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Towns are testing new ballot counting machines that use open source software

116 points by Jimmc414 4y ago

djbusby 4y ago
It's the https://www.voting.works/ https://www.voting.works/ VotingWorks project
philips 4y ago
VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance, and of course the open source nature opening up the potential for a competitive market without rip and replace. Since the article didn’t mention the RLA stuff it is here: https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits A favorite part of watching their journey has been their case study videos which were produced after they ran their first elections in small Mississippi jurisdictions: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVuDBQQA8kL https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVu... For those in San Francisco they are doing a pilot this year: https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20RELEASE_BOS%20APPROVES%20OPEN%20SOURCE%20VOTING%20PILOT.pdf https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20R... disclosure: I am a donor to VotingWorks and previously a member of the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California? You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above: > How Does a RLA Work? > A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won. > The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome. Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins. If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed. Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away. There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)
    - trelane 4y ago
      > There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. Uhh, citation please?
      - cudgy 4y ago
        Given that countless companies, websites, social media networks, governmental organizations, hospitals, school systems, and individuals including consumer credit companies are hacked every year, do you really need more evidence that an electronic voting machine could be compromised?
        toofy 4y ago
        generally we need to see evidence, yes. particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in. do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”
        llbeansandrice 4y ago
        Yes. What kind of bullshit question is that? The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.
        cudgy 4y ago
        It doesn’t have to be widespread in order to have a widespread impact. Some national elections are extremely close and essentially decided in one county of a single swing state. Most local elections are by definition “local” and close local elections can be decided by the votes from a single voting precinct. Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.
    - 4y ago
  - philips 4y ago
    I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically. The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”. In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks. Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The nice thing is that all the votes with this system are on paper ballots. The paper ballots can then be verified against the machine counts. It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Would this speed up counting process? One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience" The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day. Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California. Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.
  - philips 4y ago
    Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day. I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy. I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues. As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain). The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.
ck2 4y ago
Well that's one less thing about voting weaponized. Now if only gerrymandering could be undone, it's the real nightmare.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Do you know about the cut-the-cake algorithm? A piece of cake is to be divided among two kids. Kid A cuts the cake, Kid B gets the choice of slice. It's fair. I recall reading about a mathematician who devised a cut-the-cake algorithm that would work for gerrymandering. Naturally, nobody adopted it, because nobody in power wants fair gerrymandering.
  - wnoise 4y ago
    "A Partisan Districting Protocol with Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781 Very cool. Though it does freeze in the two-party nature.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Thanks for finding it!
  - cudgy 4y ago
    How would this work in reality? One party committee proposes 5 voting district maps that lean toward their desired outcome. The other party chooses the least damaging one. Not sure this helps much. Or how about 5 random maps that evenly divide the state? Voters vote on the maps and most voted map wins.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      See the other reply which has a link the paper.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Gerrymandering happens because districts are constantly getting redrawn for population changes. What if we took the opposite approach, and instead of making it so every district had approximately the same population, made it so each representative's vote was weighted by the population of their district? Could then use county boundaries (assuming the number of counties is >= the number of representatives) Could even weight by # of votes obtained rather than district population, to incentivize being the preferred representative for as many people in your district as possible. I like having a few pro-consensus forces in our politics in a time of polarization.
WalterBright 4y ago
Being open source is a very good idea, but it doesn't mean the software that's actually loaded into the machines isn't compromised. The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result. What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago. Banking software has been compromised in the past, but the audit ability catches it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- drewbug01 4y ago
