4 ms·

Voting is one thing I don't think should ever be fully electronic. Hard to commit actions at scale with smaller paper ballots, in most places at least.

by _joel 3y ago

trimethylpurine 3y ago
Unless you happen to own the company that makes the machines, or manages them, or operates a significant number of them, or counts the votes. And even if those people can't, the public opinion is that they can, and that's just as bad.
- progbits 3y ago
  Where I'm from, votes are hand counted by committee of multiple people in each voting district and anyone else can come and observe the process. You can't commit large scale fraud this way. And the results are available within 12 hours of the closing thanks to massive parallelism. There is no point in using machines other than enriching their manufacturer and enabling fraud.
  - the_snooze 3y ago
    >There is no point in using machines other than enriching their manufacturer and enabling fraud. This is a shortsighted take. To be clear, "machines" can fall anywhere from direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines where people vote on touchscreens with no paper record, to optical-scan machines that process Scantron-style bubble-in paper ballots. The latter is a really good option because you get all the security and usability benefits of paper with the speed of machine counts. That's especially important in jurisdictions that do ranked-choice voting (like Alaska) or places with very long and complicated ballots (like California). If you don't trust the scanner, then a risk-limiting audit [1] will detect discrepancies between what the machine says and what the paper ballots say. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit
    - pivo 3y ago
      Even better than an RLA is a full machine recount from a different company to the one that recorded the votes in the first place. RLAs typically only count a small percentage of the total ballots, while a full machine Audit will count all ballots. I'm biased because this is what the company I work for does, but I think it's hard to argue that not counting all ballots is as good as counting all ballots.
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- _joel 3y ago
  We have tabulation machines and hand verification, both cross checked, where I'm from. No systematic issues, obviously attempts at localised fraud but this has been caught. More fraud in postal voting.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  I'm surprised nobody who's opposed to voting machines has set up a company to build/sell them yet. I assume people would buy them off your competitors if your pitch was "e-voting is bad, insecure, and has intractable problems. these machines are the cheapest and least-bad ones." I was considering it for a while, calling them Expensive-Pencil machines or something, alluding to the paper they'd print out following your vote.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Empty box is opened in front of multiple witnesses Voter comes along, name ticked off list of registered voters -- "this person has voted" Voter given stamped piece of paper with candidates on in front of multiple witnesses. Voter marks an X next to a name on a paper, folds paper, showing stamp, puts in a box in front of multiple witnesses Box fills and is then sealed in front of witnesses. Number of votes inside (from the ticking the list) written on. Box is then transferred to counting place. Box is unsealed at counting location in front of multiple witnesses Papers counted to confirm they have a stamp and the number of papers matches the number of votes on the box and accompanying paperwork Papers transferred to counting table in front of multiple witnesses Papers counted in front of multiple witnesses Any confusing ballots set aside to discuss between candidates and the adjudicator If the vote is close papers are recounted Winner announced. This works fine with elections with a turnout measured >30 million people in the UK, which means it works fine for the largest election in the US (California presidential election). So it's secure, scalable, and cheap At what point can you commit fraud to a scale where the effort to do it returns more than the effort to campaign for a few more votes?
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  - FrenchyJiby 3y ago
    I'll note that France has a slight variant on that, where it's assumed that any identifiable marker of the ballot could reveal a voter's identity, bad in case of blackmail like "vote for X, and show it by having a stripe at at the top, or I [do bad things to family], I'll be checking the ballots"). To avoid this, no markers, but all possible votes are pieces of paper with printed text, grab N>2, go in the booth, put in one in an envelope. This way your vote and any other vote look identical, and vote is voided in case of any identifying mark (even weirdly bent paper etc). No stamp needed, just number of votes/envelopes.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Much larger problems with voter intimidation in the UK through the postal vote system. I've been to several counts in the UK, spotting a specific ballot, even if you know which box it's in, is impossible. You've then got to be able to enforce that enough to make a difference. You'd have to have a unique mark for every person (at least at every station) you're trying to enforce, one that can be quickly spotted by one of about 5 people you can get at the verification stage. Even then there's no guarantee you didn't just miss it. Sure, you can write "WANK" next to everyone you don't like, and that's great, but again the number of votes you could affect in this way would be a tiny number.
