! Voting is an act of faith. Faith in who manages the electoral process. We need a private laws system, where you hire the governance you want, no more majority oppression or state subordination.
tomohawk 4y ago
None of this matters unless only secret balloting is allowed. Mail in balloting is not secret. Only in-person balloting is secret. When a person has a mail in ballot, they could be coerced or paid for their vote in an undetectable way. It might not even be the person who is authorized to vote, but someone else entirely - again completely undetectable. History has shown time and again that people are motivated to cheat at elections, so all ballots need to be cast in a controlled space that prevents these shenanigans. This is why the vast majority of OECD countries disallow or tightly limit mail in balloting.
ensignavenger 4y ago
This appears to be the code repo- https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system But it does not have a license file or any license headers... meaning it may not be under an Open Source license at all? Some of their code- the audit program, looks like it is AGPLv3... which seems like an odd choice of license for this sort of system. Still happy to see more work on Open Source voting systems.

200 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

There was a voting machine posted here a while back that was literally transparent, as in you would literally be able to see the computer marking off the paper ballot through a transparent box. Is this the same thing, or is this something different? I don't think "computer experts say it's okay" is going to help build trust when people are distrusting of authority in the first place, so I hope it's the transparent one.

eru 4y ago
The article says: > “There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.” In any case, I don't think voting machines are a good idea. I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make them secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. Paper voting and traditional election observers work in a nice 'analog' way. It's tangible, and even a 'village idiot' can understand how it works. Most voting systems aren't complicated enough to need a computer to evaluate them. (And those that are should arguable be changed.)
- nicoburns 4y ago
  IMO secure isn't enough. You also need to make it auditable. As far as I can see, it's pretty much impossible to do this satisfactorily with a digital solution. It also seems entirely unnecessary. Manual counting systems work well, and allow people to feel like they are participating in the democratic process (because they are).
  - johnsbrayton 4y ago
    Ballot boxes that scan ballots are auditable because they keep the paper ballots. In my state, election workers have to ensure that the number of ballots is the same as the number recorded by the ballot box on election night - although we don’t recount who voted for who. The ballots are preserved.
  - frob 4y ago
    Most states use paper ballots that are then run through electronic tallying machines. This process is completely auditable. This is how people lying about the 2020 election were able to do all of their sham audits in Arizona and Wisconsin.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > This process is completely auditable Presumably the auditing process would involve tallying the votes manually... in case why bother with the electronic process? Unless you only run the audit if there's a complaint. Which I guess works. But personally for something as important as elections I would much more comfortable with a system where the transparent, hard-to-corrupt process is used by default.
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      You are missing the part that somebody could add additional ballots which is a claim that is being made. Supposedly there was a water leak and then people brought in some extra ballots.
- fredleblanc 4y ago
  I live in New Hampshire, and though I've never voted on a computer where I'm touching a screen, I still feed my paper ballot into a scantron machine that seems to do all the counting. I’ve voted in maybe 20 elections (between local, state, and federal) in my lifetime, and it's always been done this way around here. Maybe we all forget that that's a computer, too. All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Ranked choice voting systems (e.g. single transferable vote) have a lot of "game theory" advantages over e.g. first-past-the-post, but are hard to implement with manual counting. Edit: I suppose that doesn't mean voting machines are required though, just that the results on each ballot paper need to be inputted to a computer to determine the outcome. A lot of data inputting required, but still auditable.
