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In my locale there is a header on the physical ballot that contains a bunch of barcodes, presumably to make your votes machine readable. It then prints the vot

In my locale there is a header on the physical ballot that contains a bunch of barcodes, presumably to make your votes machine readable. It then prints the votes in text below. I absolutely hate that fact. I am a human, I cannot read barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if the important part of what was recorded is correct. Not sure if Colorado's are the same...

Dalewyn 2y ago
The value of absolute transparency is why nothing will beat paper ballots written and marked in plain English counted by hand with anyone and everyone who cares about election integrity watching the process.
- sadeshmukh 2y ago
  I mean, if you're willing to spend that much, and it'll be very expensive, then sure. It's just technophobia - machines are going to be more accurate than a human (who also can make a mistake!).
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >machines are going to be more accurate Says who? Also, what does "accurate" here actually mean? Speaking as someone who actually understands computers and machines: I agree with the commons (who are simpletons with regards to computers and machines) that machines cannot be trusted to be "accurate" (whatever that means) or even trusted in general. Especially when a simpler, confirmable-by-anyone method exists: Having someone count paper ballots by hand in the presence of anyone and everyone. That includes mistakes and errors. The value here is anyone and everyone can and will immediately understand (and thus accept) what is going on. Also, why are we even putting the integrity of the very foundation of our democracy on the table in exchange for convenience and cost of all things? Are we serious? It should be a good thing we are taking precious time and money to make sure our democracy is working properly. I thought democracy was actually fucking important.
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      Machines are amazing at counting things without losing their place. I'd trust an ATM's counted stack of bills over a human's (for sure if they only each got one try). I've written some code at a previous job to simplify data entry. The previous method was adding numbers from a stack of papers, with a calculator. I trust my code to add up the numbers on the computer over a human reading them from a printout and entering them in a calculator. Humans make mistakes. A lot.
      - the_gipsy 2y ago
        If the technical problem was solely about counting then obviously everywhere in the world we would be using machines by now. But we don't. Because the technical problem is trust, not counting.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        > Humans make mistakes. A lot. To put some numbers on this, from my experience. Health insurance manual claims processors (who usually average ~5 years of experience) can do 95+% accuracy, at speed (a few minutes), at scale. That's counting and verifying multiple things against processing rules. General data entry, from less trained folks, tends to average around 85% accurate (i.e. 15 mistakes + 85 entries correct, out of 100 entries).
  - ajb 2y ago
    We do it in the UK Volunteers count the votes because they want to see a fair election (and there are ways of checking if someone partisan slipped some votes into the wrong pile). I agree with GP. Transparency is more important than precision in democracy. Good engineering is about choosing the right technology, not just the more recent one. Sometimes the right technology is paper.
  - Dig1t 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Almost every democratic country on Earth today does it like that, and all democratic countries have done it like that for the last 100-200 years. Counting paper ballots is just not that hard. Machines are infinitely more complex and exploitable. Plus, you have the extra layer of public perception: it's much easier to convince a chunk of the public that all the machines in some area are miscounting, than it is to convince them that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction.
    - Aerroon 2y ago
      that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction. And you can send observers that can watch the entire process.
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        >watch the entire process. "Entire" is the keyword here. Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place. Anyone and everyone can watch someone count paper ballots, noone can watch a computer count electronic ballots.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        > Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place. What? There are entire systems built around doing exactly that. Embedded, military, high-trust. It's never state of the art performance or mass deployed, because most people would rather have performance and cost optimized over assurance, but it exists and is in production use. You verify hardware, chain of custody from production to delivery, track every deployed piece of hardware, then lock the firmware and enforce restrictions on anything that executes after that. It's not easy or cheap (or foolproof, as anything can be exploited), but it's also not impossible. And substantially hardens security. And for simpler systems with lower performance requirements, completely achievable. F.ex. voting machines don't need to be running 16-core, hyperthreaded CPUs running multi-process operating systems
  - mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
    The disconnect is that in most of the world we only vote for one or two candidates on a ballot. In America you vote for everything from the president to the dog catcher on one ballot. While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it compulsory.
    - worstspotgain 2y ago
      Believe me, we've been aware that this is a non-bug feature for a long time. The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite direction: trying to selectively suppress their opponents' votes further. If it hurts them more than us, it's a worthy goal!
    - mr_mitm 2y ago
      Are you sure? The last time I voted in Germany they gave me five ballots (EU, state, county, city, district), some with dozens of candidates - per party. I had dozens of votes to give. Here is a similar example: https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/w1100_h825_x1796_y1347_Kommunalwahl_Trier_2019_Stimmzettel-1a38573d4a4dfd30.JPG https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/...
    - pedalpete 2y ago
