Cryptography and elections
Transparent and verifiable electronic elections are technically feasible, but for a variety of reasons, the techniques used are not actually viable for running most elections—and definitely not for remote voting. That was one of the main takeaways from a keynote at this year's linux.conf.au given by University of Melbourne Associate Professor Vanessa Teague. She is a cryptographer who, along with her colleagues, has investigated several kinds of e-voting software; as is probably not all that much of a surprise, what they found is buggy implementations. She described some of that work in a talk that was a mix of math with software-company and government missteps; the latter may directly impact many of the Australian locals who were in attendance.
She began by noting that the "cheerful title" of her talk, "Who cares about democracy?", was hopefully only a rhetorical question, which elicited some, perhaps slightly nervous, laughter. The cryptographic algorithms and protocols that can provide step-by-step proof that a voter's intent was correctly gathered and that the vote was counted do exist, but the assumptions that need to be made about user behavior make them too difficult to use for government elections. It is unreasonable to expect that voters will take the fairly onerous actions to actually verify those steps; "it's too easy to trick people". These kinds of systems do not "adequately defend against bugs and fraud for serious elections".
End-to-end verifiable elections
The details of these techniques are complicated, she said, but "the principle is really simple": the system should "provide evidence that it has done the right thing with the data at every stage of the process". (The YouTube video of the talk shows her slides, which have some pictures that give an overview of the scheme.) Voters should be able to check that it has done so by using their own code—or code provided by organizations they trust. When voters use a machine that they may not trust to vote, they should get some kind of receipt that can be used to verify that their vote has been recorded accurately. That receipt can then be checked on some other device to ensure that the vote stored in the encrypted receipt is, in fact, the choices they wanted to make.
![[Vanessa Teague]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2020/lca-teague-sm.jpg "Vanessa Teague")
The next stage is a public bulletin board that lists the encrypted votes that have been recorded for the election. It would need to have some "fancy features" to ensure that changes could not be made to the list once it has been posted, but it could effectively be just a web page with a list of encrypted votes recorded. If there was no concern for privacy, those votes could simply be decrypted and tallied. But since there is normally a need for secret ballots, the votes, which have identity information attached to them, cannot just be decrypted.
So a series of "mixing servers" would be used to shuffle the votes (without the identity information) and re-encrypt them, to break the link between who voted and for what. When you mix a bunch of paper ballots in a box, you don't know what shuffle was applied to the votes, but that is not true for electronic shuffling. So there should be multiple mixing servers, each using its own algorithm, and, ideally, each being run by a different organization; as long as those organizations are unlikely to all collude on the outcome (e.g. political parties) the mixing will break that link.
There is still a problem, however: whether those mixing servers also "fiddled the contents" while doing the shuffle. There is some "fancy crypto" for ensuring that the contents have not been altered, which would allow a mathematical proof of honest mixing to be published on the bulletin board.
The final step is for some kind of election authority to use the secret key to decrypt the votes and tally the results. That is, of course, another step where things can go awry. Once again, though, there are cryptographic methods that allow the authority to prove that it has not altered the votes while decrypting and counting them. That proof would also be posted to the board.
She reiterated that the algorithms are complicated, but that the technique provides a kind of openness, though one that is different from what the open-source community normally envisions. It is not necessary and, in fact, not sufficient for the different organizations to use open-source software to perform these steps—for one thing, it is impossible to be sure they have used the software that they claim to have used. But all of the steps are verifiable using open-source (or other) code that does not rely on the software used in the process. It relies on voters actually verifying all of those steps, however.
Analyzing an implementation
She and two colleagues looked at the Swiss Post e-voting system, which was provided by a company called "Scytl", last year. It does not provide end-to-end verifiability, but does provide shuffling and accurate-decryption proofs. As their report notes, it is meant to provide "complete verifiability", rather than "universal verifiability"; "complete" means that there is an assumption that at least one of the server-side systems is behaving correctly.
In an outcome that will probably only surprise politicians that push (and purchase) these kinds of systems, Teague and her colleagues, when looking at the code, found a bug in each part of what the system was meant to be able to prove. "There were only two things that they were supposed to prove and they were both buggy." In this context, "buggy" means that it can provide a proof that everything has been done correctly, "while actually fiddling the votes".
She went into some detail of the problem that they found in the accurate-decryption proof, which uses a Chaum-Pedersen proof of the equality of discrete logs. Scytl had "rolled its own" implementation that did not hash an important element of the calculation during the process, so that value could be calculated after the "proof" had been presented without altering its verifiability.
As it turned out, one of her colleagues had made the same mistake and written a paper [PDF] describing the problem and its implications a few years earlier. That made it easy for them to see the problem when looking at the code; in fact, it took longer for them to get the code to compile and run than it did to find the problem. In practice, changing votes in this fashion would be obvious, because it would result in nonsense votes, though they would cancel out valid votes.
Fully end-to-end verifiable e-voting is possible, but when you start considering government elections using a system like that, "there are some serious concerns and limitations", Teague said. For one thing, voters need to do a lot of careful and complicated work to verify that their vote has been properly encrypted; if they do not, they could be tricked into recording a vote that does not accurately reflect their intentions. In addition, the system can allow voters to prove how they voted, if it was done on, say, a home computer, which may not be a desirable outcome; e-voting in a polling place largely eliminates that particular concern, however.
Beyond that, verifying the proofs of proper mixing and accurate decryption is quite complicated; it requires significant expertise, which may not be acceptable for a democracy. Subtle bugs can partly or completely undermine the security properties of the system as she had shown. This is different from traditional paper voting in that a subtle problem in a system like that does not hand over the ability for "total manipulation of all of the votes to one entity".
In summary, she said, there are reasonable solutions for doing e-voting in a polling place, but remote e-voting in a way that "really safeguards the election against manipulation and software bugs" is an unsolved problem. "That's the good news. That is the most optimistic part of my talk."
NSW iVote
She turned to the iVote system for remote e-voting that was put in place by the state government of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. She asked, what does end-to-end verifiability have to do with iVote? "Really, not a lot."
For iVote, voters use JavaScript provided by Scytl to cast their vote. In order to verify it, however, they have to use a different application that the NSW Election Commission (NSWEC) and Scytl provided. That application was closed source up through the election, so you had to trust Scytl/NSWEC to tell the truth when you asked them if they had recorded your vote correctly. Four months after the election, some of the code was made available under a "reasonable" non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so that it could be inspected. But at election time, there was no proof that the vote was recorded correctly.
The public bulletin board from her idealized view of an end-to-end verifiable election was replaced with a secret bulletin board that listed which votes were recorded; it was available within NSWEC, but not to ordinary citizens. So there was no proof that a given vote had even been counted. Likewise, the series of independently administered mixing servers was replaced with a single mixer, so paths from voters to votes could potentially be traced. It is a far cry from even the idealized system that she had just argued could not be trusted for a government election.
She and her colleagues were already looking at the code from Scytl, in the context of the Swiss Post analysis, when the first iVote election was taking place. The Swiss had put the code out for review six months ahead of the first election so that any problems could be found and fixed before it was used. At the time the researchers found the first problem with the Swiss Post system (for the shuffle proof), NSWEC was already using iVote for early voting.
When the Swiss Post bug went public, NSWEC released a statement that said, in effect, "yes, we do have that critical Scytl crypto defect, but don't worry, we're going to use it anyway", she said to laughter. Scytl patched the software to fix that bug during the election, however.
The second bug that was found in the Swiss Post system (that she had detailed earlier in the talk) came to light a week or so after the first; given that the software came from the same company, was iVote susceptible to that bug as well? The day before the election using iVote, NSWEC put out a release [PDF] saying that it was confident that the second issue found for the Swiss Post system was not relevant to iVote. "This was highly implausible at the time." She could imagine a situation where neither of the bugs were relevant, but it simply was not reasonable to suggest that a second bug found in the same code base would not be present in the NSWEC version.
At the time of the election, anyone wanting to see the code had to sign an onerous NDA that said you could not release any of your findings for five years. She and her colleagues did not sign that agreement, so they could not see the code. Four months after the election (so, mid-2019), it was changed to have a "45-day quiet period", which was far more reasonable.
NSW is supposed to have laws mandating public access to source code, she said, but that does not apply to voting software. Part of what she wanted to convey in her talk is that "laws about election software really matter". Switzerland has good laws of that sort, she said, "New South Wales has very bad laws". She showed the laws for election software security, noting that they say nothing about actually securing that software; instead, they impose penalties of up to two years in jail for disclosing the source code or flaws in the security of the voting software without approval. It is not just some part of a larger body of law requiring safe election practices, "this is what substitutes for legislation mandating secure and transparent electoral processes".
Unsurprisingly, the bug found in the Swiss Post system was relevant to iVote as they discovered later. The obvious correct fix for that bug was to simply add the relevant parameter into the hash, but Scytl took a completely different approach. They chose a random value, raised the missing parameter to that power, and hashed that instead. But that does not fix the problem. The parameter needs to be hashed so that it cannot be calculated later; hashing it commits to a particular value. Raising it to a random power, without hashing (and thus committing to) that random value, still allows the important parameter to be post-calculated.
If the code had been available for analysis before the election, rather than four months after, the problem could have been spotted in short order. Instead, NSWEC ran the election with flawed, manipulable software because they "did not make it openly available to scrutiny by people who knew what they were doing". She suggested that attendees look for themselves on the Scytl web site that allows one to apply for access to the iVote code. She only spent a short amount of time verifying the problems they had already found, and discovering that the fix was no fix, but there is "heaps and heaps of code there"; finding bugs in that code and getting them fixed will incrementally help secure the system before it gets used again.
