In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that.
Not to mention the additional level of confusion and potential for errors. All of this so you can buy two machines from two different vendors who might, in the end, still have ties via investors.
With a paper vote, you place trust in those who collect, store and, count, and you can always recount if needed. With electronic voting you place that trust in those that produce the hardware and software.
This system just begs for being manipulated.
Paper ballots are not immune from such concerns. The concept of votes being added or removed from a count isn't a new phenomena. So the standard should be whether or not the electronic means are better, rather than them being a perfect counting method.
That depends where the person is. The people managing the process, those doing the counting, have plenty of opportunity for large manipulations. There are safeguards, but the possibility remains and must be accounted for.
IF vote = Clinton AND random <= small error limit not making cheating oblivious THEN vote = Trump;
line in the code?
Easy. Serial numbers. Like any other anonymous system (paper money, raffle tickets etc) you assign a number to every valid ballot. Should the same number appear twice, or not appear, then you know something fishy is happening. Any extra fake ballots should be discovered, so long as the originals are not removed from the systems. Throw the numbers around randomly and creating undetectable fakes become very difficult.
You already have a log of who showed up to vote. Compare the number of shows S with the number of ballots V which must be <= S due to poorly marked/unreadable ballots. Simple.
Edit: and this all statistically correlates with exit polls. It's very, very hard to fake all three of these in order to rig an election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate_special_elec...
Which is why it's important to fix this earlier rather than later.
If it's your goal to cast more FUD on the issue, that's your choice. I can't even ask to you be honest about it because that wouldn't be congruent with spreading FUD.
What counts is not who votes, but who counts the votes.
Original in Russian:
Каменев. стараясь снизойти до уровня Сталина, говорит: "А вот по вопросу, как завоевать большинство в партии". - "Знаете, товарищи, - говорит Сталин, - что я думаю по этому поводу: я считаю, что совершенно неважно, кто и как будет в партии голосовать; но вот что чрезвычайно важно, это - кто и как будет считать голоса". Даже Каменев, который уже должен знать Сталина, выразительно откашливается.
На следующий день Сталин вызывает к себе в кабинет Назаретяна и долго с ним совещается. Назаретян выходит из кабинета довольно кислый. Но он человек послушный. В тот же день постановлением Оргбюро он назначен заведующим партийным отделом "Правды" и приступает к работе.
В "Правду" поступают отчеты о собраниях партийных организаций и результаты голосований, в особенности по Москве. Работа Назаретяна очень проста. На собрании такой-то ячейки за ЦК голосовало, скажем, 300 человек, против - 600; Назаретян переправляет: за ЦК - 600, против - 300. Так это и печатается в "Правде". И так по всем организациям. Конечно, ячейка, прочтя в "Правде" ложный отчет о результатах ее голосования, протестует, звонит в "Правду", добивается отдела партийной жизни. Назаретян вежливо отвечает, обещает немедленно проверить. По проверке оказывается, "что вы совершенно правы, произошла досадная ошибка, перепутали в типографии; знаете, они очень перегружены; редакция "Правды" приносит вам свои извинения; будет напечатано исправление". Каждая ячейка полагает, что это единичная ошибка, происшедшая только с ней, и не догадывается, что это происходит по большинству ячеек. Между тем постепенно создается общая картина, что ЦК начинает выигрывать по всей линии. Провинция становится осторожнее и начинает идти за Москвой, то есть за ЦК.
(Stalin faked election by printing reverted votes in «Pravda»).
How do you know if someone decided to throw away some of them?
(While also ensuring voters remain anonymous and allowing voters to verify their votes.)
You have a number of differently affiliated persons watching the proceedings, and having at the end a rough idea of the number of votes that were returned per polling station. Then (with some coordination that should be trivial for the smallest of political parties) those results can be independently reckoned and compared back to the official totals. Any irregularities should be quite obvious. Recounts are probably the Achilles heel of paper ballots, as you need a way to verify that they were not tampered with in the meantime
Compare to voting machines: "Just trust us. You need to have deep domain knowledge in several fields before you can even start to evaluate our trustworthiness (software, hardware, security, etc)... so just trust us. No, you can't examine the machines."
