That gives much stronger guarantees than paper, and while the average Joe can't verify it himself, there would be three million programmers in the US alone who easily could.
Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that.
Poll workers who do the count aren't "authorities" who lord over us. They are us. I volunteer to be a poll worker. You can too. Anyone who's an eligible voter can be part of the counting process and see how it's done. In my precinct, it's exactly what people see when they vote: they feed the machine their completed ballots and the machine spits out the count at the end of the night. If there's a problem, all the ballots are kept in sealed boxes and can be re-tallied independent of the scanner software/hardware.
If you think there's monkey business going on in your precinct, you're free to participate in the process and verify it for yourself.
You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote.
But like OP said, volunteers could see the process. The recounts were actually pretty damn close; it was just the election was way too close for that to be acceptable.
In general the US system, as crap as it is (first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems), the electoral and state-based rules do mean that election fraud isn't too big a deal. New York will likely always go Blue. Tennessee will always go Red. Even if there is same fraud there, it doesn't matter that much because of the way votes are allocated per state. It's not fair, but that's the system the US has.
Fraud matters greatly in states were elections are close (Florida, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) and it will get even worse thanks to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, if that gets triggered.
Potential fraud in swing states or NaPoVolIterCo are incredibly dangerous right now, because what we cannot have in America is loss of faith in the election system. That will be disastrous. We would not survive the 2000 Bush/Gore election today.
This shows that recount disputes almost always boil down to whether to accept a particular ballot one way or another. It's not fraud. You're just bound to run into ambiguity once or twice in a large election. It usually doesn't matter, but it can pop up when an election is really close.
There was a literal tied election in Virginia a few years ago that stemmed from an ambiguous mark for delegate: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ballot_94_AP_cro...
I'm guessing you watch a lot of CPG Grey. You should check out Cardinal Voting systems[0], specifically Approval[1] and STAR[2], as these better fix a lot of the problems. Fargo recently had great success with approval[3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
[3] https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/fargos-f...
But that also means the guy with the big wrench can follow your vote and so see whether you voted the way he told you or not, and that allows him to decide whether to smash your kneecaps in.
Electronic voting enables corruption.
But consider: at this very moment, right above you is a comment with a picture of ballot that was filled out improperly and lead to a tied election. If we can’t teach people to fill in a circle properly, how in the world do we expect them to use or understand a system that guarantees verifiability as well as anonymity.
Teaching people to use and trust an insanely complex system is. I’ve yet to hear any proposal for an electronic voting system that offers any advantages over current systems AND doesn’t require a PhD in mathematics to grasp.
The simple answer I've seen is giving people a hash or code that can be used to verify their vote in a database. Obviously you have to trust the database, but you also have to trust the people counting. I do think there are enabling technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and locally differential privacy that do help with many of the problems, but my understanding is that neither of these is mature enough for use in voting, yet.
But as to general advantages, I think there's two major ones I see. 1) Electronic voting better enables access to voting since people can vote in the comfort of their homes (especially relevant in a situation live covid). 2) Enables better research about candidates. I live in a state with mail in voting and how I vote is with my ballot in front of me while I research all the candidates. In fact, I spend several days voting (sure, not everyone will do this but it makes it easier). Links to official campaign pages or voter guides (we have this in my state with the ballot) would be helpful (and encourage candidates to create them! Because often they don't even have a website, at least on local levels).
As a minor advantage I do see having the ability to perform different voting testing and better answer questions to things like ordinal and cardinal voting systems (by participation not forced A/B testing).
Just because enabling technologies aren't there yet doesn't mean we should shutdown the conversation about how to solve those technological challenges.
We already have these systems in deployment. My precinct uses optical-scan paper ballots where any mark inside the bubble is valid. You can fill, dot, cross, check, whatever---the machine will count it as a mark. If you have a stray mark that results in an overvote, the machine will reject your ballot, then prompt you to either correct the overvote or override the error. The scanner will also accept ballots fed in any orientation as long as it's not folded or wrinkled.
It's surprisingly robust and user-friendly.
