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What makes you think you have anonymous voting now? You must identify yourself when entering a polling station and each vote is tracked, in the event of a recou

by maratd 14y ago

What makes you think you have anonymous voting now? You must identify yourself when entering a polling station and each vote is tracked, in the event of a recount. The same type of anonymity can be provided by an automated program parsing emails that I can write in about an hour. I'm proud that my state will be among the first to move in this obvious direction. Unfortunate that it had to be under such circumstances.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
The difference is that with the current system it takes a significant amount of extra effort (and avoiding monitoring and oversight) to track someone's voting preferences. Whereas with email based voting it takes a significant amount of extra effort and a lot more oversight to create systems which ensure that voting preferences aren't tracked.
sliverstorm 14y ago
Total anonymity is one of those things a perfect voting system would provide, but in reality you have to pick a balance. In the real world, total anonymity is at odds with preventing fraud. I believe our current system is somewhere in the middle, with moderate anonymity and moderate fraud protection.
- mseebach 14y ago
  Anonymity in voting only applies to your vote, not the fact that you voted. Physical paper-voting gets this right: it's trivial to see how your vote is kept secret and counted, while each entry on the voting lists only gets to vote once.
27182818284 14y ago
The fact that I just asked two people who work for the election commission and they confirmed for me that they know that I did vote (which makes obvious sense) but not who I voted for. You identify yourself to one person that is checking the registry. That person is supervised by another person to make sure there is nothing strange going on there. If OK, you're given a ballot in a plastic holder. After marking ballot, you slide your paper ballot into the secured box by letting it drop out of the plastic container. This means nobody but you saw your choice and now it is mixed in with all of the others. Later, during a recount, they can see who indeed voted, but not who they voted for. They only get the numbers.
- specialist 14y ago
  I've been lied to so many times by so many election administrators, I would take Thatcher's advice: Trust, but verify. There's a difference between CANNOT tell how you voted, vs we didn't look.
  - 27182818284 14y ago
    Don't worry, I do mean the "cannot" version. Reread my post and note how I described the process. Asking the people I knew who had worked at the election commission in the last few years was only to confirm what I had concluded from my own experiences voting. The method used (in my state at least) does not have a way to identify me personally, even if a corrupt politician stole all the boxes post election and emptied them in his office. So that takes care of the "won't" case vs the "cannot" case.
    - specialist 14y ago
      We cool. Thanks for following up. I assumed too much about your circumstances. Paper ballots cast at a poll site is the only way to absolutely ensure voter privacy. The Australian Ballot method. The reason it works is because the ballot box scrambles the order of ballots, so they can't be tied to individual voters. (There are some exceptions, like very small precincts.) Voting electronically eliminates that anonymizing scrambling. If it scrambled the order, they'd never be able to audit the process. Postal ballots (aka vote by mail) has to be done just right to protect voter privacy. Many jurisdictions don't scramble the ballots because of the added expense.
mindslight 14y ago
> The same type of anonymity can be provided by an automated program parsing emails that I can write in about an hour. No, it cannot. The process of the polling place can be verified by everybody who turns up. The integrity of your centralized program cannot.
- maratd 14y ago
  > The integrity of your centralized program cannot. Open source it. And not in the traditional sense, either. I mean setup the server to expose source code. Have a 3rd party verify security and integrity. This is actually much easier to do than in the traditional process.
  - mindslight 14y ago
    > I mean setup the server to expose source code Please explain how you envision this being implemented. (Warning: while 'remote attestation' is a valid answer for some assertions, it means that we are once again back to trusting the central signing authority. which might seem less scary, but we'd really be having the same argument at a much more technical and nitpicky level)
    - maratd 14y ago
      > Please explain how you envision this being implemented. Make the directory containing source code read-accessible using your web server? There is nothing you can truly implement that can guarantee that the code being executed is the same as the code being exposed, but you can hire a 3rd party to audit the server and verify as much.
      - mindslight 14y ago
        So to paraphrase, your answer is "give up, forget about the property that every voter can audit the system, and fall back to relying on a trusted third party to certify the opaque process" ? But yet you call it an "obvious direction" ? And we haven't even talked about coercion resistance.. Hurricane madness indeed. Please read up on actual electronic voting systems, what properties are expected of them, and what properties the state of the art ones can actually provide.

