Being open source is a very good idea, but it doesn't mean the software that's actually loaded into the machines isn't compromised.
The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result.
What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago. Banking software has been compromised in the past, but the audit ability catches it.
The problem isn't in the technology, the problem is with people. The idea of voting is that 2 groups with opposing views agree on a compromise - a fair set of rules that determines which side won. So if the losing is convinced that they've lost fair and square, they will focus on a better campaign next time, rather than on starting a revolt.
Except for the past half-a-decade the media is increasingly pitting people against each other. Each side considers their rivals evil or crazy and is not ready to respect their opinion, listen or compromise. This creates incentives to cheat and legitimate reasons to suspect cheating. No matter what algorithmical or organizational approach you take, there will be always human factor, and hence reason for doubt. And the only way to resolve it is to make sure that you can always recheck the results in a way that satisfies the losing party, rather than screaming "blasphemy" to shut them up.
That's why you need a process so transparent there is no possible suspicion of cheating. Software is exactly the opposite of transparency. Paper ballots opened locally and counted publicly is the only solution.
The damage is done. Currently I don't think there are ways to convince people that vote results are legit, short of eliminating secrecy and have every single person put their preference on a record that can be accessed anytime from anywhere. That however has its pros and cons, and is considered anti democratic.
I think the only way to improve things is to have a representative based system. Local community picks a rep, sends them to a higher level meeting, all the chosen reps pick a rep from among them to send to the next level, repeat and scale the number of layers as needed. Then there’s no mystery because everyone at each level knows who they agreed to send to represent them. Your party should just be your literal party, your local community.
This whole top-down thing where powerful established groups that already have their own agenda tell you and your neighbors that you can only choose between a few of their chosen people to represent you has got to go, the agenda should be your agenda, the rep should be your rep. This is totally doable, repeal the 17th amendment for starters. Add more meeting houses next, counties/districts can have their own house that each elect the state Congress, etc, micro-service distributed architecture!
This was how the US Constitution was designed by the smart people, before various idiots screwed it up with the 17th Amendment and Permanent Apportionment Act. Your US representative was supposed to represent about ~30,000 people and your state representatives even fewer than that. Now each representative represents close to a million.
So glad to see others calling-out the Permanent Apportionment Act. Maybe it made sense in a world without communications technology, but today we're able to scale to the numbers needed to support that ratio of representatives:constituents.
The episode "Power To The People" in the satirical comedy Yes Prime Minister deals with exactly this. It also looks at the trade-offs, which explains why this will almost certainly not actually happen. Well worth a watch :-)
- You publish a public list of randomly generated numbers/IDs (the number of IDs corresponding to the number of eligible voters, guess you need a reasonably accurate census data for this)
- Divide up into subsets and distribute these IDs to each voting booth.
- When you go to vote you draw on of those numbers and attach it to your vote.
- Election results are published as "ID X voted for Y".
Now everyone can check that their vote was counted, and everyone can check that the original list of of IDs matches the final results (or in reality, count(final list) < count(original list) since not everyone votes).
These things may seem farfetched, but happen very often in certain parts of the world.
Here very recently the Federal Road Administration was caught stopping buses in regions where the left leaning presidential candidate had the strongest support. We also had a few tens of cases where business owners were discussing strategies on how to get their employees to vote for the right-wing candidate, and some strategies depended on breaking the law by taking you smartphone to the voting booths and taking a picture (breaking the law in the process).
.. in a country where many people think ¼ is bigger than ⅓.
Seriously. We are talking about people who would claim rain is not wet, while it pours down their face if it was somehow helping them "owning" the other side. No clever system is going to fix people not wanting democracy anymore.
This is an issue of decades of uncontrolled "news" media and a lack of education and the US is going to harvest the fruit of that neglect for the next decades at least.
It might be my education about the roots of fascism that I got by growing up within the borders of former Nazi Germany, but US democracy is in an extremely dangerous spot right now. The specific mixture of economic pressures, media bubbles, lack of education, corrupt political actors and processes and split culture is a volatile explosive mix.
Placing the blame on "the media" over the last five years is not really correct. People have been undermining basic election rights and processes for quite a while and while both parties engage in it the right is far more active and devious in gerrymandering, eroding legal protections, etc. Trust in government in general is low but elections have been quite fairly run and provably so to a reasonable doubter. But doubters have been given free rein to be unreasonable, hence they doubt the auditors, and the auditors of the auditors, all the way up. Losing fair and square is no longer something many people think is possible for their party.
The media has covered this with varying effect but we hardly conjured it into existence. In fact the media can barely keep the lights on, let alone fund the lawsuits, "grassroots" redistricting efforts, organized disinfo campaigns, etc that have shaped politics at the state level — including anti-media campaigns that paint the elite mainstream media as the authors of the present electoral crisis.
However I actually advocate for fully manual, several-humans-in-the-loop counting as it's been done forever and is still done in many other first world countries.
That and scrupulous chain-of-trust on the actual ballots is , in my opinion, the only truly safe way.
Exactly. The problems in the US run way deeper than just the technicalities of voting. Both sides have been trying to bend the processes and rules their way for decades. Gerrymandering, campaign financing, elaborate propaganda campaigns, special interest lobbying (including by companies making voting machines), foreign interference (e.g. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/11/07/putin-linked-busin...), etc.