  > The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result. How could this possibly work, without having the precise same votes entered into each machine (an impossible to guarantee prerequisite)?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Start with a stack of ballots. Run the stack through one machine. Run the same stack through another machine. Check the tallies. If they differ, then the counts are discarded and the stack goes to perhaps a hand count. Each stack is handled by two people, one from each party. One feeds the machine, the other watches him.
  - shagie 4y ago
    That particular device pictured is a scanner. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/9956d4f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5000x3333+0+0/resize/1760x1174!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fad%2Fb5%2F4ec7e5b649ba9eafac8665527401%2Fps-new.jpg https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/9956d4f/21474836... It can scan a scantron sheet in which the page, side, column and row are used to generate a number. For example a bubble filled in on page 1, side 1, column 4, row 8 would generate 110408. There is some business logic here that says that "For page 1, side 1, only one of 0408, 0409, 0410 may be entered". At the end, however, you get a number counted that is then tallied for and then that is mapped back to Bob Smith for the votes. Note the alignment guides on the sides - https://www.amazon.com/Official-SCANTRON-Brand-Answer-Sheet/dp/B09X3L593T/ https://www.amazon.com/Official-SCANTRON-Brand-Answer-Sheet/... If the scanner detects a barcode page being entered (that was generated by a touch screen system), then one of the barcodes encodes the number 110408, and the barcode is read rather than trying to go from the scantron page guides. --- In the case, you've got the scanner here, you enter them into the scanner and get the vote counts "live". Then, you take them out of the secured spot and scan them all in to the other machine and compare the vote tallies. There is a paper ballot that is recording this. In the event that there is a recount, then the paper ballot is examined and the name next to the bubble is what the human auditor uses to count votes.
schimmy_changa 4y ago
Discussed here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770 It's a great idea - transparent, able for anyone to verify, with a paper trail.
woah 4y ago
Why does voting need to be automated at all? Elections have run fine for hundreds of years with manual counts.
- timeimp 4y ago
  How else can the TV networks know on the day!?!? I mean, run the elections on Saturday instead. Then you'd have a whole weekend to count without work getting in the way
  - adlpz 4y ago
    In other countries it's done manually and results are published as the counting happens and finished within the same day. Of course the US is large, but I don't see how that's a limiting factor, being the process naturally very parallel.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      It used to be the same in the US. Somehow counting seems to slow down the more voting machines we use.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Have they though? You deposit your vote, and have no way to know if it was counted as you intended. Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO.
  - hirundo 4y ago
    > Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO. If you can verify your own vote you can use the same method to verify your vote to someone else, opening up the voter to the pressures that motivated voter privacy. Like payments for voting right or threats for voting wrong. So in some measure individual vote verification would trade transparency for vote coercion and selling.
_HMCB_ 4y ago
In the end, a certain segment (and growing) will still say elections are rigged. “Transparency“ will be meaningless going forward; even after a code audit. The allegations: Someone intercepted the count in those few milliseconds after the voter submits; Someone siphoned votes away after the fact.
evolve2k 4y ago
The voting machine source code repo: https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system Like what they are doing? Give them a star.
hayst4ck 4y ago
The number 1 most important property of voting by far is that the results are believable. Voting machines irreparably damage the believability that an election was fair. They require trust, they require operation, and they increase the blast radius of bad actors. They are fundamentally a black box, open source or not, because the operation of them is subject to human malfeasance. There is no guarantee the open source software itself is what is running on those machines. I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify. I cannot even begin to explain the details or process of how an election is run. I can't even think of edge cases for voting and how they are addressed because there is too much I don't know I don't know. I can't tell you what prevents double voting, voting on behalf of non voters (for example if I knew 10 people who haven't voted in 30 years, I might be able to submit a ballot on behalf of them), or what prevents ballot interception. Some states use "signatures" yet my signature is not even remotely distinct. It doesn't have to be this way. In Taiwan, you go to your voting location, you vote in a booth, you put your ballot into a box, the box is opened after polling hours and votes are tallied publicly with anonymous ballots shown publicly as they are tallied. Ambiguous ballots are subject to public review. All unambiguous votes are counted. Everything except filling out the ballot itself is public. When conservatives spew forth the big lie, that is not something that can be thrown under the rug. That is not a Trump problem, that is not a conserative problem, that is an America problem. If election results are not fairly undeniable, the basis of democracy (that those in the minority should submit to majority rule) is violated. The fact that election officials are more concerned with "counting the vote" than "our voting integrity is unimpeachable" is a big problem.
