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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

My county uses a bubble form which I then place into a scanner and I can see the counter on the scanner increment. I can print out a sample ballot from the county website ahead of time.

This seems like the best system to me. Most Americans are very familiar with bubble forms and there is a clear paper trail while still allowing electronic counting. The only downside is the cost of the paper ballots, and I suppose, not allowing for last minute changes. I don’t know how accessibility issues are handled, but I believe there are attendants to help with that.

There’s just no way I will ever trust an touch screen voting system, especially from a single manufacturer. Maybe a system where a touch screen system from company A prints out a receipt which is then scanned by a scanner from company B and both systems have to match. Maybe.

Meanwhile the parties are fighting over voter ID though so I don’t see this getting any real attention.

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"This seems like the best system to me. Most Americans are very familiar with bubble forms and there is a clear paper trail while still allowing electronic counting."

The problem is that the paper ballots may never be hand counted if the margin between the candidates given by the electronic vote counting machine is far enough apart.

Of course, whoever hacks a vote counting machine can give any vote count they want, so they can set the margin however wide they want.

The only way to really be sure of the totals is to do hand counts of paper ballots, with representatives of each party participating or at least observing the entire count.

Machines should never be trusted.

It seems like any electronic-based voting system should be subject to randomized audit via manual recount of its paper trail, regardless of reported margin. This way we can reap the efficiency rewards of electronic systems while also becoming aware if wide-scale tampering has taken place.

That would be excellent if you had to modify hundreds of machines to influence an election but the case now is that even a few strategically chosen machines could drastically swing an election.

So audit those machines. It's still a small number.

Spot checking isn't enough. To claim that spot checking effectively enforces integrity is turning a blind eye, and shrugging at cut corners.

It's not about the technical problem, it's about the perception from people of an electronic vote. People that didn't grew up in the tech revolution are going to be skeptical anyway, and I'm not sure about the ones that are full of social induces doubts about everything. It seems to me we are trying to solve a non existant problem

>>Of course, whoever hacks a vote counting machine can give any vote count they want, so they can set the margin however wide they want.

Exit polls give you a pretty good idea, within a margin of error, of who is winning. If somebody is winning by a large margin and you want to change that by hacking voting machines, it is very likely to be detected by the exit polls.

I'm guessing you didn't vote in 2000.

In a real dispute exit polls are worthless.

Just to play devils advocate here, would it be much harder to place people on the ballot counting committees who might incorrectly record it?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a video stream of ballot persons actually counting paper, so it may not be monitored publically

Russia successfully infiltrated the NRA, I'd imagine local ballot groups wouldn't be much harder for a foreign adversary to do

I know this is hard to imagine but I'd love to see a situation where a small community actually gets together and "on good faith" (this is the nearly impossible part, if not impossible) agree to record their votes pre-voting, anonymously, and PROMISE to vote the same exact way when they officially vote.

After the votes are tallied and it's said to be certiefied and "officially" over and counted from whatever government entity that community would check their results against the "official" ones.

I know that exit polls are designed to get an idea of what's going to happen but I'd love to see a scenario where a community, ahead of time, put this type of security in place to test and see if the people counting the votes / people creating these machines / any outside forces had a hand in tainting the election.

It wouldn't matter what party you voted for, it wouldn't matter who the candidates are, and hopefully people no matter their political beliefs would all agree that finding out if their vote truly matters or not is more important than any sort of partisan bickering.

It's nice to daydream though, is it not?

I'd love to see a situation where a small community actually gets together and "on good faith" (this is the nearly impossible part, if not impossible) agree to record their votes pre-voting, anonymously, and PROMISE to vote the same exact way when they officially vote."

I was going to suggest that such people could just film themselves voting. But then I realized that with today's technology that's easily faked.

The concept of ignoring paper vote counts for large margin victories is entirely why we should always audit the paper trail.

Democracy needs opsec. Something about "eternal vigilance"...

"Democracy needs opsec"

That's a t-shirt right there.