There is no basis for trust here that parties are even trying to play by the rules. They are actively using every trick known to them to gain an advantage and the financial stakes are high enough for people to look the other way given enough plausible deniability.
So, start with making the voting process as transparent as possible and just go back to counting votes manually. It won't solve all the issues but it will reduce the endless bickering about who actually won the votes that were issued.
I believe the generally accepted way of solving this problem is to do Risk Limiting Audits of the system; randomly sample districts, and then manually recount until you're confident to X sigma that the results are correct (or, if the audit diverges, you trigger a full manual recount). Citation: https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/
Banks don't randomly apply banking controls to check for fraud, they do it for all the money flows.
The original idea of double entry bookkeeping was to:
1. catch errors
2. make fraud much more difficult
It's been in continuous use since the 13th century. It works. The reason it works is because an error, to remain undetected, requires a matching error somewhere else.
I like double-entry bookkeeping as much as the next guy. But your proposal isn't double-entry (which requires every ledger entry to net out to zero), it's more akin to aerospace/NASA style reduntant control systems where you have independent implementations that must agree with each other for their output to be propagated.
Redundant control is a great system if you need to provide realtime output with high correctness requirements (though for this of course three implementations is better than two as you can discard one faulty output and continue with the quorum output).
In elections, we don't need to provide real-time control; in the happy path the random audits don't add an unreasonable delay, and when they do find a discrepancy we're fine to wait a week or two if needed for a full hand count.
Another reason why banking/accounting is a poor analogy: in banking, you don't have anonymity requirements. Each transaction is tied out to a known individual (even more granular than that really); you can do double-entry bookkeeping because you know which accounts to debit and credit for each transaction, and maintain the accounting invariant that all accounts sum to zero. In voting, we have strict anonymity requirements, so there's no equivalent "debit Alice's account of a vote, and credit Candidate Bob's account" operation, and there is no equivalent to "netting the voting accounts to zero" that I can see.
Another way of thinking about this is the RLA is simply a different approach to provide your second implementation of a vote tallying machine. It's an implementation that uses manual (human) counting, and for pragmatic cost/time reasons doesn't count every vote, just enough votes to get statistical confidence that the result is correct. And, if you have two machine implementations, who's to say that everyone will trust one of them? You still need to solve "trusting trust" for each one, and while it's harder to subvert two systems, there's no reason it's impossible. Whereas I think it's a lot easier to produce a human-powered vote counting system that is transparent and trustable by virtue of its simplicity.
Down the road I'd be happy to put a second vote tallying machine in place to provide better assurance of the initial counts (and I'd love to stop using closed-source private implementations), but I think it's important to be pragmatic here and focus on the best ROI steps, and I think implementing RLAs and abolishing DREs are two of the very-high ROI items we should be focusing on first. Adding RLAs to all states would be a much better improvement than adding a second open-source machine tabulator to all states.
Right, we’re not dealing with banks here. Ultimately we’re picking between N alternatives. The size of the gap between them doesn’t really matter, as long as it preserves the correct ordering of winners. Given that, using statistics to reduce your work is a completely reasonable efficiency here.
I don't really understand why we are always stuck in the past on things like this. 155 million votes, spread out over thousands of polling stations is a minuscule number. Why not have each voting station digitally scan/print every ballot cast, and then once the stations close - upload everything to a centralized and publicly accessible server organized by station and their reported polling result. If anybody wants to do a recount, they can - to whatever degree of confidence, and using whatever method they prefer.
One might still make claims of ballot stuffing or exclusion, but there would be literally zero doubt that the count itself was accurate.
Have a look at the links I shared above, particularly https://verifiedvoting.org/votingequipment/ for a quick summary; it gives some analysis of different voting equipment and concerns thereof.
In particular, purely-digital systems are widely regarded to be too vulnerable to hacking to be safe. What you're describing sounds like DRE with VVPAT, which isn't considered to be a secure option, though it's better than DRE without VPAT since as you note you can in principle audit it. (However, note that most jurisdictions don't yet do RLAs to randomly audit, so right now digitizing, even with VPAT, could weaken the system.)
I think the basic idea here is -- if paper is secure and will be your fallback, and digital is insecure, you should just build your process to be optimized for paper-first, rather than digital-first. Digitizing as you suggest doesn't really gain anything over paper (except perhaps reporting provisional results faster, but you'd still need to do a risk-limiting audit to verify that your digital votes didn't get hacked so this might be a wash), but it does add more attack surfaces along the chain of custody.
Ultimately, paper is a very robust solution to the problem of making the system hard to subvert at scale; you can think of it as a sort of "proof of work", where it would be extremely difficult for, say, Russia, or the DNC / RNC to tamper with large quantities of ballots across the nation. Compare that robustness with a digital system, where IF it works you have the same properties... but around here we all know that almost all digital systems can be owned by a persistent enough adversary.
If you're willing to relax some of the requirements around refutability, there are some interesting e-voting schemes, for example you can do some cool stuff with homomorphic encryption like https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard/. But there is something to be said for having a tallying algorithm like "count the pieces of paper" that doesn't require a PhD to understand.
