3 ms·

Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy. Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we

Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy. Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway. Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately. Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong, but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but will be more accurate its more of a psychology question than a technical question though.

bkummel 1y ago
You can introduce procedures to minimize the error to a point that it’s not significant anymore. Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.
Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
These system used for voting means that humans don't hand tally hundred of millions of votes. They tally those in a voting district only. Those them get aggregated with other districts and so on until the whole states and then the country is counted. The problem with the accuracy assumption of electronic voting is that a) its all coded without errors and b) someone hasn't deliberately but code into manipulate the vote numbers.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  We have good reason to believe a is true and b is false; the machines get tested to death before election day.
  - teddyh 1y ago
    As mentioned in the video, there is no amount of “testing” which could prove the absence of malicious software or hardware. None.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing. If you're saying we should be writing voting machine code in ML and keeping the firmware in Fort Knox, I'm going to make the argument that it's a lot cheaper to do sampled hand-counts to check against machine error or tampering... Which we already do.
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
        > That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing. It doesn't because even with unit and integration testing, software still fails and get hacked/exploited on a regular basis. What's worse with software voting is that a single good exploit could affect all the votes.
        shadowgovt 1y ago
        It really can't. What is the mechanism by which it could? Different states use different machines and each individual machine is airgapped. A general supply chain attack would show up in statistical sampling audits (i e. hand recounts of small numbers of ballots, which we already do).
teddyh 1y ago
User name checks out.
- jancsika 1y ago
  I mean, you left yourself open to that glib, low-effort criticism when you wrote this: > no software or programmable hardware That's obviously too stringent. Consider: 1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet. 2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader. Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links! Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    Indeed. That is what I was responding to; if I over-assumed the GP's position, my apologies. We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election). If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason alone) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception"). Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.
  - teddyh 1y ago
    If your proposed process is implemented, it will take about 5 seconds before the precinct realizes that they can just feed it all to the machine and sign whatever number which comes out as the “hand-counted” one. Especially as they will be dinged whenever their count differs from the machine, which will be assumed by their superiors to be more trustworthy. More seriously, even though some cars are programmable, I did not mean that nobody could use cars to transport ballot boxes. I obviously meant that the official results should be the manually-counted one; machines could conceivably be used to get interim results faster, and/or to double-check a count to see if it needs to be counted again. But I was serious about requiring absolutely no machines involved in the counting of the official results.
gmueckl 1y ago
Human tallying is a source of errors, but it typically doesn't affect the outcome in major ways. This is more of an argument against large scale winner-takes-it-all election systems, as they have the least resilience against this kind of error. The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. If this was indeed caused by fraudulent voting software, it happened without leaving any other obvious traces of tampering.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. When and where was this?
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    It's being litigated, but in general the answer is there is not yet evidence that machine voting systems were compromised. - in New York there is statistical anomaly correlated with a couple small-town polling stations. Those towns are small enough that they have a huge population of one religion, and one explanation is that the Democrat party's perceived "soft on Israel" stance tilted 100% of voters in those locations away from supporting the Democrat presidential candidate. - in Pennsylvania a standard statistical analysis tool used to detect vote disruption suggested disruption occurred. The form of the disruption could be fraud, but it can also be things like voter intimidation (which was observed and reported in Philadelphia) and sudden discontinuity in voter behavior (the aforementioned "soft on Palestine" issue). Correlation does not imply causation, and the lack of evidence of tampering of the machines in the audit logs is lack of evidence of tampering of the machines, not indication that the audit logs were compromised.
floweronthehill 1y ago
I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country. People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember. To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on. So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.
- mariusor 1y ago
  Yet there are many ways in which paper ballots can be taken advantage of. As an example do a search for Eastern European Carousel Voting[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
  - okanat 1y ago
    It is not the paper ballots that's taken advantage of. They have no general public participation and opposition. The public simply do not give a damn about polling stations in places where Carousel voting is possible. There is no opposition observers or they cannot be because the examples in the Wikipedia page are dictatorships, not democracies. You cannot turn a dictatorship into democracy by voting. Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.
    - mariusor 1y ago
      > Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters Yeah, do that by hand please, without relying on electronic means. Paper ballots with "honour" based out of circumscription participation is not secure. My country also suffered from this issue and it's not an authoritarian regime. They fixed it by adding and checking IDs on a ballot participation list. Nobody explained how that works to the average voter. What I was trying to underscore is that even for something that's presented as simple and fool proof as paper ballots one can find vulnerabilities, especially when you're dealing with nation level threats. So in my opinion we shouldn't ask electronic ballots to be more security than what is already in wide use. And in fairness, electronic ballots don't need to be more (or as) secure as paper ballots, but 'mail in' ballots. If we can come up with a method that's as secure as mail ballots I'd call it a success, despite what Tom Scott says.
constantcrying 1y ago
>Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Humans just need to be able to separate a few hundreds of ballots into a couple of piles. When introducing double checking this makes an incredibly rigorous process, which can be open to the public. This is the case here in Germany. Everything after that can be done by computers as all the data after that is published.

bkummel 1y ago

You can introduce procedures to minimize the error to a point that it’s not significant anymore. Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.

Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago

These system used for voting means that humans don't hand tally hundred of millions of votes. They tally those in a voting district only. Those them get aggregated with other districts and so on until the whole states and then the country is counted. The problem with the accuracy assumption of electronic voting is that a) its all coded without errors and b) someone hasn't deliberately but code into manipulate the vote numbers.

shadowgovt 1y ago
We have good reason to believe a is true and b is false; the machines get tested to death before election day.
- teddyh 1y ago
  As mentioned in the video, there is no amount of “testing” which could prove the absence of malicious software or hardware. None.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing. If you're saying we should be writing voting machine code in ML and keeping the firmware in Fort Knox, I'm going to make the argument that it's a lot cheaper to do sampled hand-counts to check against machine error or tampering... Which we already do.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
      > That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing. It doesn't because even with unit and integration testing, software still fails and get hacked/exploited on a regular basis. What's worse with software voting is that a single good exploit could affect all the votes.
      - shadowgovt 1y ago
        It really can't. What is the mechanism by which it could? Different states use different machines and each individual machine is airgapped. A general supply chain attack would show up in statistical sampling audits (i e. hand recounts of small numbers of ballots, which we already do).

teddyh 1y ago

User name checks out.

jancsika 1y ago
I mean, you left yourself open to that glib, low-effort criticism when you wrote this: > no software or programmable hardware That's obviously too stringent. Consider: 1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet. 2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader. Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links! Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  Indeed. That is what I was responding to; if I over-assumed the GP's position, my apologies. We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election). If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason alone) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception"). Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.
- teddyh 1y ago
  If your proposed process is implemented, it will take about 5 seconds before the precinct realizes that they can just feed it all to the machine and sign whatever number which comes out as the “hand-counted” one. Especially as they will be dinged whenever their count differs from the machine, which will be assumed by their superiors to be more trustworthy. More seriously, even though some cars are programmable, I did not mean that nobody could use cars to transport ballot boxes. I obviously meant that the official results should be the manually-counted one; machines could conceivably be used to get interim results faster, and/or to double-check a count to see if it needs to be counted again. But I was serious about requiring absolutely no machines involved in the counting of the official results.

gmueckl 1y ago

Human tallying is a source of errors, but it typically doesn't affect the outcome in major ways. This is more of an argument against large scale winner-takes-it-all election systems, as they have the least resilience against this kind of error. The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. If this was indeed caused by fraudulent voting software, it happened without leaving any other obvious traces of tampering.

lurk2 1y ago
> Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. When and where was this?
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  It's being litigated, but in general the answer is there is not yet evidence that machine voting systems were compromised. - in New York there is statistical anomaly correlated with a couple small-town polling stations. Those towns are small enough that they have a huge population of one religion, and one explanation is that the Democrat party's perceived "soft on Israel" stance tilted 100% of voters in those locations away from supporting the Democrat presidential candidate. - in Pennsylvania a standard statistical analysis tool used to detect vote disruption suggested disruption occurred. The form of the disruption could be fraud, but it can also be things like voter intimidation (which was observed and reported in Philadelphia) and sudden discontinuity in voter behavior (the aforementioned "soft on Palestine" issue). Correlation does not imply causation, and the lack of evidence of tampering of the machines in the audit logs is lack of evidence of tampering of the machines, not indication that the audit logs were compromised.

floweronthehill 1y ago

I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country. People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember. To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on. So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.

mariusor 1y ago
Yet there are many ways in which paper ballots can be taken advantage of. As an example do a search for Eastern European Carousel Voting[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
- okanat 1y ago
  It is not the paper ballots that's taken advantage of. They have no general public participation and opposition. The public simply do not give a damn about polling stations in places where Carousel voting is possible. There is no opposition observers or they cannot be because the examples in the Wikipedia page are dictatorships, not democracies. You cannot turn a dictatorship into democracy by voting. Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.
  - mariusor 1y ago
    > Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters Yeah, do that by hand please, without relying on electronic means. Paper ballots with "honour" based out of circumscription participation is not secure. My country also suffered from this issue and it's not an authoritarian regime. They fixed it by adding and checking IDs on a ballot participation list. Nobody explained how that works to the average voter. What I was trying to underscore is that even for something that's presented as simple and fool proof as paper ballots one can find vulnerabilities, especially when you're dealing with nation level threats. So in my opinion we shouldn't ask electronic ballots to be more security than what is already in wide use. And in fairness, electronic ballots don't need to be more (or as) secure as paper ballots, but 'mail in' ballots. If we can come up with a method that's as secure as mail ballots I'd call it a success, despite what Tom Scott says.

constantcrying 1y ago

>Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Humans just need to be able to separate a few hundreds of ballots into a couple of piles. When introducing double checking this makes an incredibly rigorous process, which can be open to the public. This is the case here in Germany. Everything after that can be done by computers as all the data after that is published.