      In Australia, (I believe) you have to pick your top 5...for a bunch of different items you're voting for. Here's an example ballot https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/images/article/2018_LC_Above.png https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/images/article/2018_LC_Above.png
      - bigger_cheese 2y ago
        I'm Australian, that screenshot is from the State election in South Australia, it is an example of how the Upper House ballot paper looks, it is similar in my state New South Wales. The vertical columns (labelled as Group A to E in screenshot) divide up the political parties. The Greens will be one column, Labor Party another, Liberal Party another column and so on. There are two horizontal rows separated by a thick line. You can choose to either vote "above the line" or "below the line" but not both methods. Above the line is used if you would like to vote based upon the wishes of a political party and below the line is used for "finer grained" voting for individual persons. For example the Labor party might have 3 Candidates "Fred", "Mary" and "Bob" if I vote above the line I can put a 1 next to the Labor party and then the Labor party's wishes will determine how my vote is distributed. Or if I Vote below the line I must number 12 different people in the order I want them to be chosen. So I could number Bob from Labor first, Peggy from the Greens second, then Fred from Labor third and so on and I exert exact control over how I want my preferences to be distributed. edit: Our elections are staggered, The State parliament is elected on different day to the Federal Parliament, which is different to Local City Council elections.
- bomewish 2y ago
  Absolutely agree. Just seems soooo simple.
- briandear 2y ago
  And we should dye the thumb of those that already voted.
  - dambi0 2y ago
    I’m not sure what problem that solves that crossing voters of a list doesn’t already solve. What about mail in and early voting?
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      It’s a fun way to add flare to voting day.
      - dambi0 2y ago
        It’s only fun if you want people to know you voted. Not everyone does.
        jonhohle 2y ago
        From a IS centric POV, are there communities where voting is looked down upon?
        dambi0 2y ago
        I was mostly thinking people in coercive relationships. But in terms of communities it might be that voting is looked down upon for certain members of that community not the community as a whole. In broader terms while marking people who have voted may not reveal who they voted for it does reveal that they did vote. This is less private than the election authorities maintaining the record of who has voted.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      I suppose it could help with duplicate voting since some places don't require ID to vote.
ytpete 2y ago
I believe the idea is that random audits check whether the barcode matches the human-readable part, and in the extremely unlikely even problems are found they simply hand-recount _all_ the ballots ignoring the barcode.
- saas_sam 2y ago
  Can you find any website or document that validates that these "random audits" are done? By whom and on what cadence? I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on.
  - lukev 2y ago
    Colorado requires automatic risk-limiting audits on its election systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    If you don't trust risk-limitjng audits, you're never gonna trust any voting system. Someone has to administer the system, do the counting, sum up the totals, etc.
    - Palmik 2y ago
      Asking these kind of questions, and authorities being able to answer them clearly, is essential to build and maintain trust.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    > I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on. (Taking a bit more pointed tone than I usually would, because of the amount of misinformation around this general topic and because of annoyance at people putting less effort in than election workers, from secretaries of state down to volunteers, and casting shade from the laziness of their armchair. Thank you to all the people spending their time trying to secure elections!) Did you try searching for "colorado voting audit"? There's a page on their SOS site... https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html Which even has a YouTube video on the process... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo
shawnz 2y ago
Let's say they get rid of the barcodes and only show the human readable text. How does that prove any better or worse that the machine counted the vote the way it says it did on the slip? The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to reduce the trustworthiness of the system
- floating-io 2y ago
  It starts with being able to tell that the information was encoded correctly when I submitted it. Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose because a dot is filled in? The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the information is encoded correctly on the ballot I submitted if it's done scantron-style. I cannot do that with barcodes. It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place. JMHO.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    Pretty sure GP is saying a scantron-style one can still be flipped or offset at the destination. They use position on the ballot, not OCR, to determine what the vote is.
    - flakeoil 2y ago
      At least the source would be correct so 50% less chance of cheating i.e. the cheating did at least not occur while producing the vote.
    - floating-io 2y ago
      It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by downstream hardware and software. That's a different issue. It's about the ability for the voter to determine that their own part of the process -- the recording of their own vote -- is done correctly in every respect. Each step of the system has to be verifiable as correct for the system to be trustworthy. As it stands right now, I cannot visually verify that my own vote produced a correct printed ballot. I have no way of doing that. This removes one of the most critical safeguards. If something in the software (malicious or otherwise) records an incorrect barcode, I have absolutely no way of knowing. That's a problem. Garbage in, garbage out.
breatheoften 2y ago
I didn't notice any barcodes -- it looked just like a ballot a human would fill out but with the bubbles filled in as part of the printing Googling around I think colorado banned ballots with qr codes / non human readable machine encodings .. or at least banned use of them for tallies https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becomes-First-State-to-Stop-Using-QR-Codes-Barcodes-to-Count-Ballots.aspx?admgarea=ht.government https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becom...

