It's precise, it's easily observable, it's easy for people to understand where their vote goes. It's also easy to grasp how the election is protected from manipulation.
With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control.
"When electronic voting machines are deployed, it must be possible for the citizen to check the essential steps in the election act and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowledge."
So your average neighbor, grandma and co-worker must be able to understand how you came to the result because that's important in a democratic process. Your open-source voting machine software doesn't meet that requirement and neither does your fancy blockchain-based cryptographic system. But paper does: You make a cross on paper, you count them.
You can find an official, full English translation of the ruling here: http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidu... (my quote is from paragraph 119).
With paper based precinct voting, perhaps 20% of the work is done outside. Mostly printing, ballots, pamphlets, poll books. But also buying some simple gear, like the optical (scanotronic style) scanners or punchcards (whatever is used).
Adding touchscreens to the mix outsourced more stuff.
With postal balloting, I'd estimate 50-60% is outsourced. For more printing. Signature matching. Ballot image scanners. A lot of bookkeeping software.
With internet voting, closer to 100% of the elections will be outsourced. What jurisdiction is sophisticated enough to build, run, maintain voting systems? None. So every jurisdiction will be like the state of Georgia, where all of election administration is conducted by a corporation.
--
Buddy of mine is trying to sell me on blockchain voting. Claims it'll protect privacy via some kinda tor like onion routing whatever.
I don't even care.
If we adopt some magical crypto voting system that actually work for our form of elections (unlikely), we'll completely forfeit the primary function of our governments, which is administrating elections.
Private voting and public counting will be gone.
I may be missing your point or misunderstanding your comment, but what you describe there is a by-product of a successfully developed blockchain-based voting solution.
Everyone's votes are verifiably recorded, but publicly anonymous. You can still conduct public counts and everyone with access to the blockchain's ledger (or a trusted method of viewing the ledger) can confirm that the only votes that count towards the contest are those actually recorded. The additional benefit is that at any point in time, you can revisit your own vote to confirm it is still contributing to the outcome as it should.
I don't see how this in any way undermines or "forfeits the primary function of our government, which is administrating elections." This may be due to our differing opinions on what the role of government is. Generally my reasoning falls closer in line with Milton Friedman's (paraphrased) view:
> Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.[...][1]
--- [1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/578626-government-has-three-...
Blockchains are more easily conducive to side-channel attacks at revealing who a person voted for than paper voting is.
I'm not even sure it's possible to build one, given that humans are a portion of the workflow. On the other hand, I'd love to be proven wrong.
In the paper system Michigan uses, ballots are not distributed anonymously, but the identifying information is torn off the ballot before it is counted and secured.
(I think it's pointless to propose a voting system that depends on individuals securely managing a cryptographic wallet; it's pretty clear we don't yet live in a world where that's a good idea. But it'd be interesting to see how they propose to solve the above problem.)
edit: logfromblammo answered my question below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12382298
Do you have any examples of corporations submitting to FOIA (public record) requests?
My point is that our elections are being privatized. Internet voting is just the excuse.
"...my reasoning falls closer in line with Milton Friedman's..."
Mine's closer to Abraham Lincoln's:
of the people, by the people, for the people
No, I don't. "Public counts" in my comment refer to how the individual votes would be captured within a blockchain's ledger -- by design, visible and traceable.
I appreciate your follow-up. The right to free expression, and by association, the ability to vote, define our constitutional republic. It's so basic that I didn't consciously recognize it.
Cryptography is not my strong point, so forgive me if this is obvious to others, but how can we build a system which simultaneously:
1. Allows you to verify that your vote counted in the direction you wanted it to
2. Allows you to be confident that your public "receipt" (half of a key, or whatever you use to confirm your vote counted) is unique, and you aren't sharing it with someone else who voted the same way (lumping multiple votes under the same "verifiable" vote)
3. Prevents you from publicly proving you voted in one direction, thus allowing you to sell your vote?
To put it another way, what good is it to be able to privately verify to myself that I voted in one direction if, when I find a discrepancy, I can't prove to people that the system miscounted my vote? Yet if I can prove it, what's stopping me from selling my vote?
For example, if I have one "votecoin" that I vote with that isn't tied back to me (as per necessity of private voting), how can the system ensure that it's actually me voting, and not just whoever I gave/sold my vote to beforehand?
Hard problem.
Seems like a double standard. With paper it is impossible to prevent manipulation & provide control as well. To wit, the countless examples of election fraud:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
With either system is a question of risks & mitigation strategies. Neither system can guarantee the elimination of fraud.
Within this context, there is indeed a double standard, as indeed it is no more possible to prevent a true Scotsman from committing electoral fraud with paper than to confound him with electrons. However, a claim may be misleading, unfair, or erroneous irrespective of whether it involves a double standard.
I believe that you make an error in seeking relief from the double standard. Essentially you are establishing that if we are to accept the first patently false assertion, we must equally accept the second (which is true)... and then agreeing to accept both.
So we are already quite far into the woods when we come to my reason for responding to you.
What you have presented is an example of the 'appeal to link' fallacy. You have suggested (and believed, probably) that there are countless examples of electoral fraud, and offered a link.
However, the document you have linked does not present or even suggest that there are countless examples of electoral fraud. It is a wikipedia article that enumerates specific methods of electoral fraud, loosely defined.
Furthermore, the document implicitly assumes the truth of the original assertion that is the subject of debate, namely that there are categories of fraud to which electronic voting systems are uniquely susceptible.