  - eru 4y ago
    First-past-the-post is pretty horrible. Alas, experience from Australia shows that single transferable vote isn't any better in practice, either. It's more complicated with no benefit in practice. (See https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html for more details on Australia.) If traditional voting is required, I have higher hopes for approval voting or the slightly more complicated range voting. These are quite easy to evaluate completely by hand. Especially the former. If you are happy to go a bit off the beaten track, using sortition amongst volunteers might be a good way to fill up a parliament. (Or any other body big enough for the law of large numbers to kick in.) As a slightly more complicated system, I would have every voter indicate their favourite candidate on a ballot sheet, and then draw enough votes at random to fill up parliament. (Use your favourite mechanism to handle the same candidate being voted for multiple times in your sample. Perhaps give them more weight, or re-draw, or have people write down an ordered list of preferred candidates, and admit the highest ranked one who isn't already in parliament, etc.) Random sampling is surprisingly powerful. It also completely bypasses Arrow's impossibility theorem.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Does it ?! Wow, that is tempting...
      - eru 4y ago
        Well, Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic procedures.
      - Vecr 4y ago
- velcrovan 4y ago
  I’m curious, do you distinguish between ballot counting machines (what the NH SoS is talking about) and voting machines (your term)? I understand “voting machine” to be any mechanism that acts as a substitute for a paper ballot, or that acts as an intermediary between you and a paper ballot. And I would agree that the former are a terrible idea and the latter probably don’t provide much net benefit. But ballot counting machines are a different matter. Here’s the thing: there’s no voting process without a ballot counting machine. It’s just a matter of whether that machine will be a carbon-based one subject to bias, fatigue, boredom and hunger, or an electronic one that excels at stupid-simple repetitive tasks and is subject to none of those things.
  - eru 4y ago
    There's a third option: a mechanical ballot counter. I know that human beings are fallible. That's why I wrote: > I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make [electronic machines] secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. People are used to the failure modes of other humans. And they trust other humans in a way they don't trust machines. This is similar to how juries still put a lot of stock in eye witnesses.
    - velcrovan 4y ago
      How is “mechanical ballot counter” a third, distinct option from “ballot counting machine”? Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy?
      - eru 4y ago
        > Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy? Potentially, yes. Especially if you used off-the-shelf machines that IBM built in 1920. In any case, that's just a distraction. Just use humans.
- frob 4y ago
  Electronic ballot-tallying machines are necessary to running accurate and speedy elections. As we saw in the Arizona fiasco with the "Cyber Ninjas," hand-counting ballots takes weeks, if not months. Additionally, hand-counting has an error margin of 1-2%. In a era where many races are within a point or two, hand-counting ballots will lead to the wrong person winning office. We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.
  - CHY872 4y ago
    In the UK all ballots are hand counted, and the counting is done within a day. I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
    - eru 4y ago
      Same in Germany.
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      How many races are on your ballot? Next Tuesday, I'll have 11 races to vote for, plus 4 ballot referendums. That's probably a median election ballot in the US.
      - whoooooo123 4y ago
        In the UK? Typically just one race: you vote to elect your local MP. You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
      - 4y ago
snarf21 4y ago
Voting machines should only ever be used to automate counting of votes. They should never mark the voting sheet. Having the physical paper lets us easily recount or reverify. If it was marked erroneously, all is lost.
- kube-system 4y ago
  No, the paper should be marked by a machine, and displayed to the user for confirmation. If you let the user mark the paper, you get 'hanging chad' problems.
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hirundo 4y ago

> Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H. Anyone who cares to will be able to see if the new machines recorded the votes correctly If hand counting paper ballots instills confidence, then at some low level of public confidence in elections, it makes sense to do so routinely, rather than just a demonstration. Vilifying doubters doesn't seem to be very effective. For many of those there is no level of proof that could dent their opinion, so little is lost by simply attacking them. But there are many others that are convincible by sufficient openness. Sure, turning it back into a manual process has its own issues, particularly with efficiency. But with an election efficiency is a minor consideration compared to confidence.

bediger4000 4y ago
There have traditionally been ways to mess with a hand count. One example I recall is vote counters wedging a piece of pencil lead under a fingernail. If they see a ballot they don't like, swipe the lead across it and toss the ballot in the "spoiled" pile. Sure, this requires a little bit of blind eye from the county clerk (or whoever), but if the election goes the right way, it's worth it.
- iso1631 4y ago
  In the UK party candidates and guests are watching the count so would pick that up. It's very rare that the losing candidate plus all spoiled votes makes a difference in any case, and significant numbers of double voting would raise very interesting questions. They simply don't happen.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I do believe audits and observers would catch that pretty quick.
  - puffoflogic 4y ago
    Not when the observers are banned from the room because social distancing.

Simulacra 4y ago

“Software everyone can see“ sounds like window dressing.. You would have to understand how the software works. Open source voting software is a great idea, but the vast majority of people are not gonna have any clue. Is this really transparency?

eru 4y ago
It's a small step in the right direction.
pessimizer 4y ago
> You would have to understand how the software works. No you don't. You have the opportunity to trust someone who understands how the software works, which you wouldn't have if the people you trust weren't allowed to inspect the software. With this kind of logic, you could never trust an election where you didn't physically count all of the votes yourself. Since that doesn't make sense (not scalable when elections get beyond about 20-30 people), we allow voters to send people they trust to observe and participate in the vote count. This is like that.

iso1631 4y ago

In the UK we go to a voting place. We get given a piece of paper. We walk to a little booth, we mark an X next to who we want, we put that piece of paper in a black box. Your name is crossed off on a piece of paper to say you've voted. That black box gathers a few hundred votes over the course of the day. There are multiple people in the room with that black box throughout the day. At the end of the day the number of people who have voted and the number of pieces of paper that have been used, are both counted to ensure they are the same. The box is then sealed (with tamper tape) and transported to a central hall, usually in a car, but sometimes by ferry or helicopter depending on weather and location. Obviously this takes longer for rural areas than for urban areas. When it arrives, it is unsealed in front of many witnesses, and the ballots emptied. They are counted (how many pieces of paper), and this number matches the above paperwork. The ballots are then put into a pile in the middle of the room where all the candidates and their teams can see, and are counted by a team of however many (say a team of 20 for a district of 60k votes - tend to be local council workers being paid overtime). From the counts I've seen, 300-600 an hour is a reasonable speed. Those are bundled into bundles of 100 and put into piles on display. Any ambiguous marking that the person counting or the people watching think is amigious is set aside (the famous "WANK/WANK/NOT WANK" case [0]), and the candidates and their agents get to see and agree on the paper. Urban counts of districts with c. 70,000 voters tend to get the first ballot boxes about 10-15 minutes after polling closes and start counting. Some have large numbers counting in an aim to get the count done first (in an hour or so), others take longer, but the majority of districts are verified, counted, and recounted after about 6 hours. Some places have to wait for the aforementioned ferry etc so don't report to maybe 12 hours after. I don't understand why you need machines to vote or machines to count. Breaking the system above by a few votes is probably possible with a small team of conspirators, but breaking it beyond that doesn't scale. [0] https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-ballot-paper-puts-not-wnk-next-to-greens-deemed-acceptable-as-a-vote-233070 https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/voter-writes-wnk-all-over-bal...

puffoflogic 4y ago
> Your name is crossed off on a piece of paper to say you've voted. In the US, this is racist. > where all the candidates and their teams can see In the US, this is insurrectionist.

falafelite 4y ago

A lot of skepticism and negativity here, with a focus on "open source means something to me, not the layman" as well as mentions of is that really helpful, is it auditable, etc. Valid concerns, but I guess my reaction is hopeful because hey there's at least one group of people who are trying to build something that is more transparent. Maybe it's not perfect, but (at least to me) seems like a step in a good direction. Also for what it's worth the company making the tech has a product for auditing as well. Idk guess I'm feeling more optimistic this morning.

eru 4y ago
I wrote some skeptical remarks. But yes: this is definitely progress compared to closed source machines.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> Maybe it's not perfect, but (at least to me) seems like a step in a good direction. Is it? Provided you have a working democratic state with checks and auditing, what is the problem that voting machines solve? The level of guarantees that you have with a paper vote is hard to surpass and the inconvenience of paper vote is not that big considering how often voting occurs (even in the extreme case of Swiss style referendums).
- falafelite 4y ago
  Is a paper-vote a reference to literally marking a piece of paper, or a human counting said piece of paper? Sorry if that's a dumb question, just want to make sure I follow. It seems like this tech works with marking a piece of paper that is then read by a machine. I suppose if the paper is kept, perhaps it's nice from the point of view of the election-handling-folks to automate the counting process, but be able to audit the paper ballots?
- davoneus 4y ago
  >Provided you have a working democratic state with checks and auditing, what is the problem that voting machines solve? It solves the problem of waiting days or weeks for a result. It solves the problem of multiple languages on a ballot. It solves the problem of visually-impaired voters accessing the voting machine, it solves the problem of incorrectly filled out voting sheets (hanging-chat). Hell, that's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure others can contribute more.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