- bilekas 4y ago
  The fact that there has been no evidence of any significant voter fraud, machine malfunction etc is a conservative problem. I only see Left and Liberal believing in the data. And pushing for people to vote. Instead the right say "if we win it's good, if not we need to investigate". So I don't buy your line personally. What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections? Serious question I'm curious. Because this is a fairly recent phenomenon that has exploded exponentially thanks to conservatives. Most famously Trump.
squokko 4y ago
There is a simple solution here: everyone gets a serial number with their ballot, the list of serial numbers for each candidate is published, and you can verify that your vote was counted in the right spot. Yes, this is susceptible to coerced voting where your family member can force you to vote a certain way, but guess what, the entire vote-by-mail system that we've gone to is already susceptible to that, so as far as I'm concerned the ship is sailed.
DarthNebo 4y ago
Tax funded equipment should be running open source software out of the gate. Gujarat government in India also made the push for public WiFi hotspot software to be FOSS
coffeeblack 4y ago
Serious question: why not count them manually?
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  Agreed. I don’t know why counting is so slow in the US. If you have resources to hold an election, you have resources to make sure that ballot counting is done in a reasonable time
  - coffeeblack 4y ago
    Another aspect I don’t get is, why are voted in the U.S. shipped to central counting facilities, instead of counting decentralized in each voting station? Not sure if it’s common in the U.S. I just remember the videos from that Detroit counting centre (the one where they tapped over the windows, so observers couldn’t look inside).
    - coffeeblack 4y ago
      Apparently, the same is happening right now in Maricopa County. Ballots being collected and shipped to “counting facilities”. https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1589997249584857088 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/158999724958485708...
wildcow 4y ago
We need a way confirming that the source code i look at on fx GitHub is the software that runs on the machine.
teddyh 4y ago
Machines of any kind have absolutely no place in any voting system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
piokoch 4y ago
What is that crazy pull for ballot counting machines? Election is not happening every week, has to be supervised by humans anyway, this additional cost of having two more people here and there to count votes, sign the papers and put ballot results on the doors for transparency is negligible as compared to the problem that distrust in the election process is causing. USA knows this best, yet they dance around "better" and "more secure" voting machine solving problems that are already solved. "Secure" voting machines is indeed interesting engineering problem, so I am not surprised this is being discussed on HN, but let's face it, we don't need to solve this engineering problem. Progress is not always something good. X-Raying foot while purchasing shoes was also very cool in the '50, but it turned out this is not such a great thing.
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
FYI: written in Typescript
reese_john 4y ago
Meanwhile in Brazil, the land of electronic voting, they hired Oracle's "Cloud at Customer" offering to count votes on a "Exadata X8 Full Rack" server ... I wonder if that decision really was a technical one. [0] https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2020/Novembro/nota-de-esclarecimento-sobre-nuvem-para-contabilizar-votos https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2020/Novembro/no...
jefurii 4y ago
We need to have a system where all the code is open source and available for download. All the code, from the registration servers to the voting machines to the tallying servers. Everything made available along with the SHA256 checksums. The public should be able to clone repositories of all the software, run the checksums on their own hardware, and examine software checksums on every piece of voting equipment they have access to. Checksums for each piece of hardware used by the government should be made public. Digital representations of votes need to be in text, and they need to exactly match a printed receipt given to the voter at the moment they vote. The data would include a digital signature, some hash of the vote values, the precinct, the datetime, and a salt, and would be anonymized. The data should go into Git repositories. You wouldn't put an entire state's data into a single repository, you'd have separate repos for e.g. the district or even precinct level. Git repositories would be initiated before voting begins, and updates could come in via network or via physical storage transported with the same security as ballot boxes. [Before all the Git haters descend to say that the public will never be able to use Git for themselves, I agree with you that that would never work. Nobody would be using Git directly, the software would use Git under the hood to manage the vote data.] Once the repositories of vote data are conveyed to the district level, the public should be able to browse all the votes, and each person should be able to enter the digital signature from their paper receipt (via typing, or QRCode, semacode, barcode, or whatever) and find their vote. If they want and if they are organized enough, they should be able to confirm that the votes of whole communities are in fact all in the system. The public should be able to download the vote tallying software along with as much of the vote data as they want, and run the counts on their own hardware. If the data is in Git repositories, every single vote will have a digital signature. Every modification of the data that is committed would have a signature, and would have its own signature. Every piece of data, every modification, and every bit of the history would be perfectly transmissible, and if it's not perfect it will become immediately apparent.

