San Francisco could lead on open-source voting | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco could lead on open-source voting

sfexaminer.com

100 pointswillow988622 comments

The caption on the image ("If San Francisco moves forward in developing an open source voting system, paper ballots could be a thing of the past") is incorrect. The open-source voting plan has nothing to do with getting rid of paper ballots. Paper ballots will stick around.

San Francisco's election process has many distinct pieces, some of which currently involve software. For instance, the optical scanning machines that scan paper ballots run software. With this proposal, these machines will run open-source software.

The proposal isn't for a new electronic voting system (e.g. electronic voting machines), or to rid the city of paper ballots. It's just to improve the existing process.

Here's a better idea:

Get rid of electronic voting entirely.

It's an incredibly hard security problem that hasn't been solved. Making the software open-source is putting lipstick on a pig.

(Somewhat reassuringly, a slim majority of the readers of the article agree with me: http://i.imgur.com/k5OZ7vB.png)

Please see my comment below. The author of the piece mis-captioned the photo. This is not an electronic voting proposal. It's simply making the existing multi-step process that San Francisco uses open-source. For instance, we currently use optical scanning machines here (as do most cities). With this proposal, those machines will run open-source software.

Isn't optical scanning as hackable as if the votes were originally recorded electronically, though? Or are people performing random checks on the machine's count? (Honestly curious)

Don't get me wrong, running open source software is a plus for many reasons, if one is using software at all. But any automation in elections seems to carry a hard to bound amount of risk.

Random manual recounts are done on a statistically significant portion of paper ballots. Additionally, paper ballots allow for manual recounts in contested contests (e.g. a legal challenge).

E.g. see https://twitter.com/SFElections/status/534405668258594816 and https://twitter.com/SFElections/status/535541022915186688

And here is a video of the random selection process for last week's election (the two tweets above are from last year):

http://sfgov2.org/index.aspx?page=4938

This took place this morning (Tuesday, November 10). I'm the lone member of the public who showed up and rolled the dice the first few times (5:15 into the upper video). :)

This is, unfortunately, true. I say unfortunately because there are things we could do with software voting that are impossible with paper ballots (e.g. directly overriding our representatives on specific bills, liquid democracy, etc).

But as the state of software security stands now (and it doesn't seem to be likely to get any better), the voting alternatives seem to be: (mostly) accurate, secret, electronic. Pick at most two.

There was talk of using ATMs as voting booths and your bank account as a method of verification.

Sure it's not perfectly secure and is biased to voters who have debit cards, but it seems to be a step in the right direction.

"Open a GNB account today - No ATM fees when you vote Republican"

Electronic voting is already widely in use. I've never voted on a paper ballot.

And it makes some really cool voting systems possible. For example, you can do Condorcet voting systems, which are far superior to normal first past the post. Or cool systems like single transferable vote for electing groups of representatives.

These systems are much harder to do manually and with paper ballots, but trivial to do electronically.

San Francisco uses both paper ballots and single transferable voting (in its single-winner, instant runoff voting form). Indeed, I believe all jurisdictions in the United States that use STV also use paper ballots.

In San Francisco, voters vote on paper ballots, and the ballots are electronically scanned. This generates a digital representation of the rankings cast on all ballots, which can be fed into tabulation software. SF actually releases these rankings publicly as a text file for each contest. See here, for example:

http://www.sfelections.org/results/20151103/#english_detail

Yes it's the vote tallying machine that needs to be electronic, not necessarily the ballot that the voter fills out.

But even then, it's harder to do ranked paper ballots. Presumably someone has to transcribe the numbers voters wrote on the ballot into a computer, which introduces room for mistakes and lots of work.

None of that requires manually transcribing numbers. Here's what the ranked paper ballot looks like that we use in SF. This is entirely scanable by machine.

http://californiawatch.org/files/imagecache/image-full-width...

Notice that it says (hard to read in this image) in the second and third choice that the selection must be different from the other choices.

Ah, interesting way of doing it. Still a bit messy, and the size of the ballot could grow quadratically with the number of candidates.

> These systems are much harder to do manually and with paper ballots, but trivial to do electronically.

I'm a fan of Condorcet method and STV/IRV, but to be honest, I'd rather wait for election results that are verified over speed of implementation.

The mechanics of better election methods shouldn't require a hard-to-verify electronic voting booth.

Paper ballots are much harder to commit fraud with (and the conspiracy need to be larger) than e-vote machines all writing to memory (and likely to be closed-source).

> Or cool systems like single transferable vote for electing groups of representatives.

Scotland, where I live, uses the Single Transferable Vote for local council elections. We use paper ballots. It doesn't seem to be a problem.

There was a UK-wide referendum in 2011 for adopting the Alternative Vote (single-seat STV) for House of Commons elections. It failed to pass, but if it had, that too would have used paper ballots.

Hell yes. This is totally amazing.

The beauty of developing an open-source voting platform is that it can be reproduced throughout the country, even throughout the world. All that was necessary was for someone to pay for it and use it.

Thank you San Francisco for being rich enough and wacky enough to make the world a slightly better place.

s/better/open-source

Thanks, pzone! Yes, that's the idea: affordability, modifiability, etc. Stay tuned to next week's Elections Commission meeting for more on this. ;)

http://sfgov.org/electionscommission

PS - I'm the President of the SF Elections Commission.

"The most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2007) counted 39,044 general purpose local governments, which includes 19,492 municipal governments, 16,519 township governments and 3.033 county governments."

San Francisco tax payers do not need to carry the entire financial burden for an open source project that could benefit so many other governments. Partnerships are the way forward for a project like this.

> Partnerships are the way forward for a project like this.

In theory, that sounds nice. But keep in mind that introducing more stakeholders also has significant downsides.

For example, government organizations are complicated, slow-moving beasts, so introducing more governments would likely slow things even more. Parts of San Francisco government first expressed interest in open source voting systems over eight years ago, and we are still in the "discussion" phase!

Introducing more stakeholders also increases the likelihood of scope creep on an already ambitious project, because other jurisdictions have their own interests, requirements, and priorities. I believe this is the main reason that Los Angeles County hasn't shown interest in partnering with other counties on their own voting system project [1] (VSAP, a project that may or may not turn out to be open source). It also introduces the question of how such a partnership would be governed.

Basically, it is politically challenging enough to get even one jurisdiction on board. So I would lean towards establishing such a partnership or organization to coordinate and maintain improvements only after an initial system is built and working.

[1] https://www.lavote.net/vsap

Url changed from http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-compan..., which points to this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com