You describe the UK system, this video somewhat shows it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U19GzqfGdqM

I think you're describing the opscan machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_scan_voting_system

Doug Jones is the recognized expert on these particular systems.

http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/optical/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_W._Jones

Of all the available and proposed systems, opscans are the least bad, for the USA. (Better would be manually counted ballots, but that'd require some unpalatable changes to be feasible.)

If I was king, I'd require open source (hardware & software), hardwired to boot off a WORM media (eg mini CD-ROM). The media would be purpose burned per election, enumerated and notarized, and their physical chain of custody guaranteed, to be warehoused for future inspection.

The tabulation would be RAM only, with a report printed when the polls close.

Source: Election integrity was my issue.

I like the ram only aspect but I wonder if the risk of losing all that data in a power disruption is worth it? Seems like it would make a temptimg target for "accidents" in areas where many people vote a certain way and some group wants to disrupt this process. Voting in the US is already a huge ordeal of waiting in line for hours, a lot of those people probably can't / won't come back to revote if the volatile memory erases the machine data.

Just rescan the ballots.

The only truthworthy system is built on mutual distrust (checks & balances). For instance, while I was a poll inspector, everything required two participants, representing both sides. And all actions be done in public.

Every secure system is going to rely on some source of trust. Wheather that’s certificate issuers for SSL, a non-biased Judge, or the trust of the developers working on the bitcoin protocol, trust doesn’t just emerge purely from systems, there is always some root source based on societal norms.

If you were king, there wouldn't be voting in the first place.

Actually, just for kicks, you might find it interesting to know that quite a few historical monarchies were essentially democracies with extremely limited enfranchisement. A setup where - instead of having a bloody "game-of-thrones" civil war to decide the king - they instead had a large body of nobles vote on the king, was actually pretty common.

In fact our Electoral College, as a name, comes from one of these - during the medieval age, in the western heartland of europe (vaguely covering parts of france, switzerland, germany, italy), there were a bunch of little fiefdoms led by nobles who banded together into a big federation called the Holy Roman Empire. They all collectively voted on which noble would become Emperor, and it took several hundred years before one family was able to bend it into being hereditary.

This is basically still the case in the Vatican, Malaysia and Cambodia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy#Current_uses

I disagree that you can call any situation with such limited enfranchisement a "democracy".

I guess the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Sweden are just dreams. I suspected something might be up with Belgium, but I had no inkling about the others.

We use something similar here (broken arrows pointing to each option, connect an arrow to indicate a vote).

What I never understood was what the selling proposition was for the black-box-no-paper-trail machine. You're selling a complex tech product to a very traditional, low-end bureaucracy that wouldn't normally jump on complex tech products.

It's probably not about cost of ballots. Even ignoring the up-front cost of the machines, you're going to have to spend quite a bit of money storing and securing the machines, reprogramming them after each cycle, and I wouldn't be surprised if the software is on a subscription basis. i suspect there may be legal requirements for things like absentee and sample ballots that mean you still have to print some paper forms anyway.

Accessibility seemed the best argument-- a machine with big buttons and pictures is easier for low vision or mobility users, but there's no reason the machine couldn't be an assistant only-- make your choices, and it prints a regular bubble form ballot you confirm before dropping in the box for counting.

My county uses the bubble form too. Accessibility is handled by a touch screen system (with headphones), which prints out a paper ballot. It's quite refreshing-- these guys usually mess things up.

Honestly, I don’t see how people can be concerned about an audit trail without being concerned about voter id. It seems like the two go hand in hand.

Why bother with the audit trail if you can’t verify the voters themselves?

Large scale voter fraud is much more difficult to pull off, especially if the rest of the process is well audited?

One person committing voter ID fraud can feasibly vote a handful of times. One person hacking a voting system can feasibly alter vote totals by hundreds or thousands.

> One person committing voter ID fraud can feasibly vote a handful of times.

Yeah, and scaling voter fraud up in many if not all states is _extremely_ hard. You need at least:

- a priori knowledge of who is registered but will not vote at each voting location; even one double-vote could blow your operation

- a large number of people who are willing to actually cast the fraudulent ballots

- logistics to shuttle your malicious voters between voting locations to cast their multiple ballots, without raising suspicion.