116 points by Jimmc414 4y ago

It's the https://www.voting.works/ https://www.voting.works/ VotingWorks project

VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance, and of course the open source nature opening up the potential for a competitive market without rip and replace. Since the article didn’t mention the RLA stuff it is here: https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits A favorite part of watching their journey has been their case study videos which were produced after they ran their first elections in small Mississippi jurisdictions: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVuDBQQA8kL https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVu... For those in San Francisco they are doing a pilot this year: https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20RELEASE_BOS%20APPROVES%20OPEN%20SOURCE%20VOTING%20PILOT.pdf https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20R... disclosure: I am a donor to VotingWorks and previously a member of the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California? You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.
- hedora 4y ago
  Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above: > How Does a RLA Work? > A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won. > The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome. Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins. If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed. Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away. There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)
  - trelane 4y ago
    > There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. Uhh, citation please?
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Given that countless companies, websites, social media networks, governmental organizations, hospitals, school systems, and individuals including consumer credit companies are hacked every year, do you really need more evidence that an electronic voting machine could be compromised?
      - toofy 4y ago
        generally we need to see evidence, yes. particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in. do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”
      - llbeansandrice 4y ago
        Yes. What kind of bullshit question is that? The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.
        cudgy 4y ago
        It doesn’t have to be widespread in order to have a widespread impact. Some national elections are extremely close and essentially decided in one county of a single swing state. Most local elections are by definition “local” and close local elections can be decided by the votes from a single voting precinct. Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.
  - 4y ago
- philips 4y ago
  I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically. The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”. In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks. Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The nice thing is that all the votes with this system are on paper ballots. The paper ballots can then be verified against the machine counts. It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.
systemvoltage 4y ago
Would this speed up counting process? One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience" The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day. Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California. Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.
- philips 4y ago
  Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day. I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy. I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues. As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain). The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.

ck2 4y ago

Well that's one less thing about voting weaponized. Now if only gerrymandering could be undone, it's the real nightmare.

WalterBright 4y ago
Do you know about the cut-the-cake algorithm? A piece of cake is to be divided among two kids. Kid A cuts the cake, Kid B gets the choice of slice. It's fair. I recall reading about a mathematician who devised a cut-the-cake algorithm that would work for gerrymandering. Naturally, nobody adopted it, because nobody in power wants fair gerrymandering.
- wnoise 4y ago
  "A Partisan Districting Protocol with Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781 Very cool. Though it does freeze in the two-party nature.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Thanks for finding it!
- cudgy 4y ago
  How would this work in reality? One party committee proposes 5 voting district maps that lean toward their desired outcome. The other party chooses the least damaging one. Not sure this helps much. Or how about 5 random maps that evenly divide the state? Voters vote on the maps and most voted map wins.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    See the other reply which has a link the paper.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
Gerrymandering happens because districts are constantly getting redrawn for population changes. What if we took the opposite approach, and instead of making it so every district had approximately the same population, made it so each representative's vote was weighted by the population of their district? Could then use county boundaries (assuming the number of counties is >= the number of representatives) Could even weight by # of votes obtained rather than district population, to incentivize being the preferred representative for as many people in your district as possible. I like having a few pro-consensus forces in our politics in a time of polarization.

