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[Egan_BW]

sounds good

[Starver]

Double-post, if this still is (it isn't!), to deal with Blockchainy mechanics.

Complaints about electronic voting tend to accumulate to "How do I know that when I've cast my vote for Foo, it won't get marked against Bar?"... With apparent worries that machines were hacked to change the on-screen vote of people, in 2016 (ignoring the fact that this would be an ultra-naive way to do it, if you had any proper access to the system. Best to say "Yup, you voted Foo!" on-screen but make it tally fror Bar anyway).

Also, people can be worried that They can tell how they vote (or, for people not worried, others might be worried that a Them might be rewarding people who are proven to have voted Their desired way). Which requires anonimisation, and so a solution to the first problem of having a searchable index for voter to ask "who do you think I voted for?" is also not a solution in that raw form.


I suspect Blockchain is being touted because it (at one level) takes data and mixes it into another mass of previously verified data in a verifiable way such that specific queries can be made of it (if necessary) without having one big plaintext infodump (ab)usable by a certain kind of entity.

Though much of that facility is just basically a massively-salted hashing function. Which isn't anything new. And doesn't stop the hacked/pre-biased system from finding ways to tally things up 'wrongly' but give a reassuring 'right' answer, I'm sure.


However, this is how I'd do it, knowing that I'm not spending enough time trying to examine the pitfalls I undoubtedly am building in:

Actually, deleted it. It's just saying what others have said it might be, but with too many words.


Also this was designed for official machines, easily controlled and auditable, not AppStore dowloaded one-vote-each connections to the node.

[Starver]

The only truly secure method is to put a hyper intelligent AI in charge of discovering the preferences of every single person in the country.
It might end up cutting some heads open with diamond blades just to be sure it got the right answer, but it'll work.

Sounds complicated. Every single person?

How about just the one?

[Egan_BW]

Complicated, but it's possible and therefore worth doing. ;P

[sluissa]

Can we just drop all this silliness and go back to paper ballots, please? I mean, yes, they can be foiled by party balloons. But at least it's not a single point of failure. Any attempt to make major changes has to be widespread and organized with many actors involved.

Paper ballots led to the whole hanging chads debacle in 2000, no system is going to be 100% infallible. You do have a point in that any major changes have to be done in an organized fashion, which is why only the government really has the resources (and authority) to do that.

No, overcomplicated machines that spit out machine readable paper combined with human insistence on non-obvious rules led to hanging chads in 2000. And that's not even getting into the downright shady stuff that did happen that we know about. But at least we do know about it. When it's all electronic, there's no way to know. You just have to trust that whoever made the machine and whoever is operating the machine is doing it properly.

You have a simple paper, you instruct them to mark the paper in a certain way. If they don't mark the paper the way instructed, then it's an invalid ballot. Trying to interpret the invalid ballots as valid ballots is what led to problems.

Electronic voting for something as important as government will never be safe enough, will never be trustworthy enough, will never be reliable enough. Voting is the foundation upon which everything else in government is based and no expense should be spared on it. That means paper, that means a holiday or extended voting periods, that means additional assistance to get EVERYONE to the polls if necessary. Voting is not just a right, it's a responsibility. It should damn well be mandatory. For if the vote can be questioned, and if the leadership doesn't have the mandate to lead, then there is no effective government.

Yes, paper boxes can be stuffed. That's no secret and it's happened. The vote can be manipulated in plenty of ways no matter how it's counted. But electronic ballots are the final straw in making an open process that should be visible in every important aspect into an opaque black box into which your vote disappears and you simply have to trust that it'll still exist at the end.

[Dorsidwarf]

as opposed to paper ballots, where your vote vanishes into a literal black box and you have to hope it comes out the other end :p

[smjjames]

Can we just drop all this silliness and go back to paper ballots, please? I mean, yes, they can be foiled by party balloons. But at least it's not a single point of failure. Any attempt to make major changes has to be widespread and organized with many actors involved.

Paper ballots led to the whole hanging chads debacle in 2000, no system is going to be 100% infallible. You do have a point in that any major changes have to be done in an organized fashion, which is why only the government really has the resources (and authority) to do that.

No, overcomplicated machines that spit out machine readable paper combined with human insistence on non-obvious rules led to hanging chads in 2000. And that's not even getting into the downright shady stuff that did happen that we know about. But at least we do know about it. When it's all electronic, there's no way to know. You just have to trust that whoever made the machine and whoever is operating the machine is doing it properly.

You have a simple paper, you instruct them to mark the paper in a certain way. If they don't mark the paper the way instructed, then it's an invalid ballot. Trying to interpret the invalid ballots as valid ballots is what led to problems.