Perhaps I phrased it poorly. When I refer to "scanning", I mean as in making an image of a physical source, as in a digital scanner, not scanning as in processing data.
The idea is to create a publicly accessible collection of an image of every single ballot, organized by the station from which they were collected. This can then be manually cross referenced, by anybody, against the reported vote count and result.
And yes, digital only ballots would pose a major problem here and in general.
The concern because of this is reasonable: identification would allow voter coercion or vote buying. But I think there are two issues with this concern. The first is that our current system doesn't prevent this. Bringing recording equipment into voting booths is not allowed, but in practice has 0 enforcement or enforceability since many (most?) locations offer shielded voting booths that even include privacy curtains.
The other practical issue with this concern is that buying or coercion would need to be of substantial scale, centralized, advertised, involved traceable transactions, and so on. And this is a criminal felony so the consequences for a leak are substantial. Ultimately, it just does not seem like a realistic attack vector.
So in many ways, I would consider this a feature more than a bug. You can personally verify that your ballot did indeed get counted (at least if you're willing to dig through thousands of ballots looking for your 'secret code') without allowing anybody else to see how you voted.
The current system does make this expensive. Making the ballots public will effectively make the votes public once some student posts a model on github.
To be clear, you do mean makes the voters public right? Because the whole idea of this suggestion is precisely to make the votes public. And I do agree that, within hours, there would be models developed to effectively parse the ballots and help detect any discrepancy - something the current centralized operators just can't seem to manage.
The problem is if the people casting the ballots can be identified by third parties. And in this regard, I don't understand what you mean or if that is what you are even talking about.
People casting ballots will be identified by anyone with an AWS account, yes. The location of the vote and the handwritten checkmark are likely enough to identify the voter.
I prefer to think in ratios rather than absolute numbers. If the whole country is voting then that’s a lot of votes, but it’s also a lot of manual labor made available to run the vote.
A counter can get through 10,000 single issue ballots in a four hour hand count. If an election has 10 issues then, on average, one person can count a thousand votes.
There have been various proposals to publish all the records after an election has been been certified. Which is always shot down on the basis of voter privacy (protecting the secret ballot).
A fundamental limitation of RLAs is that they don't follow the ballot chain of custody, only the counting procedure. So if you have an old-fashioned political machine with dead people voting or people in nursing homes being scammed out of their votes it will not appear in RLAs.
Technology strangely enough doesn’t solve voting — if there are publicly available machines, you can’t verify what is actually ran there, if they are some decentralized crypto-based “smart contract” you lose the ability to refrain from voting (e.g. an agressive husband can make her wife vote as he pleases, while with the traditional approach she can just go inside and say that she voted, while it’s truly up to her what she does.
I think paper votes with people who count votes (getting representation from every party, as well as volunteers) is a fair and okay system — it’s not like it will scale. The problem is parties (their very limited number, and tendency to find small, often unimportant differences and use “us vs them” against us), electorates and that humans are dumb as a whole. Not sure how to solve these.
The insistence of pro-machines is tiring. There is no argument in favor, in France with <5% voting machines, we know who’s the president with 95% certainty at 20:00:02 through television (through surveys, of course). So the argument “but it’s a big country!” doesn’t stand - France is already 67m.
OTOH, if I were a foreign power intent on falsifying an american election, I’d push as hard as I can for voting machines.
Same in situation in Germany. Polls close at 18:00 and 18:01 everybody knows the general results. It will only change by ~0.1% over the next 1-2 days and only really matters if a party is close to the 5% hurdle.
This is a novel take on the problem of election integrity.
Auditing in elections is called a full manual recount.
Verification in elections is the phrase for inspecting the hardware, software, processes, results. Which is probably why election integrity focused orgs have names like Election Verification Network and Verified Voting.
You did say "confidence", which is the correct framing, rather than "trust".
Much like our Constitution, confidence in our elections are built on "an orgy of mistrust", eg I watch you and you watch me, and when ultimately all the participants abide by the final results.
Which is moot when one party's platform is to reject the results, regardless of objective reality.
I don't have a clue how to address the cultural, sociological, and realpolitick parts of our country's current discord wrt election integrity. Though I do know there's no technical fix. Perhaps someday that party's voters will stop rewarding such belligerence.
> The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result.
How could this possibly work, without having the precise same votes entered into each machine (an impossible to guarantee prerequisite)?
It can scan a scantron sheet in which the page, side, column and row are used to generate a number. For example a bubble filled in on page 1, side 1, column 4, row 8 would generate 110408. There is some business logic here that says that "For page 1, side 1, only one of 0408, 0409, 0410 may be entered".
At the end, however, you get a number counted that is then tallied for and then that is mapped back to Bob Smith for the votes.
If the scanner detects a barcode page being entered (that was generated by a touch screen system), then one of the barcodes encodes the number 110408, and the barcode is read rather than trying to go from the scantron page guides.
---
In the case, you've got the scanner here, you enter them into the scanner and get the vote counts "live". Then, you take them out of the secured spot and scan them all in to the other machine and compare the vote tallies.
There is a paper ballot that is recording this.
In the event that there is a recount, then the paper ballot is examined and the name next to the bubble is what the human auditor uses to count votes.