artificialLimbs 3y ago
In the US, we used to be able to tabulate votes in 1 day, fairly correctly, with little corruption. Where there were problems, we could manually audit quickly and effectively. Then we switched away from paper ballots to e-voting.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  >In the US, we used to be able to tabulate votes in 1 day Have we? Do you have a particular state in mind? As far as I know, all states have a post-election canvassing period of at least a week or two (if not longer) before official results are certified. Some states like California and New York are notoriously slow to certify. Election night results are always preliminary and subject to shifts, especially as mail and provisional ballots get processed.
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    Voting is a massively parallel process. Officials can count ballots, fill acts and seal the urns in the same day. In fact, elections in other countries, like Mexico, usually have at least 95% of votes certified by the next day, even if the last few percent drags their feet for some reason. There's no sensible reason to wait weeks for voting results, just put more people to the task, for the sake of transparency and promptness.
    - the_snooze 3y ago
      >In fact, elections in other countries, like Mexico, usually have at least 95% of votes certified by the next day, even if the last few percent drags their feet for some reason. I don't know what this means. "Certification" is when a state finalizes the official legally-binding results for elections. Votes aren't certified, election results are. It's when a state says "Coca-Cola got 832,992 votes and Pepsi got 902,311 votes" and enters it into its legal and historical record. All US states take time to certify results precisely to make sure the process is carried out correctly. They do things like archiving paper ballots, electronic records, and signed affidavits in case of legal challenges, processing provisional ballots and same-day registrations, and cross-checking the number of registered voters who showed up with the number of ballots cast at each precinct.
Tainnor 3y ago
It might be theoretically possible to devise an electronic voting scheme that is reasonably secure against various threat models (possibly with slightly different tradeoffs than paper ballots), but so far, every scheme that has been used in practice seems to have been severely flawed. Plus, even if such a "good" e-voting system existed, it would probably be almost impossible to explain to people how it works. With paper ballots, you can have people observe the process and verify that it was fair. With all the wild accusations of fraud that we have already, I don't want to know what the world would look like if people had to do operations on the blockchain or something to verify that votes were counted correctly.
xinayder 3y ago
Let's also stop using electronic techonology for banking and do it manually because it's harder to commit actions at scale with physical bank notes. This is a non sequitur, if we use it for banking (which is much more critical than voting), why is it a problem if we use electronic technology for voting? Estonia has it and it's working well so far. Brazil has a complete different system and it's much more auditable and less prone to manipulation and vote output alteration from human error. Edit: conclusion of the article is "lets switch back to paper because this system uses the internet". well, do you know that you can still have a 100% electronic voting system that - brace yourselves - don't use the internet? Take a look at Brazil's electronic ballots for example. They aren't connected to the internet at all, everything is stored locally on a memory card that is collected by the authorities at the end of the voting period, then sent to Brasilia for counting at a special room where the machines that read the cards don't have access to the internet.
- iinnPP 3y ago
  When politicians can clean out your bank account for protesting, or simply sending money to a protest fundraiser, your vote matters more. Canada.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  > if we use it for banking (which is much more critical than voting), why is it a problem if we use electronic technology for voting? If a bank makes a significant mistake, the average person WILL notice and the bank can resolve it through extensive audit logs and other records. This isn't the case with voting where any audit logs are purposefully anonymized. The average person can't identify electronic voting fraud or even honest mistakes/bugs while anyone can be present during ballot counts, re-counts and add up the numbers as long as they have a calculator. A process as fundamental as voting should be completely transparent, simple to understand for the average person and shouldn't require blind trust in "experts" and institutions.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  >This is a non sequitur, if we use it for banking (which is much more critical than voting), why is it a problem if we use electronic technology for voting? Banking as a use-case is far more fault-tolerant than elections. Bad transactions can be reversed and redone. You can insure transactions, and all parties involved have visibility into the amounts, senders, and recipients. Elections are one-off events involving secret ballots. You can't have a do-over without throwing the whole system into question. You can't take out insurance for elections.

