With paper ballots it's easy for anyone to get involved in verifying the trustworthiness of part of an election.
You can watch the box that the votes are put into, you can be present at the opening of the box, you can participate in the count. All the key parts of the process can (and in most countries do) happen in public view, and even someone with a low level of education can gain high confidence that the election is fair, trusting only other people like themselves - no need to trust the corporation that built the machine, or the politicians currently in power - you can watch it from empty box to published voting district results, and as long as you think there are people like you in each district doing similar checks, you can be confident the entire vote was done correctly.
That's good and all, but in the 4 states I've voted in, only one had a paper ballot. 3 were me showing up to the polling place and pressing buttons on a monitor. The 4th mails me a ballot, I fill things in, and send it back (so no receipt either).
Given my experience, and that several others tell me they do similar things, I don't understand your counter argument. We already do not have paper ballots to check. There is ZERO verification currently. If those ballots are printed out from the electronic machine that I voted on, well you still have to trust that a corporation did not mess with anything and printed out the wrong ballot, or just didn't print yours out. The way we are doing things and the way we used to do things don't enable the trust that you are suggesting.
But let's assume that the year is 2000 and we're voting on a paper ballot. We don't get to take a copy home. Once we leave we don't know what happens to that ballot in the box. Has our vote been counter? Did we fully punch out the paper chad? Did our ballot get lost when a country wide controversy started and my ballot got mailed around the state several times? Can I verify that the government's decision of how to count my vote reflected my actual intention?
The answer to these is that you can't do any verification of this. So I rather kinda like the idea of a website that I can go to and check that my vote was counted correctly and matches. The triviality of it from the voter side makes this process easy. Does it solve all verifiablity problems within the pipeline? No. Does it solve some? Yeah.
Personally I'd rather take a step forward, even if that step is small.
You are also able to volunteer to take part in the counting, or to observe the whole process. Sure, when you leave, you don't know that nothing bad happened, but you don't have to leave until the end of the process. In my jurisdiction, you can be part of the process that determines whether a vote is distinct (and should be voted) or not.
It sounds like you've already taken many steps backwards in your voting system, so this further step doesn't seem so bad, but it's still worse than a properly run paper system.
It sounds like you've already taken many steps backwards in your voting system
My voting system or the systems in the 4 states I've voted in? Which, I'll remind you, one uses paper ballots.
The year 2000 example I gave was literally what happened in Florida. Besides the chad part (which was a _MAJOR_ part of what I was suggesting as unverifiable), I'm also suggesting that given the close call there were many more opportunities for fowl play or accidents.
Really we don't care about verifiability in elections that went as expected. We care when they are close. Where mistakes make a difference. With thousands of ballots everywhere, it isn't hard for a few to get lost. Also, there were plenty of complaints about the ballot layout and how it confused people (Buchanan). You're also not going to be able to keep an eye on the ballots for 36 days (how long it took before the supreme court got involved).
Unless you have a receipt and a database you can easily access you can't really verify that your vote was counted. I'm not aware of any state that has this.
it's still worse than a properly run paper system.
I also cannot think of a case where this is being done. I'll also note that according to this list[0], I voted with "Paper and DRE without paper trail", but I definitely did not vote on a piece of paper. I was put in front of a machine, so I'm not sure why this is called paper.
Touchscreen BMDs are called "paper" because they produce paper ballots, which you can (presumably) inspect, and those are what is counted. The nightmare scenario for us in Cook County last cycle was a night where the counts in our pollbook didn't match up with the count of paper ballots we ended up with; we had to stay a bit late because of a minor snafu with them.
Thanks for that clarification with Touchscreen BMDs.
The problem here is that many of these don't have the receipts (see link). And I'm guessing the other ones the receipts are upon request, so I don't know if it is obvious for users to print them out. And that still doesn't solve the problem of a lack of a easy to access database to check your ballot.
As I understand it, if it doesn't have a paper artifact, it's not a BMD, it's a DRE. BMDs are suboptimal; DREs are actively harmful.
