Hacker News Reader

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

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)

View on HN

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.

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.

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"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com