Sorry - so how do I ensure that the code running is the code I expect it to at the moment I vote? I "can simply hire a computer expert to examine it and see, in real time"? That doesn't seem feasible while I'm sitting in the voting booth. I see they are using manual vote counting this time around to check, but how is that any guarantee the software will be the same in 2 years time when it happens all over again? Knowing there is software in some git repo somewhere that I can audit doesn't make me trust the machine in front of me any more.

starkd 4y ago
True, the average voter is not inclined to hire a computer expert to do an analysis, but if there is widespread suspicion, they will at least have the ability to vent their collective outrage into an actual audit of the code. This transparency can provide some assurance.
- mFixman 4y ago
  Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests by creating software that did the expected results only during an audit. Doing the same for voting software would be much easier. There's no way for a computer to completely prove it has the right software for a job.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Can it though? If the audit is called for after the election how do we determine the code that the auditor is inspecting is what was run on election day? It's still a black box on election day - it's just got detailed instructions written on it claiming that's what is inside.
- nyokodo 4y ago
  > audit of the code The OP is talking about the inability to audit the code actually running at the time of voting. You can audit the code in the repo all you like but if the hardware of the voting machine is compromised, or the code you audit is modified or replaced sometime before execution, or there is other malicious code running on the machine interfering with the voting then your audit is useless.

sidewndr46 4y ago

Unless I can take home the voting machine & verify that the software running on the machine is in fact the claimed software this doesn't mean anything. You could just as easily publish one set of software and have the machine run something completely different.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
That's my struggle with this as well - what are you going to do, show me a checksum on the monitor to somehow "prove" that the software is the same?
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Given that they could just as easily fake the checksum, they might as well use a 1-bit checksum. The security of a 1-bit checksum is just as good as a 256-bit checksum in that scenario.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Yeah, that's why I wrote it "prove" - it's not proving anything. There's absolutely no way they can prove that the code in that box is the same as on the repo, not to mention all the other upstream issues - it has to send that count somewhere to be aggregated, and now we're even further removed from all the possible points of "failure".
starkd 4y ago
They can automate the installation of the current code onto the machine, which is in turn also open source.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  They are going to have 24 hour cameras pointed to the machines after the installation, including during shipment right? If not somebody could change the software. Even with cameras somebody could manipulate it probably.

jmyeet 4y ago

I'm glad to see New Hampshire still has paper ballots doing this. Pure electronic voting (IMHO) should be banned. Either you should fill out a ballot that a computer can verify or use a touchscreen that produces a paper (filled-in) ballot. As for open source, I don't think it matters. I mean, even if the software is open soruce, how do you know what the machine is running? Are you going to build it yourself and verify hashes? Can you? Don't get me wrong: open source for something like this is a good idea. Experts should be able to verify this. It just won't stop claims of election fraud because those largely aren't based on a lack of transparency but rather political expeidency.

jmclnx 4y ago

> there’s a paper record to prove it. Well at least NH seems to be doing it right. But if I use that machine, do I get to see the paper record. What I mean, is it printed for me to look at and placed into a sealed ballot box ? If not, then I am glad I do not live in NH.

tomatotomato37 4y ago

Can someone enlighten me why we need a full multipurpose computer that can run custom software just to increment one of two numbers? What's the secret sauce that means we can't run the whole election off of a cluster of 4000-series CMOS's on a breadboard mounted in a plexiglass case in the public somewhere?