Victoria
She asked the audience how many were from NSW (many) and if they had used iVote, but seemingly no one had (or would admit to it). She then asked how many were from the state of Victoria (as she is). She asked, "feeling smug?" That was met with groans, nos, and scattered laughter as attendees guessed that things there were probably not much better—or perhaps even worse.
At the end of 2019, a law passed the lower chamber of the legislative body for Victoria that would allow the Minister for Elections to choose a voting system that would be universally applied to all local elections (i.e. not for federal offices). It allows the Minister to choose postal voting, which has a body of laws already to govern election security and privacy, attendance voting, which has an even older set of laws surrounding it, or "anything else he feels like with no restrictions whatsoever".
It is clear what the agenda is, Teague said; there is no groundswell for voting with "bronze discs or pottery shards". It is meant to facilitate "large scale, totally unregulated electronic voting compulsorily for everyone" who is voting in local elections in Victoria. The legislation is coming up for a vote in the upper body in February; she suggested that attendees from Victoria figure out who their five representatives are and contact them to request the removal of that clause. "Once we lose the ability to have genuine democratic local elections in Victoria, we are never getting it back."
Risk-limiting audits
She then shifted gears to talk about a pilot project that she participated in to do a risk-limiting audit for a San Francisco district attorney election. Instead of talking about electronic voting, the second half of her keynote would be about electronic counting of paper votes, which is an easier problem in every way, Teague said. Assuming that the paper records have been properly secured along the way, there exists a full record of voters' intents that can be double-checked against the tallies provided by counting devices.
In jurisdictions that use paper ballots in the US, that kind of double-checking is often done; "serious statistical audits of those paper records" are performed to ensure that the electronic counting system is accurate. There are a number of sophisticated statistical analysis techniques that can be used to give a level of confidence that the outcome has not been subject to malware or bugs in the counting systems. In her opinion, the best technique is risk-limiting audits.
At the beginning of an election, the auditors will need to decide on the probability of being tricked they are "willing to live with"; if you are doing random sampling, there is always some possibility that the statistics do not reflect the results. Then there are calculations that can be made to determine how to do the sampling such that those constraints are met; if the sampling indicates that the reported outcome is not as it should be, then a full count by hand should be done.
These audits are used in several states, but the US has a "really weird primitive voting system" where a single candidate is chosen by each voter and the one with the most votes wins. The audit is just checking to ensure that the declared winner is actually the candidate with the most votes. But some US jurisdictions are starting to use instant-runoff voting, "which in Australia is called 'voting'", she said to laughter. It is a great voting system, she said, but it breaks the risk-limiting audit frameworks that are in place.
She got involved in a project to take the Australian understanding of preference voting and to combine it with the ideas of risk-limiting audits for the most recent election in San Francisco, which was held in November 2019. (LWN covered a talk about other aspects of San Francisco election handling back in August.) The district attorney election had four candidates and the results were quite close.
She and her colleagues in the project decided to test their risk-limiting audit techniques on that race. They only got access to the postal votes, which turned out to be about two-thirds of the votes cast. So the audit did not actually provide evidence that the outcome of the election was correctly decided, but it demonstrated how the audit could work in an election with preferential voting. It turns out that the outcome when considering just the postal votes is the opposite of the outcome when looking at all of the votes, because polling-place voters overwhelmingly chose the winning candidate. "That doesn't really affect the math, nor does it affect how this thing, in its ideal form, should work."
The idea behind the project is to provide a set of "completely open, publicly available verification and auditing tools". The actual counting machines are a kind of scanner and digitizer that comes from a proprietary company (Dominion) that she does not trust any more than she does Scytl. There is no opportunity to look at the code, but they did get the report from that system, which detailed the choices counted on each ballot; "the seventh ballot in bag 52 has this list of preferences".
Using that list, a random selection of ballots is chosen to be audited; those will be examined and compared with what the counting system reported. A tally of discrepancies is then maintained. Then there are two different sets of math analysis that need to be done.
The first is to carefully determine which parts of the preferences are important in terms of the outcome. The order in which the losing candidates are eliminated can sometimes make a big difference in the overall outcome (because the next level of voter preference is then boosted from ballots that preferred the eliminated candidate). Switching the order can cascade into a completely different winner, though usually that is not the case; normally, the low vote-getters can be eliminated in any order and it does not affect the outcome. The tool that they developed looked at the election and determined which of the comparisons were critical and then ignored the rest (for auditing purposes).
The second piece is "to do the careful statistics for eliminating the possibility that the comparison was made wrongly". Both pieces are available as open-source software: Risk-limiting Audits for Instant Runoff vote Elections (RAIRE) and Sets of Half-Average Nulls Generate Risk-Limiting Audits (SHANGRLA). Citizens in San Francisco were able to observe the auditing process, see which ballots were chosen to be sampled, compare them to the reported preferences, and then run the calculations themselves if they wished. The code can be used by others to reproduce the results or to add different types of statistical measures, for example.
Back to Oz
So, like the mechanisms to verify every step of an e-voting election, an electronically counted election can also be verified using an open process, even though the software running on the devices may not be available for scrutiny. But, she asked, what does this have to do with the Australian senate count? "You probably have already guessed—not a lot."
She went over some testimony by the electoral commissioner about the integrity of the senate count. Pointed questions were asked about whether any manual auditing of the ballots had been done and whether the error rate for data entry had been estimated, but the commissioner said that he would need to look into both of those questions. But when asked about whether the commission had followed the recommendations of the last inquiry by the Australian Parliament about the senate elections, which were to appoint expert scrutineers to observe the ballot-counting process, his memory suddenly returned. Parliament had only recommended that action, not required it by law.
There is an important element to his answer, Teague said: actual legislation is needed to ensure that voting is secure. The Swiss e-voting laws are detailed and well thought-out, with an orientation toward transparency of the process, privacy for the voters, and the ability to verify the results; they are not perfect, but they are quite good. Switzerland found out about its problems as soon as it forced the source code to be open, she said to applause.
In contrast, New South Wales found out about its problems 12 days before the election. California has "pretty decent laws about election auditing". But the Australian senate scrutineering rules have not been updated since the days of hand-counted paper ballots, which was a long time ago. In effect, those rules say that scrutineers must be allowed to stand in the room while "they do their thing on their computers". It does not say anything about providing meaningful evidence that those computers are doing the right thing.
What she believes is needed for the senate count is a mandate for a statistical audit of the paper ballots that can be meaningfully observed by scrutineers. There is no need for "the perfect law", just for something that requires auditing and allows public oversight. It seems rather obvious that the electoral commission is not going to do so unless they are forced, so a legislative mandate for that is needed, she said.
The senate count is a place where "there is a risk for undetectable electoral fraud", she said, particularly in the last few seats where "lots and lots of preference shifting" has been needed to decide them. It would be pretty difficult to fiddle with the tallies for the top vote-getters from the major parties, she said, but the preferences further down the list could be more easily manipulated. Unlike some e-voting systems, such as iVote, the senate count is in a much better position to be audited because the paper records exist.
A new project?
She finished "on a slightly upbeat note"; rather than spending 2020 by picking holes in bad software, she thought it might be better to work on a new project. "Democracy is about more than just elections." She spent some time working to defeat—or even just amend—the "shocking train wreck that was our anti-encryption laws" that were passed at the end of 2018. Working to try to convince legislators is not something she ever wants to be involved in again, but it did get her thinking.
The legislative process in Australia is fairly open; the text of the proposed bills is available online under a Creative Commons license. What if there were an online amendment and voting site that would allow cryptographically verified voting on the bills, amendments, and the like. It would allow people to more actively participate in the process and to provide input in ways other than "writing 50,000 submissions" to various committees that "ignore what we write".
She thinks a version could also be rolled out for teenagers so that they could practice debating various issues of the day. The e-voting verification techniques could be used to give users some level of assurance that the votes are being tallied correctly, while familiarizing people with the approach. The lack of an Australian digital ID will make it difficult to trust the aggregation, since the identities of the participants cannot be verified, however. In any case, she would like to pursue something down this path and solicited attendees to tell her that it is a bad idea or to give suggestions for better ones.
[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for
travel assistance to Gold Coast for linux.conf.au.]
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Security | Cryptography |
| Conference | linux.conf.au/2020 |
Posted Jan 29, 2020 2:57 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (127 responses)
Let's assume someone invented a hack-proof e-voting system that was completely verifiable and could not be subverted. I know this is in fact an impossibility, but for the sake of argument, let's assume we have it.
It still would not be good enough for democratic elections.
Not only must an e-voting system be reliable and verifiable, it must be seen to be so by people who don't have any advanced technical education.
Here's how elections work in Canada: You receive a paper ballot. You put a mark next to the candidate you want to vote for. The marked ballot goes into a sealed box, and an unmarked part is torn off and kept in a separate box as a check on the total ballots cast.
When it comes time for the votes to be counted, they are counted by hand at each polling station. Representatives from all of the candidates are allowed to scrutinize the counting. When everyone agrees on the count, the results are sent to the central tallying station and added up. Again, representatives of each party verify the tallying.
Anyone with an 8th-grade education can understand this system. Anyone can see that to materially hack the system, you'd need to subvert a lot of people as well as subvert representatives from all the parties.
I have a Master's degree in Engineering, and my eyes glazed over reading this article. I have no idea how those algorithms work or why I should trust them or why the computers they run on cannot be massively subverted like every other computer in the history of humanity has been so far.
Please, give up on e-voting for anything important. Just stop.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 3:27 UTC (Wed)
by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2020 3:33 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (20 responses)
Making voting easier and more accessible would at least alleviate it.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:49 UTC (Wed)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (14 responses)
Make not voting inconvenient. Make it mandatory with a small penalty (*) if there isn't a good reason like a medical certificate. If not voting is a deliberate decision, one can always put a blank ballot into the box.