I guess you trust the mail service and the people on the receiving end to properly record your vote.
I prefer the day of (also in CA), where you get to put it into the counting machine yourself—at least then I know it was counted at my polling place.
^-- Fixed that for you.
But seriously, at some point, unless everyone sticks around to watch everyone else's votes being counted, there has to be some level of trust with the system. The only thing we can do better is to make vote counting machines' code open sourced and have the code signed with a trusted Public Key Infrastructure of some sort.
The paper system is very open source already. So open that even non-developers can understand it.
I was listening to something specifically talking about California counting mail-in ballots. They said California took longer than most states because it's big, it has liberal laws about eligibility (counting provisional ballots) and citizens are pretty sloppy about filling in mail-in ballots. They described coffee and spaghetti stains obscuring the choice. They will fill out "clean" ballots in pairs with their best guess. I'm sure that's a small number of ballots.
When I've voted in person they deliberately have me feed my ballot into a machine to confirm it was valid.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32428648
Was this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutfur_Rahman_(politician)#Fal...
Is it just me or does this sentence not make sense?
That way being "walking around money" in the sense of mingling with wealthy people at expensive events funded by other wealthy people in an attempt gain favor (and votes) from the people who can afford those events.
I think it's being purposely dramatic, but the English (kind of) adds up.
It was a knee jerk reaction by Congress to the 2000 presidential election recounts in Florida. They passed a bill that funded the purchase of new voting machines called the Help America Vote Act[1]. It provided a fat pile of federal funds to states for the purpose of replacing voting equipment. Of course, throw a mountain of money in front of federal contractors, and several will rush out poorly designed systems quickly to claim the prize. Secure voting was the last thing on their minds. Diebold actually sued the state of Massachusetts for "wrongful purchase" of competitor systems.[2] Slashdot covered the fiasco generated by HAVA for years. Just search for Diebold or Sequoia in relation to their domain.[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/03/26/1431258/diebold-sues...
[3] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=diebold%20site%3Aslashdot.org
One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then comes to you and threatens you and your family. Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else... You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats.
The electronic voting machines protect your identity. They allow you to vote anonymously. They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don't just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe). His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to allow us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.
Where I vote, my paper ballot in no way identifies me. I identify myself upon entering the polling station, they find my name on the list of registered voters and mark it. When I'm turning in my completed ballot, I again identify myself and my name is marked on a separate list. So there's a record that I voted but not for whom I voted. How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?
BTW, where I vote, the paper ballots are the bubble scan kind and the voter feeds it to the machine themselves. This provides very fast tabulations with a paper record for security and recounts.
I am just theorizing here: Someone now takes the box of paper votes and runs it through the scanner machine. And passes this number along to someone. What is stopping them from tampering at this step? I think this is precisely what my co-worker was describing. There is an inherent trust that your paper ballot is scanned and recorded in a fashion that matches your vote.
An electronic voting machine could potentially communicate votes in real time over a secure connection. Or in the case of Brazil's machines, I believe stores it locally, encrypted, with a verifiable cryptographic signature of some sort.
I'm sure we all know the multitude of other attack vectors this introduces. I guess I am just not convinced that paper makes things more secure.
We designed a vote printer that would allow the voter to see a paper copy before storing it, but it was never used.
Given the number of comments you've made on this thread, it seems this is an area of interest to you. I encourage you to look though the previous HN discussions on this topic. Here's a list of some of those from the past month or so:
Doesn't scale is a concept that only developers and entrepreneurs understand. Sadly, that makes it an invalid argument for the other 98% of the population.
The problem I have with this particular scenario is that it imagines a reality in which someone can afford to collect votes one by one with impunity but can't force these same bunch of people (and one or two simply aren't enough to matter) at the voting station itself.
I don't know if this is the current case (or perhaps your scenario is one of the reasons for the current procedure), but they can just put a serial number on the stub so that the poll worker can verify that the ballot that was handed out was the one just filled out.
I am sure there are many reasons to prefer electronic voting, but that just seem logistically impossible when you are talking about millions of people. No way that wouldn't go unreported or undetected.
Whereas, with voting machines, if compromised has much more reach and would be difficult to detect.