willcipriano 4y ago
You probably want a record of votes with times and not just a simple counter.
- yifanl 4y ago
  I'll come off as glib. but... why? So third parties can make a funny youtube infographic timeseries?
  - delecti 4y ago
    So you can demonstrate that votes correspond to people voting. Not on an individual basis, but just to make sure that if you have 100 votes on a machine (or 1000 votes across 10 machines at a location, they happened when there were 100 (or 1000) people at that voting location. It prevents adding votes before or after the fact, like putting a thumb on a scale.
    - yifanl 4y ago
      You'd have to hide the results of the vote if you're collating them with timestamp, otherwise you could pretty easily figure out Bob who showed up early voted for the square. And I'm unsure how adding timestamp helps with the problem you're trying to solve, don't you just need Sum(machine vote count at location X) == voters visiting location X. (Also this hueristic is kinda leaky since how do you account for voters protesting with intentional spoilers?)
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    If you let the government get away with just simple counts they don't have to work as hard to fake an election. A time series can be compared with exit polling for example to highlight irregular patterns.

ecshafer 4y ago

Open Source is not sufficient for voting machines, and frankly I don't think software should be involved at all. How do we know the source code was compiled without a tool chain attack? How can we verify that the software running even is the source code involved? How can we verify there isn't some kind of IME like kernel running somewhere that does something nefarious? How we do know it wasn't tampered with? Even if you remove networking from a machine the whole system is so fragile and there are very high stakes at play.

lbriner 4y ago
The same way you verify that manually counted votes haven't been miscounted, discarded or altered. You allow witnesses. Independent examiners will be permitted to verify the source code is actually used as-built, that it has a signature attached and that every machine that is built has the signature checked. Sure, it's not perfect but neither is manual counting (plenty of countries are proving that right now). The question is, I guess, does a software-based system provide notable advantages over manual counting other than cost and speed of a result?
- sb057 4y ago
  Are you going to have experts examine the hardware of 1 million+ voting machines in the United States? And are all of those witnesses going to be infallible and trusted by the public?
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Don't need to test them all, just enough to probabilistically catch anyone hacking them.
    - Vecr 4y ago
      Yes you would need to test them all, I assume there are school board elections and things like that with only one or a few machines. Not everything is the presidential election.
- 4y ago

Vvector 4y ago

We need a voter verified paper trail, based on an open standard, that can be read by different tabulator machines running different software, and still be hand counted just in case.

contravariant 4y ago
That's basically just pen and paper but with automated counting machines.
- Vvector 4y ago
  Computer assistance can prevent over-votes and warn of under-votes. It also resolves any "voter intent" questions (i.e. hanging chads). It can also format the printed ballot to increase the speed at which a machine can read them.
jcrawfordor 4y ago
That's exactly what this system, and the majority of electronic voting systems used in the US for the last decade, provides.

up2isomorphism 4y ago

Voter id voter id voter id, that’s it. It is ridiculous that we are still debating on that , which shows how messed up we are now.

mrweasel 4y ago
What do you mean? As someone not in the US, I don't know what you mean if you just write "voter id" three time.
- Vecr 4y ago
  In some places in the US they don't check your ID before you vote. When I voted this year and last they did not check for any ID whatsoever, and the only information they wanted could be looked up in a phone book or previous voter record (but I did flash a US passport last year just in case, so they know I'm probably not an illegal, this year they probably know who I am, new clerk last year). Without checking IDs it's easier to vote twice (under a false name all but one time, or some bluffing/sneakiness to avoid giving a name, otherwise you would probably get caught). The main thing people appear to be concerned about is people voting where they are not supposed to be, such as US non-citizens on visas/green cards, tourists, and illegals. Another problem would be voting in the wrong state's elections, or the wrong county/schoolboard's.

duxup 4y ago

I always like the mix of the scanning ballots in Minnesota that are paper / filled out by hand, scanned and go into a box tied to a machine for easy auditing.

ilc 4y ago

This is one of the few areas where paper is still king, IMHO. Been filling out paper ballots for years. I don't want to vote on a machine. A machine can count my vote. But there should be a paper that goes in the ballot box, so it can be recounted using multiple methods. Different machines, humans, dogs, cats... whatever. There are real physical artifacts.

