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Personally I love the idea of a fully verifiable election. I do the the current election protocol my county uses is pretty good: you present id in one room, the

Personally I love the idea of a fully verifiable election. I do the the current election protocol my county uses is pretty good: you present id in one room, they check your eligibility, then you’re given an anonymous ticket, in another room you vote using said ticket, and get a receipt. You can see your but counted online using said receipt. There are two problems with this: 1. You can’t verify extra or in eligible voters voted. 2. It relies on trust that to tell you your vote was counted. I am very interested in reading about this protocol, and it might make a fun hobby to re implement it as a research project. The one issue I have is: the act of physically showing up is an important one. Mass stuffing of ballot boxes is nearly impossible when physical presence is required. It also puts ‘your ass in the game’, meaning you really care so to speak; as you have to do a minor piece of physical labor in order to get your vote counted. If this protocol could be adapted to the physical world, I think it would be perfect barring any other issues.

thepra 2y ago
Please forget about showing up physically, it's noble to think of "you really care" but in places with organized crime they have ways to count if those that depend on them come and vote for their "right" choice. It has been estimated that around 20-30% of IRL votes in Italy follow the organized crimes choice.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  You don't think this is even more pronounced if the criminals can keep af gun to your head in your own home when voting? That said - I am yet to see any protocol that is resilient against not showing up IRL (due to the exact reason above).
  - oivey 2y ago
    Criminals showing up to your house, putting a gun to your head, and demanding your vote is a fantasy. You don’t need to defend against it because it’s a totally unscalable way to steal an election.
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      Apparently it is not fantasy that these people do it at the locations. I think more creative thinking on how the schemes could look will show some scalable solutions to coerce votes.
      - oivey 2y ago
        You’re talking about voter intimidation at polling places, right? Yes, that is in fact well documented and not a fantasy. You can send a couple guys with bats to a polling location and coerce hundreds of voters. What you’re describing would require a highly organized set of crimes taking years of man hours that would definitely attract law enforcement due to the prolonged time and scale. Fantasy. “Creative thinking” is leading you down the path of made up problems with ludicrous solutions.
      - nicopappl 2y ago
        If you are interested in creative voter coercion, and generally very creative ways of changing law so that the election results always end up how you like them, I recommend reading up on the very innovative Hungarian system https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-viktor-orban-wins/ https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-viktor-orban... > “Chain voting” ensures that people vote the right way. Voter 1 goes into the polling station, > appears to vote by depositing an empty envelope into the ballot box, but comes out with a > blank ballot. Voter 2 is then sent in with that ballot—now marked by a [party] operative—and > told to put it in the ballot box and exit with another blank ballot in hand. Carried on down > the line, the [...] party boss in the town can ensure that all have voted the proper way > while the election workers find that they are short only one unaccounted-for vote
    - codesnik 2y ago
      happened in annexed parts of Ukraine during "referendum"
      - oivey 2y ago
        Source on that? That was a crooked vote, but it doesn’t really make sense for the Russians to send people door-to-door threatening people to send in coerced absentee ballots. I assume they instead did the more normal things of local voter intimidation, outright not counting, and lying. If your government doesn’t want to follow democracy you’re fucked either way. No need for armed gunman to make you vote at gunpoint.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    The digital platform would allow you to recast the vote after. Only the final vote counts. So unless you are kidnapped and guarded after rhe fact, it wouldn't work.
- ziofill 2y ago