Start with a stack of ballots. Run the stack through one machine. Run the same stack through another machine. Check the tallies. If they differ, then the counts are discarded and the stack goes to perhaps a hand count.
Each stack is handled by two people, one from each party. One feeds the machine, the other watches him.
> What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago.
Having the count be auditable doesn't really help you. If you have a pile of ballots, and you can prove with certainty that you've correctly counted what they say, you've made zero steps toward legitimacy. Where did the ballots come from?
This is a huge problem for secret ballots, where the goal of the system is that ballots can't be audited. It is not a problem for cash counting machines, because the only problem they're trying to solve is determining how much cash you have.
The same way the cops do it. Each bag of ballots has a chain-of-evidence protocol like the cops do.
Ballot boxes are opened by two people, one from each party. The ballots are put into the ballot bag, which is sealed. Both people then sign the bag and log its serial number. Every transfer up to the voting machine is witnessed and logged and signed for by two people, one from each party.
It's local volunteers counting their local votes and the public is welcome to witness it (if they manage to behave and not try to disrupt the count).
Until the proceedings are done the ballots do not move more than a few meters from where they were distributed and filled out.
Switzerland regularly manages large referendums on paper just fine and AFAIK they use a similar system.
But then these countries all vote on Sundays and with a sufficient number of polling stations (and higher voter turnout) so it usually takes no more than a few minutes.
The US has some serious operational problems regarding it's election system even before talking about the political side.
Penn and Teller, in one of my favorite jokes of theirs, say that an unwritten rule of the cups and balls trick is that you must not ever perform the cups and balls trick with clear plastic cups.
However, magicians do frequently make something about a trick of theirs transparent - figuratively or literally - as a way of making you more surprised when they pull the trick off anyway. You were looking in the wrong place, at the transparent part of the trick.
That's not to say transparent boxes are a bad idea. They really do make some attacks harder.
why can't voting happen on machine-online in realtime basis?
we can do polls for thousands and millions on facebook for example and the results are instant. everyone gets one vote and there is no double spend problems so why is political voting living in dark ages?
sure it has open source software now but in india for example, machines are transported physcially, they are tampered with in the interim, machines get lost on and on
Facebook polls are neither secret nor verifiable. Facebook knows how everyone voted, and voters cannot verify that Facebook is reporting the correct result. Those problems can theoretically be solved with cryptography (assuming the voter has full control of the device used to cast their vote), but not in a way the average voter can understand and verify.
Another problem with online voting is that malware can infect a voter's device to spy on how they vote and/or change their vote. I don't think there is a solution to that problem.
Online voting is a terrible idea. The only way to have secure elections is to publicly count every ballot by hand. If you think that's too expensive, you think electoral democracy is too expensive.
VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance, and of course the open source nature opening up the potential for a competitive market without rip and replace.
One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience"
The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day.
Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California.
Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.
> The US certainly has problems. Election integrity isn't one of them.
The US has a real problem with perceptions of election integrity. You may argue that’s all because one side is duping people-but even if that’s right, the real flaws in US election administration make it easier for people to believe those claims, and addressing those flaws - for example, elections being run by elected officials rather than independent electoral commissions as in most other English-speaking countries-will make them less believable, and hence help prevent people being duped.
> Read here about the Australian election. The official result can take up to ten days.
A large part of why it takes so long here, is because Australia has a significantly more complex voting system than the US - a combination of ranked choice (or “preferential voting” as we call it) and single transferable vote, instead of first-past-the-post - so how long it takes here isn’t really relevant to how long it takes in the US.
Furthermore, a big reason why claims of election fraud are far less believable in Australia, is because we have an impartial/independent/apolitical and highly respected government agency, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which fully runs all national elections, and also controls redistricting - and each state has its own state-based equivalent which does the same for state and local elections. Australia’s system is miles more trustworthy than the US system of leaving the management of the process to elected state and local politicians.
Except the party that would support such a program doesn't like voter id requirements and the party that wants voter id is hostile to putting government resources into making id easier to get.
Here’s what I don’t get about this topic: Democratic voters skew urban, Republican voters skew rural: isn’t government ID easier to acquire in urban areas than rural ones? If you need to go to some government office to do so, odds are in a rural area you’ll be travelling a greater distance to get to it, taking up more time and money, requiring more time off work, etc. Wouldn’t it thereby follow that voter ID laws actually hurt Republicans more than Democrats? Why then do the former support them and the later oppose them?
>If you need to go to some government office to do so, odds are in a rural area you’ll be travelling a greater distance to get to it, taking up more time and money, requiring more time off work, etc
A rural office often is overstaffed for the population compared to an urban one, so while it may take a bit longer to drive there you'll spend less time at the DMV. Plus, traveling thirty miles in a rural setting can be quicker than ten in an urban one.
Basically I don't think this is a meaningful difference, and it has nothing to do with why some Republicans are against a required free ID.
People think it'd be too invasive or expensive, and allows for things like tracking gun owners or racial profiling.
The Real ID act, which didn't even create a national ID merely required certain standards for state ID, was so controversial that I'm not sure all states comply with it seventeen years later. And there are still some people so opposed to a government ID that they don't register their births or get social security numbers.
>I didn't say it had to be a national ID card. A state one would be good enough.