Voting is one thing I don't think should ever be fully electronic. Hard to commit actions at scale with smaller paper ballots, in most places at least.

by _joel 3y ago

Voting is one thing I don't think should ever be fully electronic. Hard to commit actions at scale with smaller paper ballots, in most places at least.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

Unless you happen to own the company that makes the machines, or manages them, or operates a significant number of them, or counts the votes. And even if those people can't, the public opinion is that they can, and that's just as bad.

progbits 3y ago
Where I'm from, votes are hand counted by committee of multiple people in each voting district and anyone else can come and observe the process. You can't commit large scale fraud this way. And the results are available within 12 hours of the closing thanks to massive parallelism. There is no point in using machines other than enriching their manufacturer and enabling fraud.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  >There is no point in using machines other than enriching their manufacturer and enabling fraud. This is a shortsighted take. To be clear, "machines" can fall anywhere from direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines where people vote on touchscreens with no paper record, to optical-scan machines that process Scantron-style bubble-in paper ballots. The latter is a really good option because you get all the security and usability benefits of paper with the speed of machine counts. That's especially important in jurisdictions that do ranked-choice voting (like Alaska) or places with very long and complicated ballots (like California). If you don't trust the scanner, then a risk-limiting audit [1] will detect discrepancies between what the machine says and what the paper ballots say. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit
  - pivo 3y ago
    Even better than an RLA is a full machine recount from a different company to the one that recorded the votes in the first place. RLAs typically only count a small percentage of the total ballots, while a full machine Audit will count all ballots. I'm biased because this is what the company I work for does, but I think it's hard to argue that not counting all ballots is as good as counting all ballots.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
_joel 3y ago
We have tabulation machines and hand verification, both cross checked, where I'm from. No systematic issues, obviously attempts at localised fraud but this has been caught. More fraud in postal voting.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
I'm surprised nobody who's opposed to voting machines has set up a company to build/sell them yet. I assume people would buy them off your competitors if your pitch was "e-voting is bad, insecure, and has intractable problems. these machines are the cheapest and least-bad ones." I was considering it for a while, calling them Expensive-Pencil machines or something, alluding to the paper they'd print out following your vote.
ta1243 3y ago
Empty box is opened in front of multiple witnesses Voter comes along, name ticked off list of registered voters -- "this person has voted" Voter given stamped piece of paper with candidates on in front of multiple witnesses. Voter marks an X next to a name on a paper, folds paper, showing stamp, puts in a box in front of multiple witnesses Box fills and is then sealed in front of witnesses. Number of votes inside (from the ticking the list) written on. Box is then transferred to counting place. Box is unsealed at counting location in front of multiple witnesses Papers counted to confirm they have a stamp and the number of papers matches the number of votes on the box and accompanying paperwork Papers transferred to counting table in front of multiple witnesses Papers counted in front of multiple witnesses Any confusing ballots set aside to discuss between candidates and the adjudicator If the vote is close papers are recounted Winner announced. This works fine with elections with a turnout measured >30 million people in the UK, which means it works fine for the largest election in the US (California presidential election). So it's secure, scalable, and cheap At what point can you commit fraud to a scale where the effort to do it returns more than the effort to campaign for a few more votes?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- FrenchyJiby 3y ago
  I'll note that France has a slight variant on that, where it's assumed that any identifiable marker of the ballot could reveal a voter's identity, bad in case of blackmail like "vote for X, and show it by having a stripe at at the top, or I [do bad things to family], I'll be checking the ballots"). To avoid this, no markers, but all possible votes are pieces of paper with printed text, grab N>2, go in the booth, put in one in an envelope. This way your vote and any other vote look identical, and vote is voided in case of any identifying mark (even weirdly bent paper etc). No stamp needed, just number of votes/envelopes.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Much larger problems with voter intimidation in the UK through the postal vote system. I've been to several counts in the UK, spotting a specific ballot, even if you know which box it's in, is impossible. You've then got to be able to enforce that enough to make a difference. You'd have to have a unique mark for every person (at least at every station) you're trying to enforce, one that can be quickly spotted by one of about 5 people you can get at the verification stage. Even then there's no guarantee you didn't just miss it. Sure, you can write "WANK" next to everyone you don't like, and that's great, but again the number of votes you could affect in this way would be a tiny number.

