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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

Don't, use pen and paper instead. Previous HN discussion on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891266

I agree, however, those of us who understand the importance of paper ballots are having a hard time selling it to the public. We're coming across as Luddites. I'm impressed that the New York Times is promoting open source software; it's a small step in the right direction. Perhaps the message we should be spreading is that paper ballots are even more "open source" than any computer software. With paper, poll workers can prevent hacking by simply observing, using physical locks, and communicating with other poll workers. Software (open source or not) only seems to complicate all of that.

That's why I find the HN discussions on this so important. If the actual technology people can't see it the rest of the population has no chance. The rule of thumb, that almost never fails, is that technology always brings advantages and quickly. Sometimes it even steals their jobs. If we can get a broad agreement on the message that "trust me, I implement new technology all day every day and electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem and if your local politician tries to sell you on it he's most likely trying to steal the vote" we can do quite a bit.

Voters know in their bones that the voting computers are bad. Voters are not the problem.

Returning to paper ballots means less cheddar for cronies. Happily there's a workaround. Postal balloting (close the poll sites)!

Ballots are digitally scanned as they're received at central count. So it has all the downsides of the touchscreens with all new vulnerabilities (undetectable alterations, signature mismatches, preview election counts, voter coercion...). But voters get the comfort of paper and it keeps the cheddar flowing for the cronies.

I remember someone saying here that a key shift in framing in Germany was to call them voting computers rather than voting machines (since the broader public understands that computers can be hacked). I think we might adopt that as well.

I guess it should be pointed out that voting computers have effectively been banned by the constutional court in Germany in 2009, probably in part as a result of that framing.

That's a great tip. Thank you.

As you know, election administration is more than tabulation. Maps, candidate filings, voter guides, voting records, designing ballots (artwork), poll books, canvasing reports, etc.

I traveled my state advocating open source software. I called it "citizen owned software). It's a slum dunk with voters (tax payers). And it's how things used to be.

The gatekeepers (blockers) are the election admins who outsource to their cronies. They even invent make-work just to have more cheddar for their cronies. Like signature verification and ballot tracking.

There are actually elaborate rules and measures on the handling of paper ballots to work around complicated schemes that have been devised to defraud the vote. It's certainly not foolproof.

Problems with paper voting:

  - Fraud
  - Counting time
  - Margin of error

Problems with electronic voting:

  - Hacking
  - Cost
  - Programming bugs
  - Machine error
  - Scalability

Actual way voting is handled

  - Some states use mailed paper ballots
  - Some states use paper-free voting
  - Some states use a mixture of electronic and paper voting

The biggest risk is not the mechanism, but the way it is implemented: 5,000 independent jurisdictions all have completely independent ways of choosing how to vote, and then completely independent methods of implementing it. [3]

This[1] testimony from 2001 includes a good history of the voting process and the reasons why it is handled the way it is. The parent[2] directory contains 16 years of commentary articles.

[1] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/congress.html [2] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/index.html [3] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/PutinTrump.sht...

Paper ballots can be destroyed easily too:

I remember this in San Francisco in 2001,

http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Scavenged-ballot-box-...

That's one of the methods of fraud. Many counties have had "lost" ballots. Many voters have not received their absentee ballots. Florida was actually not even close to finishing counting its ballots when Obama claimed victory in 2012. California had the same problem in June 2016.

With regard to machines, many machines have recorded thousands of extra votes. Some machines run out of memory, and end up losing thousands of votes (those machines did not have paper trails). There's been plenty of problems with these machines - ones that can be fixed. But the fact that every precinct decides independently what to do and how to do it, there is absolutely no way (in the US) to provide a uniform solution to the problems of paperless voting.

I am not advocating for paperless, what I want to see is a combination of the two. Paper for auditing, Digital for backups and replication with on-site initial counting which should be validated as the ballots make it back to main election offices.

This would mean there is a digital record on receipt of the ballot and the ballot itself. This seemingly would reduce the potential for fraud in both systems.

Implement that system and an attacker will then proceed to destroy your democracy by hacking the digital part, making the counts not match and causing complete distrust in the voting system. Properly implemented paper elections have no significant fraud possibilities and convince whoever lost the election that he indeed lost. There is no problem to solve here and technology only makes things worse.

> Properly implemented

Again, 5,000 independent districts, and every single district manages itself independently. There is no way whatsoever to ensure proper implementation.