Dalewyn 2y ago

The value of absolute transparency is why nothing will beat paper ballots written and marked in plain English counted by hand with anyone and everyone who cares about election integrity watching the process.

sadeshmukh 2y ago
I mean, if you're willing to spend that much, and it'll be very expensive, then sure. It's just technophobia - machines are going to be more accurate than a human (who also can make a mistake!).
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >machines are going to be more accurate Says who? Also, what does "accurate" here actually mean? Speaking as someone who actually understands computers and machines: I agree with the commons (who are simpletons with regards to computers and machines) that machines cannot be trusted to be "accurate" (whatever that means) or even trusted in general. Especially when a simpler, confirmable-by-anyone method exists: Having someone count paper ballots by hand in the presence of anyone and everyone. That includes mistakes and errors. The value here is anyone and everyone can and will immediately understand (and thus accept) what is going on. Also, why are we even putting the integrity of the very foundation of our democracy on the table in exchange for convenience and cost of all things? Are we serious? It should be a good thing we are taking precious time and money to make sure our democracy is working properly. I thought democracy was actually fucking important.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Machines are amazing at counting things without losing their place. I'd trust an ATM's counted stack of bills over a human's (for sure if they only each got one try). I've written some code at a previous job to simplify data entry. The previous method was adding numbers from a stack of papers, with a calculator. I trust my code to add up the numbers on the computer over a human reading them from a printout and entering them in a calculator. Humans make mistakes. A lot.
    - the_gipsy 2y ago
      If the technical problem was solely about counting then obviously everywhere in the world we would be using machines by now. But we don't. Because the technical problem is trust, not counting.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      > Humans make mistakes. A lot. To put some numbers on this, from my experience. Health insurance manual claims processors (who usually average ~5 years of experience) can do 95+% accuracy, at speed (a few minutes), at scale. That's counting and verifying multiple things against processing rules. General data entry, from less trained folks, tends to average around 85% accurate (i.e. 15 mistakes + 85 entries correct, out of 100 entries).
- ajb 2y ago
  We do it in the UK Volunteers count the votes because they want to see a fair election (and there are ways of checking if someone partisan slipped some votes into the wrong pile). I agree with GP. Transparency is more important than precision in democracy. Good engineering is about choosing the right technology, not just the more recent one. Sometimes the right technology is paper.
- Dig1t 2y ago
  [flagged]
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Almost every democratic country on Earth today does it like that, and all democratic countries have done it like that for the last 100-200 years. Counting paper ballots is just not that hard. Machines are infinitely more complex and exploitable. Plus, you have the extra layer of public perception: it's much easier to convince a chunk of the public that all the machines in some area are miscounting, than it is to convince them that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction. And you can send observers that can watch the entire process.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >watch the entire process. "Entire" is the keyword here. Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place. Anyone and everyone can watch someone count paper ballots, noone can watch a computer count electronic ballots.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        > Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place. What? There are entire systems built around doing exactly that. Embedded, military, high-trust. It's never state of the art performance or mass deployed, because most people would rather have performance and cost optimized over assurance, but it exists and is in production use. You verify hardware, chain of custody from production to delivery, track every deployed piece of hardware, then lock the firmware and enforce restrictions on anything that executes after that. It's not easy or cheap (or foolproof, as anything can be exploited), but it's also not impossible. And substantially hardens security. And for simpler systems with lower performance requirements, completely achievable. F.ex. voting machines don't need to be running 16-core, hyperthreaded CPUs running multi-process operating systems
- mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
  The disconnect is that in most of the world we only vote for one or two candidates on a ballot. In America you vote for everything from the president to the dog catcher on one ballot. While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it compulsory.
  - worstspotgain 2y ago
    Believe me, we've been aware that this is a non-bug feature for a long time. The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite direction: trying to selectively suppress their opponents' votes further. If it hurts them more than us, it's a worthy goal!
  - mr_mitm 2y ago
    Are you sure? The last time I voted in Germany they gave me five ballots (EU, state, county, city, district), some with dozens of candidates - per party. I had dozens of votes to give. Here is a similar example: https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/w1100_h825_x1796_y1347_Kommunalwahl_Trier_2019_Stimmzettel-1a38573d4a4dfd30.JPG https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/...
  - pedalpete 2y ago
    In Australia, (I believe) you have to pick your top 5...for a bunch of different items you're voting for. Here's an example ballot https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/images/article/2018_LC_Above.png https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/images/article/2018_LC_Above.png
    - bigger_cheese 2y ago
      I'm Australian, that screenshot is from the State election in South Australia, it is an example of how the Upper House ballot paper looks, it is similar in my state New South Wales. The vertical columns (labelled as Group A to E in screenshot) divide up the political parties. The Greens will be one column, Labor Party another, Liberal Party another column and so on. There are two horizontal rows separated by a thick line. You can choose to either vote "above the line" or "below the line" but not both methods. Above the line is used if you would like to vote based upon the wishes of a political party and below the line is used for "finer grained" voting for individual persons. For example the Labor party might have 3 Candidates "Fred", "Mary" and "Bob" if I vote above the line I can put a 1 next to the Labor party and then the Labor party's wishes will determine how my vote is distributed. Or if I Vote below the line I must number 12 different people in the order I want them to be chosen. So I could number Bob from Labor first, Peggy from the Greens second, then Fred from Labor third and so on and I exert exact control over how I want my preferences to be distributed. edit: Our elections are staggered, The State parliament is elected on different day to the Federal Parliament, which is different to Local City Council elections.
bomewish 2y ago
Absolutely agree. Just seems soooo simple.
briandear 2y ago
And we should dye the thumb of those that already voted.
- dambi0 2y ago
  I’m not sure what problem that solves that crossing voters of a list doesn’t already solve. What about mail in and early voting?
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    It’s a fun way to add flare to voting day.
    - dambi0 2y ago
      It’s only fun if you want people to know you voted. Not everyone does.
      - jonhohle 2y ago
        From a IS centric POV, are there communities where voting is looked down upon?
        dambi0 2y ago
        I was mostly thinking people in coercive relationships. But in terms of communities it might be that voting is looked down upon for certain members of that community not the community as a whole. In broader terms while marking people who have voted may not reveal who they voted for it does reveal that they did vote. This is less private than the election authorities maintaining the record of who has voted.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    I suppose it could help with duplicate voting since some places don't require ID to vote.