artificialLimbs 3y ago

In the US, we used to be able to tabulate votes in 1 day, fairly correctly, with little corruption. Where there were problems, we could manually audit quickly and effectively. Then we switched away from paper ballots to e-voting.

the_snooze 3y ago
>In the US, we used to be able to tabulate votes in 1 day Have we? Do you have a particular state in mind? As far as I know, all states have a post-election canvassing period of at least a week or two (if not longer) before official results are certified. Some states like California and New York are notoriously slow to certify. Election night results are always preliminary and subject to shifts, especially as mail and provisional ballots get processed.
- ASalazarMX 3y ago
  Voting is a massively parallel process. Officials can count ballots, fill acts and seal the urns in the same day. In fact, elections in other countries, like Mexico, usually have at least 95% of votes certified by the next day, even if the last few percent drags their feet for some reason. There's no sensible reason to wait weeks for voting results, just put more people to the task, for the sake of transparency and promptness.
  - the_snooze 3y ago
    >In fact, elections in other countries, like Mexico, usually have at least 95% of votes certified by the next day, even if the last few percent drags their feet for some reason. I don't know what this means. "Certification" is when a state finalizes the official legally-binding results for elections. Votes aren't certified, election results are. It's when a state says "Coca-Cola got 832,992 votes and Pepsi got 902,311 votes" and enters it into its legal and historical record. All US states take time to certify results precisely to make sure the process is carried out correctly. They do things like archiving paper ballots, electronic records, and signed affidavits in case of legal challenges, processing provisional ballots and same-day registrations, and cross-checking the number of registered voters who showed up with the number of ballots cast at each precinct.

Tainnor 3y ago

It might be theoretically possible to devise an electronic voting scheme that is reasonably secure against various threat models (possibly with slightly different tradeoffs than paper ballots), but so far, every scheme that has been used in practice seems to have been severely flawed. Plus, even if such a "good" e-voting system existed, it would probably be almost impossible to explain to people how it works. With paper ballots, you can have people observe the process and verify that it was fair. With all the wild accusations of fraud that we have already, I don't want to know what the world would look like if people had to do operations on the blockchain or something to verify that votes were counted correctly.

xinayder 3y ago

Let's also stop using electronic techonology for banking and do it manually because it's harder to commit actions at scale with physical bank notes. This is a non sequitur, if we use it for banking (which is much more critical than voting), why is it a problem if we use electronic technology for voting? Estonia has it and it's working well so far. Brazil has a complete different system and it's much more auditable and less prone to manipulation and vote output alteration from human error. Edit: conclusion of the article is "lets switch back to paper because this system uses the internet". well, do you know that you can still have a 100% electronic voting system that - brace yourselves - don't use the internet? Take a look at Brazil's electronic ballots for example. They aren't connected to the internet at all, everything is stored locally on a memory card that is collected by the authorities at the end of the voting period, then sent to Brasilia for counting at a special room where the machines that read the cards don't have access to the internet.

iinnPP 3y ago
When politicians can clean out your bank account for protesting, or simply sending money to a protest fundraiser, your vote matters more. Canada.
dns_snek 3y ago
> if we use it for banking (which is much more critical than voting), why is it a problem if we use electronic technology for voting? If a bank makes a significant mistake, the average person WILL notice and the bank can resolve it through extensive audit logs and other records. This isn't the case with voting where any audit logs are purposefully anonymized. The average person can't identify electronic voting fraud or even honest mistakes/bugs while anyone can be present during ballot counts, re-counts and add up the numbers as long as they have a calculator. A process as fundamental as voting should be completely transparent, simple to understand for the average person and shouldn't require blind trust in "experts" and institutions.
the_snooze 3y ago
>This is a non sequitur, if we use it for banking (which is much more critical than voting), why is it a problem if we use electronic technology for voting? Banking as a use-case is far more fault-tolerant than elections. Bad transactions can be reversed and redone. You can insure transactions, and all parties involved have visibility into the amounts, senders, and recipients. Elections are one-off events involving secret ballots. You can't have a do-over without throwing the whole system into question. You can't take out insurance for elections.