(*) personally I would it make a big penalty: 3 time missing without good reason -> forfeit citizenship. I know there are international treaties against producing stateless persons, but ...
Posted Jan 30, 2020 3:24 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (13 responses)
Under Afroyim v. Rusk, you can't take people's American citizenship involuntarily. But IIRC Australia does fine people who fail to vote. It's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'm not entirely sure it would help in the US as much as you might hope. We hold elections on Tuesdays and do not consider election day a holiday. So you have to fit voting into your regular working schedule, or vote early or absentee (if your state allows it). For people with limited income and no vacation time, fining them is not going to help them get to the polls.
Making voting easier seems like a more productive direction to me. I think wider availability of postal voting would strike the right balance. It's already a federal crime to tamper with the US mail, it's really hard to tamper with a lot of ballots before they arrive (they're all originating from individual mailboxes instead of some central depot, so while you could theoretically modify your neighbor's vote, you would have a hard time modifying your county's vote), and it's far more convenient to the voter than having to appear, in person, at a specific location on a specific day. To give a few examples of how this currently works in the US:
Posted Jan 30, 2020 9:25 UTC (Thu)
by cyphar (subscriber, #110703)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's not an either-or proposition -- here in Australia we've done both (it's both compulsory -- though the fine is fairly minor -- and incredibly easy to vote).
Registration can be done online very easily, and there is no widespread voter suppression or purging (unlike in the US). There are no voter ID requirements (unless you're a silent elector -- a special status where you request that your address isn't put on the voter roll), and once you're registered you're registered for life. Voting is also compulsory for ex-convicts (and current convicts if the sentence is shorter than 3 years).
Voting itself is incredibly simple -- all our elections are on Saturdays, and there are early voting centers *everywhere* which open *3 weeks* before the date of the election. Voting takes a few minutes -- the longest I've had to wait in a queue was for 10 minutes. If you're out-of-state you can vote in another state fairly easily -- though there are longer lines (but you don't need to pre-register). If you're out of the country you can vote at a consulate or embassy. And finally, if none of those work for you it's possible to register for postal voting (though this does require you to register as a postal voter for a given election a few weeks earlier).
However, I would argue that the reason why voting is so easy in Australia is because everyone has to do it -- it would make no sense for any party in power to try to make it harder for certain people to vote (as is happening in the US) because fundamentally everyone has to vote anyway.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 6:53 UTC (Fri)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link]
To be more precise, introducing something makes voting more tedious is going to piss off a lot of voters. I gather in America it wouldn't, because people who vote care deeply about some issue or other. But in Australia most people simply because they have to. They don't have particularly strong feelings about any issue, so pissing them off on the day, when they are about to put pencil to paper is a really bad idea.
On and it turns out that compulsory voting undermines the reason give for all those voter purges. In Australia you usually don't need an ID. Just tell them your have and go vote at any voting station you want. If there are 100 people that can vote, voting is compulsory, and 100 people voted then it's pretty clear what happened. But if voting is not compulsory and only 40 voted, that leaves a lot of wriggle room for a few phantom voters to improve the turnout figures, doesn't it?
Posted Jan 30, 2020 20:52 UTC (Thu)
by logang (subscriber, #127618)
[Link] (9 responses)
It takes a lot more time to get informed about who the candidates are and form an opinion on who to vote for than the actual act of casting a ballot.
IMO, people won't vote more because of disillusionment with the parties or candidates -- or not really having a good idea who to vote for because all the choices are pretty awful. When you spend a month hearing about how every candidate is going to destroy the country (because campaigns are fought so dirty) it's hard to get motivated to vote for any of the choices. I don't think I've ever heard of someone not voting because it was too difficult when they had a candidate they supported. If people care, they will get out to vote.
Fining people or making voting mandatory is just going to make people more upset and they'll just cast an invalid ballot in protest of the system. And making the process even easier obviously won't fix such issues.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 23:38 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (6 responses)
Americans regularly wait in line for hours to vote.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 1:40 UTC (Fri)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (5 responses)
The problem with long lines to vote in the USA is political, not technical. We could solve the lines by giving more resources to places that have a history of long waits to vote. We don't because those long lines are a form of election fraud. The people running the elections have deliberately avoided allocating enough resources to polling places that are dominated by the other party in an attempt to discourage people living there from voting. But as long as nobody is directly prohibited from voting, nobody in the media is willing to call it election fraud.
Posted Feb 2, 2020 4:51 UTC (Sun)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (4 responses)
* American elections are run by the states, not the feds. States don't directly pay for the American military or any of the other breathtakingly expensive things in the federal budget. Regardless, the American budgeting process is completely illogical at all levels of abstraction except perhaps the most local; the purpose of the budget is not to constrain spending but to provide excuses for not doing things. Money is the standard excuse used for the "election fraud" you speak of, all across America. If you're not willing to fight this issue on the money front, then you are not going to win.
Posted Feb 2, 2020 16:46 UTC (Sun)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (1 responses)
I guess I really have two points, which I've muddled together:
1) The reason voting in the USA isn't easy is political, not technical. We don't have universal agreement that voting should be easy and universal. As long as there are people trying to restrict voting, arguments about new voting technology are basically proxies for the deeper argument about whether voting should be easy and universal. We have to win that argument before it makes sense to start arguing about which technology to adopt.
2) I think traditional methods of voting are basically fine, and the problems we see with them are a result of deliberate sabotage by people who don't like universal voting. Because of that, we should try to fix traditional methods by reversing that sabotage rather than adopting new, untested approaches.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 23:24 UTC (Mon)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
My opinion is that we should fight this on every front simultaneously. I'm uncertain what "winning" that argument would look like from a policy perspective, so I fear that delaying our other tactics would stymie the overall effort. But ultimately, I think we agree on what the world ought to eventually look like and merely disagree on how we might best get there.
> I think traditional methods of voting are basically fine, and the problems we see with them are a result of deliberate sabotage by people who don't like universal voting. Because of that, we should try to fix traditional methods by reversing that sabotage rather than adopting new, untested approaches.
Every state in the union allows some voters to vote by mail. 33 states allow any voter to vote by mail if they feel like it. Seven states (including CA, which is the most populous state) plus D.C. allow any voter to get a ballot mailed to them automatically for every election. Five states (including UT, which is somehow also on the previous list) mail a ballot to every voter, no questions asked. Americans living abroad, including military personnel stationed overseas, generally vote by mail regardless of their state of citizenship (the last state where they lived before leaving the country). There are another 17 states that demand an "excuse" for absentee voting, but frankly, they're in the minority.
Finally, the United States Postal Service (including its predecessors) is literally older than the United States. They have been delivering small pieces of paper across the country for well over two centuries. By now, I would tend to assume that they know what they are doing.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/abs...
Posted Feb 22, 2020 12:35 UTC (Sat)
by DonDiego (guest, #24141)
[Link] (1 responses)
No. Postal votes are much easier to tamper with and reduce election security. Also, if people do not vote on the same day, they have different information. I did a postal vote once a week or two before the election and voted differently than I would have on election day because new information surfaced.
Posted Mar 1, 2020 9:49 UTC (Sun)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
There are 3 scenarios:
1. You only have postal voting
If there's new information last minute, 1 is equal for all (just like information 1 day after the election would've been), 2 is status quo with today (people who couldn't vote on the day earlier cannot do that either, so the availability of new information won't affect their vote), 3 is status quo.
Feel free to present actual evidence of cases where there has been election fraud related to postal voting (especially in countries where postal voting is the only--or preferred--option). Postal voting election fraud, at least with the model of postal voting used where I'm from (Sweden) is actually extremely inefficient and we (luckily) don't have voting machines. The most efficient election fraud is probably the Russian model anyway...
Posted Feb 3, 2020 13:27 UTC (Mon)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 3, 2020 14:39 UTC (Mon)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link]
Well, a couple of years ago we had a referendum. The xenophobic agenda was obviously popular, so from the start it was clear which option would win. However, the required turnout was far from guaranteed, so even voting against the government-sponsored option could have helped their cause. That's why there was an actual grass-root, alternative campaign to cast invalid votes. In the end the invalid votes outnumbered the losing option by about 4 times. The ability to cast an invalid vote is important.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 22:03 UTC (Thu)
by milesrout (subscriber, #126894)
[Link]
Posted Jan 31, 2020 0:14 UTC (Fri)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link] (4 responses)
A very easy way to make voting more accessible.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 11:07 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (3 responses)
Yes – it only excludes religious fundamentalists who believe that Sunday is for church and literally nothing else. But then again, they can cast postal ballots or avail themselves of early in-person voting.
(I don't know why the US always vote on Tuesdays but I believe this may be part of the reason; certainly when the rules were set down, the sanctity of the Sabbath was much more of an issue in the general population than it is today.)
Posted Jan 31, 2020 19:16 UTC (Fri)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 1, 2020 0:12 UTC (Sat)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
Fascinating!
Posted Feb 5, 2020 16:41 UTC (Wed)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
Generally the design goal is again to keep things as far away from Shabath (Saturday), on which some of the people avoid doing any kind of work.
Elections as a day off work (hey, it's the Holiday of Democracy. Or whatever). This also makes it possible to use schools for the ballots.
In the recent elections they simply failed to find a Tuesday that was available, and politicians were in a hurry, so they decided to go for a Monday instead.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 6:13 UTC (Wed)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (44 responses)
Just as much to the point, in the US, that system is regularly hacked. Generally by the Republicans, but there's certainly the argument that's only because the Democrats benefit from wider voting. You put polling places where rich people go, and sparsely in places with black people. You avoid colleges, and add ID requirements designed to make it more challenging for the poor and students to vote.