WalterBright 4y ago

Being open source is a very good idea, but it doesn't mean the software that's actually loaded into the machines isn't compromised. The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result. What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago. Banking software has been compromised in the past, but the audit ability catches it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drewbug01 4y ago
> The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result. How could this possibly work, without having the precise same votes entered into each machine (an impossible to guarantee prerequisite)?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Start with a stack of ballots. Run the stack through one machine. Run the same stack through another machine. Check the tallies. If they differ, then the counts are discarded and the stack goes to perhaps a hand count. Each stack is handled by two people, one from each party. One feeds the machine, the other watches him.
- shagie 4y ago
  That particular device pictured is a scanner. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/9956d4f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5000x3333+0+0/resize/1760x1174!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fad%2Fb5%2F4ec7e5b649ba9eafac8665527401%2Fps-new.jpg https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/9956d4f/21474836... It can scan a scantron sheet in which the page, side, column and row are used to generate a number. For example a bubble filled in on page 1, side 1, column 4, row 8 would generate 110408. There is some business logic here that says that "For page 1, side 1, only one of 0408, 0409, 0410 may be entered". At the end, however, you get a number counted that is then tallied for and then that is mapped back to Bob Smith for the votes. Note the alignment guides on the sides - https://www.amazon.com/Official-SCANTRON-Brand-Answer-Sheet/dp/B09X3L593T/ https://www.amazon.com/Official-SCANTRON-Brand-Answer-Sheet/... If the scanner detects a barcode page being entered (that was generated by a touch screen system), then one of the barcodes encodes the number 110408, and the barcode is read rather than trying to go from the scantron page guides. --- In the case, you've got the scanner here, you enter them into the scanner and get the vote counts "live". Then, you take them out of the secured spot and scan them all in to the other machine and compare the vote tallies. There is a paper ballot that is recording this. In the event that there is a recount, then the paper ballot is examined and the name next to the bubble is what the human auditor uses to count votes.

schimmy_changa 4y ago

Discussed here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770 It's a great idea - transparent, able for anyone to verify, with a paper trail.

woah 4y ago

Why does voting need to be automated at all? Elections have run fine for hundreds of years with manual counts.

timeimp 4y ago
How else can the TV networks know on the day!?!? I mean, run the elections on Saturday instead. Then you'd have a whole weekend to count without work getting in the way
- adlpz 4y ago
  In other countries it's done manually and results are published as the counting happens and finished within the same day. Of course the US is large, but I don't see how that's a limiting factor, being the process naturally very parallel.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    It used to be the same in the US. Somehow counting seems to slow down the more voting machines we use.
encryptluks2 4y ago
Have they though? You deposit your vote, and have no way to know if it was counted as you intended. Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO.
- hirundo 4y ago
  > Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO. If you can verify your own vote you can use the same method to verify your vote to someone else, opening up the voter to the pressures that motivated voter privacy. Like payments for voting right or threats for voting wrong. So in some measure individual vote verification would trade transparency for vote coercion and selling.

_HMCB_ 4y ago

In the end, a certain segment (and growing) will still say elections are rigged. “Transparency“ will be meaningless going forward; even after a code audit. The allegations: Someone intercepted the count in those few milliseconds after the voter submits; Someone siphoned votes away after the fact.

evolve2k 4y ago

The voting machine source code repo: https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system Like what they are doing? Give them a star.

hayst4ck 4y ago

The number 1 most important property of voting by far is that the results are believable. Voting machines irreparably damage the believability that an election was fair. They require trust, they require operation, and they increase the blast radius of bad actors. They are fundamentally a black box, open source or not, because the operation of them is subject to human malfeasance. There is no guarantee the open source software itself is what is running on those machines. I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify. I cannot even begin to explain the details or process of how an election is run. I can't even think of edge cases for voting and how they are addressed because there is too much I don't know I don't know. I can't tell you what prevents double voting, voting on behalf of non voters (for example if I knew 10 people who haven't voted in 30 years, I might be able to submit a ballot on behalf of them), or what prevents ballot interception. Some states use "signatures" yet my signature is not even remotely distinct. It doesn't have to be this way. In Taiwan, you go to your voting location, you vote in a booth, you put your ballot into a box, the box is opened after polling hours and votes are tallied publicly with anonymous ballots shown publicly as they are tallied. Ambiguous ballots are subject to public review. All unambiguous votes are counted. Everything except filling out the ballot itself is public. When conservatives spew forth the big lie, that is not something that can be thrown under the rug. That is not a Trump problem, that is not a conserative problem, that is an America problem. If election results are not fairly undeniable, the basis of democracy (that those in the minority should submit to majority rule) is violated. The fact that election officials are more concerned with "counting the vote" than "our voting integrity is unimpeachable" is a big problem.

bilekas 4y ago
The fact that there has been no evidence of any significant voter fraud, machine malfunction etc is a conservative problem. I only see Left and Liberal believing in the data. And pushing for people to vote. Instead the right say "if we win it's good, if not we need to investigate". So I don't buy your line personally. What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections? Serious question I'm curious. Because this is a fairly recent phenomenon that has exploded exponentially thanks to conservatives. Most famously Trump.

squokko 4y ago

There is a simple solution here: everyone gets a serial number with their ballot, the list of serial numbers for each candidate is published, and you can verify that your vote was counted in the right spot. Yes, this is susceptible to coerced voting where your family member can force you to vote a certain way, but guess what, the entire vote-by-mail system that we've gone to is already susceptible to that, so as far as I'm concerned the ship is sailed.

