Bruce Schneier thinks that the best compromise is to to have paper ballots that can be counted by a machine or by hand. If all observers agree the vote was right, machine count stands. If someone challenges the vote, you count by hand.

The caucuses are not normal elections: there are no ballots. The results are literally counting where people in a room are standing and recording that on a spreadsheet. The problem has been relaying that spreadsheet to the party.

This year, caucus participants also have cards on which they write down which candidate they supported in each round. So there’s a verifiable trail beyond the head counts.

Early reports on the radio mentioned that people trying to call in and relay the results were waiting ages on hold, but they also said that the reason phones were so heavily used was that the app was giving inconsistent results. I never heard any more about what that could mean exactly.

The Iowa Democratic Party was quite clear that their explanation was that the numbers being reported through the app were inconsistent; the reason there are three sets of numbers (first alignment, second alignment, and state delegate equivalent) reported from each precinct and then aggregated this year is that multiple candidates in the last cycle complained about apparent inconsistencies in the final results vs. there internal tallies (because voting is not private in caucuses, campaign precinct captains tend to report out results to the campaigns), and the DNC imposed transparency requirements to provide confidence in the final results.

> The Iowa Democratic Party was quite clear that their explanation was that the numbers being reported through the app were inconsistent

I guess that’s the part I don’t understand very well. Does that mean the number of delegates didn’t match what the math said they should based on the final voting counts? Or does it mean some of the folks who used the app to report the counts also called in with different numbers? Or something else?

As of last night, that was unclear. I’m hoping that they do a whole post-mortem on what went wrong and how they resolved it.

> I guess that’s the part I don’t understand very well. Does that mean the number of delegates didn’t match what the math said they should based on the final voting counts?

I'd don't know whether it's hard inconsistencies (e.g., delegate counts not right given second alignment totals) or just improbable combinations that call for manual review out of caution (e.g., second alignment numbers that are technically possible but improbable given the first alignment) or a mix.

I think this is the first year that they are reporting the results of each round. My guess is that the round-to-round numbers didn't match expectations, and my guess-the-second is that more people leave between rounds than we realized.

> I think this is the first year that they are reporting the results of each round.

It was.

> My guess is that the round-to-round numbers didn't match expectations, and my guess-the-second is that more people leave between rounds than we realized.

They diagnosed the problem to the reporting functionality in the app not including all data in all reports, not unexpected results in the actual logged data.

From what I heard, it means that the volunteer captains are old people who don’t know how to download apps, and they preferred dialing a phone number.

Many of the people didn't know they were going to be required to have a certain app, and that's why they didn't download it beforehand. They were then told to rely on the phone call-in method, which failed.

Many of the caucus sites don't have good enough cell reception to download an app at the last minute. Imagine yourself arriving at a location with poor cell reception, told to download someone else's unknown code onto your personal phone using a weak or nonexistent cellular data signal. Problematic to say the least. Finally, the next day the Internet calls you "old people" as a final slap in the face.

Minus the google being evil part, this entire operation could have been done in google sheets and would probably have gone 100 x better. With free robust revision history, permission control, and everything....

Assuming they set it up properly and/or use multiple sheets, a single sheet for 20+ people can get real messy and hard to audit.

I would set up each reporting unit (precint/causaus site) with their own sheet. There are probably only 5-10 officials per site that should even have edit access, maybe less, like only secretaries?

Make a nice formatted layout specific to that year. People feel pretty comfortable in excel-like spreadsheets/forms.

Then at the state level, since you have permission to all the sheets, its simple to aggregates all the sheet data

It's not some wiz-bang branded app with fancy animations, but its piggybacking on a very robust spreadsheet system that many people have some experience/intuition with.

They probably mean via a Google Form. That’s a fairly safe way (in my experience) to add inputs from many users concurrently.

Then you get into problems dealing with erroneous entries though right?

This kind of naivety is likely what brought about the entire issue in the first place.

Consultants with more budget than sense seems more likely.

It feels like a caucus exists to arbitrarily filter out participants based on how long they take. Not everyone has the 2-3 hours to spend on a caucus vote. Why don't they just vote via paper ballot?

It's worth noting that the caucus is supposed to be much more than just registering your presidential preference. The idea is that you have a regular gathering with your neighbors to discuss political concerns. That most people view it as an elaborate and slow version of a primary is an indictment of how sad the state of political participation in our country is.

