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If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date
by kevinalexbrown 14y ago
If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time.
If enough people cry foul to rule out a large group collectively lying or forgetting their confirmation numbers, fraud would be much easier to establish and localize. Moreover, requiring each independent database of votes to match to within some margin would also decrease the likelihood of fraud by requiring collusion between both organizations.
EDIT: Note that the confirmation number would be issued to you anonymously and sans receipt - there would be no way to prove your vote - you could have found some random confirmation number, and no recourse for a single citizen crying foul. The point, rather, is that if several hundred or thousand individuals noticed that their vote seemed to have changed, the likelihood that they were all making it up or forgetting their confirmation numbers would decrease substantially.
- eli 14y agoDefinitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.
- goostavos 14y agoI was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).
- tobias3 14y agoSomeone can give you money to vote for a specific candidate and verify that you voted correctly via the confirmation code.
- ry0ohki 14y agoSo say if some party were to gain power and start harassing people that voted for the other party...
- blindhippo 14y agoIf this is the reason, there is a bigger problem in America then simple voter fraud...
- mindrag 14y agoThere are all sorts of laws that protect us from various government abuses, such as requiring search warrants, trial by jury, freedom of speech, etc. Voter secrecy is a prudent safeguard along those same lines.
- briandear 14y agoEver dealt with a union election? That's exactly the problem with non secret ballots. You vote against unionization and thugs show up at your house. Union activists are among the most violent people around.
- thomasz 14y agoGosh. Ever dealt with a union election? That's exactly the problem with non secret ballots. You vote for unionization and libertarians show up at your house. Libertarians are among the most violent people around.
- bdunbar 14y agoPerhaps you know libertarians that I don't. The ones I know are well armed, but about as non-violent as you can be and not be a Quaker.
- thomasz 14y agoJust to make it clear: This was sarcasm. I never have dealt with armed libertarians beating somebody up because he supported unionization. The point is: Neither has he encountered union thugs beating somebody up because he was against unionization. It's a ridiculous myth.
- LandoCalrissian 14y agoThe short answer is you can buy votes then. If you can prove to me who you voted for, I'll give you $5 or whatever.
- Firehed 14y agoWhich is trivially easy with the availability of camera-phones (just include your ID in the shot). I know it's not foolproof as you could request a new ballot, but I'm guessing those buying votes aren't the smartest folk. Plus you'd be crazy to not accept the money upfront, as there's no way they're actually going to pay out after the fact and it's not like you can take someone to court for not upholding their end of an illegal bargain.
- sadawi 14y agoWhat you're buying isn't a vote, but a receipt. What if we could increase the supply of valid receipts enough to make them effectively worthless? For example, voting machines could drop duplicate receipts into a bucket that voters are free to rummage around in.
- shinratdr 14y agoOr just not have receipts and avoid the issue altogether.
- sadawi 14y agoSure, but there's a benefit to receipts: you can verify that your vote was counted correctly.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- shinratdr 14y agoWell, you can verify that the receipt says your vote was counted correctly. That assumes you both trust the receipt system and believe that whatever tampering was done to cause your Obama vote to become a Romney vote couldn't have possibly also resulted in the receipt providing incorrect information as well.
- cabalamat 14y ago> What is the significance of it being secret? So that people can't bribe or blackmail you into voting a particular way.
- brown9-2 14y agoOr rather, it makes the purchase of votes much less attractive.
- darien 14y agoFederal District Judge Christine Arguello denied the existence of a constitutional right to a secret ballot. http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21601455/federal-judge-says-no-constitutional-right-secret-ballot http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21601455/federal-j...
- cafard 14y agoGiven that a) the secret ballot was introduced into the US (originally as the "Australian ballot") many years after the ratification of the Constitution b) no amendment has prescribed it I find it hard to quarrel with the judge. I do consider the secret ballot an excellent idea, but I don't see it as constitutionally mandated.
- nickzoic 14y agoYou guys really should have copied preferential voting while you were at it. Or skipped over us entirely and gone with proportional representation.
- wpietri 14y agoYes. Proof of who you voted for is an invitation to vote-buying.
- zbowling 14y agoOne way hash with secret salt would work. You enter a secret password as a salt and get a hash code from all your votes so you have a provable record your vote got counted that you can verify but no body can reverse to know it's you. Then stick all the votes up on a server somewhere. Let us go and check our votes are in the list. We could then have informal verification and audits of the counts.
