I absolutely hate that fact. I am a human, I cannot read barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if the important part of what was recorded is correct.
Not sure if Colorado's are the same...
(Taking a bit more pointed tone than I usually would, because of the amount of misinformation around this general topic and because of annoyance at people putting less effort in than election workers, from secretaries of state down to volunteers, and casting shade from the laziness of their armchair. Thank you to all the people spending their time trying to secure elections!)
Did you try searching for "colorado voting audit"?
There's a page on their SOS site... https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html
Which even has a YouTube video on the process... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo
But in terms of communities it might be that voting is looked down upon for certain members of that community not the community as a whole.
In broader terms while marking people who have voted may not reveal who they voted for it does reveal that they did vote. This is less private than the election authorities maintaining the record of who has voted.
Plus, you have the extra layer of public perception: it's much easier to convince a chunk of the public that all the machines in some area are miscounting, than it is to convince them that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction.
And you can send observers that can watch the entire process.
"Entire" is the keyword here.
Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place.
Anyone and everyone can watch someone count paper ballots, noone can watch a computer count electronic ballots.
What?
There are entire systems built around doing exactly that. Embedded, military, high-trust.
It's never state of the art performance or mass deployed, because most people would rather have performance and cost optimized over assurance, but it exists and is in production use.
You verify hardware, chain of custody from production to delivery, track every deployed piece of hardware, then lock the firmware and enforce restrictions on anything that executes after that.
It's not easy or cheap (or foolproof, as anything can be exploited), but it's also not impossible. And substantially hardens security.
And for simpler systems with lower performance requirements, completely achievable.
F.ex. voting machines don't need to be running 16-core, hyperthreaded CPUs running multi-process operating systems
This is a completely different thing. In those systems, the organization doing the vetting is the one that protects itself through those systems; the good of the organization is presumed to be aligned with the good of the end-users by the threat model. That is, the threat model is purely external to the organization: we are protecting the army's computers from an enemy army or a rogue soldier. An end-user of such a system (say, a low rank soldier sitting in a tank that includes remote-controlled components) can't really trust that those things are used in their best interest. For all they know, the devices are listening to every conversation looking for signs of treason/incompetence - this is still perfectly allowed by an embedded, military, high-trust system. It's the generals that trust the system, as it were, not the individual soldiers.
In contrast, in an election, what we care about is not that the sitting president trusts the results; we care that every individual voter trusts them. And the individual voters are not the ones that have the power to control the way procurement, hiring, vetting, verification, and everything else is done. In fact, the relationship between the electorate and the voting organizers is normally modeled as partly adversarial. The true test of a democracy is whether the populace can easily vote down the people currently in power, the ones that are organizing the election, when they would like to maintain their power.
So yes, I agree that if I am building a system that I want to trust with voting, and I have enough money, I can build an electronic system that I can trust. And you can build one that you can trust. But I can't build one that you can trust, unless you already trust me.
There is no way to demonstrate that what is executing is the source code unless you're compiling at execution time from a local vetted copy of the source code. Is the guy who vetted the source code vetted? Who vets the vetter? Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about bugs in the compiler? Is the source code even what it claims (binary blobs!)?
What about the hardware? Are there any black box enclaves? Bugs? Does it actually crunch as would be generally expected of a number cruncher? Does it even have the vetted software?
All this complexity and anyone would be fully within their right to say "I don't and won't trust this."
Meanwhile, someone counting paper ballots by hand can be immediately understood by anyone and everyone. It's simple and it's brutally effective. So what if the process takes time? Good stuff usually takes time, what's the rush? So what if the human counter(s) screw up? Human errors are inevitable, that's why you count multiple times to confirm the results can be repeated.
The most secure, most hardened, most certified ballot counting machine cannot compare to a simple human counting paper ballots in witness of anyone and everyone.
Still, in the interest of a conversation, some brief answers. Please ask in detail about any you're interested in (but realize I'm going to balance the time I spend answering with the time you spend researching and asking).
"Is the guy who vetted the source code vetted?" Yes, because he or she was assigned a key and signed the code with it.