I'm not saying this scenario is plausible for swaying the outcome of a presidential election (which is what I am sure is on many of your minds right now). But for locally elected officials? Seems at least plausible to me.
At the end of the day I imagine electronic voting is all about speed. A quick wiki search brings up the following anecdote:
> The voting system has been widely accepted, due in great part to the fact that it speeds up the vote count tremendously. In the 1989 presidential election between Fernando Collor de Mello and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the vote count required nine days. In the 2002 general election, the count required less than 12 hours. In some smaller towns the election results are known minutes after the closing of the ballots.
Or, alternatively, spend tons of money on electronic voting machines that allow the bad guy to game the system on a more massive scale without having to threaten as many people.
I'd be willing to bet money that this scenario has never, ever happened.
https://insajder.net/en/site/tema/794/
http://www.novinite.com/articles/120632/Bosnians+Name+Vote-B...
I voted on paper and it was put in a box to be counted in a central location. This takes forever and they just now are finishing up counting.
Electronic voting is a lot quicker and cheaper to count. I'd argue that the best system is one in which you vote on paper but it's counted electronically at the polling booth. That way there's a paper trail that can be audited and also quick counting.
Our population is only 1/6th yours, IIRC, and you subdivide more heavily into states already.
That's how we do it around me, and it seems like a strictly superior approach. What am I missing?
The machine itself can keep count, or the cards could be designed for scantron-esque machine counting - regardless, in case of a disputed result, the cards can be counted the traditional way (by hand, with observers from each party present, etc).
Not my idea, BTW, but I don't recall where I read it - nor whether it was a description of something actually in use or merely a proposal.
Do you remember "hanging chads"?
But yeah, that's the crux of the idea: have a machine take the voter's choices, to effectively eliminate accidentally-spoiled ballots (the design of the "hanging chads" machines was sorely lacking on this point); but then have it produce a physical record, visually checked by the voter, to enable auditing & recounts.
Counting the hard copies would be the definitive source of truth, just like traditional paper ballots - any automated score-keeping would just be a bonus for early result reporting (although might also stand in for the manual count in "safe seats" where no-one cares to dispute the expected result).
Have the checker mark the holes it detects with red ink or something, to make it clear to the user that the system detects their votes properly, and to provide a fallback. In the event another machine fails to count it, the user's intent is double-marked.
And then have the same style of vote-counting, where people manually scrutinize the votes, and have each party's representatives slide the votes into their counting machine. If the machines lose sync, you stop and figure it out at the point of the specific vote that fails to scan.
Speed-wise, it only takes the machine about 1 second per ballot card.
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,0...
Which is a shame, because it's a fairly effective way to push money back into the economy, at least when a manual system is used.
Second electronic machines are popular because they speed the election counting and are cheaper to run because the election board doesn't have to print tens to hundreds of thousands of ballots. A good electronic voting machine reports the vote 2 ways digitally to some vote tabulator local to that voting place and with a paper record that can be audited. The paper print out their having printed in this video is the end of the night tally that'll be reported to the county/state board of elections to be combined with the rest of the results.
Third doing it on a centrally located machine instead of over the internet adds a lot of security to the process. Trying to properly secure single purpose hardware like a voting machine that can be kept in a monitored location is a much simpler task than trying to find a way to ensure the Joe/Jane Voter's computer isn't compromised when sending the data to their counties board of elections. Not to mention that by accepting votes over the internet you're opening yourself up to everyone being able to remotely attempt to exploit the system. At least with a voting machine only connected to other election hardware attacks are limited to someone that's physically at the voting location. It's also tricky to prevent double voting while maintaining complete anonymity.
The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too.
You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.
In the UK's 2014 elections for the European Parliament, a Scottish voter wrote against the four parties/candidates listed: "wank"; "wank"; "good guy"; "wank".
The vote was deemed valid as the voter had expressed a clear preference.
(Source: https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/pho...)
http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/2015-05-08/angry-voter-...
There are pictures and a description here: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064
The difference is that the voting machine makes it possible to hack the paper trail.
In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later gets shipped off to the counting room. I just can't understand why you guys have to physically turn up if you are just going to select your answer on a computer anyway.