I strongly recommend people volunteer for their next election cycle to see this stuff firsthand. You'll definitely have better "this is how the election will be stolen" stories to tell than this mixnet verification stuff. At this point, I'm automatically skeptical of any story, positive or negative, about election security that doesn't include the word "pollbook".
Unless you have a receipt and a database you can easily access you can't really verify that your vote was counted. I'm not aware of any state that has this.
1. in the morning, the ballot box is shown to be empty and is then locked.
2. during the day, voters leave their paper ballots in the box.
3. in the evening, the box is opened, and all the ballots inside it are counted.
The entire process is public, and the ballot box never leaves the public eye. So you can verify that your vote went into the box, and that all votes in the box were counted.
You realize that this doesn't provide any verification, right? All that you have verified is that there are ballots in the box. Not who they belong to, if yours was counted, etc. You have no idea if those are even the same ballots. Sure, there is trust, but we're trying to create a system with minimal trust, right?
Sure it does? From the point where you put your ballot in the box, you can keep the box in sight until it is opened, at which point you can verify that all ballots contained in it were counted.
Since you say you don't understand the counterargument, I'll attempt to restate it: participation in the vote needs to be accessible at all levels, from the actual voting to the administration of polling places to the counting of votes. That's what we get with a paper ballot system (the touchscreens we have in Cook County are BMDs and produce paper ballots that are counted; you can volunteer for roles in the election administration) and what we potentially lose with a system that relies on algorithmic counting.
If you have strong opinions about how elections should be run, the best advice I've seen is Matt Blaze's: volunteer to be an election judge in your district, to get firsthand experience.
what we potentially lose with a system that relies on algorithmic counting.
I don't understand this argument. From my understanding the computers (I'm not using algorithmic counting because that's not a distinct enough word. By hand you're still doing an algorithm) are already counting and the paper is a backup. If we can still count up all the ballots after and have a verifiable method, then I don't see anything lost.
I’ve yet to see a technological solution that doesn’t fall victim to this.
I’m a reasonably intelligent software engineer and I would not trust myself to audit the described solution to know it does what it claims.
I can, however,
* review the receipt produced by the voting machine and ensure it matches
* observe the random audits of submitted receipts to tabulated votes to be sure they match
I can also trust that a wide section of the public can do those things as well.
You can watch the box that the votes are put into, you can be present at the opening of the box...
But you can't monitor the boxes in transit or be sure that any given box, or vote, was tallied properly.
It's happened numerous times in the Bay Area that boxes of ballots have been "found" days after an election, with votes curiously inconsistent with others from nearby precincts.
In many countries with paper ballots, the box never leaves the room until the count is complete. You can watch it from the moment it arrives empty until the results are submitted to the election committee.
If you look up how elections get rigged, there are all sorts of opportunities for corrupting the election, which actually happen all over the world -- ballot boxes getting swapped out, literally stuffed with extra votes, being hidden and forgotten completely, getting "lost" or "accidentally destroyed" to prevent a recount along with forged results, the list goes on and on.
Yes the UN can send unbiased people to observe elections, but there just aren't enough to be present at every polling station and verify every step of the way. And the police tend to be happy to deny "unauthorized" people from observing... in the name of "security" to promote election integrity.
So considering that even official UN observers historically have been unable to verify the trustworthiness of many elections, I don't understand how you think "anyone who can count" could possibly do so.
You are right that ultimately it's based on trust, currently. But with technology we can have far greater certainty, and follow the phrase Reagan popularized: "trust, but verify". Elections deserve nothing less.
My contention is that when there are things like you describe going on, it's usually fairly obvious to people (even those who can't count) because they weren't able to do the all points observation that the process allows.
I'm describing elections where you can literally watch the box before it is sealed, to being opened, to having the votes counted and the count being published. If you're in a place where you are not able to do that, then yes, of course, you're running a high risk that the election is not fair.
You don't even need people to be unbiased, you just need a selection of people with different allegiances who will be able to cry foul if they see something happening that is not right because they think it will damage their side.
But with technology we can have far greater certainty
I have yet to see any technological solution that gives greater certainty than the ballot box system. Most of them allow the voter to prove their vote or involve many more actors that must be trusted. They also provide new central points of attack, where a well run paper vote is very distributed.