I basically did, and as you were asking me the question I assumed you were asking why some Republicans are opposed to a required free ID. I tacked in a bit about why some Democrats may be opposed to it, but I'm not sure what you're hoping for by attacking my proof that there are people that oppose a required free ID.
Most of my point was that the time needed to get an ID is not a meaningful factor in any party's support of this issue.
I don't believe minorities don't drive cars or purchase alcoholic beverages. Nor do I belive they're incapable of getting an ID. They have IDs and it's not a tall ask.
Many European countries use IDs to verify the integrity of the voter but for some reason we can't in the USA?
Is it still true that "economically marginalized groups... tend to vote democrat"? In 2020, Trump won "high school or less" by 15 points, while Biden won postgraduates by 35 points [0] – surely the former group are much more "economically marginalized" than the later? Likewise, I would be surprised if there is anyone with a postgraduate degree who lacks government-issued ID, while I would expect that the vast majority of those who do lack it would belong to the "high school or less" educational category.
Isn’t education level a better indicator of social class than income? An unemployed grad student may currently have lower income than the high school dropout with a full-time low-skill job, but quite possibly has far greater future earnings potential.
That link is about Queensland state and council elections, Federal elections are run by the AEC: https://aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/ (although the process is similar).
When looking at this information you need to keep in mind that virtually all ballots in Australian elections are paper ballots that must be manually counted. Postal votes can still be received for a week after the election, but a result can be declared anyway if the margin is greater than the number of outstanding votes.
Counting is initially focussed on the House of Representatives, which uses single-member electorates, is where control of government is decided and has terms that start at the first sitting after the election. The Senate count is left later - it uses multiple-member electorates where the count can't be declared until literally every ballot is data-entered, but it is also of less public interest as it doesn't decide control of government and there is a delay before the Senators take their seats.
Hey I didn't mean to bash the Australian system. It seems great!
My point was just to illustrate that the idea of elections with "immidiate result" "total transparency" "exactly accurate" is neither realistic or necessary in a well functioning democracy.
Democracy is not in the decimal place of the accuracy of the election result. It's a combination of factors about of how political disagreement is handled. Separation of powers. Anti corruption work. Etc.
Oh yeah, just wanted to provide some necessary context for those reading our links. I'm not sure I'd put the case that Australian elections are overall counted particularly fast, they do seem to be well resourced though.
People think the US has an election integrity problem. Therefore the US has an election integrity problem. The system must be broadly trusted. And by "broadly" I mean "overwhelmingly within any given subset of the population", not just a particular filter bubble.
Election integrity is not the reason why nations elect to not use voting machines, do not use mail in voting, or also require ID. The purpose of all those choices is to encourage voter confidence and trust, which has shown to increase voter turnouts and trust in the democratic process.
I am just giving you the typical tagline toed by the party in question, I literally just made up the list of countries as I was writing it. It does not matter what names I list there. That's not the point in the slightest, see quotation marks. The point would still stand if no other nation out there were better than US election system. The idea is that election counting process should be quick and the results should be evident on the same day. If no one else is doing it, we should be the first ones to build a system that can count votes in the same day.
That would be great. I certainly hope you'll achieve it.
But it seems unlikely to succeed given that parts of the Republican party actively undermines the process and the faith in the system, with the intent of limiting access to voting for poor people and minorities.
Cure the cause and not the symptom! How transparent, accurate and fast do a ballot counting system have to be for Trump and his gang not to question it?
1. Voter ID Laws Deprive Many Americans of the Right to Vote
Millions of Americans Lack ID. 11% of U.S. citizens – or more than 21 million Americans – do not have government-issued photo identification.
2. Obtaining ID Costs Money. Even if ID is offered for free, voters must incur numerous costs (such as paying for birth certificates) to apply for a government-issued ID. Underlying documents required to obtain ID cost money, a significant expense for lower-income Americans. The combined cost of document fees, travel expenses and waiting time are estimated to range from $75 to $175.2
The travel required is often a major burden on people with disabilities, the elderly, or those in rural areas without access to a car or public transportation. In Texas, some people in rural areas must travel approximately 170 miles to reach the nearest ID office.
3. Voter ID Laws Reduce Voter Turnout. A 2014 GAO study found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by 2-3 percentage points, which can translate into tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state.
The statistics are nonsense and do not represent a significant population.
First of all, way beyond 11% of the population would be outside of the voting age, and/or unable to or unwilling to vote anyway.
Second, how could these people even rent or own a property without an ID or otherwise function in society? You cannot even get a library card, cash a check, get a bank account, or receive government assistance without an id. How are they able to pay any bills or receive income? Does cash sprinkle from the sky? Very few actual, able, or potential voters fit within this extremely small group.
Third, if a citizen is unable or unwilling to travel a short distance to obtain a simple id for $25 in order to ensure basic participation in society, are they likely even able to understand for whom or what they are even voting? Also, if they cannot travel or afford to travel to get an id, how are they even able to travel in order to vote, get groceries, get medical care, or anything else for that matter?
Fourth, if a citizen has no id, how can you know they are even a citizen that is able to vote in the first place?
