Mail in voting is similarly exceptionally easy to game. Oops, lost 1% of that zip code... bummer...
At the end of the day all the important equipment gets packed up, shipped somewhere, and unpacked.
But sometimes -- rarely, but sometimes -- some really important piece of equipment gets left behind at the event site or unpacked incorrectly at its new location.
I just described marathons, carnivals, and... voting.
The horror stories of the US are a failure of their system, not of paper voting.
Requiring voter ID disenfranchises marginalised and poor voters, who may not be able to obtain ID easily. I know several people who have no form of government issued ID.
It's different in countries like Germany and France, where compulsory national ID is a thing.
Rates of fraud and abuse are low enough that this isn't an issue. Technically I could go and vote in somebody else's name, and hope they also didn't vote, and I most likely wouldn't get caught. But if they did vote as well, then the double-vote would be noticed (people have have been caught casting multiple votes in the past) and would be investigated.
(Not a conjecture, this was actually evidence in one of the various voter ID lawsuits; the state government had constructed a table with impact assessments of various approaches, then picked the one with the worst impact)
If the office that hands out ID cards is only open 9-5 Mon-Fri, for example, a voter who must work during this time and can't afford to miss work may not be able to get ID.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-vote...
To be clear what I don’t buy is voter ID having a suppressive effect iff we had an actual national ID
IMO, it's bloody retarded that this feature is still non-present in the US, resulting in all the pseudo ids like driver's licenses and SSNs.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-vote...
In the UK you must pre-register for a single voting location, and then when you turn up to vote they cross your name off so you can't come in again.
> I think this is a big part as to why postal voting fraud happens.
It might happen, but it is exceptionally rare. The impact of introducing voter ID laws would cause a far larger decrease in election validity due to voter suppression than postal voting fraud causes.
Don't audit a sample. Audit all of the votes.
This is (often) not true for word processors.
Not to mention the fact that access and efficiency are in fact forms of election manipulation. The inefficiency of the process keeps people from voting who otherwise would. That has political consequences and is absolutely used as a means to cause outcomes that otherwise wouldn't happen.
If you want to take anything secure, and make it unsecure, simply transform it from paper, and put it on a computer. Bam!
Paper is millions of times more secure than a computer. No piece of software is ever, ever secure. There are always, literally always thousands and thousands of hardware, and software vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited.
Compared to any form of computerized voting, ballots are insanely secure.
But what you're missing here is process. Paper voting has been around for a very, very long time. Process is well established, very simple to do, but it seems the US is always changing how to count, how to tally, and more.
But, to pause and take a step back ... I'm not sure how you think adding a computer to the mix, improves auditing. The entire point of a voting system, is that your vote remains anonymous. Therefore, the device or method that records your vote? Must not ever ever be assigned to you. And this also includes any form of anonymization.
This has also been handled for a very, very long time. Again, by process.
I wonder, how many years have you (or others advocating a computer inserted into the voting process), studied in depth the chain of trust used with paper ballots? Or precisely how ballots are counted? Or, even months? Weeks?
All I know is that when I researched paper ballots here in Canada, every aspect I could think of was covered. And that's what you'd expect, from a voting process that evolved over literally hundreds of years, with deep thought put into each voting cycle.
In what way, exactly, do you think paper voting is 'secure'? Do you think pieces of paper cannot be forged? Do you think it's difficult to swap out election boxes or to alter ballots?
> But, to pause and take a step back ... I'm not sure how you think adding a computer to the mix, improves auditing. The entire point of a voting system, is that your vote remains anonymous. Therefore, the device or method that records your vote? Must not ever ever be assigned to you. And this also includes any form of anonymization.
Sure, if you think about it for only about 1 second, the system you might come up with sucks. However, people have thought about it for more than 1 second on occasion, and come up with some pretty good designs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
Done correctly, it is insanely difficult to swap out an election box. Where would you do it?
At the polling station, where members from ALL political parties are present? Volunteers are present too. All together watch the voting process, following through to opening the ballot box, and performing the initial count.
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&do...
How, then, are election boxes to be secretly swapped?