Like the scene from gangs of new York? Where they vote, shave, vote again...

  a priori knowledge of who is registered but will not vote

You can indentify large numbers of such candidates with high accuracy even without complex programming, let alone anything approaching AI, and the number of prospects can be huge in registrars which don't purge dead/moved voters. There is often an order of magnitude more unvoted ballots than the vote margin for most offices and measures.

And generally, the party central committees get both registration data and turnout data for the entire county for free.

If you control the machines, then it's actually pretty easy - you simply alter the votes of people who actually voted. There's no paper receipt or general mechanism for voters to verify they voted how they think they did. And it's absent for a good reason, which is that a nonrepudiatable vote receipt opens elections to coercion. A malicious machine could use a registration database (available to campaigns) to target elderly or otherwise likely tech unsavvy voters - people, who even if they found out their vote was altered, would probably have their complaints dismissed as user error like butterfly ballots in 2000.

If your manipulation is spread across counties, and flips what would have already been a close election, it would almost certainly be undetected. Even if it was detected, the winning party (who doesn't even have to be in on the con) will defend the result. And without ironclad evidence of malfeasance, courts will be hesitant to give the appearance of overturning an election result.

It's critical that we have real security in our elections.

So have both?

> One person committing voter ID fraud can feasibly vote a handful of times.

But a bus full of people driven around committing voter ID fraud can alter voter totals.

> But a bus full of people driven around committing voter ID fraud can alter voter totals.

...unless you make even a single mistake in your assumption of who will keep the secret or who will not vote so you can vote in their place.

But it's essentially risk-free. A false voter has left behind no identification, and video at the polling place is not allowed. Even if the affected genuine voter eventually casts a successful provisional ballot, the fraudulent ballot is also counted and included regardless.

> Even if the affected genuine voter eventually casts a successful provisional ballot, the fraudulent ballot is also counted and included regardless.

That seems incorrect.

It is correct. Think about it. How would you pull that ballot back out of the system to invalidate its votes? Those votes are by definition secret.

Because legislators pushing for voter ID have outed themselves consistently to be using the tactic to disenfranchise large swaths of citizens?

Voters are ID'd. When I go vote I have to volunteer my name and my address. That's identification.

But it's also public info, right! What if someone else just walks up and gives my info??

Then I won't be able to vote. I'll have to file a provisional ballot and a complaint that someone stole my vote. These sorts of things are tracked and it turns out it's very rare.

As a means of altering an election outcome, it just does not scale. Even to fraudulently elect a town dog catcher, you would need hundreds of people to fill out fraudulent ballots, one by one by one. Where are you going to get those people from? Why would they spend their time doing that? What's in it for them? What incentive would that have to keep it a secret?

Can you see why it is dumb to worry about this kind of vote fraud?

> Even to fraudulently elect a town dog catcher, you would need hundreds of people to fill out fraudulent ballots, one by one by one. Where are you going to get those people from? Why would they spend their time doing that? What's in it for them? What incentive would that have to keep it a secret?

What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

Seems like there's money and possibly NDAs involved, in that scenario.

What if someone (perhaps a political party member) with some kind of ends-justify-the-means mentality thinks its for the greater good if they go around voting fraudulently? What if that person convinces a few other like-partied folks that it's for the best and they go along with it?

There's certainly many possible scenarios for people committing some form of election fraud.

> What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

If those people are OK with committing a felony for a few hundred dollars, ok, but I doubt most people would even entertain the idea.

It's a huge risk, a personal risk, and takes a large number of people who all have to be trusted.

And then any NDA they sign will be made irrelevant as soon as one of them gets immunity for testifying against the organizer in what would inevitably become a RICO case.

> Seems like there's money and possibly NDAs involved, in that scenario.

You think there's such a thing as an NDA enjoining silence about a criminal conspiracy?

How are you going to recruit hundreds of people without hitting one single person who talks about the recruitment? Going off of typical political activism conversion rates, you'd have to start with at least thousands of people to find a hundred willing to take part.

NDA would not solve this problem because people would only sign the NDA after they were recruited. (And NDAs cannot compel silence about criminal activity anyway.)

> There's certainly many possible scenarios for people committing some form of election fraud.