"Who vets the vetter?" Whatever level of diligence you want, up to and including TS+SCI level.
"Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about bugs in the compiler?" This is why you test. And it's pathological to believe that well-tested compilers, that have built trillions of lines of code, are going to only fail to successfully compile election code.
"Is the source code even what it claims (binary blobs!)?" See test and also dependency review and qualification.
"What about the hardware? Are there any black box enclaves?" Yes, by design, because that's how secure systems are built. And no, the enclaves aren't black boxes.
"Bugs? Does it actually crunch as would be generally expected of a number cruncher?" Testing and validation.
"Does it even have the vetted software?" Signed executables, enforced by trusted hardware.
> Meanwhile, someone counting paper ballots by hand can be immediately understood by anyone and everyone. It's simple and it's brutally effective
No, it's not. Because people are messy, error-prone entities, especially when it comes to doing a boring process 100+ times in a row.
You're not comparing against perfection: you're comparing against at best bored/distracted and at worst possibly-partisan humans.
Human counts rarely match exactly, because humans make mistakes. And then they make mistakes in the recounts intended to validate counts.
If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail, then I'd reflect on why things never fail at your work because of people, and everything always runs smoothly.
>you're not thinking about this very hard
Yes, because the commons will not think very hard about a complicated "solution" when a much simpler solution already exists.
>If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail,
Yes, humans fail. It's also not important. Any election worth its salt should be counting multiple times using a variety of counters and witnesses to demonstrate repeatability of the vote.
Again: Humans failing is not important.
What is important is the ability to verify immediately and simply how the vote is being tallied. Machines can and will fail (or more likely be corrupted) like humans, but we can immediately see when the human screws up whereas it's impossible to see when the machine screws up.
It's baffling I'm having to argue this to FOSS people of all peoples, you guys should know better than anyone else that vetting source code and binaries and hardware is a fool's errand for something as important as counting votes.
Nothing beats the brutal simplicity of hand counting paper ballots while everyone watches.
That "unless" is the whole problem. And it's not just if a third party gets involved, it can well be from the builders or the current operators of the machine who are the ones actively exploiting it as well.
While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it compulsory.
Here is a similar example: https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/...
The vertical columns (labelled as Group A to E in screenshot) divide up the political parties. The Greens will be one column, Labor Party another, Liberal Party another column and so on.
There are two horizontal rows separated by a thick line.
You can choose to either vote "above the line" or "below the line" but not both methods.
Above the line is used if you would like to vote based upon the wishes of a political party and below the line is used for "finer grained" voting for individual persons.
For example the Labor party might have 3 Candidates "Fred", "Mary" and "Bob" if I vote above the line I can put a 1 next to the Labor party and then the Labor party's wishes will determine how my vote is distributed.
Or if I Vote below the line I must number 12 different people in the order I want them to be chosen. So I could number Bob from Labor first, Peggy from the Greens second, then Fred from Labor third and so on and I exert exact control over how I want my preferences to be distributed.
edit: Our elections are staggered, The State parliament is elected on different day to the Federal Parliament, which is different to Local City Council elections.
The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite direction: trying to selectively suppress their opponents' votes further. If it hurts them more than us, it's a worthy goal!
I agree with GP. Transparency is more important than precision in democracy.
Good engineering is about choosing the right technology, not just the more recent one. Sometimes the right technology is paper.
Says who? Also, what does "accurate" here actually mean?
Speaking as someone who actually understands computers and machines: I agree with the commons (who are simpletons with regards to computers and machines) that machines cannot be trusted to be "accurate" (whatever that means) or even trusted in general.
Especially when a simpler, confirmable-by-anyone method exists: Having someone count paper ballots by hand in the presence of anyone and everyone. That includes mistakes and errors. The value here is anyone and everyone can and will immediately understand (and thus accept) what is going on.
Also, why are we even putting the integrity of the very foundation of our democracy on the table in exchange for convenience and cost of all things? Are we serious? It should be a good thing we are taking precious time and money to make sure our democracy is working properly. I thought democracy was actually fucking important.