- eli 14y agoNo dice. One of the goals is that you can't prove how you voted (i.e. so you can't sell your vote).
- zbowling 14y agoNo one can prove I voted with a one way hash either. That's the point. Only I can verify myself.
- davej 14y agoYes, you can prove which way you voted. That could potentially commoditise votes.
- jcampbell1 14y agoYou are still missing the point. Voters can't be given a receipt for how they voted, because then they can sell their vote.
- erichocean 14y agoVoters can sell their vote with or without a receipt. Furthermore, they can sell with a reasonable degree of certainty (if the buyer demanded it) already by submitting to a lie detector test. There is no valid reason, moral or technical, for preventing voters from verifying their votes were accurately counted, and verification does not enable any new crimes – but it does prevent the current crime where someone's vote is either miscounted or not counted at all.
- scottmp10 14y agoThere is plenty of research and sample implementations of electronic voting schemes in which the final outcome is verifiable without anyone being able to see anyone else's vote. As an example, I worked with Michael Clarkson on an implementation of Civitas: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf
- eli 14y agoAgreed. There are a couple of other papers as well. The problem is they are far too complicated to explain to voters which makes them unlikely to be adopted and unlikely to be trusted. Having a secure vote is obviously the primary goal, but having a vote that people trust is pretty important too.
- sinnerswing 14y agoHere's one FROM Romney to Obama 'DOZENS' OF COLORADO ROMNEY VOTERS CLAIM MACHINES CHANGED VOTES TO OBAMA http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Dozens-of-Romney-Voters-In-Colorado-Complain-Machines-Changed-Votes-To-Obama http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Dozens-of...
- mkr-hn 14y agoDo you have anything more than that? I can't accept an unsourced story from that site at face value given its past editorial failures.
- sinnerswing 14y agoit's from krdo. and there is also a video. http://www.krdo.com/news/Pueblo-GOP-Machines-switched-Romney-votes-to-Obama/-/417220/17252566/-/qpcqxr/-/index.html http://www.krdo.com/news/Pueblo-GOP-Machines-switched-Romney...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Jach 14y agoYou don't need to compromise secrecy. Are we ever going to stop complaining and call for using 3ballot or one of the any other methods? http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html
- kevinalexbrown 14y agoWhat about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did? I think this verification may already be a reality. The alternative is to disallow any form of verification, as with the Reddit poster, but then we lose the ability to perform checks on the voting procedure, and would never have known about this current anomaly. What's missing, though, is the proof that who you voted for is who the vote was internally counted for. Due to anonymity you can't individually prove a confirmation number belongs to you - you could have found one on the street or made up some random number, but if 10000 people claim that their initial vote does not match the confirmed vote, it's worth looking into more carefully.
- ceejayoz 14y ago> What about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did? That'd be a felony in Wisconsin, presumably for that sort of reason. http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/Wisconsin_GAB_Is_Felony_To_Tweet_Photo_Of_Your_Ballot_154196315.html http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/Wisconsin_GAB_Is_Felony_...
- uhwuggawuh 14y agoEven taking video is illegal, as that could also be used as evidence of voting for a particular candidate, allowing candidates to buy votes.
- erichocean 14y agoWell, we wouldn't want money to be part of the political process! Oh wait.
- briandear 14y agoTaking video is not illegal in all states. http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/documenting-your-vote-2008#StateResources http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/documenting-your-vote...
- gcb 14y agothat's naive. only bugs in the voting machine acts like that real, proper, election manipulation wouldn't be so obvious to the voters
- alexshenoy 14y agoWhat about this system covered a while back on TED: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izddjAp_N4I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izddjAp_N4I
- msg 14y agoUnless you have an absentee ballot (e.g., everyone in WA state). You give your filled out (or empty!) ballot to the mafia to drop at the polling station, with the signed outer envelope (declaring under penalty of perjury that this is your vote), and collect your reward. I dropped off my wife's ballot. It is totally normal for one person to drop off multiple ballots at the box. It would even be hard for you to notice multiple ballots being dropped. I did our two with one gesture. The vote buying cow has already left the barn. So it's far more important to let citizens verify that their vote was counted accurately, with some sort of anonymizing hash.
- MartinCron 14y agoI dropped off my wife's ballot. It is totally normal for one person to drop off multiple ballots at the box. I did the same thing with my wife's ballot this morning, and I saw multiple other people dropping more than one ballot as well.
