In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove
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Sure, there are problems with a paper ballot system, such as the fact that ballots can be misplaced or destroyed, but we've given up a lot for "convenience," which shouldn't be the top priority when it comes to our voting process.
If nothing else, our voting machines need to produce duplicate paper receipts, one for the voter and one retained within the voting machine so that electronic results can be verified.
Edit: as has been pointed out in the replies there are good reasons not to give people a paper copy of their vote, so it would be preferable to only produce a single paper receipt that the voter can view but which is retained within the voting machine itself.
The one given to the voter allows them to verify that their vote was cast correctly and gives them a piece of paper with I "vote ID" on it to show an election official if they notice a problem.
The one that is retained would be collected by election officials and stored. This would allow someone else to go back later using a separate counting device to verify that the automatic count from the voting machines.
They can then use the code on the paper receipt to check on a website that the electronic count matches their paper count.
I have no doubt even a simple system like that would be difficult to implement.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
As I said in a sibling comment, it's problematic to give the voter the ability to later prove how they voted (because it enables a coercive agent to check).
And while a paper ballot gives the voter a clear picture of the record their vote will be tallied from, it's the rest of the process that ensures them that it will be accurately tallied, which is just as important as the vote being accurately recorded.
Correct. Because it will allow them to sell their vote.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
No, they can't. They can verify that:
A) Poll location XYZ (claims to have) received your ballot,
B) The government tabulator included the votes from XYZ in the final count.
That's not the same thing as verifying C) that they actually recorded your vote as intended.
If they can verify that this specific ballot, with this ID number, is yours, that would violate ballot secrecy and existing protocols avoid this. You would need something like homomorphic encryption to achieve C).
Incidentally, I don't get why we're okay with (in California et al) the system of giving a ballot to anyone who claims to be the person on the list. Yes, there are legit arguments against going all the way to photo ID ... but "no authentication whatsoever"? Come now.
Almost any effort to rig an election involves falsifying hundreds or thousands of ballots (or, as we've started to see, depriving said number of their right to vote).
Also, you've identified why GOTV is a big deal in campaigns.
That said, rounding up a big group of people together to all vote is a whole lot easier than rounding up a big group of people to commit felonies.
I'm referring to the "reward" side of the ledger only. Do I understand you correctly, that under your model, there's no benefit to voting in the first place?
If so, I don't think you're modeling critical dynamics of the system -- I think you would be worried if e.g. only five people were officially allowed to double-vote, even if that wouldn't affect the outcome.
Case in point - under the Help America Vote Act, you do have to present identification on the first time you register (or in practice, the first time you vote after you register by mail)... but in order to avoid the disenfranchisement issue the list of allowed forms of identification is so enormous as to be meaningless.
[1] I exaggerate. A little.
They are not arguments against e.g. voter cards, requiring the person to know their address in addition to their name, etc.
Are you okay with them giving me your ballot simply because I claimed to be you? (It will be too late to take it back once I've cast.) If not, you agree with me, and "we're just haggling over the price" as the saying goes.
Btw, you need to authenticate yourself to open a bank account in the US.
The point I really want to address is that having good voter authentication is more or less equivalent to the project of having a national or state ID card. Which no one in the US seems to be willing to undertake. I am not okay with the lack of authentication, but I'm more okay with that than with disenfranchising people who happen not to be integrated into our ramshackle systems of identification. Ideally, I'd like to have a state or national ID card possessed by at least, say, 98% of the population, and use that to authenticate - but we're not there, and empirically disenfranchisement is a bigger problem in the United States than voter fraud.
(Also, WRT it being too late to take back ballots - this is the point of provisional ballots. If you show up for your first vote and can't fulfill the (laughable) HAVA ID requirements or are for some reason not on the rolls, you cast a provisional ballot in a sealed envelope, and over the next month the registrar of voters tries to decide whether it's actually you and whether to count your vote.)
What I meant was, when you go to the poll, they don't even challenge you to give a name and address. You simply have to assert that you're Silas, and boom, you get my ballot, no questions asked. And that's true, as it's what happened the last 8 or so times I voted.
>The point I really want to address is that having good voter authentication is more or less equivalent to the project of having a national or state ID card. Which no one in the US seems to be willing to undertake.
I thought I made very clear that I wasn't speaking about full photo ID? And that there are trivial mechanisms far short of photo ID but far better than "give away my ballot to any one who asks, and irreversibly count the vote before it can be corrected." For example, photo-less voter cards mailed with your registration (Usable in lieu of a photo ID).
It's not perfect, but it's easy and 100x better than "are you a bot? Promise?" that we seem to tolerate here.
In fact, that's what worries me about this whole thing, how contorted the debate has gotten: how you can't even voice trepidation at "honor system authentication" for something as solemn as voting, without getting hit with a well-tuned copypasta of sob stories about people who live off the grid but still want to vote.