  Do you have a source for this 20-30%?
- mixmax 2y ago
  since you have to be alone in the voting booth and your vote is anonymous it can't be bought. You can say that you voted for X, but vote for Y and noone will ever be able to tell.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    In France vote choice are made by placing a predefined paper in an envelope. You enter the place, present an ID, take and envelope plus zero/one/several/all papers, go in the alone room to fill the envelope with the paper of your choice. You can take zero papers because some organiser will send them prior by post but it’s not always the case. How does it work in Italie? I can picture easely how someone in the paper room can put pressure on you to only take one paper.
    - arlort 2y ago
      All choices for a given question (we have bicameral elections and usually when we have referenda we have multiple at the same time) are on the same piece of paper. Also they always give you all ballots, I don't recall ever being asked which ones I wanted. Plus at all points you are always in front of multiple people, I believe each candidate / party in an election gets to appoint someone to keep an eye on the proceedings (Also the original claim about 20/30% seems like abject fantasy to me, unless we take the entirely different meaning of "20-30% vote for a candidate that organized crime is happy with, which is entirely unrelated to electoral interference)
- romwell 2y ago
  Please forget about showing up physically because conflatingl caring* with your ability to do things physically is ableist as fuck, and not all disabilities are visible and/or certifiable. Please forget about showing up physically because setting up a polling station in a place where there's effectively no public transportation cuts off poor people from voting. Please forget about showing up physically because mail voting works fine, paper ballots are already anonymous and verifiable, and we don't need to argue about why showing up in person is better for the umpteenth time (or that adding extra friction is not a good thing). Please forget about showing up physically because that "you really care" nonsense is in the same vein as literally testing, and democracy isn't about excluding voters who don't care enough. This line of thought is, frankly, disgusting, and I'm ashamed that this is tolerated here.
  - codedokode 2y ago
    > paper ballots are already anonymous and verifiable I don't understand this part. What stops people responsible for giving out those ballots, from taking some of them and mail under someone's else name (for example, homeless person, drug addict etc)? You often need just several hundreds or thousands votes to win in a swinging state.
    - romwell 2y ago
      >What stops people responsible for giving out those ballots, from taking some of them and mail under someone's else name (for example, homeless person, drug addict etc)? A requirement to keep a record of which paper ballot envelopes were mailed out to whom, and to which address. Ballot blanks are all identical, but the outer envelopes go through the USPS and have identifying numbers on them. When the ballots are counted, the envelopes can be examined by all interested parties separately from the ballots. The ballots are taken one by one out of the outer envelopes, and put into a bin (they're folded in blank inner envelopes, so nobody can see anyone's vote at that stage). Presence of an envelope that was received, but not mailed out is evidence of fraud. Conversely, once put into the mail, the USPS can track each such envelope, and anyone other than the intended recipient tampering with that mail is committing a federal crime (regardless of what they do with it).
staindk 2y ago
Why is the act of physically showing up so important? I think reducing friction can be a great way to get more people to vote.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  Because you need to ensure that the vote is given without anyone interfering.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    I think a better measure against this is not physical presence, but allowing one individual to exercise their vote any number of times until the ballot period ends. This means that a malevolent entity that wants to influence votes needs to sequester the voter(s) for the whole ballot period, which is vastly more difficult than putting a gun to someone's head for a single vote. Executing this at scale so the effect can be statistically significant is even more difficult, and if it's still possible the entity holding the ballot can be assumed to have more pressing issues to care about than fair ballots. :D