- jcurbo 14y agoThis entire thread is interesting because our typical programming instincts - making sure user actions are linked to user desires via digital signatures, etc - get completely thrown out the window when you talk about voting and secret ballots. You need to be able to ensure the voter is able to make their choice independently, without pressure or publicity - but you can not perform any kind of integrity check that would link the vote back to the voter.
- specialist 14y agoYup. There is exactly no way to ensure the secret ballot (voter privacy) or public count (auditable results) with any form of electronic voting.
- cantankerous 14y agoThis is actually not quite true. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf
- specialist 14y agoSkimmed that paper. Thanks for link. Nice to see Civitas would use a tamper evident log file (rolling temporal hash). Alas, generally, encoding the order of the ballots cast destroys voter privacy. I stand by my earlier comment (cross thread): These crypto based voting systems rely on hash collisions to hide individual ballots within a herd of ballots. Because Civitas encodes votes as ranked preference (to support winner takes all, Condorcet, approval voting), there's even more information contained within each ballot, decreasing the likelihood of a hash collision, increasing the likelihood of inferring each voter's unique ballot. Something did occur to me, however. Right now, all races are encoded onto a single ballot. Making it more likely that every ballot within a precinct is utterly unique. But if each race was split onto its own ballot, then a crypto based voting system might be workable. Hmmm. As loathe as I am to validate a crypto-based scheme in any way, these schemes aren't going away, no small part because the geeks keep pushing technological fixes for perceived societal problems. So I'm somewhat resigned that I should make the most of it, help make sure the worst parts are mitigated.
- oh_sigh 14y agoIncorrect. You can combine a personal secret code with the output of the vote-teller in order to determine who you voted for. The vote-teller would have no way of determining who you actually voted for without your personal code. Even more secure would be to have two personal codes, one a "real" code, which outputs the actual candidate you voted for, and one "duress" code, which outputs a candidate you didn't vote for(in case someone is holding a gun to your head to confirm you voted for their candidate)
- dubya 14y agoWouldn't the person with the gun just demand both codes? And typically a ballot has multiple offices to elect. Would you flip all of them for the "duress" code? It seems like it gets complicated really quickly.
- oh_sigh 14y agoThe duress code and real code would be indistinguishable. You could simply tell the person your duress as your real one, and your real one as the duress. Another possibility is to make the duress an option. You can fill out a fake ballot for your duress code if you want, but you aren't forced to(since most people don't need to worry about it)
- njs12345 14y agoSee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan for an example of one such system which preserves the secret ballot property.
- kybernetikos 14y agoFrom reading the wiki article it seems that Punchscan allows the voter to prove which way they voted.
- trhtrsh 14y agoThat is incorrect. Why do you think so? Are you thinking of this: ". The voter can look up her ballot by typing in the serial number and she can check that information held by the election authority matches her ballot. " The voter must retain her vote (A or B) in human memory, which cannot be externally verified, except by brain scan, etc... but that detail is rather unsolvable. Punchscan is a bit impractical for verifying large ballots, but large contested ballots are rare.
- kybernetikos 14y agoYou're right, only the piece you've already kept, which by itself is not enough to prove which way you voted is kept. I was confused because it said that it showed you something which could prove that a vote was 'counted as cast', and I don't see how you can prove that without the system proving to you that it knew how you cast your vote.
- dbaupp 14y agoWow! That is a really elegant solution. I wonder what (if any) pitfalls it has, other than the increased complexity and less obvious correctness (i.e. it would be hard to convince a non-mathematically inclined person that it works properly).
- seanalltogether 14y agoOr just let anyone grab a copy of the database so that any independent organization can host a lookup service so you can verify that your vote went through correctly.
- briandear 14y agoDefine an "independent" organization. There's no such thing. All organizations are partisan.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pippy 14y agoYou could give voters a receipt with the time, machine, and candidate they voted for. Checking for voter fraud would be as simple as comparing some receipts against the voter logs.
- mtgx 14y agoThis system kind of does what you're asking: http://www.wombat-voting.com http://www.wombat-voting.com
- sebastianavina 14y agoI think all the electronic machines should print a recepit, deposit the receipt on a box, and at the end of the day, count all physical votes. If they don't match the electronic machine, then audit them.
- righteous 14y agoWhy are you like so many others attempting to make electronic voting work? What's the benefit? Electronic voting is a slight improvement in speed-to-count and a mega step down in reliability, opportunity for fraud, undetectable errors, software glitches, screen glitches. Not the mention the need for electricity. Paper ballots work great. Why change?