> have no significant fraud possibilities

We have a ton of provisions implemented to curtail significant attempts at fraud of paper ballots. And in paper ballot and absentee voting, there are large numbers of problems virtually every election cycle in various jurisdictions.

> and convince whoever lost the election that he indeed lost

This isn't even close to accurate. If there is a wide margin in a result, it isn't officially contested, even when we have evidence of corruption. When the margin is small, and a recount could possibly swing the vote, then the electee becomes unconvinced and demands a recount. (Or when the election result is simply too extreme, and the necessity of a recount is obvious)

>Again, 5,000 independent districts, and every single district manages itself independently. There is no way whatsoever to ensure proper implementation.

Right, so the evidence that the US sucks at implementing paper elections should be used to advocate the implementation of an incredibly more complex system that somehow will implement itself?

>We have a ton of provisions implemented to curtail significant attempts at fraud of paper ballots. And in paper ballot and absentee voting, there are large numbers of problems virtually every election cycle in various jurisdictions.

Most of the world runs these kinds of elections regularly without issue and electronic means only makes this worse. You not only don't make the count any more accurate you also add complexity and enable a bunch of denial of service opportunities.

>This isn't even close to accurate. If there is a wide margin in a result, it isn't officially contested, even when we have evidence of corruption. When the margin is small, and a recount could possibly swing the vote, then the electee becomes unconvinced and demands a recount. (Or when the election result is simply too extreme, and the necessity of a recount is obvious)

All of that is true in the US yes, but again that's because the process is poor enough. Other places have extremely close elections that don't require this. You have such poor confidence in your election process you sometimes have legally mandated recounts on a low enough margin.

Yes, we suck at elections. That's why the article we are talking about is about making our elections suck less.

Using both electronic and paper means we get the benefits of both, and each side's downsides are managed by the other mechanism. According to every expert on the subject it's the most effective means we have right now.

If you would like to compare countries and voting systems, I welcome that discussion, but unless it works specifically for the US, it's not relevant.

>According to every expert on the subject it's the most effective means we have right now.

Citation is needed for this. I know of no expert that recommends this and no argument for this. I've already pointed out how an electronic+paper system would be extremely vulnerable to attack. All you need is for the count to be different between the two for no one to trust your election.

>If you would like to compare countries and voting systems, I welcome that discussion, but unless it works specifically for the US, it's not relevant.

There's nothing about the way elections are properly run everywhere else that wouldn't work in the US. Implement enough voting booths properly staffed and you'll have no issues. If you can't do that you also can't implement any complex electronic system so this discussion is pointless.

Tabulating ballots as they are received (at central count) is a terrible idea.

The gold standard is precinct-based tabulation of paper ballots, counted the moment the polls close.

That's exactly what I said, the tabulation at at central office would be to verify precinct counts. I'm not sure I see an issue with multiple counts, if they don't come out the same then the system should be reviewed for issues.

Sweden does two manual counts, one at the precinct and one by central election authority. The second count is the real one, but if there are too large discrepancies they would be investigate.

Using US elections as an example is generally flawed because they are usually very poorly run. Proper election procedure doesn't have that failure mode. You run a lot of small precints each with representatives of all parties. The ballot box doesn't leave their sight during the whole day. When the polls close the same people will open the box and count the votes together and since they are adversaries they won't allow any one of them to steal. This is a highly scalable method that's very cheap to run and that also has the extremely important property that whoever lost is also fully convinced he lost.

Using that procedure, two of the largest states in the US have failed to complete counting their votes in time for an election to be called for a particular candidate, several times over the past four years.

Saying we should ignore US elections as an example is totally ridiculous.

>"You run a lot of small precints"

The US fails to do this and then has a problem counting fast enough. We should ignore the fact that the US is incapable of running proper elections since we have plenty of examples across the world of well run elections.

>failed to complete counting their votes in time for an election to be called for a particular candidate

This is another example of not running a proper election. If you haven't counted the vote the election is not over. There is no such thing as "not calling in time". In time for what? The news cycle?

> Using that procedure, two of the largest states in the US have failed to complete counting their votes in time for an election to be called for a particular candidate, several times over the past four years

I'm not even sure what “failed to complete counting their votes in time for an election to be called for a particular candidate”; are election results perishable such that of a count takes too long it no longer counts? Specific examples of the phenomenon you are discussing would perhaps be useful.

FFS. We know. And then the ballots are missing. Which is more preferrable than silent or undetectable failure modes.

Isn't there a logical fallacy named for nitpicking (concern trolling) while ignoring the whole picture?