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
      I actually love this. I always cast my vote on election day because I want to have the most information. What if I vote early, then the person I voted for has a major scandal the day before the polls close? Being able to change one's vote would remove all the disincentive to voting early or whenever it's most convenient for you.
      - dmurray 2y ago
        If you're changing your vote based on which side was the latest to have a major "scandal", you're part of the problem.
        actionfromafar 2y ago
tzs 2y ago
For in-person voting use "fill in the oval" ballots that can be hand counted or counted by offline optical card scanners, and augment that with Scantegrity II [1]. Scantegrity II is a system that adds end-to-end voter verifiability [2] to such systems by combining some clever chemistry with some clever cryptography. It requires no hardware modifications at the voting site except that special markers have to be used to mark the ballots. Briefly, a code is printed inside each oval using a special ink that is invisible, which turns visible when that oval is marked by a special marker. After the election all the ballots can be published, allowing any third party to independently verify the counts. Voters that wish to verify that their ballot was included in the count and counted correctly can note the code from the oval and afterwards use it to verify the count. The code cannot be used to prove to a third party, such as a vote buyer or vote coercer, that the person voted the "right" way. Here's a proof of that [3]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
- codedokode 2y ago
  Interesting, but regarding this: > The code cannot be used to prove to a third party, such as a vote buyer or vote coercer, that the person voted the "right" way. What if the vote buyer is with the government and can actually inspect the ballots after voting? Knowing the code is a proof that you saw a specific ballot.
sinuhe69 2y ago
Why could they not verify against extra or ineligible voters? If each ticket is tied to a national ID, then you can verify all tickets, right? To ensure the secrecy of the vote, the votes should not be linked to the tickets. Each voter must verify that his vote has been counted. But once a vote has been counted, using blockchain can ensure that it cannot be undone or changed. Could this work?
- codedokode 2y ago
  The government can create as many fake IDs as it wants, and vote in their name. Imagine a president that doesn't want to leave his post.
codedokode 2y ago
> You can see your but counted online using said receipt. If the receipt allows to view whom you voted for, then it can be used to buy votes or pressure to vote for a specific candidate.
Nathanba 2y ago
I agree, but we need far more than just some online encryption. 1. We need a sort of blockchain system to make sure nobody can change votes later. 2. Every citizen can deposit their vote with their own key tied to their id number that nobody else has. Everyone should be able to look up their own vote via their key. 3. We need more proof of work, require every booth to record a video of the voter and have a unique physical marker so that the video cant be reused and require voters to write something specific to that location during their video. 4. Proof of location? Require voters to transmit their GPS at all times during the entire election day. Then at least group voting (beyond faking your own family members' votes perhaps) should be impossible and multi voting should also be impossible. 4. Make sure that the counting of ballots is instantaneous so that the cheaters have less room to cheat. 5. Proof of time? Surely we should be able to simply use time to our advantage, given that somebody who wants to cheat on a mass scale inherently has less time than the individual voters? Maybe all of it together, we have so much data about citizens in most countries. It should be absurdly easy to have a citizen be forced via GPS to vote from his area or even his building where he is registered to live before he starts going to his local voting booth. This would give us a lot of confidence that this is really a separate, real person and also the person in question. We need to use what we have to our advantage. People may be able to fake a lot of things but all of them? I rather trust a complex system like this than literal pieces of paper where any person with a bad mind can just choose to read it differently or stuff a few extra pieces of paper somewhere.