At least some of this is subverted by e-voting. In any case, your trust in the old school system is not shared at all by many of your fellow voters, and really is not justified.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 6:50 UTC (Wed)
by chatcannon (subscriber, #122400)
[Link] (14 responses)
Unfortunately, any system which hacks paper voting like that is also likely to hack electronic voting by requiring top-end hardware that only rich people have, adding some bogus facial recognition "for extra security" which fails to recognise black faces, under-speccing the servers so that people who try to vote at peak times get network failures, or probably some even more nefarious idea which takes more than five minutes to think up.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 7:08 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (13 responses)
> adding some bogus facial recognition "for extra security" which fails to recognise black faces
And unlike real polling places, software will need to be fixed ONCE, not across hundreds of counties.
> under-speccing the servers so that people who try to vote at peak times get network failures
Electronic voting will help to solve turnout problem.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 8:37 UTC (Wed)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (8 responses)
In NZ employers are required to give you at least two hours off work on election day; that might have affected her answer.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 9:02 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (5 responses)
This is compounded by the complicated nature of voting in the US. You not only elect the president but also school board, prosecutors, judges, local councilpersons and vote on various proposals. Simply browsing the options can easily take 20 minutes.
Also, splitting complicated elections into multiple single-issue elections will help a lot. It's way easier to dedicate 10 minutes 5 times a year to voting than 50 minutes 1 time a year.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 10:29 UTC (Wed)
by idrys (subscriber, #4347)
[Link]
I always find it odd when elections are not held on Sunday/whatever-weekday-holds-that-role, so that the majority of people won't need to take time off work to vote...
> This is compounded by the complicated nature of voting in the US. You not only elect the president but also school board, prosecutors, judges, local councilpersons and vote on various proposals. Simply browsing the options can easily take 20 minutes.
Local elections where I live are very complicated as well: While I can simply vote for a list, I can also split 60 votes between candidates from different lists and give them 1 to 3 votes (as long as I don't give out more than 60 votes). The solution here was that they sent everyone the voting sheets beforehand and you had to bring them with you to the voting station, already filled out. Where my parents live, they sent everyone the voting sheets marked as not valid, and you had to fill out the real sheets in the booth.
This has some drawbacks, but they are the same as for voting by mail.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 20:35 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (3 responses)
This is a political problem rather than a technical one. We could easily eliminate those long queues just by providing more resources to busy precincts or by splitting them up and having more polling places. That doesn't happen because one of our political parties knows it does badly in those places and deliberately fails to provide them with enough resources in order to make voting as inconvenient as possible for the people there. It's very hard to have a good voting system when one of your political parties doesn't want every eligible voter to vote.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:13 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
e-Voting can be done centrally.
There is a good precedent in the recent history - the healthcare exchanges run by the Federal government in disease-loving states.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 2:02 UTC (Fri)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link]
You're just describing how the problem is political rather than technical. We could solve it politically. For example, we could pass a new voting rights act that required a minimum number of voting booths and poll workers per registered voter in a precinct, or which required the local authority to increase resources for any polling place that had long wait times. We haven't done those things because the politicians who benefit from voting being difficult are fighting to keep it that way. Those same politicians would also fight against an attempt to require e-voting.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 11:17 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
There's no real election authority in the US anymore that can force these changes.
It turns out that in the US, even federal-level elections are being run by the individual states, by design, and this is something that the states are quite particular about. For example, for presidential elections the US constitution explains how many votes a state has in the electoral college, but it leaves it completely up to the states to decide exactly who they send. (Most states operate a “winner takes all” system where whoever gets the most votes at state level governs all of that state's votes in the electoral college, which is why “swing states” where the race is very tight get so much attention from the campaigns.)
The federal government had to jump through a bunch of flaming hoops to get Obamacare sorted out, because healthcare is technically not something the US Congress is supposed to control. Doing the same thing with elections would be at least as difficult.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 11:42 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:44 UTC (Wed)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link]
Then again, we don't have elections here on weekends either, so you have to do it next to your work.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 15:53 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
Electronic voting will help to solve turnout problem.
That's not a settled question.
I don't think voter turnout is low because of a lack of e-voting. I think it's low because people are cynical about the whole process. That's a much harder problem to fix. When I observe US politics, it's frankly hard for me to see how anyone can have any faith in the system at this point.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 20:11 UTC (Sat)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
From the outside it doesn't look much different to regimes like Russia or Iran. That includes targeting demographics in a very literal sense to deter them from voting.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 19:26 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
The underlying problems are social, not technical.
A $50 used smartphone will not be certified by the election authorities - the hardware you use must be certified, and hey, only high end hardware is certified, so sad, too bad. If anyone cares enough, they can pony up the $10m or so to get a device certified, but it's per-device, and the list of which hardware the authorities have certified does not tell you which ones they did for free, and which ones were paid for.
The facial recognition won't outright fail to recognise black faces; it'll just be bad at it unless the lighting is just so. When people complain, you demonstrate it in good conditions (showing that it copes just fine with black faces), and argue that it doesn't fail, it's just that people aren't co-operating. If that doesn't get rid of the outcry, allow people to use passport-grade ID to bypass the recognition thing; it happens that possession of such ID is biased against blacks, but hey.
The point is that when you're rigging an election, you make sure that all of the things you do sound reasonable, and look reasonable when in test conditions, but break down on the day.
Additionally, you can unlawfully monitor what's going on with an election, and blantantly break the election if one voting route is going "wrong"; if e-voting is mostly voting for the "wrong" candidate, you inject a large number of random votes into the e-voting system, for example, making it impossible to tell which votes were real.
The evidence from Estonia is that e-voting does not solve the turnout problem; the only solution that's been found so far is to combine compulsory voting, paid time off to go and vote, and a way to indicate that you have considered the ballot and chosen to abstain.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:27 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
This will not work for more than 1 election cycle. People will complain, lawsuits will follow, software will get fixed.
Ah, such refreshing naiveté! Because politicians who underhandedly win elections never get to pick the judges who would adjudicate these cases, ever.
And unlike real polling places, software will need to be fixed ONCE, not across hundreds of counties.
Ah, such refreshing naiveté! Because we all know software has only one bug, ever. And never has back-doors, ever. And fixes are never wrong, ever.
The thing is, nobody has pointed out a realistic way to hack paper elections as they are conducted in Canada. So no technical fix has been needed.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:17 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (23 responses)
Materially subverting a Canadian election is very hard. You may be able to tamper with a few votes, but changing the outcome is well nigh impossible.
Subverting e-voting can be done on a massive and almost undetectable scale.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 23:25 UTC (Wed)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (22 responses)
You said it's about a system people trust. I can tell you trust it, but I think your trust is a little blind. I suspect I could find some First Nations people who would darkly laugh and laugh about the concept that your system is in any way fair, and none of your security theater is going to help with that.
You ignored the other stuff I wrote, about how physical voting is regularly manipulated in the US on a massive scale, and none of your stunts with observers matter in the least. It's like going on about how secure SSL is, and ignoring all the hacks going on that make that irrelevant. You're talking about the strongest link in the chain, not the weakest.
What do historians say? I believe the general consensus in the US is that the number of dead voting against JFK in Illinois balanced out, to some extent, the number of dead voting for him, and that JFK would have won Illinois anyway, but there were still a lot of dead people voting in the 1960 election. And I bet Illinois had some nice laws just like yours that anyone could have pointed to and said "hey, look, there's no way anyone could rig this!"
Basically, I wasn't saying much for e-voting. I was saying that "Anyone can see that to materially hack the system, you'd need to subvert a lot of people as well as subvert representatives from all the parties" is silly and willfully blind. You're letting security theater blind you to the ways that your system is currently being hacked, and you think other people can and do trust the system based on that, when rightly or wrong, distrust of your current system is rife.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:13 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (18 responses)
I believe someone could possibly do a magic trick affecting one polling station. That's anywhere from 50 to a couple of hundred votes.
I do not believe anyone can materially affect the election outcome without someone noticing. You'd need thousands of talented magicians to pull this off, and they'd all have to do it without arousing suspicion. And yes, the ballot boxes are constantly watched; they're out in plain sight in front of all the election workers and all the people in the polling station waiting to vote. That'd be quite some magic trick. After voting is over, the votes are immediately counted. The ballot boxes aren't left sitting somewhere for hours before counting begins.
It's entirely possible the physical voting system in the US has been materially manipulated; I don't know what safeguards there are. I'm very, very skeptical of any claim that a Canadian election has been so manipulated, but please feel free to offer evidence to the contrary.
Electoral fraud in Canada has typically involved misleading robocalls, attempts to mislead voters, and people trying to vote who didn't actually have the right to vote. I'm not aware of a single instance of fraud involving tampering with ballot boxes once votes have been cast, but again... please feel free to provide citations to the contrary.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:27 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
> The ballot boxes aren't left sitting somewhere for hours before counting begins.
> It's entirely possible the physical voting system in the US has been materially manipulated
It's often said that you can't solve societal problems with computers. But it's wrong. You can't solve ALL societal problems with computers, but you can solve SOME problems with them.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:19 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
Oh, thanks for correcting my geography. I was not aware that North Carolina is in Canada.
I was talking about the Canadian system, in case you missed it.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:53 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (15 responses)
I don't believe that. You've said $13 (USD) per voter, so that means you have to open a voting station and staff it for between $650 to $2600. Space, workers, voting machines, and the whole bit? No way. From another perspective, we're talking a representative from each party plus staff; that's, what, ten people for 50-200 voters. Are you saying somewhere between 5% and 20% of Canada is working at the polling places on voting day?
(And to be fair, even if space is loaned and people are volunteers, that's still cost, it's just not the government paying for it.)