This was not trolling. This was a failure mode missed in the GP. I believe we need multiple modes of storing counts and ballots, such that one single system can't be overcome.

My comment was merely in support of that.

Ok. We cool. I apologize for overreacting.

Respectfully, the biggests risks to election integrity in order are:

- Change - Privatization - Centralization - Digitization

We geeks focus mostly on the voting computers. We need to focus more on stability and the appropriations process.

Agreed. And to add to it, we should switch to a system in which we have:

* 100% mail-in paper ballots, like Oregon -- no long lines, no games about which districts get which machines, no polling place intimidation

* Mandatory random-sample hand recounts (this has been shown to only need to be on the order of thousands of ballots out of millions for most races, given the statistical confidence you get with it)

Mail-in ballots offer far more robust intimidation and coercion opportunities than are available in polling places.

I was expecting that response. The only solution, then, is to ban all mail in ballots. Right now California, for example, has optional mail-in voting. Wouldn't you expect that anyone who can be coerced to vote some way could be coerced whether the mail-in voting is optional or mandatory?

I'm not arguing that mail in ballots don't have benefits that warranted the increase in coercion risk, I'm just arguing that mail in ballots cannot be viewed as a mitigation of coercion risk compared to the way US in-person polling stations are run since they exacerbate, rather than mitigate, that risk.

Care to expand? Don't see how that could be the case.

Your vote and name are linked together when you mail in your ballot. Ergo, I could figure out how you voted if I were an unscrupulous postal or poll worker.

You wouldn't want your colleagues at Google knowing you voted for Trump now would you...?

With a mail-in ballot, it's possible for someone in a position to apply coercion/intimidation to compel you to complete, sign, and mail your ballot in their presence; ballot secrecy is a strong protection against intimidation/coercion, and mail-in ballots compromise that protection.

The privacy of the voting booth offers substantial protections to a voter. You might threaten or bribe me, but I can vote as I please, because you can't ever know how I actually voted. Many of these protections disappear if your ballot paper is delivered to your home and returned by post.

Husbands can coerce their wives into registering for a postal ballot and then vote on their behalf. Religious leaders can coerce their followers into registering for a postal ballot and handing it over to a chosen candidate. A corrupt care home worker could register dozens of residents for postal voting, then sell their ballot papers. Migrants with a poor grasp of the English language can be tricked into giving up their ballot paper. Poor people can be offered cash for their ballot paper. Postal ballots can be stolen from postboxes and sorting offices.

All of these frauds have taken place in the UK; local election results have been nullified on more than one occasion due to endemic fraud.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1156001...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4406575.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32428648

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/7302809.stm

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_fil...

Given that, I wonder how has Oregon has managed to have such smooth elections.

While my intuition would be that incidents are fairly rare for social reasons, intimidation/coercion with postal ballots is essentially invisible, until and unless people come forward and complain (which intimidation and coercion itself can be deployed against.) So, even if it was common, the elections would look smooth by the things we usually look at.

It's also a precaution against future regressions: you want to design protections like this for the worst political climates, not the best, so you'll be ready if e.g. an employer starts thinking they can get away with abuse during a recession or a union leader decides desparate times warrant desparate measures.

It's much easier to prevent that kind of thing rather than repair the damage after the fact, similar to the problems we've seen with gerrymandering.

Coercion is a concern in communities where there's a power imbalance in the home. Consider, for example, an overbearing husband coercing his wife to vote in a particular manner, or just taking her ballot and voting it himself (and coercing her to sign the back of the envelope.)

An option considered in one state (Utah?) was to allow mail-in voting, but the mailed ballot could be invalidated if you stopped into a polling place and voted. It adds some complexity but reduces the absolute chance of coercion.

In the current system people can intimidate you as much as they like but they can't follow you into a booth. They can't inspect your ballot after you've marked it.

Only you know who you actually voted for. That's the point.

Unless, of course, you are asked to provide evidence of your vote with the camera you are likely carrying with you into the polling booth.

I'd guess mail-in ballots increase participation at the expense of some coerced ballots. Surely the net outcome is positive. On top of that, it helps to remove the chance for the use of intimidation at the polling stations. I remember that being an issue last election.

A picture is no evidence. You could take a picture of a ballot but then put another one in the ballot box.

I would ask for video evidence.

Somebody else mentioned that some areas have a system where if you show up in person, your mailed ballot is invalidated. That seems like a good safeguard.