>(Also, WRT it being too late to take back ballots - this is the point of provisional ballots. If you show up for your first vote and can't fulfill the (laughable) HAVA ID requirements or are for some reason not on the rolls, you cast a provisional ballot in a sealed envelope, and over the next month the registrar of voters tries to decide whether it's actually you and whether to count your vote.)
That doesn't undo the ballot that was just cast by the guy claiming to be me.
Paper trails that stay in the hands of the registrar of voters are a good idea, in that they can be used to cross-check the results of the counting. Sure, you now have to trust the people with custody of the physical ballots, but it expands the size of the required conspiracy to more than just a few people with access to the voting machine software.
You could still use those for auditing with simple statistics. But any particular voter could simply say they didn't get one.
Give up to ten ballots to each voter. They get to deposit exactly one. They legally have to shred at least one receipt no exceptions (could be the one they voted, could be one they didn't)
Publish the full list of votes complete with receipt and name mapping.
If I'm coerced I eat my receipt for the vote I actually submitted.
If I kept my vote, it should show up in the list of Trump serial numbered voters or maybe I printed a fake receipt, they'll be handing out fake receipts because the mapping was published before the election. In fact I can falsely claim I voted for any one or take the identity of any voter. The receipts are not going to be elaborate, by intention, the secret is the number on it not the paper.
I can prove I shredded 9 hillary votes so if they show up in the list of YES then shennanigans
I can tell a corrupt mass media employer I voted for Hillary merely by turning in any published "Hillary-serial number" combination. All valid ballots were published after the election.
You can make it more elaborate and maybe better or worse by assigning two serial numbers to each ballot, a public serial and a private serial and playing public key crypto style games with which is published.
Coercion and vote-selling are legitimate issues. There are methods of doing this. For example, take an election with two choices: Coke, and Pepsi. Half of the ballots are printed with multiple choice A: Coke, B: Pepsi. The other half are marked A: Pepsi, B: Coke. In the booth, a voter gets a ballot at random and marks it. Their receipt shows that they choose A or B, but what A or B correspond to. They can prove they voted, but not who they voted for.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan
There are other methods as well. Really interesting stuff, I think.
* That the voter not be able to prove to anyone else who they voted for (your proposal addresses that).
* That the voter be able to prove to their own satisfaction that their ballot was counted correctly (your proposal doesn't really address that - how do they know that their ballot was counted using the right label-to-choice mapping?).
The secret sauce of punchscan is in the second requirement - with the choice of whether to keep the position-to-choice mapping or the actual position voted as a receipt, and making it so that the voter can verify their ballot was received and auditors can check for the correctness of the total count. I'd need more time to understand exactly how that part works, but it's a non-trivial algorithm, and super cool.
[Side note - you can already prove that you voted - this is public information. When you vote your name is crossed off a list, and that list becomes part of the public record and is fed into e.g. political parties' voter files. The challenge is proving to your own satisfaction that your vote was counted as you intended.]
Registered voters (which is virtually everyone) receive a card in them mail telling them where to vote. They bring the card, along with proof of address and photo ID to their polling station on election day. Their ID is checked against a list by two poll clerks and the elector is given a ballot. They take the ballot behind a curtain and make a mark with a pencil beside their candidate of choice. They take the ballot to the ballot box, where an observer watches them place it inside.
At the end of the night, the ballot box is opened by the two poll clerks, who are generally (but not necessarily) observed by several "scrutineers": one representative from each party. One of the poll clerks holds each ballot in turn, and announces who they believe the ballot was cast for. If everyone agrees, the ballot is counted. If it is disputed, a discussion takes place with reference to the printed rulebook. If there is still no agreement, it gets escalated.
Once all of the ballots have been counted, the results are reported to the Deputy Returning Officer, who phones them in to Elections Canada. The ballots go back in the box and the box is sealed. It is delivered to Elections Canada and stored in case of a recount. Enough results are generally available nation-wide a little after midnight (polls close at 9 or so) for a winner to be declared and concessions speeches given, although the official results can take a little longer.
The system seems to work. I don't see how electronic voting machines could do it cheaper, more securely or even very much faster.
I understand an American election is more complicated and may require a more complex system, but truly I feel electronic voting machines are a false efficiency here.
Source: Worked a few elections as a poll clerk. More details at http://www.elections.ca
There was even a video interview with Howard Dean where he shows how easy it is to dink around in the MS Access database on voting machine and change the votes [0].
This [1] paper from 2003 sums up some of the issues nicely:
Voters can cast multiple votes without leaving any trace. Voters, as well as voting staff or others with access to the machine, can perform actions that normally require administrative privileges, including viewing partial results and terminating the election early. Furthermore, communications between voting terminals and the central server are not properly encrypted, allowing a malicious man in the middle to alter the content of the communications
I have zero faith in Diebold voting machines (or machines like it). And I'm very skeptical that people with malicious intent haven't already attacked and plan to attack such electronic components.