On top of this, all ballots are serialized. Each voting station has multiple voting boxes. Voting boxes are sealed. How are you going to compromise them?
What I find astonishing, is how intensely some people seem to want to use computing for everything. Paper ballots, and the process used to employ them, are incredibly secure. Incredibly.
Its a problem that absolutely, positively does not need to be solved. At all.
Yet people are consistently working very diligently to do so, and the only real reason for that is one. Profit.
And we don't need that motive in an election counting process.
And any way, we don't have to theorize:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/upshot/mapped-why-voting-...
The point is: a properly designed cryptographic voting system would make all of this provably secure. We wouldn't need to rely on witnesses paying attention, any citizen would be able to verify the integrity of the entire election on their home computer. That is why electronic voting is the best system.
And that's a false arg anyway, even if you could "audit" it (ask the hardware nicely to not lie to you:), it's still a (really) bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
If individuals can audit their own votes, the hardware cannot lie.
Electronic (aka proxy) voting is a requirement on the checklist to skip physical presense.
I mean, sure, anyone with a laser printer can print 10,000 pieces of paper. 10,000 ballots, though... you'd have to get the right paper, the exact size, the exact font and layout. Then you'd have to move your printed ballots into the ballot stream, upstream of where they're counted. That could be done, but as I said, it's a somewhat large operation.
Compare that with changing a SIM card, where you can change multiple votes at once.
Can you do better in theory, yes. Have we seen any evidence that various US election bodies can do better through using electronic voting, no. The exact opposite in fact.
It's similar to passwords: writing down all your passwords in a notebook and keeping it in your desk draw is a bad idea. But it's usually significantly harder to break into millions of desk draws than to break any given site's security.
If we didn't have an electoral college, that might be true. But the reality is that you don't need to compromise that many people in that many places to have a decent probability of tipping a close election one way or the other.
> Can you do better in theory, yes. Have we seen any evidence that various US election bodies can do better through using electronic voting, no. The exact opposite in fact.
Which is exactly why DARPA is researching the problem.
Look, going to the bank is more secure. So why do we have banking apps? What if all your money is stolen?
Seriously, I find the knee jerk downvotes every time someone questions “just use paper” to be pretty ridiculous.
Top Level) General population can only verify their own votes
Mid Level) Counties can tally their county only
Low Level) States can tally up their states only
Ground Level) Federal government can tally up all votes.
The blockchain ledger will allow everyone to see votes without knowing individuals. To get name and location and other data, you need to be at a lower level.
If that's the case, it would be evidence that an individual voted for a specific candidate. This is, essentially, proof for anyone who'd want to purchase votes.
If they can't see who they voted for, they'd need some alternative way to verify that their vote counted for the candidate they wanted to vote for, without actually disclosing who that candidate is. Which would add some complexity to the solution.
To solve the issue of first voters (when there would be no other valid hashes for their printout) simply seed all candidates with a billion votes to start. Which hash is real and which is 'fake' is irrelevant since all that matters is the sum total of which we know 1 billion are to be removed.
The sums of the polling stations should equal the district.
The sums of the districts should equal the state.
The sums of the states should equal the nation.
I have to say it also makes me wonder what in the world darpa is thinking. Modern technology possible, somewhat trivially, elections that would be nearly impossible to fake in any way, shape, or form. And I'm certain this isn't exactly a secret to darpa.
The only other way to forge votes would be to invent new people that don't really exist, or maybe piggyback on recently deceased people. These are both problems that should be fairly straightforward to address if you have decently efficient administrations keeping track of things.
> The only other way to forge votes would be to invent new people that don't really exist
Exactly.
> straightforward to address
The question is how? I don't think it's considered that straightforward in blockchain voting circles.
Use paper ballots. Scan them at the polling place for fast electronic tally.
Audit a significantly significant random sample of the paper ballots after the election, and do a full recount if any discrepancy is found.
Prosecute people that violate chain of custody for the ballot boxes. (Give this power to a non-partisan authority.)
There are open problems around tampering with voter rolls; this is done both by state governments and foreign powers. We still need a scheme to make this more detectable (and to invalidate the election when it happens).