>Second, how could these people even rent or own a property without an ID or otherwise function in society? You cannot even get a library card, cash a check, get a bank account, or receive government assistance without an id
They can't. It's a red herring that gets tossed around as an in-group signaling mechanism by those who have never lived near the margin and therefore don't realize how much more often you need to ID yourself when you're "down there" so to speak.
I always found it hilarious that while significantly poorer countries can have working national ID systems, in the U.S. it’s somehow too expensive to give 10% of people any form of ID at all. Like, have you considered a tiny slice of the trillions of stimulus, or military, or whatever money printed can be dedicated to solving this problem? In fact I bet EM’s Twitter acquisition money can solve this problem five times over. But no, we have to hear this “it doesn’t work here” excuse over and over. What a joke.
Doesn’t matter. People will lose their national id’s anyway and whiners would complain that the system is unfair because 11% of people lose their id’s and are unable to get a replacement. They will claim that getting a replacement is an unfair burden; some of these people cannot get public transportation from their cave in the middle of the Texas desert.
Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day.
I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy.
I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues.
As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.
Other developed nations have no problem providing same-day (or near) tallies of all votes. The fact that it can take weeks to get a complete tally is a symptom of huge dysfunction.
Doesn't matter. Argument you're presenting is fine for a small number of people who live in Oregon but someone living in Nebraska has no idea what the hell is going on. We need a standardized process that doesn't take 7 days to count ballots. That's ridiculous regardless of the historical significance. Again, we're not engaging in solutions, but presenting excuses (your point is reasonable to people who live in Oregon, but still some people will always complain).
The idea is to stop all complaining. Other nations seems to do just fine and better than us. Shameful.
It is a feature of US elections that they are far more decentralized than any other country. To your point, the people conducting the elections in Oregon and Nebraska do so as employees of their respective state governments and not as Federal representatives.
I suggest that you and other commentators in this thread read the Elections Clause [1] and historical background on it. You can't just address flaws in a system that has been running for 200+ years with a flippant "stop complaining". It would require Congress to pass a bipartisan voting law, and recent efforts to that effect have failed because of lack of bipartisan support [2].
> The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day.
That comparison isn't even the problem, the problem is that we used to be able to. Does no one else remember staying up late on election night to see the result?
The party that sows doubt does so intentionally because it helps them politically. In many states that are controlled by that party, they’ve passed legislation preventing the government from even opening envelopes before polls close on Election Day, much less processing the ballots or counting the votes.
These things are not provable but hypotheses, the same thing is accused of our immigration policy that it helps to recruit voters. You can't really prove that and this level of discussion goes nowhere. No progress is made.
We should stay rational and just fix the bugs.
Edit: I meant the open-border policy and migrants flowing in. I am not stating my own opinion here, I am trying to say that these are the things thrown around in the debates and there is no way to prove one way or the other.
It’s not some unprovable hypothesis, rather very plain facts. Many politicians who screech about the suspicious nature of delayed vote counting were in the majority legislatures that passed laws to ensure slow vote counting. Pretending otherwise is so silly.
There is literally no other reason to craft laws in this way except to later give credence to dishonest “voter irregularity” claims.
Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above:
> How Does a RLA Work?
> A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won.
> The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome.
Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins.
If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed.
Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away.
There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)
Voter Action proved in court that Kerry won New Mexico, rather than Bush. The problems in NM were a subset of the problems in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere. Make of that what you will. Walks like a duck...
Given that countless companies, websites, social media networks, governmental organizations, hospitals, school systems, and individuals including consumer credit companies are hacked every year, do you really need more evidence that an electronic voting machine could be compromised?
The claim is “widespread evidence of fraud”. I’d like to see any of the widespread evidence and not hand wavey back tracking to “could be compromised”.
It doesn’t have to be widespread in order to have a widespread impact. Some national elections are extremely close and essentially decided in one county of a single swing state. Most local elections are by definition “local” and close local elections can be decided by the votes from a single voting precinct.
Requiring the evidence to be widespread in order to acknowledge the risk is real and impactful is shortsighted and “hand wavy”.
particularly with the claim of “widespread” and “systemic abuse” casually tossed in.
do we doubt machines have been hacked? of course not, you’re on hackernews, we all attended defcon voting machine village, but yes, “widespread” and “systemic abuse” needs to be backed up with something more than, “it happened to joe and jim two streets over so obviously it happened to jill next door.”
I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically.
The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”.
In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks.
Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.
The number 1 most important property of voting by far is that the results are believable.
Voting machines irreparably damage the believability that an election was fair. They require trust, they require operation, and they increase the blast radius of bad actors. They are fundamentally a black box, open source or not, because the operation of them is subject to human malfeasance. There is no guarantee the open source software itself is what is running on those machines.
I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify. I cannot even begin to explain the details or process of how an election is run. I can't even think of edge cases for voting and how they are addressed because there is too much I don't know I don't know. I can't tell you what prevents double voting, voting on behalf of non voters (for example if I knew 10 people who haven't voted in 30 years, I might be able to submit a ballot on behalf of them), or what prevents ballot interception. Some states use "signatures" yet my signature is not even remotely distinct.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In Taiwan, you go to your voting location, you vote in a booth, you put your ballot into a box, the box is opened after polling hours and votes are tallied publicly with anonymous ballots shown publicly as they are tallied. Ambiguous ballots are subject to public review. All unambiguous votes are counted. Everything except filling out the ballot itself is public.