Electronic voting for something as important as government will never be safe enough, will never be trustworthy enough, will never be reliable enough. Voting is the foundation upon which everything else in government is based and no expense should be spared on it. That means paper, that means a holiday or extended voting periods, that means additional assistance to get EVERYONE to the polls if necessary. Voting is not just a right, it's a responsibility. It should damn well be mandatory. For if the vote can be questioned, and if the leadership doesn't have the mandate to lead, then there is no effective government.

Yes, paper boxes can be stuffed. That's no secret and it's happened. The vote can be manipulated in plenty of ways no matter how it's counted. But electronic ballots are the final straw in making an open process that should be visible in every important aspect into an opaque black box into which your vote disappears and you simply have to trust that it'll still exist at the end.

Which is why you should have a paper trail of reciepts or something for electronic machines so that they can be verified.

I get your point as far as fully electronic voting goes, but there's gotta be a happy medium somewhere in between.

[Greiger]

Lets do a compromise then, lets take a paper ballot, and feed it into a slot on a computer.  Only the paper ballots will actually be counted in the election. The computer pops up on the screen and says yes you voted Foo.  Then puts the ballot in the box.

That system can even be helpful for you, like if you vote 3rd party it can automatically shred the ballot for you.  Or if you vote foo in a place that is already predetermined that bar will win it can shred the ballot for you as well.  Just get rid of all the pretext, and show you that the entire goddamn system is pointless, and nothing matters until that's fixed.


EDIT: My pessimism aside how feasible would it be to get a code upon voting that you could later go online with and compare to what was actually tallied under that system?  With the prevalence of personal pocket cameras If something funny starts happening it seems it could get found out quick.  It sounds like plenty of people would take a picture of their vote with the code onscreen and get really public with photographic evidence if stuff does not match up.

[Doomblade187]

The issue with the latter bit is that currently, taking pictures of your ballot invalidates your vote.

[smjjames]

I'm sure there would be a reasonable exception if you see something strange happening and need to document it.

[Doomblade187]

I'm sure there would be a reasonable exception if you see something strange happening and need to document it.

Well, even if it does invalidate your vote, I feel that reporting it is worth the cost.

[EnigmaticHat]

Let's talk about something else: US politicians have a culture that when the election is over, you stop talking about election tampering.  When was the last time you heard ANY politician talk about what happened in Florida in 2012?  Cause for me it was, well, 2012.  We had the Supreme Court decide an election.  Every other country on Earth would have declared the result invalid and done another one.  But no one brings it up.  Hell, even now none of the democratic politicians are expressing outrage that we lost the election, focusing more on collusion (which granted is the bigger concern).  Trump is the only US politician I can remember in my entire life talking about election tampering after the election itself.

The thing is that pushing all this potential tampering under the rug was all fine and dandy when people still had faith in our democracy.  But now they don't and we need to take highly visible steps to restore faith.

Here's what I say we need.  Step one, every polling place should have a camera aimed at the voting machine, angled so it can't read the text on the papers people are putting in but you can still see who's putting the papers in.  Step 2, randomly pick a small number of polling places in each state.  For each picked polling place, a truck comes to pick up the machine with a government official who takes the camera and then rides with the voting machine in the back of the truck.  The truck then takes the machine to a facility where all of its paper ballots are counted and compared to the electronic count.  Additionally someone should analyze the camera footage to make sure no one put any extra ballots in the machine and that the camera was actually recording for the entire time frame.  Then finally all the cameras from the places that weren't selected have their footage deleted on-site to protect voter anonymity.

Each state gets federal money to improve the machines.  Every election one of their tests falls out of the desired range (something like +/- .5%) they pay a fine for each failed test and the test results are made public knowledge.  Next year if they have more fines its added to the previous years' fines, and they only reset if the state has a perfect election.  While that might be too much of a slap on the wrist at least we have the data on whose machines are working and whose aren't so we can take further action from there.  An additional step would be to make election day a national holiday.

[Lord Shonus]

And all of that would be worthless. Rigging an election by directly changing votes is like sticking a gun in a bank clerk's face instead of using stock manipulation or computer fraud. It is far too much work to set it up, is much likelier to get caught, and you can get a far stronger result with less risky means. Social media makes opinion manipulation easy, because stuff that comes in through Facebook (especially things shared by your friends and family) or other platforms tends to bypass the "propaganda filter" we all apply to advertising.


What you're proposing would be nothing more than security theater. It might help boost perception in the short term, but would turn into a laughingstock pretty damn quickly.

