4 ms·

scanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY more error prone than computers at counting.

ethbr1 2y ago
Seriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning and counting systems here is surprising. I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean all systems have to be incredibly complex. Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on electronic systems: something that's completely impossible with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or the people auditing them). If you're careful, you can be sure that only specific code is executing. I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized voting systems, from programming professionals, by programming speciality. I have a suspicion you'd get different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to pick a couple of examples.
- aesh2Xa1 2y ago
  > Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money. Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?
  - vacuity 2y ago
    Because the current implementations for ballots don't feel up to snuff, and I at least don't trust profit-driven companies to make "simple computerized systems" that are auditable and whatnot. Get a good solution in place for many election cycles and then we can all be happy.
blibble 2y ago
so then the attack becomes introducing enough error at critical counts such that it affects the result without being regarded as having been tampered with pretty easy if your company produced the machines
- Sparkle-san 2y ago
  How would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?
  - blibble 2y ago
    what's the failure point? then you work inside that I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that produced food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign his entire job was to allow the company to push up as close to that line as possible without going over when checked randomly saving them tens of millions a year
    - Sparkle-san 2y ago
      Depends on how many ballots you sample, but the number you could change would only matter in an extremely close election and in my state, if a vote is within 0.5%, it triggers an automatic recount. These systems have layers of auditing and validation to prevent these errors whether intentional or not.
- ninkendo 2y ago
  Random audits can generally solve this. Take a random count from a random machine and validate that it matches the hand count. If I’m trying to rig an election I would have to be very reckless to just cross my fingers and hope that the systems I hacked aren’t audited. I’d have to bribe the auditors or something, and at that point it’s simpler to just bribe people anyway and not bother with the whole hacking part.
- irq-1 2y ago
  Scanned paper ballots are changed all the time -- the manufacturer doesn't know that row 2 option 1 is a particular candidate. Authorities aren't stupid and know to change the ballots and test the machines. Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it has a lot of trust.
joedevon 2y ago
Not sure if this is a "thing" or if there's a problem with it, but why not live-stream video of every vote being counted so the entire population could validate at least the counting portion of voting.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
With encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't we do some basic anti-fraud measures? Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be randomly generated. So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The ballot is scanned with a scantron.

Seriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning and counting systems here is surprising. I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean all systems have to be incredibly complex. Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on electronic systems: something that's completely impossible with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or the people auditing them). If you're careful, you can be sure that only specific code is executing. I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized voting systems, from programming professionals, by programming speciality. I have a suspicion you'd get different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to pick a couple of examples.

aesh2Xa1 2y ago
> Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money. Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?
- vacuity 2y ago
  Because the current implementations for ballots don't feel up to snuff, and I at least don't trust profit-driven companies to make "simple computerized systems" that are auditable and whatnot. Get a good solution in place for many election cycles and then we can all be happy.

blibble 2y ago

so then the attack becomes introducing enough error at critical counts such that it affects the result without being regarded as having been tampered with pretty easy if your company produced the machines

Sparkle-san 2y ago
How would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?
- blibble 2y ago
  what's the failure point? then you work inside that I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that produced food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign his entire job was to allow the company to push up as close to that line as possible without going over when checked randomly saving them tens of millions a year
  - Sparkle-san 2y ago
    Depends on how many ballots you sample, but the number you could change would only matter in an extremely close election and in my state, if a vote is within 0.5%, it triggers an automatic recount. These systems have layers of auditing and validation to prevent these errors whether intentional or not.
ninkendo 2y ago
Random audits can generally solve this. Take a random count from a random machine and validate that it matches the hand count. If I’m trying to rig an election I would have to be very reckless to just cross my fingers and hope that the systems I hacked aren’t audited. I’d have to bribe the auditors or something, and at that point it’s simpler to just bribe people anyway and not bother with the whole hacking part.
irq-1 2y ago
Scanned paper ballots are changed all the time -- the manufacturer doesn't know that row 2 option 1 is a particular candidate. Authorities aren't stupid and know to change the ballots and test the machines. Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it has a lot of trust.

joedevon 2y ago

Not sure if this is a "thing" or if there's a problem with it, but why not live-stream video of every vote being counted so the entire population could validate at least the counting portion of voting.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

With encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't we do some basic anti-fraud measures? Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be randomly generated. So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The ballot is scanned with a scantron.