The goal of a voting system is not verifiability, but trust. Without trust elections have no legitimacy.
The elder generation grew up with stuff where you had to be more cautious of damaging it, while the younger generation is far more confident with "randomly mess around until it works", because they grew up with products that were designed to be more forgiving.
I meant it in the sense of the younger generation has more exposure to concepts like encrypted communication and peer to peer communication and encrypted ledgers, etc. They might not know how exactly they work, but they know they exist and have an inkling of their attributes as they pertain to data secrecy, auditability, etc...
I think that the details of the vote will indeed be opaque to most voters, but I think that's the case right now for most of us. As a voter you must have some trust in the process and in the fact that the correct auditors have vetted it. Hopefully it's going to get there for electronic voting some day.
(Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know - perhaps you'd end up agreeing with whichever side has the most believable technological shibboleths, which isn't that much different from the current best practice of listening to the side with the better attack ads).
Whether the candidates themselves, all of them, can be trusted is a much more serious problem with democracy, I think, than "dumb" people affecting the vote.
dumb people vote for dumb things, whether issues or candidates.
Also, gay marriage isn't really a complex issue: Even the dumbest person understood the consequences of banning it, they just were that sadistic. Agreed on Brexit though.
As for the implications of your premise: Do you feel comfortable in not having a say whether you are taxed more, have your hobbies criminalized, or get sent off to die in some awful war somewhere so that some jerk can get rich? Because that's what you ask for when you say some obnoxious technocrat is fine running the country with no input.
And before you mention passing an exam or something to vote, that's just a direct path to corruption and disenfranchisement.
HTTPS is shrouded behind inscrutable crypto, but nearly everyone trusts it with their credit card details.
Voting doesn't have to be any different. The implementation details don't matter, as long as there are easy-to-understand verification concepts such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted. And then journalists and other private election integrity observers who do random sampling from voter rolls and follow up on complaints. (This is not a complete list, just examples.)
And remember, physical voting is actually tremendously complicated as well -- inscrutable optical scanners detecting which bubbles you filled in, and then... what? Who's actually adding the numbers, and where, and how? The point is, the details aren't really important as long as we're vaguely aware that there are election observers and journalists trying to catch any irregularities, and we all know it will be major news whenever they're found.
Yes, it has to be. If you break the ability for the average citizen to understand exactly how and why your vote is counted, you undermine trust. Trust into the democratic process is the thing keeping a democracy alive.
If someone currently says "<Country> / <Party> interfered with the voting process!", I can tell them to just observe their local polling station or even become part of the polling station staff themselves. Be there, check that the election staff doesn't start throwing away votes and count correctly. Check that the numbers they count are equal to the one on the official result for the polling station. It's all paper. It's easy to follow.
If we put anything between this, which requires trust into a magic box with a display, I cannot do this. If your credit card is abused, you see it on your bank account, always. You cannot have the same certainty the same for an anonymous election - yes, they may have proof that their vote was correctly counted, but what about the polling station as a whole? The votes of the other citizens? Most people will not check, just as you may only get one observer per polling station max today (which is already enough to prevent fraud for the whole station, in the case of paper ballots).
"Trust the journalists" does not fly.
> And remember, physical voting is actually tremendously complicated as well
It doesn't have to be. You don't need complex equipment, you can count directly in the polling station after it closes. Paper and people suffice.
> Check that the numbers they count are equal to the one on the official result for the polling station. It's all paper. It's easy to follow.
I say that, using paper, it's not easy -- it's next to impossible for any individual to do.
On the other hand, if I can download a file of voting results, import it into Excel, and run SUM(), it's about a million times easier.
What's important to rely on is the fact that people are able to verify that their own votes are consistent with what's in the public votes (using something like tracking numbers), and we can also verify there isn't vote stuffing (which there's no room for, if the number of votes and "didn't-votes" equals the size of the voter rolls).
You claim this "requires trust into a magic box with a display" but that's simply not true. All it requires is the ability for everyone to verify that their vote got included accurately, that people who didn't vote got included as not voting, and that nothing got stuffed on top.
Paper and physical voting is actually far, far, far harder to independently verify and trust. It's just that until recently, we haven't had a practical alternative.
If you want, you can even stay the whole day and keep an eye on the whole voting process except when the voters make their choice behind the privacy screen, you can see everything which enters the ballot box. I've seen myself someone regaining trust in the democratic process because of this - a guy who openly accused us, the polling station workers, of voting manipulation, being openly hostile, agreeing that everything was done correctly in the end. This would've been impossible while using electronic or online voting.
