10 ms·

You get to feed the ballot into the (literal) black box yourself, it beeps and tells you your vote has been recorded. What did it record? Who knows?

gruez 2y ago
> What did it record? Who knows? How is it any different than traditional voting, where you drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll workers would count it correctly? You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct, you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well, unless your adversary has incredible luck.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  Historically, you open the box and count them in front of anyone who wants to watch — using enough polling sites that’s a relatively short task at each. Moving ballots, machine counting, etc are all relatively modern inventions — and seem to greatly weaken the consensus mechanism for little benefit.
- roenxi 2y ago
  In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities. With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a hand count it'd be relying on who-knows-who, who-knows-where with an uncertain risk profile.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Seriously? You are saying that you just trust some people not to manipulate the votes? Why not use a Merkle Tree or a Blockchain to verify that your vote was included in the total ? They were invented to remove trust in middlemen. Mutually distrusting parties can maintain the vote tallying. That’s how elections should be done.
    - nicoburns 2y ago
      In a hand count you might get the odd bad actor, but you're unlikely to get large scale systematic bias, which is much easier to introduce in a machine counting system.
      - EGreg 2y ago
        “the odd bad actor” is incredibly optimistic, almost like there is already a bias against ever digitizing or using cryptography for adding security to a manual process with tons of ways to corrupt an election Elections around the world do not match this optimistic characterization. If they did, we’d all trust the outcomes of: Belarus’ election of Lukashenko Venezuela’s election of Maduro Crimean 2014 referendum Kosovo’s independence referendum (Note you probably think the last one was a lot more reliable than the first three — a lot of it has to do with living in a certain part of the world and believing the national media, which is only possible because the voting system and results can be so untrustworthy as to not allow regular people around the world to check anything, so propaganda is given free reign. Science and reliable knowledge usually doesn’t work this way.) In fact, let’s be clear… the “dictators” WANT the elections to have many ways to corrupt them, they WOULDN’T want a blockchain or merkle tree, that should tell you a lot And the “war hawks” in countries like USA who oppose their geopolitical rivals also want the elections and referendums to not be secure and clear, so they can cast doubt on them (eg Crimea) while at the same time claiming others (like Kosovo) are completely legit and justify unprecedented actions . As an aside, the vast majority of both Crimea[1] (94%) and Kosovo[2] (99%) that turned out to vote in referendums in 1991 voted for independence, so we all pretty much know what the public wanted later too, but it doesn’t affect the spin put on the later referendums and conflicts anyway If elections were secured by cryptography, the People around the world would have far more confidence, rather than listening to their own media propaganda spin the ambiguities, and the wars might even be avoided. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_autonomy_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_autonomy_referend... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Kosovan_independence_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Kosovan_independence_refe...
    - echoangle 2y ago
      The advantage of just counting in public and having other people vouch is that it is easily understandable by everyone. If you use the blockchain, how many people can be convinced that the election was stolen with some techspeak? Do you think the average citizen understands enough cryptography to validate that the election was legit?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tedunangst 2y ago
    What do you do when you know the vote counter and don't trust them?
    - roenxi 2y ago