anonym29 4y ago
+1! But this is still a net positive. Multiple forms of validation and open sourcing the software running on these machines are both components of a "defense in depth" strategy.
capableweb 4y ago
So you're for this voting system then? Your messages reads like you're against the system mentioned in the submission, but it seems like the system is actually doing it via paper, just like how you want it? The trial described in the article: > On November 8, VotingWorks machines will be used in a real election in real time. New Hampshire is the second state to use the open-source machines after Mississippi first did so in 2019. Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H. It seems to involve paper ballots, as far as I can understand it. And this is how the authors of the voting system describes it themselves: https://www.voting.works/voting-system https://www.voting.works/voting-system
- ilc 4y ago
  I'm not sure I like VMDs. They can lead to slippery slopes. IE: Only Fred used the VMD... Or how does the counter interpret the VMD? Are people vigilant about checking their ballots? Pen, paper -> Into Box -> Counting, KISS. I can deal with a scantron. Not much more is needed here. I'd rather we work on chain of custody and figuring out who has voted etc, that are harder to solve. Though honestly, the fraud rates are so low, on double voting, I suspect made up voters, and ballot box stuffing are bigger concerns.

elil17 4y ago

When I voted in this year's election in the US, I used a computer which printed my ballot after I filled it out digitally. That ballot was then scanned by another computer and put in a ballot box for any potential future recounts. That seems like the ideal way to do it to me - I eliminate the risk that my ballot isn't counted due to my admittedly poor scantron filling skills but I still get a paper ballot in a box that a human can count if need be.

schimmy_changa 4y ago

Man, people are really negative about this, but it's a great idea. In the old days, paper ballots would also 'go missing' from districts known to be favorable to the other side (aka be chucked out of trucks on a bridge over a river). The best option seems to be open source voting machines + paper audit. This way you get immediate counts and then an audit trail, so would-be manipulators have to mess with BOTH at the same time which is significantly harder. Think you know a better way HN? Let's hear it.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
Yes, that's why we have poll watches / volunteers from both sides.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Brazilian here, we've been using voting machines for quite some time now. We are currently facing nation wide protests at least partly due to suspicion of election fraud. People aren't accepting the election's results. Questioning the legitimacy of the voting machines has also become illegal ("fake news").
- ufo 4y ago
  (Because of unfounded claims of fraud, according to the losing candidate). It's a shame. There are many ways that the voting machines could be improved but that will be much harder now that the far right has monopolized the discourse on auditable paper trails in their self-serving attempts to overturn valid election results.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Your argument makes no sense to me. You think there's many ways the system can be improved. In other words, you think it's fallible. At the same time, you think any results produced by such a system are legitimate and should be accepted at face value. Why shouldn't "the far right" question results that are questionable?

TrevorJ 4y ago

The fact that at some point over the last 6 years, a huge bipartisan majority of people expressed doubts about the security of our elections (One party in 2016, another in 2020) and yet very little real change has been accomplished is pretty telling. Fact is, if you are in power, there's very little motivation to mess with or risk a change to the system that got you into power.

ensignavenger 4y ago

It is worth noting that Windham New Hampshire had a case of actual vote miscounting in the 2020 election- though not the presidential election- and the miscounts did not change the results. The Democrat who lost the race is the one who requested the recount (and the recount favored the Republican candidates who won). See https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-new-hampshire-voting-machines-election-2020-campaign-2016-7bd52410b91c65a1922141d8a7af626f https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-new-hampshire-voting... https://www.concordmonitor.com/voting-machines-nh-new-hampshire-43907947 https://www.concordmonitor.com/voting-machines-nh-new-hampsh... The news of this has of course been buried under all of the false claims of voter fraud from the 2020 presidential election. So it is not surprising that New Hampshire would be looking at a new approach to voting machine technology.