Sure, and there are lots of scenarios where a voter ID law doesn't stop them either, like if the criminal masterminds pay a few hundred dollars to have some fake IDs made. Did you think of that scenario?

What there is not is evidence that this happens more than rarely, or is a problem for American elections.

Meanwhile there is tons of evidence that restrictive voting laws prevent legitimate votes from being cast. In short, voter ID laws cause far more vote irregularities than they prevent.

I used to work in politics. It's hard enough getting 40 people to show up at an event with free food in beautiful weather. You'll never get enough volunteers that look normal enough or are skilled enough to look normal enough to pull this off in dozens (hundreds?) of places without getting caught even once. There are easier and more reliable ways of hacking the vote (voter suppression, which you may have heard about).

I gave you a vote because this seems like an honest question. I suspect the downvotes are because you seem to believe a highly political myth (that voters are not ID'd or that fraud is widespread).

FUD about voter fraud has been debunked over and over again, sometimes even by Republican officials. It's hard to do and just doesn't seem to be happening.

It is an honest question. I’m familiar with the debate and I honestly don’t understand why it’s such a hot topic.

From a sheer systems design standpoint, it’s one of those things that seems like a reasonable thing and the opposition has never made a lot of sense to me.

From an audit trail standpoint, if we are taking measures to better ensure integrity of elections it seems like you would want to do both. Do it with whatever measures are necessary to ensure that people who would have difficulty obtaining an ID have some means to do it.

It just seems like if we have a goal of removing questions about election integrity, we should go the whole way.

It's because it disenfranchises people without ID for no good reason. Fraud of this type doesn't happen. All voter ID does is make it harder to vote as it requires people to do more unessessary work to vote.

From a "systems design standpoint" it's adding a feature for a high cost that that isn't needed and makes the result of the system worse as fewer people will participate. Overengineering at the expense of the user.

In a perfect world I understand your point and in an ideal system everyone would be easily able to get the ID they need. In reality some people will find it harder than others to obtain the ID. The difficulty could be raised in areas where people in power wish to suppress the vote by limiting supply and people with less free time or money may not be able to get it.

Making it even harder for people to vote is undemocratic and there is no reason to add this extra layer because there isn't really a problem that is solved by it. If there was strong eveidence then the trade-off might be acceptable but this really isn't the case. There is also a high added cost to the system. The discussion only exists because fewer voters generally means proportionally higher turnout for republicans and this is why they are cynically suggesting it.

The true intentions of the populace in an election would be effected much more by the number of people who are excluded by a voter ID system than they ever would be by the statistically insignificant levels of direct voter fraud.

I genuinely hope this helps you understand the other point of view.

For some people, in some communities (that lean left, weird), obtaining and maintaining physical photo ID is non-trivial. To the politicians that those people won't vote for, they have exactly zero incentive to improve their access to voting.

If getting a state-issued picture ID was free, easy, and convenient, I don't think nearly as many people would object to the requirement. But somehow that's never mentioned by those that want to "ensure election security". Because for far too many of those people, what they actually want is fewer minorities and low-income people voting.

> If getting a state-issued picture ID was free, easy, and convenient

I agree this is inadequately discussed/addressed.

It might still be remarkably expensive overall to implement, but voter IDs could be handled at the local level, as voter registration often is, with similarly lightweight documentation requirements. Ideally, registration and ID application/issuance (for the next election) would be mandated for every polling place.

It could have the added benefit of being an additional/secondary piece of identification (technically even government-issued), something that can be out of reach of someone low on income and/or time, even once they've obtained the state ID.

> voter IDs could be handled at the local level

Handling this at the local level introdces opportunities for limiting supply in areas where it is beneficial to the local party in charge to suppress the vote.

> Ideally, registration and ID application/issuance (for the next election) would be mandated for every polling place.

Why? What is the benefit? Voter fraud of this kind in minimal so what justifies the added cost?

> It could have the added benefit of being an additional/secondary piece of identification ... something that can be out of reach of someone low on income and/or time, even once they've obtained the state ID.

Why should people need a secondary ID? The issue is that low income people don't always have ID and you're suggesting the could need two forms of ID to vote. What makes this easier to obtain for low income people than other forms of ID?