> it's about a million times easier.
If you, as a random citizen, know SUM() and even think about downloading the data for Excel, you are the top-n% in computer literacy. You are aware of that, right? ^^'
For most people, verifying their own vote on a website with no understanding of the underlying process is the absolute maximum you can expect, IMO. In this case, it is "trusting a magic box with a display". You compared it yourself with HTTPS, for which the same is true for the general public.
> What's important to rely on is the fact that people are able to verify that their own votes are consistent with what's in the public votes
But will people do this at scale and do people trust that they do so? The latter is the most important. It doesn't have to make statistical sense, it's about feelings in this case.
Because if most people (of a certain demographic like the elderly) don't check their own vote or a significant amount of people don't believe that they do so, you cannot automatically assume that all votes in the polling station have been counted correctly. It may have been e.g. only the votes of certain demographics (who are unlikely to check their own votes), which have been tampered, even if this believe is statistically unjustified.
If you supervise a whole analog polling station, you see for yourself this is not the case.
> But will people do this at scale and do people trust that they do so? The latter is the most important.
Yes, absolutely. This is the most important, and that's what makes it all so easy! If you don't trust, verifying your own vote is a click away. If you think there's something fishy in your town, ping a few friends and ask them to verify. Journalists and international observers can sample a few thousand randomly chosen people and verify that the election is at least 99.9% accurate.
Because we all know that if journalists find even any pattern of people whose votes aren't getting counted, or were changed, it would be front-page national scandal news.
The whole process you're describing for physical polling places is a million times more work for any individual. It requires a massive amount of time and attention.
Meanwhile, with electronic/online voting, all you need to do is see if people are reporting discrepancies that hold up upon further investigation. If they're not, then it all works. I don't understand why you think people wouldn't trust this. It's dead simple.
> I don't understand why you think people wouldn't trust this.
Because people are not always rational beings, often don't understand statistics and, in my experience, the set of people not trusting journalists and having doubt on past elections having significant overlap. If you are not convinced the press isn't lying, and maybe just prints what the government wants, you will not expect that they uncover election intervention. And your friends may be on a list of the city hall, "they" know that they vote for certain parties[1]. This is basically verbatim what voters sometimes tell you, why they don't vote via mail. It's easy to transfer those fears onto electronic voting.
It's very hard to keep believing in serious election fraud if you see how (this kind of) analogue voting works, though. You have to trust nobody, only yourself, at least in regards to your local polling station.
> The whole process you're describing for physical polling places is a million times more work for any individual. It requires a massive amount of time and attention.
Yes, I don't disagree. It's significantly more work, inefficient and antiquated. All true. I'm just not convinced that the convenience of electronic / online voting is worth the risk that a) a fuck-up due to any kind of bug / security problem and b) people losing even the slightest bit of trust into elections because of "magic computer", even if they are caused by delusions, would pose.
[1] Germany has no "registration" as Republican or Democrat (w/ German parties of course) like the US has - they don't have such lists
Credit card via HTTPS has a second layer to it though, the accountings/auditing layer. You can't achieve that with secret ballot voting without throwing out the secret part.
From your long sibling thread I gather that for you it is more important to be able to verify the votes by yourself through the output of the voting system (the excel example) than to be able to reason through the voting system itself. Whereas for schroeding it is more important to be able to conceptually understand and scrutinize the voting process as a whole, even though it might be difficult for any single individual to check on that their own vote was counted. Correct me if the summary was not fair.
Suppose we bring the two ideas to the extreme and imagine two voting systems:
- an extermely complex, completely opaque voting system that can only be managed by experts to function correctly, but with a perfectly infallible way to individually check that their vote was correctly counted
- an extremely obvious and straightforward way of voting such as paper ballots that are securely physically transported to a central location (all of them) and counted by people surrounded by observers (all in one sitting). clearly any individual cannot check that their vote was actually counted
If there is a disagreement about the result of a vote because, let's say for the sake of the example that the losing party thinks they should have won; In the first system everybody can of course check their votes, but what if the losing party questions the checking system itself? Then it is on the experts to justify why the vote is correct (can they do it?). On the second system, because everybody can reason through it, it is on the losing party to prove that the vote was not performed correctly, by pointing at some part of the (simpler) voting procedure.
I think that the second system is more robust in the sense that when there is a disagreement, it is easier regain everyone's trust. With simple procedures, the disagreeing party can make more meaningful demands on the people who manage the voting system to check that the vote was correct. In the first system it is the opposite, and because by definitions it is only understood by experts the losing party cannot do anything but to claim that the whole system is rigged.