When conservatives spew forth the big lie, that is not something that can be thrown under the rug. That is not a Trump problem, that is not a conserative problem, that is an America problem. If election results are not fairly undeniable, the basis of democracy (that those in the minority should submit to majority rule) is violated.
The fact that election officials are more concerned with "counting the vote" than "our voting integrity is unimpeachable" is a big problem.
> I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify.
How could one person ever do that though?
Have you considered becoming a poll worker or doing election observations or getting hired by a precinct as temp?
Just this week I spent 2 hours watching election workers unpack ballots, verify signatures, etc.
There are opportunities to see with your own eyes but it requires learning how the process should works and showing up to see if things are being done correctly.
Our entire election system as it exists today has integrity as an assumption, not as a guarantee.
Voting machines require integrity as an assumption, they offer no guarantee. They actively damage trust, and yet a trade off was made in exchange for cheaper, less complex (to run, not understand) elections?
This means our election officials, with the presumption of integrity, optimized for getting the most people voting (in blue states), not for trust. Choosing to use voting machines when there is significant dissent about their use alone is enough to damage the integrity of an election.
It doesn't matter how many people vote if you can't trust the votes. It doesn't matter if some people trust the votes if the loser of an election does not trust the votes.
Democracy means the loser sees they are the minority and submits to someone else's authority because they recognize that they are the minority. If the loser does not trust the integrity of the system, then democracy has failed.
I watched an election in Taiwan (paper ballot system) happen, and I feel pretty comfortable that I can think about and reason how it operates or how it might be attacked.
I really don't think our election would be that hard to attack an election in a state that would shield the attackers from consequences. We have not seen any consequences for a flagrant attempt to attack our elections in Georgia.
I am a fairly well educated product of the American public education system. I am almost certainly in the top 15% of Americans as far as education goes, and I do not have a firm understanding of how elections operate. I think 70% is a lowball estimate of Americans that probably couldn't tell you a very good story about how elections actually work and why we should believe they are legitimate. That is a real problem.
"It can't happen here" is American exceptionalism, and I've got some very bad news. It can happen here. It is happening here.
The fact that there has been no evidence of any significant voter fraud, machine malfunction etc is a conservative problem.
I only see Left and Liberal believing in the data. And pushing for people to vote. Instead the right say "if we win it's good, if not we need to investigate". So I don't buy your line personally.
What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections? Serious question I'm curious. Because this is a fairly recent phenomenon that has exploded exponentially thanks to conservatives. Most famously Trump.
I cannot verify or convince myself of the believability of an election. Therefore, it is reasonable for conservatives to not be able to convince themselves of the believability of an election. Therefore, while I believe that the conservative effort to deny elections is done in bad faith, there is a good faith argument to be made that there is a very serious problem with our elections.
The moral hazard is that because conservatives are bad faith, I can't imagine a good faith effort to improve election integrity.
> What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections?
What has me concerned is that our elections are complex beyond a layman's ability to communicate a meaningful story about how elections are conducted and why they are to be trusted. A layman is left with only one option: trust.
"Trust us" is not a good foundation to build a democracy upon. Especially if "us" is someone who has declared themselves an enemy, if not in words, definitely in action.
If that's not enough, the highest office in our land, literally called an election official on tape and asked for votes, and there has been no consequences. A system incapable of producing consequences for bad actors cannot maintain integrity.
The end result of that saga was a person making the ethical choice, but what prevented the secretary of state from finding those votes? I don't know what would have prevented it or what safeguards there were. Even if he "found" those votes, and even if it were caught, there would have been chaos, and that chaos would have been used as a ladder. History is always written by the winners as they say, so history will always report elections as legitimate, regardless of how chaos was used as a tool to shift outcomes.
Do you think Americans decided the outcome of the 2000 election, or do you think the judicial branch did?
What do you think happened to Raffensperger after he chose to do the right thing and deny trump his request to corrupt the election? The state voted to remove him (the secretary of state position itself) from the state election board chair.
As one last final note, there has been considerable effort to attack elections, the whole DeJoy thing alone should be worrying. "I trust our elections" liberals are going to look awfully silly when the conservative assault on election integrity starts showing fruit. Gerrymandering and limited polling locations alone are an assault on election integrity without being a "direct" attack on integrity. If that can be done consequence free, what makes you feel so secure?
Have they though? You deposit your vote, and have no way to know if it was counted as you intended. Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO.
> Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO.
If you can verify your own vote you can use the same method to verify your vote to someone else, opening up the voter to the pressures that motivated voter privacy. Like payments for voting right or threats for voting wrong. So in some measure individual vote verification would trade transparency for vote coercion and selling.
There is nothing stopping those now as you could just have someone do the same for mail in votes. Also, if someone is threatening you they could also be forcing you to pull money out of an ATM or commit murder for them. It sounds mostly like a strawman argument. Being able to verify your vote counted as intended is IMO way more important than the possibility that someone is blackmailing you and that has also stole a hash or digital signature to check your vote.