I was tempted to conclude that "this is why we can't have nice things", but the truth is that we could have much nicer things if we took a moment to step back and examine what we are discussing just a little more carefully.
The US has not experienced (yet) a candidate that refuses to accept the results of an election. An unloyal candidate will claim fraud without any proof. And enough people would believe him to cause internal division or even a civil war or a coup d'etat.
I believe that the population of americans that view politics as reality TV are the majority.
Also, Bush v. Gore, florida election results, 2000. AKA "The Hanging Chad" incident. Also happens to be the year that americans at large learned the words "enjoin" and "disenfranchise."
> It's really not possible to have a coup in the US
Then what exactly happened on 9/11? In non-banana variety republics, the person in charge of national air defense would have been minimally subjected to a court martial. This still happens here too [1] for far less serious events.
The general in this case, however, got promoted. [2]
> US. Government is too distributed for a quick take over
How about a very slow and deliberate take over. Would that work?
[1]: http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/another-navy-command...
[2]: http://www.jcs.mil/About/The-Joint-Staff/Chairman/General-Ri...
No, that is not what a coup is.
As an example in the U.S., let's say that 3/4s of Republican governors, along with half of Republican Senators, and an absolute majority of the House, the vast majority of their individual financial backers, and a large number of generals decided that Trump lost due to voter fraud that occurred largely in states and cities with Democratic administrations. A group of them then read an open letter on Fox News about it, and the reading, while not carried on major networks, is broadcast on all channels by Comcast, Altice, and Cox Cable. As the letter is being read, a mass email goes out to the Trump email list to converge on the White House in DC and Clinton Foundation headquarters for a peaceful protest, named "Occupy the Crooked Election." As the thousands accumulate, the Governors that can announce that they're going to mobilize the state militias to do a recount, or rerun the election.
Is this impossible? How do you walk it back? Also, didn't we just have a massively blood soaked civil war 150 years ago?
Fox isn't a major network? (Or did you mean "not carried on other major networks?)
*Take over the media (simply not possible in America
due to the volume), initially to block
information
*Take over the Military (Too large and diverse
to accomplish in America.)
*Arrest/Detain all political opposition.
(there are simply too many local governments
in America for this to happen.)
#1 is entirely feasible. #2 is entirely possible as well - there are lots of revolving doors with defense contractors and the DoD... heck, just read through the Patraeus scandal [1]. This a 4-star General (Commander of CentCom), Director of CIA and was a likely presidential candidate - just read through the tawdry and incestuous relationships within the community, and wonder at how easy it'd be to simply bribe everyone with an offer they couldn't resist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal
I posit this can be planned indefinitely. Once the hammer drops, yes countdown time is hours, but... take a look at the 2000 election results and the weeks it took to finally stop the clock on vote counting.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...
At this point, there is no reason not to use actual paper. Computer scanning and counting has gotten really good.
I still agree that paper isn't vulnerable to the mass-scale undetectable vote-rigging that electronic machines have the potential to be! But it does have its own weaknesses: people who decided to switch to electronic definitely had credible reasons in mind at the time.
I don't know with a key tied to your vote that can be verified by yourself isn't half bad. Though then the exploit moves to the tallying of the votes since no one can independently do that...
I feel like electronic voting systems have to be the future but so many seem to think it's impossible it makes me wonder what the ultimate solution will end up being.
Each person just needs a private key, and it could actually be issued once for each election.
However, I am not saying that we are ready for this, as not everyone is able to access the internet still.
so I don't understand this fantasy that "paper" which is an ambiguous term is bandied about as the ideal solution. From paper ballots to punch cards, there are hundreds of stories of fraud. If you don't just up and lose them or mysteriously get different votes than the district involved would imply. If you can't find fraud you simply challenge the votes until you get the results you want, keep some polls open than longer, or take people to vote and help them.
The ideal solution is getting it out of the hand of politicians into an independent board which can implement and secure it as needed.
The real reason this comes up is because one side or another wants an excuse for losing over and over at various levels. It also is because it is becoming even more difficult to hide fraud that they have to scream its more rampant than ever or lurking right around the corner.
I have no faith in current crowd-validation elections.
I do not believe, that people are able to vote for the longer term greater good if they are able to vote for everything in an instant.
Of course this is a skill and it will be acquired for some time. After that, we don't even need politicians that much.
I'll try constant populism because today we live in the era of constant oppression.
If we really wanted to do elections cheaply, we'd just hire a couple of undergrads to write a Node.js script and give polling stations some desktop PC's loaded up to the page. Would hardly cost anything. But doing elections cheaply is not the point.
We don't need PCs. Self contained scanotronic style systems (think SAT tests) work just fine. In fact, all but the largest jurisdictions (because of ballot size, complexity) could get away with manual counting.
The last time I voted, I had a scantron ballot that was maybe A3 in size and needed filling both front and back. I'm probably forgetting a few offices, but I was voting for:
* President
* Federal Senator
* Federal House representative
* State Governor
* State Secretary of State
* State Senator
* State House representative
* Mayor
* City Council (slate)
* Sheriff
* State corporation commission (slate)
* Judges (slate)
* 5 or 6 ballot initiatives
* 1 or 2 local initiatives (i.e. school funding bond overrides or the like)
18 US states currently do use paper ballots.
How large is your precinct? Probably somewhere between 0 and 1000. Totally manageable.