> Handling this at the local level introdces opportunities for limiting supply in areas where it is beneficial to the local party in charge to suppress the vote.

That may be true but has nothing to do with my original point, which I perhaps didn't make clear enough originally, is that the lack of discussion around ease and cost of IDs tends to result in the tacit assumption that the only suitable IDs would be existing, state-issued ones, whereas easier, cheaper options could be mandated.

> Why? What is the benefit? Voter fraud of this kind in minimal so what justifies the added cost?

I'm making no assertion as to the underlying benefit of requiring IDs in the first place, but lighter weight documentation requirements would be easier than a state ID and presumably cheaper. Co-location with polling places would make it at least approximately as easy/available as the voting itself (far more so than a state DMV).

> you're suggesting the could need two forms of ID to vote

I'm doing no such thing, and it's an uncharitable reading of my comment to accuse me of it, considering I pointed out an added benefit. Opening a first bank account would be easier with two forms of photo ID.

> That may be true but has nothing to do with my original point, which I perhaps didn't make clear enough originally, is that the lack of discussion around ease and cost of IDs tends to result in the tacit assumption that the only suitable IDs would be existing, state-issued ones, whereas easier, cheaper options could be mandated.

This wasn't clear thanks for clarifying. But I have little faith that a new form of ID would be any easier to obtain than current options. Ideally we'd just make the current state IDs easier to obtain but even then they still shouldn't be necessary for voting if we truely want to count the opinion of as many citizens as possible.

> I have little faith that a new form of ID would be any easier to obtain than current options.

It's hard to see how having yet another option could make getting any ID overall more difficult, but, of course, merely easier isn't adequate.

It has to be so easy and frictionless (in addition to being free) as to avoid voter suppression. As such, it would have to be at least as easy as current voter registration (which itself is not necessarily easy enough to begin with).

I have more faith that, if this is possible, it would be doable by augmenting existing election bureacracies to include photo ID issuance, than retrofitting existing DMV bureacracies (and adding locations?!). (I also think that even just attempting a DMV retrofit is likely to end up being a boondoggle/moneypit of breathtaking proportions, at least for the larger states [1])

[1] Witness http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/14/local/la-me-dmv-proj...

If you would like to take a systems design approach to looking at the U.S. federal election system, then you need to consider the costs of voter ID laws, not just the benefits. Otherwise you're not actually taking a "systems design" approach.

Voter ID laws will help prevent people impersonating one another and stealing each other's votes. But they also prevent legitimate voters from casting votes, if they don't satisfy the voter ID requirement. If the latter effect is larger than the former effect, your voter ID law has introduced a net negative impact on the U.S. election system.

Because the goal of an election system is to accurately count legitimate votes, not just to not count illegitimate votes.

> It just seems like if we have a goal of removing questions about election integrity, we should go the whole way.

Election integrity is also compromised if citizens are not permitted to vote.

If you'd like to better understand the opposition to voter ID laws, Google can do a lot for you. The ACLU is not a bad place to start, though:

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

Why is it when voter ID laws are proposed by legislators, they never propose a way to get IDs into the hands of eligible voters who don't already have them?

Nothing about giving citizens IDs at 18, nor existing or easy pathways to get a voter ID if you don't have one. Nothing about registering for IDs at the polls, nor programs to ensure that vulnerable populations like the elderly have IDs. There's no assurance given that polls won't enforce ID requirements until a majority of voters have IDs, which should be the default stance of such laws.

Voting is an important right and I'd expect our elected representatives to treat it with deference.

>Why is it when voter ID laws are proposed by legislators, they never propose a way to get IDs into the hands of eligible voters who don't already have them?

In an odd and absolutely unrelated coincidence, republicans who push these laws also close dmv’s in minority areas, change their hours to make it harder for working class drivers to access them, and instruct dmv personnel to obscure the fact that id’s are free.

Why can't the machines be open sourced in the sense that all the code, privacy encryptions, physical design, bill of materials, supply chain and manufacturing is done by the public via a voting system and any citizen has the freedom to inspect any part.

Because that would make voter suppression harder.

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