thepra 2y ago

Please forget about showing up physically, it's noble to think of "you really care" but in places with organized crime they have ways to count if those that depend on them come and vote for their "right" choice. It has been estimated that around 20-30% of IRL votes in Italy follow the organized crimes choice.

tossandthrow 2y ago
You don't think this is even more pronounced if the criminals can keep af gun to your head in your own home when voting? That said - I am yet to see any protocol that is resilient against not showing up IRL (due to the exact reason above).
- oivey 2y ago
  Criminals showing up to your house, putting a gun to your head, and demanding your vote is a fantasy. You don’t need to defend against it because it’s a totally unscalable way to steal an election.
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    Apparently it is not fantasy that these people do it at the locations. I think more creative thinking on how the schemes could look will show some scalable solutions to coerce votes.
    - oivey 2y ago
      You’re talking about voter intimidation at polling places, right? Yes, that is in fact well documented and not a fantasy. You can send a couple guys with bats to a polling location and coerce hundreds of voters. What you’re describing would require a highly organized set of crimes taking years of man hours that would definitely attract law enforcement due to the prolonged time and scale. Fantasy. “Creative thinking” is leading you down the path of made up problems with ludicrous solutions.
    - nicopappl 2y ago
      If you are interested in creative voter coercion, and generally very creative ways of changing law so that the election results always end up how you like them, I recommend reading up on the very innovative Hungarian system https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-viktor-orban-wins/ https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-viktor-orban... > “Chain voting” ensures that people vote the right way. Voter 1 goes into the polling station, > appears to vote by depositing an empty envelope into the ballot box, but comes out with a > blank ballot. Voter 2 is then sent in with that ballot—now marked by a [party] operative—and > told to put it in the ballot box and exit with another blank ballot in hand. Carried on down > the line, the [...] party boss in the town can ensure that all have voted the proper way > while the election workers find that they are short only one unaccounted-for vote
  - codesnik 2y ago
    happened in annexed parts of Ukraine during "referendum"
    - oivey 2y ago
      Source on that? That was a crooked vote, but it doesn’t really make sense for the Russians to send people door-to-door threatening people to send in coerced absentee ballots. I assume they instead did the more normal things of local voter intimidation, outright not counting, and lying. If your government doesn’t want to follow democracy you’re fucked either way. No need for armed gunman to make you vote at gunpoint.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  The digital platform would allow you to recast the vote after. Only the final vote counts. So unless you are kidnapped and guarded after rhe fact, it wouldn't work.
ziofill 2y ago
Do you have a source for this 20-30%?
mixmax 2y ago
since you have to be alone in the voting booth and your vote is anonymous it can't be bought. You can say that you voted for X, but vote for Y and noone will ever be able to tell.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  In France vote choice are made by placing a predefined paper in an envelope. You enter the place, present an ID, take and envelope plus zero/one/several/all papers, go in the alone room to fill the envelope with the paper of your choice. You can take zero papers because some organiser will send them prior by post but it’s not always the case. How does it work in Italie? I can picture easely how someone in the paper room can put pressure on you to only take one paper.
  - arlort 2y ago
    All choices for a given question (we have bicameral elections and usually when we have referenda we have multiple at the same time) are on the same piece of paper. Also they always give you all ballots, I don't recall ever being asked which ones I wanted. Plus at all points you are always in front of multiple people, I believe each candidate / party in an election gets to appoint someone to keep an eye on the proceedings (Also the original claim about 20/30% seems like abject fantasy to me, unless we take the entirely different meaning of "20-30% vote for a candidate that organized crime is happy with, which is entirely unrelated to electoral interference)
romwell 2y ago
Please forget about showing up physically because conflatingl caring* with your ability to do things physically is ableist as fuck, and not all disabilities are visible and/or certifiable. Please forget about showing up physically because setting up a polling station in a place where there's effectively no public transportation cuts off poor people from voting. Please forget about showing up physically because mail voting works fine, paper ballots are already anonymous and verifiable, and we don't need to argue about why showing up in person is better for the umpteenth time (or that adding extra friction is not a good thing). Please forget about showing up physically because that "you really care" nonsense is in the same vein as literally testing, and democracy isn't about excluding voters who don't care enough. This line of thought is, frankly, disgusting, and I'm ashamed that this is tolerated here.
- codedokode 2y ago
  > paper ballots are already anonymous and verifiable I don't understand this part. What stops people responsible for giving out those ballots, from taking some of them and mail under someone's else name (for example, homeless person, drug addict etc)? You often need just several hundreds or thousands votes to win in a swinging state.
  - romwell 2y ago
    >What stops people responsible for giving out those ballots, from taking some of them and mail under someone's else name (for example, homeless person, drug addict etc)? A requirement to keep a record of which paper ballot envelopes were mailed out to whom, and to which address. Ballot blanks are all identical, but the outer envelopes go through the USPS and have identifying numbers on them. When the ballots are counted, the envelopes can be examined by all interested parties separately from the ballots. The ballots are taken one by one out of the outer envelopes, and put into a bin (they're folded in blank inner envelopes, so nobody can see anyone's vote at that stage). Presence of an envelope that was received, but not mailed out is evidence of fraud. Conversely, once put into the mail, the USPS can track each such envelope, and anyone other than the intended recipient tampering with that mail is committing a federal crime (regardless of what they do with it).

staindk 2y ago

Why is the act of physically showing up so important? I think reducing friction can be a great way to get more people to vote.