That being said, it is an excellent way to exclude people who have other responsibilities or difficulty making it out for several hours on a week night.

It sounds like it's good at excluding a number of participants: those with physical disabilities, parents of young children, minimum wage workers who can't get time off, on-duty medical and emergency personnel, etc.

As a point of interest, those last groups are theoretically covered. I've heard of a concept of workplace caucus groups, where voters who can't get away (like medical staff) can be counted with others on the same shift. I have no idea how prevalent that is, and right now I can't find any relevant documentation either, so maybe it's not really a thing?

>Why don't they just vote via paper ballot?

Because Iowa chose to have a caucus, not a primary.

If you’re not an Iowa voter, there are a million political bikesheds that would have more relevance to your life. You’re basically just complaining about the pace of a television program.

In this specific case? Because Iowa wanted to be the first contest in the nomination process, but NH legally gets to run the first primary. Caucusing is an older alternative to voting that served as a loophole to allow Iowa to go first.

One of the changes this year was that if your candidate made it through the first round of voting, you could go home. So that should have helped the situation somewhat, but I wonder if it contributed to the inconsistencies. At least there’s a paper trail this year too.

Exactly. I think that machines can be used just fine in a very specific configuration. I.e. you go to a machine, select the choices you want, that machine prints out a ballot with your choices. You review that ballot. If the ballot is correct, you go over to a tabulation machine, feed it in, and call it a day. That machine retains the paper ballots if verification is needed.

EDIT: And if someone wants to fill out a paper ballot manually, let them. Just have a few spares around, most people won't.

This is how the new voting machines we use here in Austin work.

Big friendly, easy to use touch screen, it then prints your ballot on paper, in big friendly easy to read lettering. You then feed that into another machine. There's the e-voting, as well as paper ballot paper trail.

WHY does anyone need electronic voting in the first place? How much of an inconvenience is it to make a mark next to your choice on a piece of paper? I feel like there is some insane American reason to make voting machines but I can't comprehend it.

In Florida, our ballets are very long legal pieces of paper and can sometimes be 7-8 pages worth... So I definitely see the appeal here. The font is tiny for the population, as well. A lot of our population has problems filling the bubbles too (because of varying physical conditions).

Ballot marking devices are riskier than hand-marked ballots. A forthcoming study found that few people check what the machines print out, and even fewer actually report discrepancies to poll workers.

https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/bmd-verifiability-sp20.pdf

I'd say a combination of this idea plus a mandatory hand count of a random sample of, say, 2% of the ballots from each machine to make sure the results are similar.

That is what exactly what is suggested. OP presented a small subset of the entire article outlining how this should work. Highly recommended read.

Remember "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads" [1]? Those were machine-countable paper ballots which could be hand-counted in case of a challenge. Replace the punch-card ballot machine by pencil marks and the discussion will go over whether a specific field is just smeared or marked, whether a mark just outside the designated field still counts as a mark, etc. In short, paper voting ballots are better than this digital nightmare but they come with their own set of problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_(paper)

>the discussion will go over whether a specific field is just smeared or marked, whether a mark just outside the designated field still counts as a mark,

This is a solved problem. In my precinct in Virginia, any mark inside the bubble counts as valid. If you accidentally put a stray mark in one selection and intentionally fill in another for a single-choice contest, the scanner machine will reject your ballot and notify the poll worker about your overvote. If you marked outside the bubble, the machine will reject your ballot as an undervote.

Paper and hand counting only.

Election results are too important to risk compromising them by trying to save money or rush results.

The money saved is always marginal anyway and the extra time is usually only a few hours.

At this point in US politics, if someone can challenge it, they will. Might as well count by machine and by hand by default.

I like the system in Massachusetts: you fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a slot where it's scanned optically and deposited in a locked container. The ballot has circles you fill in with a provided marker (like standardized tests).

This.

Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.

The UK, and in particular the north east are well worth looking into here. All paper ballots, no counting machinery, 30,000 voters (smaller than Iowa but of a similar order of magnitude), voting from across the constituency (no cramming into halls), pretty much zero fraud. Accurate results within two hours of the polls closing.

The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact.

No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.

To elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.

The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.

Sorry could you expand on that a bit more? You only vote on one thing at a time?

Typically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election.

Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.

UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.

> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative

That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.

It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.

Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.

So you do not personally vote on (as an example) how much money goes to schools? Your representative does that voting for you. Is that correct?

You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.

The UK is a representative democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy).

So is the United States.

Apps could be a valuable tool if we were willing to really change how we vote: put candidates in order of preference. Doing that on paper is not intuitive. The problem is, established politicians and politicos know and prefer the complex game that they know: one vote + electoral college.

The issue is that, if one cannot reasonably trust a voting process, the vote is null in effect.

Humans cannot trust what they cannot understand and cannot verify.

A paper-based voting procedure, and counting procedure provide these guarantees: understanding and verification, through real-time, peer-based counting & review.

Any other automatic system cannot bring, at this point, the same guarantees, where you have to trust: 1) the people/system that built the system, 2) the process they used that ensures against any wrong-doing.

It is low-tech. And that's a good thing. No high-tech alternative provides the same value & the same guarantees at the same time.

I don’t know how “non intuitive “ it is, Mate — Australia’s been doing it for over a century.

It's not?

Putting numbers 1-5 in boxes isn't intuitive?

You’d be surprised. The UK had a referendum on this in 2011, where the scheme was rejected without controversy, and the “no” argument I remember from the time was that this is too complicated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternat...

And yes, I am aware this system is already used in many places.

No, unfortunately not. You will get people who will put all 1s or a 6 here and there.

Australia manages to do it... Hell, not saying its great, but in the last election you could vote 1-6 "above the line", or IIRC 1-105 below the line https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_vote/practice/practice-...

Ranked choice voting is already used by multiple countries with no problem

Personal smartphones running iOS/Android are such a huge security risk that I don't see this happening...

> Why can’t we just count votes by hand?

It works well, is hard to cheat, and there's no money in it?

I think you nailed it.

The only real argument against it is that you have to pay people to pay by hand, but I sincerely doubt that amount of manual labor costs more than an app.

My guess is most places would have volunteers out the ying-yang to count ballots.

It seems like it would be much, much easier to cheat, no? Yes a few people have to be in on it, but if the history of American politics has shown us anything; that's doable.

It's actually really hard, because the ballots are kept and can be verified by the voters. Keeping a full paper trail is a great protection against fraud.

Not to mention the sheer amount of people you have to convince if you want to have any meaningful impact. And not just to cheat, but also keep quiet about it lest you get caught.

What's that old Ben Franklin quote, three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead?

It's also really easy to verify in parallel. Two or three separate reporters per jurisdiction phone in to physically separate tabulating centers, tabulating centers cross-check and verify at the end.

It's worked in the UK for centuries

Sweden is one of the most digitalized countries in the world, yet we count votes by hand. Do like Sweden, count votes by hand :)

> Why can’t we just count votes by hand?

That's how the president, the parlament, and the local governments are elected in Lithuania, a country of the size of Iowa. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new private limited company online, but all votes in the elections are still counted by hand.

> Why can’t we just count votes by hand?

“Tabulate” here isn't a synonym for “count”, its recording/aggregating/communicating counts made outside the system.

There are 1681 reporting precincts in Iowa. I think those could be tabulated on 4-5 sheets of graph paper with a #2 pencil if needed.

They have to report first alignment, second alignment, and state delegate equivalent counts for each precinct; assuming you only need columns for 20 candidates for the first alignment and half of that for the second alignment and SDE count, and using optimal alignment and assuming each figure needs no more than one square and standard 8½”×11” sheets of 1/4” graph paper, you'd need about 22 pages for the first alignment and 11 each for the second alignment and SDE count to record the raw precinct numbers, so you're off by about an order of magnitude.

And, of course, graph paper doesn't address the need to rapidly aggregate the numbers, either physically (in space) or analytically (to get totals). Or to reconcile them for inconsistencies between the three dimensions. (Which is the whole point of the new reporting requirements imposed on the IDP, and, according to the IDP, the actual source of delays.)

And, of course, using #2 pencil for the records has its own problems as far as security goes.

They did count votes by hand (there's no other choice in a caucus).

This app was simply to aggregate the results more quickly than hundreds of phone calls. It was just a cheap app that was inadequately tested.

It's a bummer but hardly a crisis for democracy, and not really relevant to discussions of technology for vote counting in primaries or general elections.