ytpete 2y ago

I believe the idea is that random audits check whether the barcode matches the human-readable part, and in the extremely unlikely even problems are found they simply hand-recount _all_ the ballots ignoring the barcode.

saas_sam 2y ago
Can you find any website or document that validates that these "random audits" are done? By whom and on what cadence? I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on.
- lukev 2y ago
  Colorado requires automatic risk-limiting audits on its election systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  If you don't trust risk-limitjng audits, you're never gonna trust any voting system. Someone has to administer the system, do the counting, sum up the totals, etc.
  - Palmik 2y ago
    Asking these kind of questions, and authorities being able to answer them clearly, is essential to build and maintain trust.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on. (Taking a bit more pointed tone than I usually would, because of the amount of misinformation around this general topic and because of annoyance at people putting less effort in than election workers, from secretaries of state down to volunteers, and casting shade from the laziness of their armchair. Thank you to all the people spending their time trying to secure elections!) Did you try searching for "colorado voting audit"? There's a page on their SOS site... https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html Which even has a YouTube video on the process... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo

shawnz 2y ago

Let's say they get rid of the barcodes and only show the human readable text. How does that prove any better or worse that the machine counted the vote the way it says it did on the slip? The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to reduce the trustworthiness of the system

floating-io 2y ago
It starts with being able to tell that the information was encoded correctly when I submitted it. Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose because a dot is filled in? The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the information is encoded correctly on the ballot I submitted if it's done scantron-style. I cannot do that with barcodes. It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place. JMHO.
- Izkata 2y ago
  Pretty sure GP is saying a scantron-style one can still be flipped or offset at the destination. They use position on the ballot, not OCR, to determine what the vote is.
  - flakeoil 2y ago
    At least the source would be correct so 50% less chance of cheating i.e. the cheating did at least not occur while producing the vote.
  - floating-io 2y ago
    It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by downstream hardware and software. That's a different issue. It's about the ability for the voter to determine that their own part of the process -- the recording of their own vote -- is done correctly in every respect. Each step of the system has to be verifiable as correct for the system to be trustworthy. As it stands right now, I cannot visually verify that my own vote produced a correct printed ballot. I have no way of doing that. This removes one of the most critical safeguards. If something in the software (malicious or otherwise) records an incorrect barcode, I have absolutely no way of knowing. That's a problem. Garbage in, garbage out.

breatheoften 2y ago

I didn't notice any barcodes -- it looked just like a ballot a human would fill out but with the bubbles filled in as part of the printing Googling around I think colorado banned ballots with qr codes / non human readable machine encodings .. or at least banned use of them for tallies https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becomes-First-State-to-Stop-Using-QR-Codes-Barcodes-to-Count-Ballots.aspx?admgarea=ht.government https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becom...