The bottom line for me is that I think the option of mailing ballots increases participation. There may be an increased number in coerced ballots as well, but I think the net result is postitive.

Filming yourself could easily be prohibited. In France, I'm pretty sure that the voting officer wouldn't let me put my ballot if I was filming myself doing it.

Canceling mailing or e-voting ballots when voting in person can be countered by requiring that the person hand over his ID card for the vote duration.

The idea that a vote might have been bought is a dangerous one. It's dangerous even if votes buying are not proven. I'm still not convinced about e-voting for this reason. There should be absolutely no doubt on the sincerity of a vote.

In most states in the U.S. filming or photographing yourself if technically prohibited, but rarely enforced.

> Unless, of course, you are asked to provide evidence of your vote with the camera you are likely carrying with you into the polling booth.

In most states this is illegal. In, GA, the SOS posted a reminder. (follied by the President's picture)

I've never not voted due to intimidation or coercion.

Long lines or inability to get to the polls on time has contributed to my not voting. Plus it's great to be able to sit with a ballot over the course of a night or two and really think about what you are going to choose. Being at the polls with people waiting behind you applies some pressure to pick the fastest option - ie choose all Democrats or all Republicans (the machine I was on had a shortcut button for that).

This is an excellent point. Also sometimes during an election, there are referendums or other races for positions that are overshadowed by the main race, e.g. Trump v Clinton, making it hard to make an informed decision on the spot like is possible when at home with access to a computer to research.

When I voted in Oregon, they mailed a newsprint book with the ballot that had a lot of text about each item with supporting and opposing groups contributing. You're right though that these days, a website would be a better way to do it.

Last election I voted in Texas as people voted quickly. It seems like they either are only voting for one or two races or they are just pressing the button that selects all Republican (I live in a red area) candidates.

I've never heard of a district that didn't make ballots publicly available some time before the election. If you don't know what is on the ballot before going to vote, it is your own fault.

> 100% mail-in paper ballots, like Oregon

Except that mail-in ballots mean that some generally significant chunk of the electorate can't react to new news in a dynamic election.

I don't like mail-in ballots. I do think that Election Day should be a holiday.

That's actually a feature, not a bug -- 11th hour news stories are rarely accurate, seldom have sufficient context, etc.

Came here to recommend that.

Instead, use open source hardware. Use pen and paper!

:-)

We could also use open source hardware that isn't pen and paper. We just need the open source part.

Verifying hardware more complicated than a pen and paper is prohibitively difficult.

And a way to simply audit them. It's a bit difficult to make a fake pen and paper that would trick me into voting for the wrong person (especially at scale).

Nope, that would not work. Paper and pen are the best secure methods. Everything digital is insecure.

What open source hardware would that be, and how can everyone eligible to vote be able to understand how it works and be able to observe that it really does work?

Every single person doesn't understand all the security aspects of today's paper & pen ballots, how they are secured before and after the day of voting, how they are transported from one location to another, how mail-in ballots get handled, etc.

There's no reason to require something that everyone can understand when talking about a different voting system.

IMHO, we should aim to build something (whether using physical machines or using cryptography/mathematical properties) that the various parties in a government can audit and recognize as secure and that leads to a larger portion of the population voting or a cheaper election process.

Whether people do understand something is very different from whether people can understand something.

While many people maybe aren't aware of the security mechanisms of a pen and paper election, essentially everyone can actually understand them if they feel the need to, and that is extremely important. You cannot resolve widespread distrust by putting a bunch of mathematicians on TV who tell the population that everything is fine.

We already have something that can be made secure, anonymous, and auditable, and yet is easy to understand and relatively inexpensive. It is pencil and paper ballots, with multiple interested parties observing the entire process.

remember the butterfly ballot?

never forget the hanging chad!

Well then you have issues like "hanging chads," [0] that's why e-voting became big in the US.

0: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/275f00/abc-chads.htm...

Pen and paper doesn't suffer from hanging chads, surely? That's only if you use paper + hole punch for primitive automated counting?

We can trust digital money, but we can't trust digital votes?

Who trusts digital money?

pretty much anyone that uses a bank

Digital records management is a technique; not digital currency.

Who's "we?" I don't trust digital money :P

Does your bank account, credit card, etc. count as digital money? Your account balance is just bits somewhere.

You're conflating records management with actual currency.

Well, ok, but my account balance is guaranteed by a government (for well above my balance). I don't get that with digital currency.

correct.

The problem with digital voting is that it needs to be anonymous who votes for what. That makes the problem much much harder.