      What do you do when you live in North Korea and are worried about an elections integrity? At some point the answer is you survive as best you can. But to fight corruption you need more transparency and to increase the costs of conspiracies, ie, to head in the opposite direction of voting machines.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    > In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Voting in my area is managed by my county. There's 1.1M people in my county and it's not even the biggest in my state. I'm supposed to personally know all of the few hundred people working the election out of 1.1M spread across 2,200sq km?
    - roenxi 2y ago
      No.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  In a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved and can be recounted by hand. I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are recounted at least twice, by different people.
  - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
    The issue in the US is compounded further as running elections is left up to not only the states, but the individual municipalities in those states and typically run at the county level. Each with their own rules, whether or not ID verification is mandatory or literally illegal, style of voting (mail vs in-person), ballot design/UX, what languages the ballots are in (are ballots in Sweden in anything but Swedish?) and mutually incompatible equipment. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballot designs in use for the current election. When viewing this at a macro level for electing the office of the President, it seems absolutely insane.
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      On the flip side; it makes it incredibly difficult to pull off wide scale fraud. Instead of having to compromise a single system, you are forced to compromise dozens or hundreds of systems run by people with opposing ideologies
      - justsomehnguy 2y ago
        On the flip side: it makes it incredibly difficult to notice you were a subject of a wide scale fraud. You need to know an every single system and you can't look for discrepancies what would be obvious in the environment with a standardised system.
      - pstrateman 2y ago
        Wide scale fraud isn't necessary when elections are decided by 10k votes.
        deleted 2y ago
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  In traditional voting, the votes get counted by humans, supervised by other humans. If you want to spend the time and energy, you can be one of those humans. It's completely different from a machine count. Humans have human failure modes, which are easily accounted for. Machines have random failure modes, and complex ways of being attacked. And all of the machines can be wrong in one direction at the same time, which is impossible for human counters. Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked. That's theoretically a possibility, but it's trivially defeated by choosing which ballot boxes to spot check after the machines have finished counting.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Fair enough, but there is also another problem. What happens if you detect a discrepancy in one or two places, but good results in many others? Do you still issue a full recount of all places that the machine was used? If not, then an adversary can still subtly modify the results of the election, at least probabilistically.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
treyd 2y ago
The idea is that the machine just provides a preliminary count, a official manual count happens over the following several hours. If there's a discrepancy then the only the manual count counts and the machine can be identified as problematic.
- sgerenser 2y ago
  No manual count happens unless the results of the election are in question (very close race, evidence of impropriety, etc.)
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    Selective audits are standard practice though, where issues can trigger a broade r manual recount
dragonwriter 2y ago
The actual ballots are stored, a selective audit is done to verify the electronic count, and in the event that raises issues a full manual recount can be done. The electronic voting system issues in the 2000 elections motivated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 under which voter-verified paper records for audit purpose required for all voting machines (this requirement became effective in 2006); effectively, “voting machines” add ballot marking machines that may also be involved in convenience tabulation, but are always audited against hand counts of paper ballots, which are the ultimate authority.