tossandthrow 2y ago
Because you need to ensure that the vote is given without anyone interfering.
- mariusor 2y ago
  I think a better measure against this is not physical presence, but allowing one individual to exercise their vote any number of times until the ballot period ends. This means that a malevolent entity that wants to influence votes needs to sequester the voter(s) for the whole ballot period, which is vastly more difficult than putting a gun to someone's head for a single vote. Executing this at scale so the effect can be statistically significant is even more difficult, and if it's still possible the entity holding the ballot can be assumed to have more pressing issues to care about than fair ballots. :D
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
    I actually love this. I always cast my vote on election day because I want to have the most information. What if I vote early, then the person I voted for has a major scandal the day before the polls close? Being able to change one's vote would remove all the disincentive to voting early or whenever it's most convenient for you.
    - dmurray 2y ago
      If you're changing your vote based on which side was the latest to have a major "scandal", you're part of the problem.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago

tzs 2y ago

For in-person voting use "fill in the oval" ballots that can be hand counted or counted by offline optical card scanners, and augment that with Scantegrity II [1]. Scantegrity II is a system that adds end-to-end voter verifiability [2] to such systems by combining some clever chemistry with some clever cryptography. It requires no hardware modifications at the voting site except that special markers have to be used to mark the ballots. Briefly, a code is printed inside each oval using a special ink that is invisible, which turns visible when that oval is marked by a special marker. After the election all the ballots can be published, allowing any third party to independently verify the counts. Voters that wish to verify that their ballot was included in the count and counted correctly can note the code from the oval and afterwards use it to verify the count. The code cannot be used to prove to a third party, such as a vote buyer or vote coercer, that the person voted the "right" way. Here's a proof of that [3]. [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

codedokode 2y ago
Interesting, but regarding this: > The code cannot be used to prove to a third party, such as a vote buyer or vote coercer, that the person voted the "right" way. What if the vote buyer is with the government and can actually inspect the ballots after voting? Knowing the code is a proof that you saw a specific ballot.

sinuhe69 2y ago

Why could they not verify against extra or ineligible voters? If each ticket is tied to a national ID, then you can verify all tickets, right? To ensure the secrecy of the vote, the votes should not be linked to the tickets. Each voter must verify that his vote has been counted. But once a vote has been counted, using blockchain can ensure that it cannot be undone or changed. Could this work?

codedokode 2y ago
The government can create as many fake IDs as it wants, and vote in their name. Imagine a president that doesn't want to leave his post.

codedokode 2y ago

> You can see your but counted online using said receipt. If the receipt allows to view whom you voted for, then it can be used to buy votes or pressure to vote for a specific candidate.

Nathanba 2y ago

I agree, but we need far more than just some online encryption. 1. We need a sort of blockchain system to make sure nobody can change votes later. 2. Every citizen can deposit their vote with their own key tied to their id number that nobody else has. Everyone should be able to look up their own vote via their key. 3. We need more proof of work, require every booth to record a video of the voter and have a unique physical marker so that the video cant be reused and require voters to write something specific to that location during their video. 4. Proof of location? Require voters to transmit their GPS at all times during the entire election day. Then at least group voting (beyond faking your own family members' votes perhaps) should be impossible and multi voting should also be impossible. 4. Make sure that the counting of ballots is instantaneous so that the cheaters have less room to cheat. 5. Proof of time? Surely we should be able to simply use time to our advantage, given that somebody who wants to cheat on a mass scale inherently has less time than the individual voters? Maybe all of it together, we have so much data about citizens in most countries. It should be absurdly easy to have a citizen be forced via GPS to vote from his area or even his building where he is registered to live before he starts going to his local voting booth. This would give us a lot of confidence that this is really a separate, real person and also the person in question. We need to use what we have to our advantage. People may be able to fake a lot of things but all of them? I rather trust a complex system like this than literal pieces of paper where any person with a bad mind can just choose to read it differently or stuff a few extra pieces of paper somewhere.