> I'm not aware of a single instance of fraud involving tampering with ballot boxes once votes have been cast
... okay? That is part of how magicians work; establish that there's one strong point in the system and draw your focus to it, so you ignore other weaker points. Not to mention that this is proof by ignorance, which is why I suggested asking historians for examples that history may have let leak. We rarely see how the modern day is screwing up as vividly as when it's in the past and people feel freer to talk about it.
Again, ultimately, you trust all this. I don't, and that doesn't magically mean that other people do. That's what I'm focused on, the claim that people can and will trust the physical system. I suspect there are marginalized groups that will trust the anonymity of the computer over the watchful eyes of people they don't trust. I know my local physical voting system has big problems and big trust issues, so pounding on "the current system can be trusted" just doesn't work for me.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 1:26 UTC (Thu)
by himi (subscriber, #340)
[Link]
If you believe that full and equitable ability to vote is a necessary corollary to the universal right to vote then you need to accept that recording some people's votes will cost more than others, and will be more difficult to record, but that they /need/ to be recorded regardless of cost. Democracy is just that important.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:23 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (11 responses)
My sister was an election worker. She was paid around $15/hour for a 10-hour shift. So yes, $650 to $2600 for a polling station sounds about right.
You say you don't trust it. Then provide evidence that tampering has happened. There's plenty of evidence of that it many elections around the world; you can't keep large-scale tampering secret for long, especially if tampering would involve lots of people, because people tend to be bad at keeping secrets.
So go on. Find me evidence of ballot-box tampering in a Canadian election. Time to put up.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 15:58 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (10 responses)
That's $150 a person. Five people, you've blown your budget, and we haven't talked about space, transport of materials or the materials themselves yet. As for "All of the material for hundreds of voters probably costs under $25.", one folding table costs $30, and each chair costs $10. (Priced as cheap junk from Target.com.) And we're not talking hundreds of voters; we have 200. It's a minor point, but it shows me you tend to underestimate numbers when it's good for you.
> There's plenty of evidence of that it many elections around the world; you can't keep large-scale tampering secret for long, especially if tampering would involve lots of people, because people tend to be bad at keeping secrets.
Half the time it's because people don't care; if a dictator gets 107% of the vote in one precinct, or 97% over all, they're not trying to impress anyone who knows anything about democracy. The other half, it usually takes quite a while to become public knowledge, especially on more than a rumor scale.
And you've given great reasons to keep secrets. A ballot box is only 50 to 200 votes; if one of them goes missing, as part of the voting commission, is it better to cause panic and distrust of the voting system among Canadians than to turn a blind eye? How often do the stubs and votes not match, or does anyone check? Because if you tell me they always do, then you're not getting the truth; you can't tell me in all of Canada, nobody drops a ballot and pockets the stub or vice versa and the officials on hand don't catch it. Do they not report the error rate, or do they not bother checking? (The system works, as dskoll says; why should we waste an hour checking stubs versus ballots?)
> You say you don't trust it. Then provide evidence that tampering has happened.
Provide evidence that tampering has happened in any e-voting, because all I see is theory. With Canada, I suspect it's like me claiming my front door is impenetrable because nobody has kicked it down yet, when it's more about the fact that nobody has seriously tried. I suspect you could drop marbles in a jar or bag, and have them counted by a couple election officials and entered into a Google Sheets document, for much the same result.
Seriously, what's the known error rate? How many times do stubs and ballots not match? How many times do ballots have votes for multiple candidates or no votes? How often do the election officials not agree on what a ballot says? You're the expert on Canadian elections; you should know this, and it's not zero. (Pencils are pretty bad about producing spurious marks on paper, and can't give guidance to user when they've screwed up.) Unless it's not reported because it would just cause public distrust of the system to little apparent value.
As importantly, you said that everyone would see that your system is safe. I don't see it; thus your claim is false. The issue I was arguing is that you trust your system does not mean everyone does or will, even relative to e-voting. It's not obviously correct to everyone.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:26 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (4 responses)
OK, we'll agree to disagree. But here are the facts:
No computer system has ever resisted penetration by a determined attacker.
Once a computer system has been compromised, it can be compromised
in a massive way by repeating the same attack.
Computer compromises can take place remotely and undetectably.
We have seen countless such compromises.
There's no evidence the Canadian election system has ever been materially compromised. When asked to produce such evidence, everyone just waves their hands.
Nobody has provided a credible blueprint for materially hacking the Canadian voting system. Sure, votes are sometimes unclear, and sure there's sometimes disagreement, and sometimes maybe even courts have to step in, but this is much less of a problem than in the US ("hanging chads", anyone?) and has not materially affected the outcome of an election. And should a judicial recount be required, we at least have robust procedures for ensuring the integrity of the system.
The costs of folding tables and chairs are amortized over multiple elections, and in most cases are probably provided by the venue anyway.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 18:19 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (3 responses)
So where are you getting these facts? From online systems that have been remotely and undetectably compromised? From TV stations running their feeds through computer systems that have been remotely and undetectably compromised? From newspapers that have been printed from computers that have been remotely and undetectably compromised? These would be undetectable, so no one would notice.
Let's go to reality here. Computer systems pervade our reality, and the vast majority of us use them every day. Why do denial of service attacks exist if it's so trivial to penetrate undetectably? If it were so trivial, why would the Russian government worry about our faith in our electoral system when they can cause us to worry about our electricity, our air travel? Why bother with 9/11, when you can hack into airplanes and air-traffic control? Why bother with the World Trade Center when you can flood Wall Street with fake trades and trash any non-printed records? If it were all that easy, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Die Hard 4 would be documentaries, not unrealistic action movies.
Oh, how about this for an attack on your paper system? The people who counted the numbers report that person A won, 52% to 48%. It goes to the newspapers, the TVs, everywhere. Then suddenly they burst into Parliament and deny that; person B won, 52% to 48%. I mean, the person who took the (digital) phone call from the counting office heard person A won, there's digital video establishing the counting office said person A won, digital records of counts all say person A won, digital records establishing they ordered the ballots destroyed, orders that were issued and carried out in many cases, so a full recount can't be made. If computers are so, so vulnerable, you need to be edge-to-edge analog, and you're not.
> this is much less of a problem than in the US ("hanging chads", anyone?)
You use pencils, and imagine that hanging chads are a problem? https://web.archive.org/web/20090611112914/http://archive... documents some of the ways that's been handled, but if it was more of a problem than unclear pencil marks, it's certainly in the same ballpark.
> has not materially affected the outcome of an election.
Somewhere in Canada, there's been an election, 120 votes for Bob, 122 votes for Carol, and 3 unclear. A 1.3% error rate means that many elections have been within that margin of error; I'm guessing at least 0.5%*, and given that there's 5,000 places in Canada with mayors, that means 25 places in Canada will have mayor elections with the outcome of the election affected by error; someone wins with 50.5% of the vote who only got 49.5% of the actual vote.
* If it's a two person race, and the percentage of votes person A gets is linearly randomly determined between 0-100, a 1% error will shift the election 0.5% of the time. If every race was a dead heat, it would shift the election 50% of the time. Given that races tend to be competitive, but not usually that competitive, I'd make a wild-ass guess that it's more like 3-5%; I think I'm safe in saying that it's more than 0.5%.
> There's no evidence the Canadian election system has ever been materially compromised
Again, there's no evidence any e-voting election system has ever been materially compromised. Nor is there any evidence the Canadian election system would be materially compromised if it went electronic. As I said, that my door has never been kicked in says more about the lack of people trying than the strength of the door. There is plenty of evidence that ballot boxes have been materially compromised in many elections, and there's good evidence that they aren't the weak link.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indigen... points out that Inuit had the legal right to vote in 1950, and no place to vote until 1962 and "Many Indigenous peoples feared that the act of voting in federal elections would mean loss of historic rights and Indian status. For many years, Indigenous turnout at federal elections was low." It's never been materially compromised so long as you're looking at purely the mechanical parts of the system, but it certainly has if you're worried about people who have the right to vote being able to do so without fear.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:55 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (2 responses)
Ballots are never ordered destroyed. Physical ballots are kept in sealed envelopes precisely to thwart your attack.
Close elections are automatically subjected to a judicial recount using the original ballots in the original sealed envelopes. So your Bob/Carol example fails.
Observers from all political parties witness the hand-counting and record the numbers. They can take them to party headquarters and do the addition. You can bet that if their numbers are off from the official numbers, they'll raise an alarm. No computers involved here, by the way... people can do this all on paper. Or as you put it: Edge-to-edge analog.
Online banking is unsafe. The only reason I do it is that I'm protected from liability by laws, not because I trust the technology. There's massive fraud perpetrated against banks; they just keep it quiet so people don't lose faith in the system, and they swallow the losses because they're insanely profitable. There's no comparable framework to protect an election system.
Finally, as someone else reiterated, it's as important for the voting system's security to be understandably effective as actually effective. Anyone who studies the Canadian system can easily understand how it works. Very, very few people have the expertise to understand the security of electronic voting, and on that basis alone it is undemocratic.
Bringing up injustices against First Nations people is a red herring. It's entirely orthogonal to the voting system used; e-voting would not have any effect on those injustices.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 23:34 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (1 responses)
That's contradictory. You can not be insanely profitable with massive fraud. The instance someone walks with 60 billion dollars from a bank, they'll stop connecting banks to the Internet; otherwise, it's not massive. I'd be surprised if online banking per se is actually much of the problem; the problem is, we want to facilitate capitalism across the Internet, which means that consumers need to be able to transfer funds in relatively simple ways to a large variety of marginally trustworthy sellers. If we were willing to only buy from Amazon.com, and Amazon.com was willing to make buying things harder in the name of security, then we'd have minimal fraud.
> it's as important for the voting system's security to be understandably effective as actually effective
Nah. Only a few people are ever going to know how the voting system's security works. It's important for the voting system to be trusted, which is largely going to be orthogonal to its security being understandably effective or actually effective.