I've written some code at a previous job to simplify data entry. The previous method was adding numbers from a stack of papers, with a calculator. I trust my code to add up the numbers on the computer over a human reading them from a printout and entering them in a calculator.
Humans make mistakes. A lot.
To put some numbers on this, from my experience.
Health insurance manual claims processors (who usually average ~5 years of experience) can do 95+% accuracy, at speed (a few minutes), at scale. That's counting and verifying multiple things against processing rules.
General data entry, from less trained folks, tends to average around 85% accurate (i.e. 15 mistakes + 85 entries correct, out of 100 entries).
Googling around I think colorado banned ballots with qr codes / non human readable machine encodings .. or at least banned use of them for tallies
https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becom...
The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to reduce the trustworthiness of the system
Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose because a dot is filled in?
The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the information is encoded correctly on the ballot I submitted if it's done scantron-style.
I cannot do that with barcodes.
It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place.
JMHO.
I don't disagree that it's strictly better, but the improvements in security are marginal. Any audits/recounts would be done by looking at the human readable part of the ballot, and would therefore be unaffected. Moreover, regardless of whether there's barcodes or not, you'd want to conduct proactive recounts to mitigate any risk for tampered/broken machines. In that case, getting rid of barcodes wouldn't add any security in practice.
Seems a pretty substantial difference to me.
When was the last time you had a printer print the wrong thing? Moreover, if an election is close enough that a few votes matter, there's definitely going to be a manual recount, so any advantage is purely academic (eg. knowing that candidate A won by 51.704% rather than 51.703%). Point is, either the error is big enough that it's trivially detected with spot checks, or the margins are so close that a manual recount is performed automatically.
A collection of dots and a collection of bars are the same to me in terms of trusting the computer actually read it right.
I'm fine with it so long as the choices are also printed in a human readable way at the bottom. If it was just a giant bar code or whatever I wouldn't like it.
It's about the ability for the voter to determine that their own part of the process -- the recording of their own vote -- is done correctly in every respect.
Each step of the system has to be verifiable as correct for the system to be trustworthy. As it stands right now, I cannot visually verify that my own vote produced a correct printed ballot. I have no way of doing that.
This removes one of the most critical safeguards. If something in the software (malicious or otherwise) records an incorrect barcode, I have absolutely no way of knowing.
That's a problem.
Garbage in, garbage out.
To me, this seems like the only part worth worrying about, and any solution to it should satisfy your concerns as well.
Every ballot should have a UUID that the voter takes with them (or make it a hash of their voter registration number or something). As soon as the ballot is processed, the results are posted to a public place. Voters can then confirm their ballot was recorded accurately.
This still doesn't tell you that all the internal variables were incremented correctly, but you can separately aggregate the publicly posted results and compare with the aggregate reported by the machine.
The problem this still doesn't solve is electronically stuffing in fake ballots.
Opening the door for vote bribery or voter intimidation.
$1,000 for every tag proving you voted for my candidate.
If you don't prove you voted for my candidate, expect some retaliation!
This doesn't happen today because it isn't scalable and is easy to get caught and prosecuted. Electronic manipulation is more appealing because it does not require interacting with people.
Most people aren't going to try too hard to undermine or outsmart the gangster. Which is why, again, the perpetrator doesn't even need validation of how people actually voted. Vague threats will work just fine. In fact the gangster will still beat up a random sampling of the voters anyway.
If the gangster is just going to hurt a random sampling of people anyways, you might as well just vote however you want to vote. They may or may not commit violence against you regardless of how you vote, its completely disconnected. If you know they can validate it, you're probably going to be less brave.
Just put yourself in those two situations. One where the ballot is absolutely secret, and one where it can be trivially looked up. Someone says you better vote for X or I'll hurt you. You really don't want to vote for X. In the first instance, do you vote for X? In the second, do you still vote for X knowing the thug will be able to know for sure how you voted?
I'm not suggesting nobody would do an illegal thing, obviously I acknowledge people would do illegal things. I'm just pointing to that as why taking a photo of a ballot is illegal in many areas.