Half the country cries foul based on observational samples but without systemic proof, and the other half of the country says they're inventing stories and cherry-picking irregularities, and that there are just as many irregularities in the other direction to cancel them out.
And the average citizen, of course, has absolutely no idea what to think. Both sides sound entirely plausible. And even if there was manipulation, nobody has any idea if it changed the outcome by 0.1% (a few bad actors) or by 10% (the president directed it), if it was enough to tip an election or not.
By introducing foolproof technological verification, all this goes away. And I don't understand how you think this doesn't exist -- isn't this HN post just one example of multiple proposals?
foolproof technological verification, all this goes away. And I don't understand how you think this doesn't exist
Well, firstly, having some familiarity with software, it's rare to come across 'foolproof' used as an adjective, even with formally proved correct pieces of code.
But, I accept that it's possible that if implemented correctly, something like the most modern forms of things like Pret a Voter might be pretty secure. However, it's going to be harder for a normal human to check that Pret a Voter is implemented correctly than to check that a paper ballot system is implemented correctly.
For example, in Pret a Voter, the group of tellers and only the group of tellers have the ability to recover the original order. This would allow them to decrypt any of the posted receipts, if they shared that knowledge with someone nefarious, it provides perfect means for vote coercion. If the process is not run correctly and they are colluding, they could have the chance to choose a decryption that provides the right result.
If you implement Pret a Voter correctly, with a group of ideologically distinct tellers, and you involve them at the right points in the process, and not at other points, and you have a non-colluding auditor check they are doing their job correctly, then everything is fine, but in practice, how is a voter going to get that confidence?
Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Bruce Schneier. "The problem isn't the math, it's the human procedures around the math. I don't think a cryptographic voting system would be an improvement, because that's not the weakest link." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/voting_techno...
There merely boring procedure of having election workers count out in the open in front of observers is a more accessible process for laypeople to understand and build trust than printing out the assembler instructions being executed on a tabulation machine plus hardware schematics of the machine running it.
Comments
With paper ballots it's easy for anyone to get involved in verifying the trustworthiness of part of an election.
You can watch the box that the votes are put into, you can be present at the opening of the box, you can participate in the count. All the key parts of the process can (and in most countries do) happen in public view, and even someone with a low level of education can gain high confidence that the election is fair, trusting only other people like themselves - no need to trust the corporation that built the machine, or the politicians currently in power - you can watch it from empty box to published voting district results, and as long as you think there are people like you in each district doing similar checks, you can be confident the entire vote was done correctly.
That's good and all, but in the 4 states I've voted in, only one had a paper ballot. 3 were me showing up to the polling place and pressing buttons on a monitor. The 4th mails me a ballot, I fill things in, and send it back (so no receipt either).
Given my experience, and that several others tell me they do similar things, I don't understand your counter argument. We already do not have paper ballots to check. There is ZERO verification currently. If those ballots are printed out from the electronic machine that I voted on, well you still have to trust that a corporation did not mess with anything and printed out the wrong ballot, or just didn't print yours out. The way we are doing things and the way we used to do things don't enable the trust that you are suggesting.
But let's assume that the year is 2000 and we're voting on a paper ballot. We don't get to take a copy home. Once we leave we don't know what happens to that ballot in the box. Has our vote been counter? Did we fully punch out the paper chad? Did our ballot get lost when a country wide controversy started and my ballot got mailed around the state several times? Can I verify that the government's decision of how to count my vote reflected my actual intention?
The answer to these is that you can't do any verification of this. So I rather kinda like the idea of a website that I can go to and check that my vote was counted correctly and matches. The triviality of it from the voter side makes this process easy. Does it solve all verifiablity problems within the pipeline? No. Does it solve some? Yeah.
Personally I'd rather take a step forward, even if that step is small.
Where I vote, we use paper ballots. They're still widely used, even in the 21st century. The state of election security in the USA is appalling. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/buying_used_v... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
You are also able to volunteer to take part in the counting, or to observe the whole process. Sure, when you leave, you don't know that nothing bad happened, but you don't have to leave until the end of the process. In my jurisdiction, you can be part of the process that determines whether a vote is distinct (and should be voted) or not.