Rebelgecko 4y ago
Wow, those error rates are actually much higher than I'd have expected. I wonder if the cause is something like a difference in how humans vs machines deem ballots invalid?
- jandrese 4y ago
  You can change a lot of votes by altering the rules as to what is considered a valid vote. Read into the details of the 2000 election and you'll see just how much of a leg up George W Bush got from party control of the vote counting. There are plenty of scenarios where he would have lost if the rules were decided differently during the counting process. Had the decisions been made neutrally Bush would have lost in Florida.
- ensignavenger 4y ago
  The audit found that the ballots had been folded "incorrectly" (Is there a right way to fold the ballots?) and if the crease went through the mark for a candidate, it would count the crease as a mark. This meant if the voter had marked another candidate, it would think it was double voted and not count it, and if they had not marked a candidate, it would count it as a vote. I am not sure having the source code of the machines be open source would help, but maybe make it easier to audit and detect that the crease would lead to a miscounted ballot.

upofadown 4y ago

Wait, you mean that there is currently non-inspectable software in a path that could allow that software to switch around votes? How could that possibly work?

pessimizer 4y ago
That's been the case since the dawn of voting machines.

cakeface 4y ago

You can see the source code on github https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite Looks to be TypeScript running on node. They have an embedded kiosk browser.

ElijahLynn 4y ago
Thank you, I was skimming the article for a link to the source code but was having trouble finding it.

Stevvo 4y ago

"the Python and Linux programming languages are all open-source"

ElijahLynn 4y ago

I'm having a tough time finding the link to the source code in the article. Am I missing it?

ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago

No matter how transparent the voting software and machines are, nothing can fix election between candidates who all hatch from the same incubator.

sgc 4y ago

"that everyone can see" makes me want to see completely analogue tabulators that tally the vote using only mechanical means, inside glass cases that are being recorded and streamed. Less seriously, add random dry ice steam, fire, and whirling gears for best effect.

constantcrying 4y ago

Voting machines should not exist. Even if they are just printers. Computerized vote counting is a ridicolously bad idea on every imaginable level. Especially if there is any amount of centralization. Computerized ballot printing "just" makes it very easy to deanonymize people. Here where I live your name is crossed of a list after you have shown your ID card. Then you get a piece of paper which is thrown into a box. Given the incentives, anything less rigorous seems quite ridicolous.

wewtyflakes 4y ago
Given the incentives, why does that make you trust humans more?
- constantcrying 4y ago
  Because corrupting one hunan likely has negible effects. Corrupting one machine is equivalent to being able to corrupt all similar machines. Voting machines have attack vectors which can not work on humans.

cosmojg 4y ago

I don't get why we don't just print receipts with anonymous hashes at polling stations, publish all counted votes with those hashes, and allow people to independently verify that their vote was counted. This would be so easy to implement. It's truly depressing that it hasn't.

yamtaddle 4y ago
You'll still have people saying there were extra votes or that the votes weren't counted correctly. It'd have almost no effect on complaints about election integrity, just like... every other indication they're barking up the wrong tree hasn't had an effect.

aksss 4y ago

Twenty years ago, we could count on results the same night of the election, and in our town/city election night was always a party night - everybody involved in the campaigns would gather in a convention center where the local news orgs would live broadcast, the surrounding bars would be packed, and usually by 10-11pm, winners would be known. Somehow, twenty years in the future, we don't know results until weeks after the election, and auditability/transparency sucks.

halffaday 4y ago

> the Python and Linux programming languages are all open-source. Yikes

bkmeneguello 4y ago

Voting doesn't need to be fixed. It must be banned! Voting is an act of faith. Faith in who manages the electoral process. We need a private laws system, where you hire the governance you want, no more majority oppression or state subordination.

tomohawk 4y ago

None of this matters unless only secret balloting is allowed. Mail in balloting is not secret. Only in-person balloting is secret. When a person has a mail in ballot, they could be coerced or paid for their vote in an undetectable way. It might not even be the person who is authorized to vote, but someone else entirely - again completely undetectable. History has shown time and again that people are motivated to cheat at elections, so all ballots need to be cast in a controlled space that prevents these shenanigans. This is why the vast majority of OECD countries disallow or tightly limit mail in balloting.

ensignavenger 4y ago

This appears to be the code repo- https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system But it does not have a license file or any license headers... meaning it may not be under an Open Source license at all? Some of their code- the audit program, looks like it is AGPLv3... which seems like an odd choice of license for this sort of system. Still happy to see more work on Open Source voting systems.