> Bringing up injustices against First Nations people is a red herring. It's entirely orthogonal to the voting system used; e-voting would not have any effect on those injustices.
It's a lot harder to deny reasonable access to a voting place if there is no voting place, and it's just done online. So e-voting, however anachronistic, would have helped prevent the Inuit disenfranchisement mentioned.
Moreover, you keep casting aspersions on the US, and I don't believe that there's that much difference on the ballot box level. Maybe not as iron-clad in places, but it's still the strong link in the chain. I don't recall one accusation of ballot box tampering in modern US history.
Lastly, we're talking about the trust in voting systems; what difference does it make if you've built a system that is iron-clad about counting every ballot put in the box correctly, if people don't believe in the rest of the system? Part of e-voting's goal is to make voting accessible to everyone, and it's likely worth some loss of trust on one side if it gains comparatively more trust in the idea that everyone can access the ballot box.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 10:42 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
The big difference between the US and other places is that in the US there is one election day where citizens get to elect everyone from POTUS all the way down to municipal dog catcher. This makes for huge sheaves of ballots, and doing it all on a computer instead suddenly looks very tempting.
Here in Germany, we have individual dates for every election (municipal, state, federal, EU) and for most of those you get to cast only one or two votes. This makes the ballots straightforward to count by hand, there's much less incentive to use expensive and insecure computer systems instead, and it's quite obvious even to people without cryptography degrees how the system works – the main security job is to keep track of the ballots and ballot boxes.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:36 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (3 responses)
More points:
Ballots for multiple or no candidates are called "spoiled ballots". They are not counted towards the total, but are retained in case of a later judicial recount.
Nobody ever puts a stub in the ballot box by mistake because it works like this: The election worker peels off the stub and hands you the ballot. You go behind the screen and vote. If you're accidentally given the stub, you won't have a ballot and you'll notice. After voting, you fold the ballot and show it (folded) to the election worker. The election worker hands it back to you and watches you put it in the ballot box.
There is a non-zero error rate, as there is in any human enterprise. But it's an error rate, not systematic fraud, and in any election where the results are close enough, there's an automatic judicial recount. Elections Canada published an error rate of 1.3% in all voting transactions for the 2011 Federal election, but this included errors such as registration errors as well as counting errors. Elections Canada is also subject to non-partisan auditing and compliance reviews.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:14 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
We made sure to give out nice pencils before voting so that there would be no questions about different ink colors.
Good times!
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:47 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
Oh, so you did that in front of all the observers from all the political parties as you pulled the ballot from the box, unfolded it, and showed it to them all before reading aloud the voted-for name? Pretty slick.
The process in Canada is spelled out in very exacting terms, and each step in the process is designed with security in mind.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:58 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Feb 5, 2020 9:55 UTC (Wed)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
You seriously don't have schools, townhalls, or other public meeting spaces that can be used for voting? You know, places that already have chairs and tables? The kind of places where other countries seem to be able to organise their elections just fine without extra costs. Also you might want to check your numbers if $750 blows a budget of up to $2600...
Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:30 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
Oh, and I missed this: We don't have "voting machines". We have paper ballots, pencils to mark them with, and ballot boxes. All of the material for hundreds of voters probably costs under $25.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 15:39 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
In the 2019 Canadian federal election, there were just under 18 million voters and there were 300,000 election workers. That's one election worker for every 60 voters.
Here are the statistics.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:48 UTC (Thu)
by himi (subscriber, #340)
[Link]
Yes, it's possible to subvert paper based voting systems, but the protections against most subversion aren't rocket science, and they've already been demonstrated pretty effectively by a number of places. The fact that a badly implemented system can be beaten just means that you should implement a /good/ system, not that you should give up on the whole idea.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:58 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (1 responses)
Or are the master plan to infiltrate the election officials at each polling station just for the chance of possible switching out one of the several ballot boxes. The cost of this heist would be quite large and the probability of success quite low.
Magicians are also not "magic", I'm quite sure that the ones that you have seen have prepared both the location and the items used way in advance. Or are we now going to play the game that "psychics" always use when asked why they never use their powers to win at the lottery, stock market or race track. Or are there thousands of unsolved bank heists and other thefts done by rouge magicians and we just don't hear about them...
Posted Feb 3, 2020 0:04 UTC (Mon)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link]
There's a nice interview with Penn Jillette where he explains that the great escape artist Houdini used to tour and he'd get some local blacksmith or whatever to make the "inescapable" box he was to be locked inside and there'd be a whole presentation about look this was made by this local person so you know it's for real. Houdini sent them plans. Build this exact thing I've designed or else we won't use it and you won't get the prestige associated. And so actually Houdini isn't escaping from your local blacksmith's impossible trap, he's escaping from a box he meticulously designed and has practised many times. It's still a good trick, but if you'd arrested and imprisoned Houdini he wouldn't have magically vanished from his cell because he wasn't actually magic.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:25 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
Also, voter registration is easy. If you file taxes or get a driver's license, you simply check a box to be added to the voter list.
Elections in the US are quite simply fscked up, from the way boundaries are drawn, to how voter registration works, to the fact that a national election has 50 different sets of rules.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 4:07 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
That is completely unfixable. There is only one federally-run election in the country that matters. It is the Presidential election for the District of Columbia, and it matters because it controls three electoral votes (out of 538). But it doesn't matter all that much, because it's safely Democratic and is unlikely to flip in the near future. All other elections (that we care about) are run by the states, which is specifically required by the Constitution. The aforementioned DC election was only amended into existence in the 1960's, despite DC being as old as the US itself, so that should give you an idea of how long it takes to change these things.
(As for elections we don't care about: The territories and DC elect "delegates" to the House of Representatives, but delegates don't get to vote, so they are largely ignored by the rest of the country. Also, the territories and DC hold local elections, which are entirely ignored by the rest of the country. Arguably, neither of those examples should count, because the territories and DC are largely self-governing under various "organic acts," which established their local governments. Except for American Samoa, which bizarrely lacks an organic act, and is instead nominally under the direct jurisdiction of the President. Truman gave them a constitution and a typical American three-branch government by executive order, and then the rest of the US proceeded to forget that the entire territory existed.)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:14 UTC (Wed)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link]
No. The election officials report the number of votes/boxes to the central election office, so if a box is not received, it will be noticed. The vote count is done locally, at the place where voting was done (in the same room).
Or go for the good-old-fashioned ballot stuffing.
Every voter gets a single sheet from the election officers (overseen by party representatives). The sheet gets stamped out, in the open, so it would be pretty complicated to get proper, valid votes into the ballot box...
There's a couple technical ways; I'm sure a good magician could come up with several other ways, because people assume that the system works.
Actually I doubt, especially because there are easier ways to influence elections: simply buy votes with a bag of potatoes. Also mention to the voters that "what a nice village you have here, it would be a pity if anything happened to it, like not getting a single penny from the government in the next couple of years"...
Posted Jan 29, 2020 16:59 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's not as easy as that at all, there are audit checks all along the line because people have tried every different way possible to subvert elections in the past, so the security procedures for paper ballots are _very_ robust.
* ballots are secret because parties have strait up bribed people to vote with money and goods, using the receipt as proof, so anything that weakens secrecy invites bribery
It's not so much that you couldn't mess up the results and invalidate an election it's that doing so is going to be highly visible to a lot of people and can't really be a secret, when real election meddling happens with paper ballots, people know where they stand.
Posted Feb 5, 2020 17:50 UTC (Wed)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
Elections in Israel are run by the Elections Committee. Headed by a respectable judge, and with people from current parties (there are plenty of those). Various attempts (occasionally successful) for various types of cheating are known to have happened. We had two elections this year and various (potential and practical) methods of cheating have been in the news after the first elections.
Basically the elections are overly expensive (for instance: 4 people are payed be in each at the ballot committee all day. 2 would have been enough). But the point is to trust as few people as possible. Of the committee one is appointed by the central elections committee and 3 are appointed from 3 different parties[1]. So you have 4 people with conflicting interest watching the whole election process.
Counting is a tedious and error-prone process. Therefore a specific procedure was devised on how to count. Therefore all the four people count together and there is no attempt to split the load of the counting between the different members (which would have been faster). There are also various checksums to make stuffing more difficult. But (for instance) if you manages to cooperate with the other party people and manages somehow to get the secretary out of the way, you three may split the result any way you wish.
There are various ways to cheat. Requiring various levels of subversion in the process. But they are difficult. And not leaving traces behind is even more tricky.
I guess that there are many shortcuts one could take to make the process cheaper and faster but less accurate and more hackable (but I guess other countries and jurisdictions have their own methods, sharpened over the years).
I guess this also applies to any electronic voting system: at first shot there will be plenty of loose ends (regardless of the major difference of potentially easier for to make large-scale changes with no proper traces).
----------
[1] And there should be at least one candidate for an opposition party. And attempts are made to keep those people from parties who are not dominant in the local voters population.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 8:48 UTC (Wed)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link]
Paper systems can be attacked but that's a known problem, and it is difficult and dangerous to carry out those attacks at scale, so at least in New Zealand both the general public and experts are confident in elections. There is no point in risking that with electronic voting unless you are sure of a big increase in turnout, and I don't know of any research that provides strong evidence there would be such an increase.
Estonia is the poster child for national electronic voting; since they started in 2005, online voting has increased dramatically but overall turnout has not. https://www.valimised.ee/en/archive/statistics-about-inte...
Posted Jan 29, 2020 9:52 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (17 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 11:46 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (15 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:00 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (3 responses)
Also, at least taking a photo of the ballot paper can be faked (you could take the photo, then request another ballot paper), while using a website or whatever can be entirely under the control of the "vote-master".