The instructions aren't just for those filling it out. The reader should only have interpreted the properly filled in circle. The ones with marks through them are a near universal indication of "Don't count this," everywhere I go. I've also been known to either annotate, leave an instruction to th He reader, or say screw it and ask for a new ballot.
Given the significant other was completely flummoxed though when asked cold, I see your point.
Also jurisdictions can do risk-limiting audits (RLA) to spot-check that the electronic counts are in line with the results. "Following your vote" is dangerous because it opens up the possibility of at-scale voter intimidation or vote-buying. "Receipt-freeness" is a desirable property because it eliminates this risk. RLAs allow for aggregate verification while maintaining receipt-freeness.
Yup, an "I voted" sticker is OK. An "I voted" sticker with your ballot's serial number isn't.
If you can verify that your vote was correctly counted, your vote can't be kept secret, and intimidation and vote buying becomes impossible to stop.
> Whereas with paper I can't count the votes myself, I have to trust the authorities who did that.
The way it works in my home country is that the paper ballots are handled in an inspectable way and anyone can observe the counting process. You can't check your vote, but you can control all the votes.
But, if "you" can verify it, then "you" can also be coerced into revealing that verification in order to avoid physical punishment (guy with big wrench who /requested/ you vote for A lest he begin breaking knee caps mentioned in a sibling post).
The rush to vote by mail (with risk of ballot harvesting, which I saw in my own city (a Republican incidentally) and online voting (with associated risks) seems foolish to me. The secret ballot, completed by oneself in guaranteed isolation, is the pillar of my confidence in our system. Pandemic be damned - it’s not a severe enough crisis (by the number of deaths) to warrant overhauling the system the night before. Feels very much like a useful opportunity to advance an erosion of faith in the electoral system. If I were Russia or China, I would be looking on at the discord with glee right now.
Someone else mentioned a real/mask vote solution with blockchain so that issue could be solved by electronic voting.
This is a misconception. All ballots received according to the laws of the state must be counted before the secretary of state certifies the results.
News networks will call an election as soon as they're certain it's gone one way or another. If Trump is up 30% in Wyoming on election night with 500 absentee ballots outstanding, CNN will call it. This doesn't mean Wyoming won't count those ballots. They have to in order to certify the results, which happens a few days after election night. States maintain detailed election results for historical and legal purposes. They don't throw away absentee ballots just because they won't change the outcome.
States will, however, toss out absentee ballots that aren't received according to their laws (i.e., some states require those to be received by election day, while others merely require them to be postmarked), as well as those without a verifiable signature on them.
This is a really common misconception. Absentee ballots absolutely count as long as they're received correctly. States need accurate vote counts. Absentee and provisional ballots aren't "lesser" ballots. They're just subject to some scrutiny before they're counted.
The verification is manual, but the counting probably isn't. At least in California, absentee (mail) ballots are exactly the same ones you get at the polling place. You put them in an unmarked envelope, which you place inside another envelope with your information and signature.
The counting center verifies the information on the outer envelope and ensures you didn't already vote elsewhere in-person. If it's good, then the inner (unmarked) envelope is taken out and a machine processes the ballot as if you were in the physical precinct.
But if your vote is just a byte getting added to a database on a server from your personal computer over the internet, there are a hundred high-risk trust points. You have to trust the user, but also the website, the browser, the operating system, the network, the hardware, the server, the software running on the server and everybody who has ever worked on it, the counting software, the people operating the counting software, and a compromise at any single one of these points could change millions of votes without any possibility of detection.
In other words, in a scantron election, the legal vote is the paper, the electronics are just convenience. In an internet election, the legal vote is the ephemeral machine-generated bits on a wire, and that's where the problem comes from.
This is false. Votes (transactions) in Bitcoin are pseudonymous, meaning everyone can see what votes were placed, but nobody knows who was responsible for the specific votes. Only the owner knows, unless they choose to reveal to others.
Which means the owner can be forced to reveal their vote to a spouse/boss/warlord.
I could have been clearer that that is what I meant.
To be fair I thought you meant that it couldn't be kept secret from a global view - that anyone who wanted could look at the blockchain and attach votes to identities.
I don’t think what I wrote is that difficult to understand. I think you’re underestimating people when you say “the overwhelming majority of the people do not have the capacity to understand what you said.” Really? Not even the capacity to understand?