[0] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2724
[1] https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2003tr.pdf
If this is an area you're interested in, one place you can start is via the "End-to-end auditable voting systems" page on Wikipedia. Lots of good links there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
From my reading, a big hurdle right now is getting these systems -- the whole process, not just the tech -- tested in actual elections. Too late for 2016, but if we get enough money, support and education involved, this can move forward.
"Auditability and Verifiability of Elections"
https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf
It covers a lot of what I'm sure is going to be discussed in this thread, including vote receipts, coercion, verifiability that your vote is counted.
Edit to add:
And heres a good talk by Ben Adida speaking at Google for a "Theory and Practice of Cryptography" TechTalk series entitled "Verifying Elections with Crytography" from 2007. Good stuff there, too.
We're smart, well-meaning people. We can spend time discussing whether or not there is a problem: that's beside the point. How can we strengthen the entire system in a fair way that ensures reasonable people trust that the election is fair? We might disagree on which areas need to be worked on. That's an indication that all of those areas need effort, because they all need to be trusted. It's not either/or.
People have been working on this. And it tackles a lot problems people here find interesting: open systems, cryptography, application of tech in society, hardware, scaling to name a few. We can build on the work that's already been done together. It strengthens all of us.
(1) Give voters a paper receipt like they get at an ATM. They can confirm their vote, leave the receipt, and the paper trail is there for anyone to recount. It would be extremely complicated to tamper with both the electronic and paper ballots and have the results come out the same.
(2) Improve the science of exit polling. Right now exit polls suck due to sampling biases and the inability of independent firms to cover enough territory [1], but this kind of independent verification--if done expansively and competently--could provide an independent verification on the final vote tallies. If the tallies drastically differ from the exit polls, then an investigation is warranted.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-...
I'm specifically talking about this: http://www.insidesources.com/trump-campaign-relied-on-data-f...
A large part of the job of an analytics outfit on a campaign is to provide data to the boiler room on election day which informs legal action taken by the campaign to contest potential fraud or intimidation.
(edit) Don't know why parent is being downvoted. This is a legitimate concern.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence...
The fact both can do it says nothing about whether or not their efforts to commit voter fraud would be equal. It makes no sense to assume number of fraudulent votes from either side would offset.
You're probably committing the Gaussian fallacy, which is to assume that all events are always drawn from a Gaussian distribution. Drawing a series of events from a Gaussian distribution centered around zero will tend to at least stick close to zero, sure, but there's no reason to assume that fraud distribution will be Gaussian. Especially in the face of hostile and intelligent entities who know you're making that assumption and will abuse you with it. Very little math or math intuition is structured for dealing with intelligent hostile exploitation. (Game theory, of course. And a lot of math involves assuming the worst of your counterexamples, but that doesn't really come from an intelligence with goals, even if we sometimes are tempted to think otherwise.)
I don't agree with Trump's politics in the slightest, but if there's anything that can be gleaned from the Clinton leaks, it's that her campaign and the DNC at large is willing to play fast and loose to get her elected. There is undeniable documentation that they attempted to subvert the primary election (and succeeded), and it stands to reason that they may again attempt something else in the general election. While that doesn't mean that they'll hack into voting machines, it would be prudent to scrutinize the results.
(I'm keeping it generic here because this goes beyond US politics and is true for any democracy that has a party-like system.)
Further, even if by some miracle all the fraudulent parties completely cancelled each other out, it would still have a corrosive effect on the ability of the population to trust the outcome of the voting. First of all, how exactly does one go about proving to the populace that all parties committed offsetting amounts of fraud, when all parties are obviously motivated to hide what they've done? And second, it is rational of the voting population to be concerned that even though by some miracle it cancelled this time, and by some miracle they've been satisfied about that fact, it doesn't mean that will happen next time. If fraud is permitted, it doesn't take much playing with the game theory to discover that fraud is almost inevitably cheaper and more effective than anything else, and over time, the incentives inevitably align to encourage fraud to completely crowd out real voting.
And the recent chatter that corroding confidence in the voting system is bad is correct. Where that chatter goes wrong is in somehow thinking that is a primary goal, when in fact it must be built on the foundation of having a reasonably fair voting system in the first place. Having a fraudulent voting system but convincing the population it is valid is taking out debt with an catastrophic and random interest rate; it works until it without warning explosively doesn't work.
Trump won't have trouble with getting away saying that this election is rigged because we know it is.
Anyone with a bit of a CS background knows that electronic voting machines is a stupid idea, that was bound to be implemented by either corrupt or crappy consulting firms.