[EnigmaticHat]

For people who don't think electronic hacking of voting machines is possible/likely:

Maryland voting machine system financed and at least partially built by Russian oligarch:
https://wtop.com/maryland/2018/07/officials-russian-firm-used-in-maryland-election-systems/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/13/fbi-marylands-voting-system-linked-to-russian-oligarch/

West Virginia is running pilot of phone voting system (!) run by a startup company (!!!) called Voatz:
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/08/07/west-virginia-and-the-voatz-blockchain-voting-system-scaling-and-security-concerns/
https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1026616922752929792 (Voatz has project manager from Russia, indicating active Russian interest in altering 2018 vote counts)

Departing head of NSA and US cyber command who left this year says that his efforts to defend against Russia were hamstrung because he requires an order from the white house to act and he has not been given one:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/politics/michael-rogers-nsa-cyber-command-russia-election-meddling.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/27/politics/cybercom-rogers-trump-russian-cyber-threat/index.html

Russia attempted hacking voting rolls in 21 states and penetrated "several", most notably stealing the voter registration data on 500k Illinios voters.  Likely had less planning and budget than other aspects of the Russian hacking effort, indicating attacks in 2018 could be more extensive and damaging:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/russians-penetrated-us-voter-systems-nbc-citing-top-us-official.html
https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/russia-election-hacking-muellers-latest-indictment-suggests-it-could-be-even-more-damaging-next-time.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russians-ability-change-voter-data-report-says_us_5af31967e4b0aab8a78bad59 (says official claimed Russia could have altered voting rolls, but chose not to)

Officials and nonprofits call for voting machines that leave a paper trail to maintain faith in elections:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-votingmachines/ahead-of-november-election-old-voting-machines-stir-concerns-among-us-officials-idUSKCN1IW16Z
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/americas-voting-machines-risk-an-update (non-profit organization calls for voter machine updates and audits)
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/20180806/missouri-officials-look-to-improve-election-security (missouri state law already requires auditing)
https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-counties-are-struggling-to-find-money-to-replace-antiquated-voting-machines/ (Texas is attempting to upgrade voting machines to have a paper trail but not all counties can find the funds)
https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-2018/voter-ballot-box-database-security.html

Pretty much all security experts agree that our voting machines can be easily hacked, are obsolete:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-machine-hacking-russians.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-votingmachines/ahead-of-november-election-old-voting-machines-stir-concerns-among-us-officials-idUSKCN1IW16Z (double post from above)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html (this one is fun: in 2011 a county Pennsylvania had remote access software installed on the vote tallying machine, other states probably are using similar systems.  It also shows many polling places use modems to transmit results making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks)
https://futurism.com/remote-access-software-voting-machines/ (private company admits it sold voting software packaged with remote access software from 2000-2006, judging by what the other links have said few voting systems in the US have been updated in the past decade so those probably weren't)

Significant (not huge, but significant) number of democracies have banned electronic voting, some citing transparency and security concerns:
http://www.india.com/buzz/electronic-voting-machines-evms-fraud-controversy-list-of-countries-that-have-banned-electronic-voting-1927574/
https://www.quora.com/How-many-countries-use-EVM-machines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country#Netherlands

Voting machines in US elections have already been hacked:
http://www.onlineathens.com/nationworld/20180807/lawsuit-details-multiple-flaws-in-georgia-election-system
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/08/virginia-dre-voting-machines-hack/ (virginia election machines were hacked at a hacking convention; additionally there were reports of voting machines flipping people's votes (as in you click one and it selects the other) and more alarmingly fixing the glitch visually without changing the underlying vote flipping.  Fortunately the effected machines have been scrapped.

The info on how/if other countries audit their electronic voting machines was scattered and not super useful, so I'll drop my earlier claim.

[smjjames]

Like who, Russia?

Anyways, what exactly happened in Florida in 2012 are you talking about? The only SCOTUS (or state level Supreme Court, if that's what it was) thing involving Florida and elections that I know of was in 2000, and that was because Congress didn't want to take political heat for doing what the Constitution says they're supposed to do in that situation.

edit to enigmatichat's edit: For the record, I never said that hacking of electronic voting machines isn't possible, just that it'd be trickier/costlier to pull off than the route that the Russians actually did take in 2016. Not sure that anybody today commented that it's not possible or extremely unlikely.

There are signs that they may be taking a more aggressive approach this time however.

Also, the biggest investor of that Russian company in the first two links has a name that is awfully close to Vladimir Putin, same first name, but last name is pretty similar to the word 'Putin'. Just a thing I find strange, though I don't think Putin is so dumb as to use a pseudonym so similar to his own name.

edit2: Votaz has a Russian project manager, that is definetly troubling news and I didn't know that.