It sounds like you've already taken many steps backwards in your voting system, so this further step doesn't seem so bad, but it's still worse than a properly run paper system.
My voting system or the systems in the 4 states I've voted in? Which, I'll remind you, one uses paper ballots.
The year 2000 example I gave was literally what happened in Florida. Besides the chad part (which was a _MAJOR_ part of what I was suggesting as unverifiable), I'm also suggesting that given the close call there were many more opportunities for fowl play or accidents.
Really we don't care about verifiability in elections that went as expected. We care when they are close. Where mistakes make a difference. With thousands of ballots everywhere, it isn't hard for a few to get lost. Also, there were plenty of complaints about the ballot layout and how it confused people (Buchanan). You're also not going to be able to keep an eye on the ballots for 36 days (how long it took before the supreme court got involved).
Unless you have a receipt and a database you can easily access you can't really verify that your vote was counted. I'm not aware of any state that has this.
I also cannot think of a case where this is being done. I'll also note that according to this list[0], I voted with "Paper and DRE without paper trail", but I definitely did not vote on a piece of paper. I was put in front of a machine, so I'm not sure why this is called paper.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Touchscreen BMDs are called "paper" because they produce paper ballots, which you can (presumably) inspect, and those are what is counted. The nightmare scenario for us in Cook County last cycle was a night where the counts in our pollbook didn't match up with the count of paper ballots we ended up with; we had to stay a bit late because of a minor snafu with them.
Thanks for that clarification with Touchscreen BMDs.
The problem here is that many of these don't have the receipts (see link). And I'm guessing the other ones the receipts are upon request, so I don't know if it is obvious for users to print them out. And that still doesn't solve the problem of a lack of a easy to access database to check your ballot.
As I understand it, if it doesn't have a paper artifact, it's not a BMD, it's a DRE. BMDs are suboptimal; DREs are actively harmful.
I strongly recommend people volunteer for their next election cycle to see this stuff firsthand. You'll definitely have better "this is how the election will be stolen" stories to tell than this mixnet verification stuff. At this point, I'm automatically skeptical of any story, positive or negative, about election security that doesn't include the word "pollbook".
With a paper ballot, you can.
Where's the database you can easily access?
You don't need it.
1. in the morning, the ballot box is shown to be empty and is then locked.
2. during the day, voters leave their paper ballots in the box.
3. in the evening, the box is opened, and all the ballots inside it are counted.
The entire process is public, and the ballot box never leaves the public eye. So you can verify that your vote went into the box, and that all votes in the box were counted.
You realize that this doesn't provide any verification, right? All that you have verified is that there are ballots in the box. Not who they belong to, if yours was counted, etc. You have no idea if those are even the same ballots. Sure, there is trust, but we're trying to create a system with minimal trust, right?
Sure it does? From the point where you put your ballot in the box, you can keep the box in sight until it is opened, at which point you can verify that all ballots contained in it were counted.
Since you say you don't understand the counterargument, I'll attempt to restate it: participation in the vote needs to be accessible at all levels, from the actual voting to the administration of polling places to the counting of votes. That's what we get with a paper ballot system (the touchscreens we have in Cook County are BMDs and produce paper ballots that are counted; you can volunteer for roles in the election administration) and what we potentially lose with a system that relies on algorithmic counting.
If you have strong opinions about how elections should be run, the best advice I've seen is Matt Blaze's: volunteer to be an election judge in your district, to get firsthand experience.
I don't understand this argument. From my understanding the computers (I'm not using algorithmic counting because that's not a distinct enough word. By hand you're still doing an algorithm) are already counting and the paper is a backup. If we can still count up all the ballots after and have a verifiable method, then I don't see anything lost.
I’ve yet to see a technological solution that doesn’t fall victim to this.
I’m a reasonably intelligent software engineer and I would not trust myself to audit the described solution to know it does what it claims.
I can, however,
* review the receipt produced by the voting machine and ensure it matches * observe the random audits of submitted receipts to tabulated votes to be sure they match
I can also trust that a wide section of the public can do those things as well.