by maratd 14y ago

InclinedPlane 14y ago

The difference is that with the current system it takes a significant amount of extra effort (and avoiding monitoring and oversight) to track someone's voting preferences. Whereas with email based voting it takes a significant amount of extra effort and a lot more oversight to create systems which ensure that voting preferences aren't tracked.

sliverstorm 14y ago

Total anonymity is one of those things a perfect voting system would provide, but in reality you have to pick a balance. In the real world, total anonymity is at odds with preventing fraud. I believe our current system is somewhere in the middle, with moderate anonymity and moderate fraud protection.

mseebach 14y ago
Anonymity in voting only applies to your vote, not the fact that you voted. Physical paper-voting gets this right: it's trivial to see how your vote is kept secret and counted, while each entry on the voting lists only gets to vote once.

27182818284 14y ago

The fact that I just asked two people who work for the election commission and they confirmed for me that they know that I did vote (which makes obvious sense) but not who I voted for. You identify yourself to one person that is checking the registry. That person is supervised by another person to make sure there is nothing strange going on there. If OK, you're given a ballot in a plastic holder. After marking ballot, you slide your paper ballot into the secured box by letting it drop out of the plastic container. This means nobody but you saw your choice and now it is mixed in with all of the others. Later, during a recount, they can see who indeed voted, but not who they voted for. They only get the numbers.

specialist 14y ago
I've been lied to so many times by so many election administrators, I would take Thatcher's advice: Trust, but verify. There's a difference between CANNOT tell how you voted, vs we didn't look.
- 27182818284 14y ago
  Don't worry, I do mean the "cannot" version. Reread my post and note how I described the process. Asking the people I knew who had worked at the election commission in the last few years was only to confirm what I had concluded from my own experiences voting. The method used (in my state at least) does not have a way to identify me personally, even if a corrupt politician stole all the boxes post election and emptied them in his office. So that takes care of the "won't" case vs the "cannot" case.
  - specialist 14y ago
    We cool. Thanks for following up. I assumed too much about your circumstances. Paper ballots cast at a poll site is the only way to absolutely ensure voter privacy. The Australian Ballot method. The reason it works is because the ballot box scrambles the order of ballots, so they can't be tied to individual voters. (There are some exceptions, like very small precincts.) Voting electronically eliminates that anonymizing scrambling. If it scrambled the order, they'd never be able to audit the process. Postal ballots (aka vote by mail) has to be done just right to protect voter privacy. Many jurisdictions don't scramble the ballots because of the added expense.

mindslight 14y ago

> The same type of anonymity can be provided by an automated program parsing emails that I can write in about an hour. No, it cannot. The process of the polling place can be verified by everybody who turns up. The integrity of your centralized program cannot.

maratd 14y ago
> The integrity of your centralized program cannot. Open source it. And not in the traditional sense, either. I mean setup the server to expose source code. Have a 3rd party verify security and integrity. This is actually much easier to do than in the traditional process.
- mindslight 14y ago
  > I mean setup the server to expose source code Please explain how you envision this being implemented. (Warning: while 'remote attestation' is a valid answer for some assertions, it means that we are once again back to trusting the central signing authority. which might seem less scary, but we'd really be having the same argument at a much more technical and nitpicky level)
  - maratd 14y ago
    > Please explain how you envision this being implemented. Make the directory containing source code read-accessible using your web server? There is nothing you can truly implement that can guarantee that the code being executed is the same as the code being exposed, but you can hire a 3rd party to audit the server and verify as much.
    - mindslight 14y ago
      So to paraphrase, your answer is "give up, forget about the property that every voter can audit the system, and fall back to relying on a trusted third party to certify the opaque process" ? But yet you call it an "obvious direction" ? And we haven't even talked about coercion resistance.. Hurricane madness indeed. Please read up on actual electronic voting systems, what properties are expected of them, and what properties the state of the art ones can actually provide.