gruez 2y ago

> What did it record? Who knows? How is it any different than traditional voting, where you drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll workers would count it correctly? You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct, you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well, unless your adversary has incredible luck.

zmgsabst 2y ago
Historically, you open the box and count them in front of anyone who wants to watch — using enough polling sites that’s a relatively short task at each. Moving ballots, machine counting, etc are all relatively modern inventions — and seem to greatly weaken the consensus mechanism for little benefit.
roenxi 2y ago
In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities. With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a hand count it'd be relying on who-knows-who, who-knows-where with an uncertain risk profile.
- EGreg 2y ago
  Seriously? You are saying that you just trust some people not to manipulate the votes? Why not use a Merkle Tree or a Blockchain to verify that your vote was included in the total ? They were invented to remove trust in middlemen. Mutually distrusting parties can maintain the vote tallying. That’s how elections should be done.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    In a hand count you might get the odd bad actor, but you're unlikely to get large scale systematic bias, which is much easier to introduce in a machine counting system.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      “the odd bad actor” is incredibly optimistic, almost like there is already a bias against ever digitizing or using cryptography for adding security to a manual process with tons of ways to corrupt an election Elections around the world do not match this optimistic characterization. If they did, we’d all trust the outcomes of: Belarus’ election of Lukashenko Venezuela’s election of Maduro Crimean 2014 referendum Kosovo’s independence referendum (Note you probably think the last one was a lot more reliable than the first three — a lot of it has to do with living in a certain part of the world and believing the national media, which is only possible because the voting system and results can be so untrustworthy as to not allow regular people around the world to check anything, so propaganda is given free reign. Science and reliable knowledge usually doesn’t work this way.) In fact, let’s be clear… the “dictators” WANT the elections to have many ways to corrupt them, they WOULDN’T want a blockchain or merkle tree, that should tell you a lot And the “war hawks” in countries like USA who oppose their geopolitical rivals also want the elections and referendums to not be secure and clear, so they can cast doubt on them (eg Crimea) while at the same time claiming others (like Kosovo) are completely legit and justify unprecedented actions . As an aside, the vast majority of both Crimea[1] (94%) and Kosovo[2] (99%) that turned out to vote in referendums in 1991 voted for independence, so we all pretty much know what the public wanted later too, but it doesn’t affect the spin put on the later referendums and conflicts anyway If elections were secured by cryptography, the People around the world would have far more confidence, rather than listening to their own media propaganda spin the ambiguities, and the wars might even be avoided. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_autonomy_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_autonomy_referend... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Kosovan_independence_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Kosovan_independence_refe...
  - echoangle 2y ago
    The advantage of just counting in public and having other people vouch is that it is easily understandable by everyone. If you use the blockchain, how many people can be convinced that the election was stolen with some techspeak? Do you think the average citizen understands enough cryptography to validate that the election was legit?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tedunangst 2y ago
  What do you do when you know the vote counter and don't trust them?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    What do you do when you live in North Korea and are worried about an elections integrity? At some point the answer is you survive as best you can. But to fight corruption you need more transparency and to increase the costs of conspiracies, ie, to head in the opposite direction of voting machines.
- vel0city 2y ago
  > In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Voting in my area is managed by my county. There's 1.1M people in my county and it's not even the biggest in my state. I'm supposed to personally know all of the few hundred people working the election out of 1.1M spread across 2,200sq km?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    No.
BurningFrog 2y ago
In a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved and can be recounted by hand. I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are recounted at least twice, by different people.
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  The issue in the US is compounded further as running elections is left up to not only the states, but the individual municipalities in those states and typically run at the county level. Each with their own rules, whether or not ID verification is mandatory or literally illegal, style of voting (mail vs in-person), ballot design/UX, what languages the ballots are in (are ballots in Sweden in anything but Swedish?) and mutually incompatible equipment. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballot designs in use for the current election. When viewing this at a macro level for electing the office of the President, it seems absolutely insane.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    On the flip side; it makes it incredibly difficult to pull off wide scale fraud. Instead of having to compromise a single system, you are forced to compromise dozens or hundreds of systems run by people with opposing ideologies
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      On the flip side: it makes it incredibly difficult to notice you were a subject of a wide scale fraud. You need to know an every single system and you can't look for discrepancies what would be obvious in the environment with a standardised system.
    - pstrateman 2y ago
      Wide scale fraud isn't necessary when elections are decided by 10k votes.
      - deleted 2y ago
tsimionescu 2y ago
In traditional voting, the votes get counted by humans, supervised by other humans. If you want to spend the time and energy, you can be one of those humans. It's completely different from a machine count. Humans have human failure modes, which are easily accounted for. Machines have random failure modes, and complex ways of being attacked. And all of the machines can be wrong in one direction at the same time, which is impossible for human counters. Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked. That's theoretically a possibility, but it's trivially defeated by choosing which ballot boxes to spot check after the machines have finished counting.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Fair enough, but there is also another problem. What happens if you detect a discrepancy in one or two places, but good results in many others? Do you still issue a full recount of all places that the machine was used? If not, then an adversary can still subtly modify the results of the election, at least probabilistically.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

treyd 2y ago

The idea is that the machine just provides a preliminary count, a official manual count happens over the following several hours. If there's a discrepancy then the only the manual count counts and the machine can be identified as problematic.

sgerenser 2y ago
No manual count happens unless the results of the election are in question (very close race, evidence of impropriety, etc.)
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  Selective audits are standard practice though, where issues can trigger a broade r manual recount

dragonwriter 2y ago

The actual ballots are stored, a selective audit is done to verify the electronic count, and in the event that raises issues a full manual recount can be done. The electronic voting system issues in the 2000 elections motivated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 under which voter-verified paper records for audit purpose required for all voting machines (this requirement became effective in 2006); effectively, “voting machines” add ballot marking machines that may also be involved in convenience tabulation, but are always audited against hand counts of paper ballots, which are the ultimate authority.