So, since voting systems are ultimately a tool to collectively take decisions, I'd say that there is more value in having a simple procedure than efficiency and extremely precise feedback for individual votes. The trust in voting systems is different than the one in credit card processing systems.
Of course real electronic voting and real paper voting are neither of these two extremes, but choosing the e-voting moves us closer to the first system, while paper voting to the second.
That is unnecessary complexity already. Ballots can be counted directly in the voting stations, by the local citizens. If you want to check your vote is counted correctly, stay to witness the counting. After the results have been counted, they can be communicated to the city hall via phone, so everyone in the room can hear it.
I remember having a boss demand I put the authorize seal next to our credit card form, else it wouldn't be secure
We used stripe
You're generally right about each point in the process being a potential point of corruption. That's why voting systems need to be very simple and involve lots of people, even if it costs more. Ideally multiple independent parties would count the votes and compare results for discrepancies, until they reached an agreement.
That's why I said:
> such as receiving a "tracking number" for your vote that is then easy to see it was counted
There absolutely has to be a way to easily tell if your vote is or isn't counted, and that it's part of the sum total. I don't know if Belenios specifically does this in a way that is easy to see, but there's nothing inherently difficult or impossible about it.
Yup, I was clear that I wasn't giving an exhaustive list of the necessary things.
But that also has solutions that can be easy. The easiest is simply to make sure that the voting rolls are accurate, and that the size of the voting results has the exact same number of entries (because it also records every instance of not-voting).
So that if everyone who is an eligible voter, and therefore received a tracking number (even if they didn't vote), and they look up their tracking number and it's accurate (including "didn't vote") -- then there's no "place" to insert fake/stuffed ballots, because it would necessarily make the number of tracking numbers larger than the size of the voter roll. (And of course, voter rolls can be sampled randomly to determine they're made of actual real people as well, to whatever accuracy you desire.)
The point is, there are solutions to all of these things that don't involve some kind of blind faith in crypto. But rather just common-sense solutions where it's easy to understand that any massive gaming of the system will be detected.
On the other hand, “verifiability” is a more useful property on a larger scale. You may trust your local government but do you trust local government in all other districts? What if, with sufficient knowledge you could prove that their voting was right or wrong? I think that also seems like a useful property.
There were international observers in the 2020 election and they found no evidence of fraud [2], and many mainstream media sources that I hold reliable, (e.g. [3]) fact-check multiple claims of election fraud and nothing has showed up that would suggest that the election was "stolen".
I don't think it is at all preposterous to assume that the 2020 US election was fair, unless you subscribe to a view that the global mainstream media apparatus is in on some grand conspiracy.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-election-ohio-ballots-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
We've gone from "haven't seen evidence" to "seen evidence at probability P-prime". Trust in an electoral system is an important enough issue that this should be investigated to the same thorough degree as a capital crime.
Did you mean to send a different video? Or are you deliberately misrepresenting evidence to support your position?
Election day, in person secret voting, with voter ID is the way.
- the ballots can be printed at non-monitored facility. I am sure FBI has such capabilities, there are many talented people
- those responsible for transporting ballots can "forget" some of them accidentally
- at polling stations where there are no election monitors, they can take as much ballots as they need
The state should eliminate this problem by requiring everyone to vote in person on election day with voter ID using a secret ballot.
We should not expect there to be much evidence that this is happening because the system has in effect, if not by intention, been designed to prevent any such evidence from being collected.
That is why there is some legitimate doubt in the tamper proof nature of our elections.
Why stuff ballot boxes when you can just make it harder for people that typically vote against your party to even get their ballots in the first place, or divide up cities in convoluted boundaries to prevent non-white communities from being able sway districts? All perfectly legal methods that have worked well for the GOP, which didn't even win the popular vote with their last president. That is the real reason GOP leadership pushes anti-absentee ballot narratives and DNC tries to expand those programs.
Widespread absentee ballots are bad, early voting is bad, gerrymandering is bad, lack of voter ID checking is bad, non-secret voting is bad. I'd like to see them all done away with.
I took a (lazy) crack at generating an image from a (could be 120% incorrect) ChatGPT conversation, FYI:
* IMAGE https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/png/RLAzJiD03DxlAQnECF023A... (ChatGPT's images look bad)
* CONVERSATION https://chatgpt.com/share/142a2eca-1f66-4087-9568-cbf49e7c3c...