It doesn't have to involve something adversarial like theft - a bigger risk than coercion is explicit bribery. If you can prove that you voted for something, then you can prove your vote in exchange for a bribe.
The reason every functioning democracy uses a secret ballot is that coercion and bribery were trivial wherever the ballot wasn't secret. Bribery might sound uneconomical for a national election, but there will be plenty of local elections using the same machines where it could easily make the difference.
People taking bribes to vote a specific way are already likely trying to cheat the election for bribes. You're talking about people that are on meth that will do just about anything for money. If all else they could have a sting where the police says they'll give them triple the money if they narc and then arrest them for selling their votes and others for paying for vote manipulation.
We need to have a system where all the code is open source and available for download. All the code, from the registration servers to the voting machines to the tallying servers. Everything made available along with the SHA256 checksums. The public should be able to clone repositories of all the software, run the checksums on their own hardware, and examine software checksums on every piece of voting equipment they have access to. Checksums for each piece of hardware used by the government should be made public.
Digital representations of votes need to be in text, and they need to exactly match a printed receipt given to the voter at the moment they vote. The data would include a digital signature, some hash of the vote values, the precinct, the datetime, and a salt, and would be anonymized. The data should go into Git repositories. You wouldn't put an entire state's data into a single repository, you'd have separate repos for e.g. the district or even precinct level. Git repositories would be initiated before voting begins, and updates could come in via network or via physical storage transported with the same security as ballot boxes.
[Before all the Git haters descend to say that the public will never be able to use Git for themselves, I agree with you that that would never work. Nobody would be using Git directly, the software would use Git under the hood to manage the vote data.]
Once the repositories of vote data are conveyed to the district level, the public should be able to browse all the votes, and each person should be able to enter the digital signature from their paper receipt (via typing, or QRCode, semacode, barcode, or whatever) and find their vote. If they want and if they are organized enough, they should be able to confirm that the votes of whole communities are in fact all in the system. The public should be able to download the vote tallying software along with as much of the vote data as they want, and run the counts on their own hardware.
If the data is in Git repositories, every single vote will have a digital signature. Every modification of the data that is committed would have a signature, and would have its own signature. Every piece of data, every modification, and every bit of the history would be perfectly transmissible, and if it's not perfect it will become immediately apparent.
Agreed. I don’t know why counting is so slow in the US. If you have resources to hold an election, you have resources to make sure that ballot counting is done in a reasonable time
Another aspect I don’t get is, why are voted in the U.S. shipped to central counting facilities, instead of counting decentralized in each voting station?
Not sure if it’s common in the U.S. I just remember the videos from that Detroit counting centre (the one where they tapped over the windows, so observers couldn’t look inside).
What is that crazy pull for ballot counting machines? Election is not happening every week, has to be supervised by humans anyway, this additional cost of having two more people here and there to count votes, sign the papers and put ballot results on the doors for transparency is negligible as compared to the problem that distrust in the election process is causing. USA knows this best, yet they dance around "better" and "more secure" voting machine solving problems that are already solved.
"Secure" voting machines is indeed interesting engineering problem, so I am not surprised this is being discussed on HN, but let's face it, we don't need to solve this engineering problem.
Progress is not always something good. X-Raying foot while purchasing shoes was also very cool in the '50, but it turned out this is not such a great thing.
In the end, a certain segment (and growing) will still say elections are rigged. “Transparency“ will be meaningless going forward; even after a code audit. The allegations: Someone intercepted the count in those few milliseconds after the voter submits; Someone siphoned votes away after the fact.
Meanwhile in Brazil, the land of electronic voting, they hired Oracle's "Cloud at Customer" offering to count votes on a "Exadata X8 Full Rack" server ...
I wonder if that decision really was a technical one.
There is a simple solution here: everyone gets a serial number with their ballot, the list of serial numbers for each candidate is published, and you can verify that your vote was counted in the right spot.
Yes, this is susceptible to coerced voting where your family member can force you to vote a certain way, but guess what, the entire vote-by-mail system that we've gone to is already susceptible to that, so as far as I'm concerned the ship is sailed.
Do you know about the cut-the-cake algorithm? A piece of cake is to be divided among two kids. Kid A cuts the cake, Kid B gets the choice of slice. It's fair.
I recall reading about a mathematician who devised a cut-the-cake algorithm that would work for gerrymandering. Naturally, nobody adopted it, because nobody in power wants fair gerrymandering.
How would this work in reality? One party committee proposes 5 voting district maps that lean toward their desired outcome. The other party chooses the least damaging one. Not sure this helps much.
Or how about 5 random maps that evenly divide the state? Voters vote on the maps and most voted map wins.
Gerrymandering happens because districts are constantly getting redrawn for population changes.
What if we took the opposite approach, and instead of making it so every district had approximately the same population, made it so each representative's vote was weighted by the population of their district? Could then use county boundaries (assuming the number of counties is >= the number of representatives)
Could even weight by # of votes obtained rather than district population, to incentivize being the preferred representative for as many people in your district as possible. I like having a few pro-consensus forces in our politics in a time of polarization.
Tax funded equipment should be running open source software out of the gate. Gujarat government in India also made the push for public WiFi hotspot software to be FOSS
The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result.
What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago. Banking software has been compromised in the past, but the audit ability catches it.