There's a hand paper trail too of voter preference cards from each round that we can go check. The app is there to speed reporting so that the info about the winners can get out there faster.

You answered your own question.

Actually, this sound like a perfect job for open source to me.

It's not enough for the vote to be secure. It's not even enough for it to be provable. It needs to be understandably secure. As in: every moderately intelligent person must be able to understand how the process works, end-to-end.

While it's enough for cars, for example, to get approval from some trusted authority, we can see in this thread how that's not enough for elections: recent US elections are somewhat trustworthy, from what I can tell[0]. Yet a significant number of people don't trust them. While scepticism can be useful to keep the process honest, it comes with a price: lack of trust gives license, for example, for people to ignore election results by questioning their legitimacy. People drop out of the democratic process, feel less bound by law, and start skirting civil responsibilities, from paying taxes to jury duty. Lacking trust in the potential for "peaceful revolution" at the next election, they seek other means of representation, up to and including extremism and violence.

To add another European example: Germany has a polling place just about every block, at least in cities. In 10+ elections, I have never waited in line more than five minutes. After polling closes at 6pm, you can stick around/come back and observe the counting. The times where I did so, there were maybe ten other people also observing, and we were free to walk around and get as close as we wanted. With a polling place serving just a few hundred people, you can watch and independently count the votes of at least one party. Later that night, you can compare your count with the number on the published spreadsheet.

That's only one party's votes, in one of tens of thousands of polling places. But get a few trusted friends, or do it repeatedly over the years, and you rather rapidly get statistically significant evidence.

The only difficulty for the US would be the insane amount of individual votes, from ballot initiatives to dog catcher (not any longer, I know; but similar).

[0]: Apart from the well-known and completely legal top-down methods of election tampering, such as holding it on a workday, cutting down on polling places in specific locations to increase commute and waiting times etc.

Your last point about the 'insane amount of individual votes' is really the whole problem.

In Europe, as I understand it, you vote for a single person and that person does the rest of the voting for your area. I'm sorry if I am wrong about that or oversimplified it; that's the current state of my knowledge on the subject.

Just so you know: America started out that way too, which is why we have the 'house of representatives'. The framers of the constitution intended that congressional districts never exceed 50K to 60K thousand. Unfortunately the average congressional district in America is currently about 700K.

Voting for someone to represent me and my closest 699,999 friends is barely a vote at all. With congressional districts that large (not to mention fcking gerrymandering) you are not really voting along with your peers. People are grouped together in strange ways.

https://thirty-thousand.org/

Also, Germany is 1/4th the size of the US and the UK is 1/5th the size of the US.

The net result is; Americans are not accurately represented at a national level.

When you combine that with the fact that we pride ourselves on our independence and individuality; taking away our ability* to cast votes on local issues is probably not going to fly. If anything I'm guessing we'd want more power to vote individually. Two of the last five presidents who were elected were not chosen by the majority of the population.

I think a simpler solution like paper ballots and many polling places might help, but, the sheer manpower to make sure that goes well would be a massive undertaking. As I said, many multiples larger than in some European countries.

Having an explainable (to your point) system that is open and exhaustively tested is one path to avoid the current mess we find ourselves in.

Open source would be better than proprietary, but the best code ever written is the code never written.

I agree with that to a degree. The problem is we are trading off technical problems for corruption. For counting things, it seems like computers would be a good fit.

>For counting things, it seems like computers would be a good fit.

You could keep the computers but you also have the papers sealed in boxes. Then you can manually check 1-5% of the votes and make sure the machines are correct. Or if someone contests the count and a judge decides the reasons are fair you can count again all the votes in that polling station.

I like that, agreed.

For counting pieces of paper, machines sound like a good fit. Any capabilities beyond the literal needs (i.e., counting) sound like an invitation for mistakes and corruption. Your phone has 100,000 times as much memory as the Apollo Guidance Computer, but nobody would ever use a smartphone for actual spacecraft guidance.

UNIVAC famously analyzed the 1952 presidential election. Today we've got about twice as many voters, so maybe get a computer twice as powerful as a UNIVAC.

Upvote for mentioning the Apollo Guidance Computer!

Lots of good posts out there about why electronic voting (w/out a paper trail) is a bad idea. Here's one: https://www.markpack.org.uk/160622/why-electronic-voting-is-...