(FWIW, postal votes also violate the requirement of a secret ballot, and I don't really agree with them either; you could have a travelling polling station or something for people who are housebound, and early voting for those who will be away on polling day. There are persistent cases or at least suspicions of fraudulent postal voting.)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:06 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:04 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link]
Posted Jan 31, 2020 7:22 UTC (Fri)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
[Link]
Nothing I guess... The regulations made under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 require you to not communicate a voter's vote. This includes distributing a selfie of your own vote. The intent is maintain the secrecy of the vote. This allows a voter to lie in the face of standover tactics.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:21 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (3 responses)
But secrecy is not the prime advantage of paper ballots. Simplicity, verifiability and difficulty of materially hacking are.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:07 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (2 responses)
Anyhow, paper based elections are rigged quite routinely: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversial_ele...
Whether a country is a democratic one depends on a lot of factors and the how the votes are cast is just a detail in all that.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:12 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
My belief is that e-voting can only ever make things worse, never better. It makes material tampering easier to do and harder to detect.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 6:47 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:19 UTC (Wed)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2020 15:14 UTC (Wed)
by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2020 20:46 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link]
Nothing. OTOH, there are rules in place to help people who accidentally mark their ballots incorrectly. That makes it possible to take a picture of your ballot filled out the way somebody has asked you to fill it out, then get a replacement ballot that you fill out as you please. There are probably ways of getting around that (require someone to film the whole process of marking and submitting their ballot, having observers at the polling place to monitor the people whose votes have been suborned, etc.) but it greatly increases the difficulty.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:08 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jan 31, 2020 16:09 UTC (Fri)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 1, 2020 5:03 UTC (Sat)
by himi (subscriber, #340)
[Link]
Generally speaking, if you're doing something odd and the polling place workers think it's suspicious they'll just ask you what's going on. If your actions are against the law, they'll call you on it and depending on the offence they'll do something about it, but this is a vanishingly rare occurrence.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:27 UTC (Sat)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link]
When you come to a voting facility you are first greeted by one or several "floor officials" that checks your voting card to see that you went to the correct facility, they then hand you the number of envelopes needed for the election (one for each thing that you have to vote for).
Next you pick a number of ballots. The various ballots are out in public (that is one area which we have received international criticism for since it relies on people actively taking more than one ballot to keep the vote secret so this is changed in the next election): https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riksdagsval_i_Sverige#/medi... . The different colors define for what the vote is for (say for federal, state-level and city-level).
Then behind screens you put said ballots into envelopes (one per color) and then you seal the envelope: https://lekeberg.se/images/18.37088d971653e4515769af1b/15... . Behind these screens people often leave behind the ballots that they never used which means that you often have free access to other ballots without having to take more than one from the public ballot place (which is also why the economic scale of vote buying goes out the window).
Next the sealed envelopes, your vote card and your national id have to be presented to the panel of vote officials: https://www.varldenidag.se/_internal/cimg!0/3u3yv7clzc8zr... who then first check that the vote card matches your national id, that you are in the correct facility and that the color of each ballot matches the envelope (there is a small open portion of each envelope to show just the lines that you can see in this picture of a ballot https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riksdagsval_i_Sverige#/medi... ) and that there are only one ballot in each envelope. This procedure is checked individually be each of the 3 officials (who all works for different parties) before the last official drops the envelopes into the ballot box.
When the election the cast ballots are calculated one by one bye each of the 3 officials individually (so there are always 3 tallies) which can be observed by any one willing to do so. At the end the 3 tallies are compared and if they differ then a recount is performed. Then the ballots are put back into the boxes, the boxes are sealed and officials from the "voting ministry" collects the boxes and transport them all to a single secure location where they then perform a more thorough calculation that takes weeks to complete, this last step is to verify that the first tallies where done correctly.
All in all the complete system makes vote buying or vote forcing so unreliable that it's unfeasible to conduct.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:07 UTC (Wed)
by ale2018 (guest, #128727)
[Link]
In fact, the good old paper ballot system evolved based on what practical methods were available. Why do we insist that e-vote should fit those loosely scrutinized requirements?
Posted Jan 29, 2020 10:06 UTC (Wed)
by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
[Link] (2 responses)
Is that really the case though? You might say with paper ballots that in order for people to be able to trust them, everyone must be able to watch all the individual ballots be counted. And we don't require that. What we do require, as you point out, is that the counting of each individual ballots is overseen by at least one representative from all the largest groups with a stake in the election. The voters have to make do with knowing that at least one person who did not support the eventual winning candidate, oversaw each stage of the election, and has no objections to the way in which the final count was reached. Why isn't it be good enough for voters to be able to know that all of the largest groups with a stake in any election (and any minor political groups, and some independent researchers) each have experts (preferably multiple experts) who performed independent cryptographic verifications of the results, and all - particularly the losers - have not been able to find any objections to the final count?
Posted Jan 29, 2020 11:40 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link]
Also, it is easy to manufacture fake "experts" who will testify that the counting was done correctly when it wasn't, or vice versa. And most people, just as they aren't able to check the cryptography for themselves, aren't able to distinguish between real and fake expert opinions. Much better to cut the experts out altogether and have a process which is obviously simple and verifiable by anyone.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:00 UTC (Wed)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link]
If some of the 'experts' do object, how is the average voter meant to know who to believe? If you're not at least partially expert yourself, it's hard to tell who's a real expert and who's a charlatan. There are plenty of people with impressive academic qualifications who turn into cranks, or who will simply lie to further their political agenda.
Cryptography is not a field where it's safe to go with the majority, so genuine experts shouldn't recommend doing so. If a thousand people say SHA-1 is probably safe, and one person says "no, here's an actual collision I found, which lets me single-handedly corrupt the whole national vote", that one person may be right and needs to be listened to. On the other hand, if a thousand people say RSA is probably safe and one person says "no, here's a demo of our software cracking a 256-bit RSA key, you should switch to our dynamic 'non-factor' based quantum AI encryption software utilizing multi-dimensional encryption technology, including time, music's infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled key pairs", that's snake oil. But the average non-technical person can't make that distinction, because both cases just sound like gobbledygook.
In an e-voting system, that makes it easy for a single 'expert' from a party who's unhappy with the result to raise spurious concerns and create widespread doubt in the legitimacy of that result. It's hard to dismiss those concerns without creating an environment where real vulnerabilities are also dismissed (which is even more dangerous, because politicians won't bother trying to come up with well-liked policies or avoid scandals if they can just hack the result and win anyway).
With a paper voting system, if someone raises a concern about the design (e.g. the risk of voter suppression), voters don't need to judge the expertise of that person; they can understand the argument and judge it directly. And if there are concerns about the implementation of the design, the distributed nature means it's safe to go with the majority: if a thousand people say the ballot boxes were delivered correctly, and one person says they saw one of the boxes go missing, then that person is probably wrong but it doesn't matter even if they're right; one box out of thousands won't significantly affect the result (unless it was already so tight that it's basically a coin flip and either result would be a good enough approximation of the people's preferences). For a party to create serious doubt over legitimacy, it would need to get a large number of its people around the country to raise the same complaint, and it's hard to get lots of people to lie consistently.
(I feel the belief in legitimacy is important (moreso than actual perfect legitimacy) since that lets the losers grudgingly accept the result, knowing they've got a few years to convince their fellow citizens to vote better in the next election, instead of feeling like they have no alternative but a violent revolution (which rarely seems to end up going well for anybody). For the well-being of society, it's more important to maintain that trust than to precisely count every last vote.)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:01 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (24 responses)
50 years ago, only a select few worked with computers. Nowadays, the first thing people ask for when they come to stay at your house is WiFi access. Things change...
Posted Jan 29, 2020 13:09 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (23 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 16:59 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (22 responses)
If we can entrust electronics with our livelihoods, maybe doing the same with our votes isn't too far off. We'll see.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 17:56 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (21 responses)
There is a big difference between commerce and democracy. The stakes are much higher if you can affect who governs a country.
Also, what problem exactly is e-voting designed to solve? It's not as if any country that uses paper ballots has problems with its elections. The only advantage I've ever heard for e-voting is that it might increase turnout because of increased convenience. That's not really proven, and even if it were, I don't think the tradeoff is worth it. You have to ask yourself if people who can't be bothered to vote if it's a slight inconvenience should be pandered to at the cost of damaging trust in the voting system.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:03 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (20 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:08 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (18 responses)
The 2015 Canadian election cost $443 million (CAD), about CAD $17 or USD $13 per voter. That's not cheap, but I wouldn't characterize it as "terribly expensive". I don't know how much cheaper (if any) electronic voting would be for a comparably-sized election.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:52 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (17 responses)
I believe that for a larger country the total cost can easily go down to fractions of a dollar.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:06 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (16 responses)
That's fine. I'm not willing to sell out democracy for $12/person, thanks. That is not a tradeoff I would like our country to make.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:08 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (15 responses)
Ah, it's like the olden time when all these black people couldn't even get to the voting place.
The US right now has very measurable problems with elections that do need to be solved in some way.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:15 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (13 responses)
Canada is still democratic. There are flaws, sure, but it's still basically a pretty decent democracy.
The US's "measurable problems with elections" won't be solved with e-voting. The entire system is broken and needs foundational change. E-voting, if anything, will make it worse.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 1:04 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (12 responses)
Foundationally, our system is much like Canada's. I'm curious how the First Nations feel about the Canadian system; the law in the US has promised full enfranchisement since 1924, whereas Canadian law has only offered that since 1960.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:18 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (6 responses)
It's also an objective fact that disparate locations and opening hours have not been a problem (and have not been seen as a problem) in any Canadian election.
The US system is very different from the Canadian system, especially in how electoral boundaries are drawn and who runs the election mechanics.