In any case, the trust involved for a blockchain-based voting system with pseudonymity is much less than the other systems, because they can be 3rd-party audited, or even open source. And that auditing only needs to happen once rather than for each local vote collection method.
Explaining to the end-user is just a matter of communication. That’s not a “major problem.” People don't need to know how a blockchain works just like they don't need to know how UPS works. They just need to know that they're able to place a vote anonymously and verify themselves later if they want to.
This is an effective mechanism which apparently convinces enough people that the votes are legitimate.
With blockchain you would have to: - have them understand blockchain algorithms - have them understand computers (so they understand why blockchain might be safe here) - have them understand networking technologies - convince them all of that (and no more/less) is on the actual machines on voting day, for every vote
Have you ever tried explaining what an URL is to your parents? Or how passwords are stored? I am positively convinced that not an insignificant amount of the electorate would just say "there was some hack" when things didn't go their way. And they don't even need to show you proof, because you won't be able to proof the opposite because they won't understand it.
Ultimately to me the benefits of a blockchain system don't really show. It is far to complicated and has too many moving parts.
Yup. I'm pretty sure most software engineers don't even know how something as basic as hashing works. They just put lego blocks together, without much understanding of even how those lego blocks work.
When it comes to traditional voting, it's fairly easy to understand. You cast your vote, then someone counts them. You don't care how they count it, even if it's with an aid of a machine. You just care that you cast, someone fairly counts.
With a blockchain, there is no person involved and there is no counting. You vote and some piece of software that most software engineers don't even understand tells you who won. That is really not going to engender trust from anyone, not even software engineers.
I work on blockchains all the time and even I wouldn't trust that thing. Good luck convincing someone who doesn't even know how to reboot their iPhone.
No, because it violates this principle the GP pointed out:
> This can only be true if most people voting understand the mechanism, can verify it themselves
Most people, i.e., most voters, will not be able to understand the mathematics behind a blockchain system sufficiently to either "understand the mechanism" or to "verify it themselves".
Most voters can understand the paper ballot counting system:
1) turn over next ballot
2) count filled ovals/check marks/whatever it is on this particular ballot sheet that signifies a "vote"
3) add count to running tally
4) return to step 1
Observers can also watch the individuals doing the counting, and believe that they (the observers) are accurately following along in the process.
Blockchain does not provide for that transparency in the process of counting the votes.
I think the current US population that really understands blockchains is less than 1% of the population.
Even worse, good luck getting election software formally verified on a budget.
Also, don't forget it's a secret ballot, and we do not have any good database of people with public keys in this country. What the hell am I supposed to make of a ledger with 100s of million anonymous public keys? Surely I cannot claim that relates 1-1 with the choices of real people.
You'd have your private key on your 'voting card' (unsure how you call it in the US) with some pw and the machine would just scan it, ask your password. You just need the proof that someone having a private key associated with a public key on a public record has signed, not necessarily know to which public key it is associated.
But there would be so much problems with such a system that I would'nt even know where to start..
There may be other such "straws that broke the camels back", but IMO anonymity is one property that makes a cryptosystem far less intuitive even to me. It's the bridge I never advocate crossing unless people with more security knowledge than me go to great lengths to demonstrate otherwise.
> Your social security number will make a perfectly fine secret key!
Never in its history was it a secret key anymore than your drivers license number, it’s an ID number that can be used to look you up in a DB like a username would be.
The problem is, that despite everyone just instinctively knowing a username needs to be paired with a password (or ideally multiple factors, but that isn’t as universal in understanding yet), no such thing exists currently to pair with your social security number.
Imagine this, you rig a crypto-vote not through technical means, you just say you won even though the blockchain says you didn't. How many people in your country do you think will believe the experts over the politicians? My honest opinion about the US, is that the experts will lose.
It doesn't matter if you're right if no one believes you, and currently people believe the paper vote because they can understand how it would be executed fairly.
The fact is that currently, America's democracy is in danger because people are going to find it hard to trust even a paper vote during this election. No matter which way the vote swings, by planting the seed of doubt, the current administration has undermined the vote.