To be more precise, there are 3 things that must be met for a vote to be considered acceptable, digital or not:

* it must be anonymous, ie nobody but you should know you you voted for

* it must keep integrity, ie nobody can change your vote

* it must be verifiable by all participants

Paper vote makes it easy to meet all criterions: just keep an eye on the ballot and you will be relatively sure that everything is fine. On the other hand it is impossible to have all those conditions with a digital vote, if only because digital anything isn't easily verifiable by all participants.

> criterions

One criterion, three criteria.

Implementing anonymous, distributed, publically auditable voting is quite simple. Implementing it in such a way that you can verify that your vote was counted correctly, but not be able to present it to a coercive third party to as a receipt to verify you voted for their preferred candidate, is hard.

Can you trust that you won't be punished for voting the "wrong" way? Or maybe you won't get that raise that you were seeking out because you belong to the wrong party. Paper ballots keep things anonymous and make it difficult to track who voted for whom. With "digital money" it does not mater as much if people can see who exchanged monies.

There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes.

Same goes with money, these things called crypto currencies are digital money offering various levels of anonymity.

>There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes.

None that don't require printing a paper ballot so the voter can check the correct thing was done. And then taking that paper ballot and putting it in a sealed box. And once you've done that the high-tech bits are irrelevant and you're back to the cheap, safe and easy to use voting system we've been using without issue for decades or even centuries.

You can totally have a blind signature based scheme that doesn't have some of the flaws which are present with paper ballots. Some of the requirements aren't met today (such as having one and only one digital identity for everyone) but it doesn't mean that paper ballots are the only solution.

With enough effort you could implement something that still requires printing a receipt but doesn't require the ballot box. The identity issue isn't even a problem in most modern democracies. But that system would be less efficient and be easier to seed discredit since normal people don't understand it. That gives you a riot or two quite quickly. That's the other properly of paper and ballot box that technologues dismiss way too easily. >90% of the population would be able to run a paper election successfully and yet would be hopeless at understanding a complex crypto scheme. That means you quickly lose a key property of elections which is that whoever lost actually accepts that result. From the previous discussion:

"Electronic voting is the reverse FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz tests if you know the absolute basics about technology to implement something extremely simple. Electronic voting tests if you are able to reject the use of technology when it doesn't add any advantage and instead creates very hard to solve failure modes. Voting benefits from the use of the extremely simple ballot and box. It benefits from it not being programmable and from the counting method being something that almost all the population is able to carry out let alone understand."

> There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes.

I have yet to see one that involves a digital voting system. Many of these voting systems are insecure and F/OSS(free and open source) won't fix that. You are giving too many people physical access to these systems at every step of the chain. Many have proposed a "blockchain" based voting scheme, but that takes out the anonymous aspect of voting.

> Same goes with money, these things called crypto currencies are digital money offering various levels of anonymity.

Yes and none of them provides any anonymity since they all at one point or another reveals too much about a given transaction.

With paper ballots, it's really difficult/infeasible to track who voted for whom and is a bit more tamper resistant on a large scale.

edit: a word.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot

Rivest

Who says we can trust digital money?

The "trust" of the digital money system is because we can have humans unwind any transactions we deem to be "incorrect".

Unfortunately, we can't "unwind" an electoral transaction without giving up anonymity.

And if you want the benefits of computers (fast counting, ability to prove your vote was counted correctly) without sacrificing the secret ballot or the paper audit trail you can use something like punchscan or scantegrity.

Then we can debate whether or not a bubble has been completely filled in. Or if a "hanging Chad" counts as a vote.

It seems perfectly reasonable to not count votes that are unclear. It's not a complex procedure to fill in a circle on a scantron, if you can't follow the directions, then too bad for you and your vote and your preferred candidates.

Yes, the US has been able to screw up even paper elections in an attempt to make counting supposedly faster. Most other countries just use a paper ballot with some squares next to the candidates and you mark with an X. Any deviation from that is a null vote because the voter could try to identify himself otherwise. Our elections run smoothly every time and we have well counted results in a few hours at most, faster than the US is ever able to accomplish from what I've seen.

Which country is this?

I'm in Portugal. Most of Europe is the same, Canada too.

Doesn't Portugal have widespread corruption, especially in regards to political parties and parliament?

Perception of corruption is about on par with the US in the studies I've seen. That's mostly unrelated to quality of the election process though. There the US is quite a long way back. The Bush/Gore mess would never happen here.

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