It's happened numerous times in the Bay Area that boxes of ballots have been "found" days after an election, with votes curiously inconsistent with others from nearby precincts.
In many countries with paper ballots, the box never leaves the room until the count is complete. You can watch it from the moment it arrives empty until the results are submitted to the election committee.
OK, use this scheme where the receipt you take is a carbon copy, and then you can maintain the votes in a ballot box, too.
Sorry, but that's just not true.
If you look up how elections get rigged, there are all sorts of opportunities for corrupting the election, which actually happen all over the world -- ballot boxes getting swapped out, literally stuffed with extra votes, being hidden and forgotten completely, getting "lost" or "accidentally destroyed" to prevent a recount along with forged results, the list goes on and on.
Yes the UN can send unbiased people to observe elections, but there just aren't enough to be present at every polling station and verify every step of the way. And the police tend to be happy to deny "unauthorized" people from observing... in the name of "security" to promote election integrity.
So considering that even official UN observers historically have been unable to verify the trustworthiness of many elections, I don't understand how you think "anyone who can count" could possibly do so.
You are right that ultimately it's based on trust, currently. But with technology we can have far greater certainty, and follow the phrase Reagan popularized: "trust, but verify". Elections deserve nothing less.
My contention is that when there are things like you describe going on, it's usually fairly obvious to people (even those who can't count) because they weren't able to do the all points observation that the process allows.
I'm describing elections where you can literally watch the box before it is sealed, to being opened, to having the votes counted and the count being published. If you're in a place where you are not able to do that, then yes, of course, you're running a high risk that the election is not fair.
You don't even need people to be unbiased, you just need a selection of people with different allegiances who will be able to cry foul if they see something happening that is not right because they think it will damage their side.
I have yet to see any technological solution that gives greater certainty than the ballot box system. Most of them allow the voter to prove their vote or involve many more actors that must be trusted. They also provide new central points of attack, where a well run paper vote is very distributed.
I like Schneiers analysis of the papal election protocol: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/hacking_the_p...
Except it's not, which is the whole point.
Half the country cries foul based on observational samples but without systemic proof, and the other half of the country says they're inventing stories and cherry-picking irregularities, and that there are just as many irregularities in the other direction to cancel them out.
And the average citizen, of course, has absolutely no idea what to think. Both sides sound entirely plausible. And even if there was manipulation, nobody has any idea if it changed the outcome by 0.1% (a few bad actors) or by 10% (the president directed it), if it was enough to tip an election or not.
By introducing foolproof technological verification, all this goes away. And I don't understand how you think this doesn't exist -- isn't this HN post just one example of multiple proposals?
Well, firstly, having some familiarity with software, it's rare to come across 'foolproof' used as an adjective, even with formally proved correct pieces of code.
But, I accept that it's possible that if implemented correctly, something like the most modern forms of things like Pret a Voter might be pretty secure. However, it's going to be harder for a normal human to check that Pret a Voter is implemented correctly than to check that a paper ballot system is implemented correctly.
For example, in Pret a Voter, the group of tellers and only the group of tellers have the ability to recover the original order. This would allow them to decrypt any of the posted receipts, if they shared that knowledge with someone nefarious, it provides perfect means for vote coercion. If the process is not run correctly and they are colluding, they could have the chance to choose a decryption that provides the right result.
If you implement Pret a Voter correctly, with a group of ideologically distinct tellers, and you involve them at the right points in the process, and not at other points, and you have a non-colluding auditor check they are doing their job correctly, then everything is fine, but in practice, how is a voter going to get that confidence?
This is ignoring very real usability concerns (that in some cases can be politically weaponized to disenfrancise particular segments of the population). https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/jets15/jets_0...
Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Bruce Schneier. "The problem isn't the math, it's the human procedures around the math. I don't think a cryptographic voting system would be an improvement, because that's not the weakest link." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/voting_techno...
There merely boring procedure of having election workers count out in the open in front of observers is a more accessible process for laypeople to understand and build trust than printing out the assembler instructions being executed on a tabulation machine plus hardware schematics of the machine running it.