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The verifiability is the biggest one. One could conceivably develop a voting system that had perfect accountability, secrecy, and integrity, but would be far fa

The verifiability is the biggest one. One could conceivably develop a voting system that had perfect accountability, secrecy, and integrity, but would be far far more difficult to work out by hand. A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems.

Gibbon1 3y ago
Fist off where I've voted they switched from punched cards to scanning paper ballots. It's all typically run by three middle aged women with a printed book of who's registered to vote. You just tell the first one your name and they find your entry and you sign next to it. The next one hands you a scantron sheet. You mark it up. The the third one feeds your sheets into the machine as you watch. Machine records your votes and drops the sheets into a bin in the machine. That's a system I trust and it has the positive of civic engagement. And fundamentally it's not broken. You now also have the option of mailing in a ballot. That's easier to corrupt I'm sure. But at least it's still paper. All the fully computerized systems seem really really sketchy to me. Especially in low trust cultures where underhanded stuff is normalized.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  Couldn't the Scantron display one thing and record another? If the paper ballots aren't manually recounted, would anyone ever know?
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    The big thing is you can do audit with original documents created by the voter themselves. Which is the problem with all the 100% electronic systems. You can't because the voter doesn't create a master copy of his vote.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems. Sometimes, it's about efficiency as well. I've been a ballot worker here in Germany for the 14 years since I was eligible. There are simple elections: electing a mayor, for example. You have a ton of DIN A4 paper sheets, but you simply sort them into heaps, count the heaps, and you're done. These don't really benefit from computerizing them, other than speed, but even for a larger polling station, you're done in an hour or two. Then there are more complex elections, like the German Bundestag, where you have two votes on one DIN A4 sheet: the "Erststimme", where you vote for the directly elected representative of your district, is just as easy to count as the mayoral elections. But then you have to go through all the ballot papers again to count the "Zweitstimme", where you vote for the party lists that make up the other half of the Bundestag. While most people vote the same in both where you can short circuit during the first phase of sorting, IME around half the people vote different (say, they vote for the SPD candidate in primary because he's the one that will most likely have success over the CDU conservative, but in secondary vote they vote Greens or Left), so it's still a sizable amount of paper you have to touch twice. And then there are the horrors: the European Parliament election [1] or regional/city elections [2], where each ballot paper can reach almost 1 m² in size making them very difficult to handle, and you have a ton of ways to distribute your votes across parties ("Panachage" [3] and others), so for the (again) about half of people actually using the complex distribution you have to painstakingly check and count votes. Having these computerized would eliminate so much trouble, particularly as there's always 5-10% of voters who mess up their maths, rendering sections or their entire vote void. And counting these can last for days of very mentally intensive work. On top of that come specialized voting schemes such as ranked choice and its countless variants, where some are very difficult to execute without having a computer that can run through vote combinations as a batch job. [1] https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckerei-fertigt-wahlzettel-fuer-ganz-bayern-7496285 https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckere... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-wahlzettel-kolumne-1.4839361 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
- RandomLensman 3y ago
marcosdumay 3y ago
> A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. There's no need to do calculations by hand. An electronic voting system only needs to be verifiable by the use of public data. Everybody walks with a computer. If you mange to create a system that does that, well, the entire world is quite interested on it.

Gibbon1 3y ago

Fist off where I've voted they switched from punched cards to scanning paper ballots. It's all typically run by three middle aged women with a printed book of who's registered to vote. You just tell the first one your name and they find your entry and you sign next to it. The next one hands you a scantron sheet. You mark it up. The the third one feeds your sheets into the machine as you watch. Machine records your votes and drops the sheets into a bin in the machine. That's a system I trust and it has the positive of civic engagement. And fundamentally it's not broken. You now also have the option of mailing in a ballot. That's easier to corrupt I'm sure. But at least it's still paper. All the fully computerized systems seem really really sketchy to me. Especially in low trust cultures where underhanded stuff is normalized.

dividedbyzero 3y ago
Couldn't the Scantron display one thing and record another? If the paper ballots aren't manually recounted, would anyone ever know?
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  The big thing is you can do audit with original documents created by the voter themselves. Which is the problem with all the 100% electronic systems. You can't because the voter doesn't create a master copy of his vote.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems. Sometimes, it's about efficiency as well. I've been a ballot worker here in Germany for the 14 years since I was eligible. There are simple elections: electing a mayor, for example. You have a ton of DIN A4 paper sheets, but you simply sort them into heaps, count the heaps, and you're done. These don't really benefit from computerizing them, other than speed, but even for a larger polling station, you're done in an hour or two. Then there are more complex elections, like the German Bundestag, where you have two votes on one DIN A4 sheet: the "Erststimme", where you vote for the directly elected representative of your district, is just as easy to count as the mayoral elections. But then you have to go through all the ballot papers again to count the "Zweitstimme", where you vote for the party lists that make up the other half of the Bundestag. While most people vote the same in both where you can short circuit during the first phase of sorting, IME around half the people vote different (say, they vote for the SPD candidate in primary because he's the one that will most likely have success over the CDU conservative, but in secondary vote they vote Greens or Left), so it's still a sizable amount of paper you have to touch twice. And then there are the horrors: the European Parliament election [1] or regional/city elections [2], where each ballot paper can reach almost 1 m² in size making them very difficult to handle, and you have a ton of ways to distribute your votes across parties ("Panachage" [3] and others), so for the (again) about half of people actually using the complex distribution you have to painstakingly check and count votes. Having these computerized would eliminate so much trouble, particularly as there's always 5-10% of voters who mess up their maths, rendering sections or their entire vote void. And counting these can last for days of very mentally intensive work. On top of that come specialized voting schemes such as ranked choice and its countless variants, where some are very difficult to execute without having a computer that can run through vote combinations as a batch job. [1] https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckerei-fertigt-wahlzettel-fuer-ganz-bayern-7496285 https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckere... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-wahlzettel-kolumne-1.4839361 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting

RandomLensman 3y ago

marcosdumay 3y ago

> A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. There's no need to do calculations by hand. An electronic voting system only needs to be verifiable by the use of public data. Everybody walks with a computer. If you mange to create a system that does that, well, the entire world is quite interested on it.