They provide literally no value over conventional vote counting, this is a textbook case of "better is good's enemy". I personally don't feel comfortable casting my vote in a literal black box. And if you had any doubts the political parties that makes up this country are ethical here is a couple links you should check:
[0] - Project Veritas: DNC execs and shadow consultants conspiring mass voter fraud logistics on tape - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDc8PVCvfKs
[1] - Again. This same time the higher-up are caught on tape in pretty sketchy stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEQvsK5w-jY - funny that the boss who fired the "black-ops" employees of [0] ended up on tape as well.
[2] - John Podesta emails - ""US not a democracy" - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/23756
[3] - "Trump: WikiLeaks Shows How Clinton Campaign Rigged The Polls By Over-Sampling Democrats" - http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/24/trump_wiki...
[4] - See the attached document about oversampling polls: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551
[5] - Found this court testimony of a software developer who allegedly worked on the voting machines used in state elections - I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this video, see for yourself if you find that credible or not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmsaDS_FwY
edit: I have no problem with a rain fire of downvotes, but perhaps you can take a little time to oppose actual arguments.
In addition to that, if you took the time to read this (short) comment you would have noticed that those sources I am using are only there to further my point that political parties are unethical and that one party dominating demographics of the intellectual class mechanically sees its power of nuisance increase tremendously. The bigger idea here is that political parties are willing to do anything to advance their interests and it is a mistake to allow them to self-regulate when it comes to respecting the will of the people.
They have no regards for this and the emails show how cynical they are about it.
For receipt of this message to reflect in any way on Podesta, you need to establish a pattern of communication and reliance on the advice of the sender.
Imagine you think this reply to you is really stupid. Does that stupid then automatically reflect back on you?
However: 1/ the sender isn't a nobody. 2/ there are an amount of other elements that makes it highly unlikely that somehow one of the most influential back office advisor of the Democratic party isn't aware of the very unethical crap that is going on the field.
Podesta did not say "US not a democracy". That was a forward he received about a study by Princeton. There's a solid academic debate to be had on the nature of democracy and representation. I don't see how this is somehow malicious or cynical on Podesta's part. I would hope that people involved with politics have some clue about what political scientists are saying.
Additionally, oversampling is a common polling technique[0]. I don't see how using oversampling for their internal polls means that Podesta forced other polls to be conducted in the exact same manner. To claim that multiple polls by separate organizations are rigged, you need much, much stronger evidence.
I'm also not sure that a stump speech by an opponent ever rises to the level of evidence.
Even if I accept all of your claims on face value, they don't add up to "we know this election is rigged".
After that, it didn't seem worth watching the videos because you have lost credibility in my eyes because I'm not sure you're arguing in good faith. I can tell from your two other comments that you're not just attacking, but your first post comes across as overly partisan (only accusations against Ds, citing Trump as evidence), so your larger point becomes muddled.
I'm still not totally certain whether you think this a problem with Ds or both major parties or an inherent problem to a party based system or something else entirely. At the end of the day, I think we probably agree. "The bigger idea here is that political parties are willing to do anything to advance their interests and it is a mistake to allow them to self-regulate when it comes to respecting the will of the people." If that was your original comment, I think the upvotes would be rolling in.
Finally, complaining about downvotes tends to make the problem worse.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/methodology/u-s-survey-research/s...
Well, that's pretty convenient isn't it. I don't think you're arguing in good faith either, so I'm going to ignore everything you're saying.
As I see it, I did not ignore everything GP said. I read all of their original statements, over half of the evidence, and their 2 additional comments. I admitted that I did not have 30 minutes to watch the videos at first. I explained why my reading of the rest of their comments made me less inclined to spend 30 minutes watching videos. GP seemed confused about HN's reaction, so I attempted to explain my thought process.
Which part of my comment is in bad faith? If I did not disregard all of GP, why should all of my comment be disregarded?
P.S. I did end up watching most of the videos when I had time. I'm still not totally convinced, and since they are entirely about D's, it doesn't help GP seem less partisan.
There's a lot of editing, and I tend to be skeptical of what was edited out (like when ACORN was 'exposed'). Were these people led in a certain direction? Are some of the comments made by someone other than who they're attributed to? A lot of the time you can't see the person speaking.
But, a lot of the commentary in the videos is quite troubling, infuriating even. Given that there appears to be admission of crimes across multiple jurisdictions, why has there not been further prosecution? Especially since some of the allegations occur in majority R states, I'd think they'd jump at the chance to prove D's are cheats.
Both parties are cheats. I think GP agrees, it just didn't come across that way at first.
If anything, calls for in-depth election process audits should've come at least a decade ago. The U.S. isn't doing so hot in terms of election integrity (and no, Russians have nothing to do with it, either):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/21...
In this case there was a (vague) assertion made, so you can try to disprove that.