DarthNebo 4y ago

Tax funded equipment should be running open source software out of the gate. Gujarat government in India also made the push for public WiFi hotspot software to be FOSS

coffeeblack 4y ago

Serious question: why not count them manually?

charlieyu1 4y ago
Agreed. I don’t know why counting is so slow in the US. If you have resources to hold an election, you have resources to make sure that ballot counting is done in a reasonable time
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  Another aspect I don’t get is, why are voted in the U.S. shipped to central counting facilities, instead of counting decentralized in each voting station? Not sure if it’s common in the U.S. I just remember the videos from that Detroit counting centre (the one where they tapped over the windows, so observers couldn’t look inside).
  - coffeeblack 4y ago
    Apparently, the same is happening right now in Maricopa County. Ballots being collected and shipped to “counting facilities”. https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1589997249584857088 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/158999724958485708...

wildcow 4y ago

We need a way confirming that the source code i look at on fx GitHub is the software that runs on the machine.

teddyh 4y ago

Machines of any kind have absolutely no place in any voting system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

piokoch 4y ago

What is that crazy pull for ballot counting machines? Election is not happening every week, has to be supervised by humans anyway, this additional cost of having two more people here and there to count votes, sign the papers and put ballot results on the doors for transparency is negligible as compared to the problem that distrust in the election process is causing. USA knows this best, yet they dance around "better" and "more secure" voting machine solving problems that are already solved. "Secure" voting machines is indeed interesting engineering problem, so I am not surprised this is being discussed on HN, but let's face it, we don't need to solve this engineering problem. Progress is not always something good. X-Raying foot while purchasing shoes was also very cool in the '50, but it turned out this is not such a great thing.

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

FYI: written in Typescript

reese_john 4y ago

Meanwhile in Brazil, the land of electronic voting, they hired Oracle's "Cloud at Customer" offering to count votes on a "Exadata X8 Full Rack" server ... I wonder if that decision really was a technical one. [0] https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2020/Novembro/nota-de-esclarecimento-sobre-nuvem-para-contabilizar-votos https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2020/Novembro/no...

jefurii 4y ago

We need to have a system where all the code is open source and available for download. All the code, from the registration servers to the voting machines to the tallying servers. Everything made available along with the SHA256 checksums. The public should be able to clone repositories of all the software, run the checksums on their own hardware, and examine software checksums on every piece of voting equipment they have access to. Checksums for each piece of hardware used by the government should be made public. Digital representations of votes need to be in text, and they need to exactly match a printed receipt given to the voter at the moment they vote. The data would include a digital signature, some hash of the vote values, the precinct, the datetime, and a salt, and would be anonymized. The data should go into Git repositories. You wouldn't put an entire state's data into a single repository, you'd have separate repos for e.g. the district or even precinct level. Git repositories would be initiated before voting begins, and updates could come in via network or via physical storage transported with the same security as ballot boxes. [Before all the Git haters descend to say that the public will never be able to use Git for themselves, I agree with you that that would never work. Nobody would be using Git directly, the software would use Git under the hood to manage the vote data.] Once the repositories of vote data are conveyed to the district level, the public should be able to browse all the votes, and each person should be able to enter the digital signature from their paper receipt (via typing, or QRCode, semacode, barcode, or whatever) and find their vote. If they want and if they are organized enough, they should be able to confirm that the votes of whole communities are in fact all in the system. The public should be able to download the vote tallying software along with as much of the vote data as they want, and run the counts on their own hardware. If the data is in Git repositories, every single vote will have a digital signature. Every modification of the data that is committed would have a signature, and would have its own signature. Every piece of data, every modification, and every bit of the history would be perfectly transmissible, and if it's not perfect it will become immediately apparent.