Yes, First Nations people were disenfranchised in Canada for a long time, and yes, we are not perfect. But that doesn't take away from the fact that our electoral system is far more trusted by citizens than the US one is by Americans.
And if you think the US offers "full enfranchisement" in any meaningful form today, you're dreaming. In many places there are institutional barriers that disenfranchise entire populations of disadvantaged people.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:20 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (5 responses)
Which hurts your case, IMO. That has nothing to do with ballot boxes and stubs. It has nothing to do with e-voting versus paper ballots. It's all about people and society, and thus completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:41 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (4 responses)
Umm, no. One reason our system is more trusted is that the counting procedure is more trustworthy. (It's not the only reason, but it's a reason.)
Posted Jan 30, 2020 18:33 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (3 responses)
Oh, and https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-irony-of-the-first-na... , second paragraph:
"But the same cannot be said of the First Nations’ vote. There is good reason why First Nations have traditionally resisted voting in Canadian elections. Regardless of who First Nations vote for in any federal election, their voice makes no actual difference."
I bet the main reasons your system is more trusted is because (a) there have been Americans scare-mongering about the voting system, up to the president claiming that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the last presidential election, and (b) the black community in the US has more political power than the First Nations in Canada.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:45 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (2 responses)
It's objectively the case that our system is more trusted than in the US, by any measure including voter turnout.
The rest of your points are either irrelevant or strawmen.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 0:27 UTC (Fri)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 4, 2020 21:28 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
You wrote: "The printed paper trail of Nevada's voting systems is more trustworthy than putting pencil to paper."
And then you wrote: "How is it relevant that your system is more trusted than in the US?"
Do please make up your mind as to what you consider relevant.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:18 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jan 30, 2020 22:40 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:11 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link]
Online voting is the amplification of the problems with e-voting to the n-th degree.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:33 UTC (Sat)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (1 responses)
Online voting would allow vote buying and vote bullying on a massive industrial scale no matter how you implement it which is why even the die hard e-voting advocates are seeing the problems with that.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 14:00 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Instead, the ones that are considered acceptable are those that print out a completed paper ballot based on the voter's choices. That printed ballot is the actual legal ballot, which the voter can double-check before submitting/stuffing into a ballot box. Even if the ballot is electronically scanned as the next step, the physical ballot still exists and can be audited or manually counted.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:47 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
The US problems with elections are nothing to do with the technology of voting, and everything to do with the social and political background. Until the US gets to a point where the election authorities aren't trying to swing the elections, by gerrymandering, carefully constructed voter ID laws, insufficient polling stations in areas likely to vote the wrong way etc, no amount of technological change will work.
E-voting, for example, will just encourage the same people who currently think they can get away with cheating in the current rules to stuff the e-voting ballot, or drop half the votes from e-voting, or otherwise mistreat the system with a view to damaging its legitimacy whenever it comes up with the "wrong" result. The idea is that the democratic process must always produce the "right" result (for certain values of "wrong" and "right"), and if it doesn't, the process is broken; there's no acceptance that the "wrong" result can happen because people disagree with you on what is actually "right".
Ultimately, until there's acceptance that sometimes, the democratic result will be "wrong", nothing will change in the US.
Posted Feb 5, 2020 18:06 UTC (Wed)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
There are various figures for the total cost of the elections, mainly due to a single day of holiday. Lower estimates extra ₪1,000M and higher ones are ₪4,000M.
So elections here are expensive anyway. Regardless of the method.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:41 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jan 31, 2020 3:01 UTC (Fri)
by djbon2112 (guest, #101854)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jan 31, 2020 10:57 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
Here in Germany, vote-counting is a public event and you can basically amble in from the street to watch the ballots being counted.
The exact procedure of counting the ballots is mandated by law. For example, for federal parliamentary elections, after the actual voting is over the (unopened) ballots are counted and checked against the total of votes cast in the voting precinct. Then the ballots are sorted into valid and spoiled ballots. Any ambiguous ballots are looked at and their disposition is documented. Then the valid ballots are counted twice, by different election workers; the sums must agree with the total number of votes cast each time. Members of the public are invited to watch all stages of the procedure, and the various parties will usually send observers on principle just to be sure.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 2:56 UTC (Fri)
by djbon2112 (guest, #101854)
[Link]
Posted Jan 31, 2020 10:16 UTC (Fri)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (8 responses)
If your standard is "people can not sell their vote", then as far as I am aware no one knows how to build an internet style voting systems that meets it. I personally would not trust any voting system that doesn't meet it.
At the other end of the scale it's almost a no-brainer. Electronic voting systems:
- Can verify the data entered to near eliminate accidental invalid votes,
- Can eliminate writing problems (is that a 5 or an 8?),
- Can be tailored to allow people with visual, physical and other disabilities to enter their vote privately,
- Can cater to people who don't speak the predominant languages,
- Can eliminate paper waste from "how to vote pamphlets",
- Can eliminate "how to vote pamphlet" fraud,
- Can record the vote in multiple ways in multiple places simultaneously (including paper), so fraud becomes harder,
- Can give a voter a receipt they can use to cryptographically prove their vote was recorded accurately, and was counted accountably,
- Can be counted or at least give preliminary results near instantaneously.
Why on earth would anybody consider this a bad thing?
Actually, I can think of one reason. Although a well designed voting system can indeed do all those things simultaneously, come with formal proofs they are doing most of what they say on the box and do it so well they will improve the elections around the world, apparently most of our current crop electoral offices would choose to purchase a expensive polished dog turd over them provided the said turd is stamped "cryptographically secured by Microsoft Windows-ME", is nicely arranged on Wedgwood special edition china plate presented by a authoritative smooth looking salesperson dressed in a very expensive suite and accompanied by the companies written iron clad guarantee there is not, never has been and will never be any security problems with their system. Granted that since those electoral officials have done the choosing to date that's pretty much what we've all been forced to use, but judging all e-voting systems by that standard is a little unfair.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 16:03 UTC (Fri)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (7 responses)
Vote-buying is alive and well even in systems with secret paper ballots. It usually takes the form of campaign promises. Seriously, though, any attempt to put technical roadblocks in the way of buying votes is necessarily going to rely on people being able and willing to lie about how they voted without being detected, and most people can't or won't do that. Especially the ones that you *want* voting. And there are Internet-style voting systems that would make it impossible to prove to anyone else that you voted a certain way, assuming once again that you're able and willing to lie.
IMHO if someone is willing to change their vote in exchange for money then we should let them; clearly they didn't have a strong preference to begin with. Voter *coercion* is a bigger issue but the coercion is already illegal whether or not it's connected with voting.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 0:51 UTC (Sat)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link]
Nope. No lying is required for it to work. Just "I won't tell you how I voted". If you make that the law, it becomes morally very easy to say just that.
Lying may be required if you want to sell your vote. But to point out the obvious, unless the buyer produces verifiable proof of how they voted seller is leaving themselves wide open to fraud as the buyer can sell their vote multiple times. In Australia at least, all the ways we can think of for producing a verifiable proof of how you voted is illegal. (See gdt's comment.) Vote buying being illegal ensures there is a cone of silence around the transaction, which makes it near impossible for multiple vote buyers to collude and check if they have been defrauded by a particular buyer.
Example: in a common vote buying scheme vote buyers stand near the entrance to the polling both where they can watch the voter enter, and give the voter a single fraudulent ballot paper filled in the way they want. The vote then places that filled in ballot in the casting box, and on exit gives the blank ballot paper they were handled inside to the vote buyer, and are paid.
But enough of this formal proof stuff. Formal proof's are remarkably brittle. If a real engineer can't measure it, he doesn't believe it. We can measure the effectiveness of measures to prevent vote buying in advances nations, and we know they are near 100% effective.
> IMHO if someone is willing to change their vote in exchange for money then we should let them
Again, you can attempt measure the outcome of allowing this. Unfortunately the result is just a correlation, but the correlation is very strong. Citizens in countries that allow vote buying have an order of magnitude worse GDP per capita than those that don't. It may just be a correlation, but when what is at stake is me at the age of 60 sitting in a comfortable chair using a $3,000 laptop in an air-conditioned house sitting on an acre of land, vs a 40 yr old me (because the odds are I'll be dead by 60) sitting in a mud hut flighting off tsetse fly and inhaling the odour of food being cooked on a cow dun stone, then there is too much at risk for me to take the bet.
Vote buying boils down to offering a voter a small, but very certain short term gain as an incentive for acting against what they believe may be hugely advantageous in the long term. We live in a world where countries spending enormous sums on 50 year infrastructure and educating their children get a large and compounding advantage over those that don't. Investments like that are long term - you do worse in the short term, where the "short term" is measured in decades because it takes decades to educate a child. But the pay back for doing it consistently over a century is the difference between an OECD country and Nicaragua. In this world where nation states complete, losing that race badly means civil war, famines, and occasional genocide. The nation you live in favouring short term planning at the expense of long term inevitably turns into a personal tragedy for you and your extended family, regardless of whether you choose a short term strategy or not. IMO systems and polices that encourage favour the short term over the long term, like vote buying, are a cancer that should be excised with fire.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 13:37 UTC (Sat)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link]
Posted Feb 3, 2020 17:54 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (4 responses)
This is what you want in a democracy, legislators "buying" voters support with public policy that benefits the voters, the alternative is legislators buying support from the police or military to stay in power and that's not as much fun.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 19:59 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 6, 2020 16:43 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (2 responses)
But now we are talking about the efficiency of a democratic process at capturing the will of the people and how gerrymandering makes the process inefficient, and not a process where the peoples will doesn't matter at all. Pandering to a gerrymandered subset is somewhat better for the well-being of the general population than only needing the support of the oligarchs, police and military.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 17:05 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
> Pandering to a gerrymandered subset is somewhat better for the well-being of the general population than only needing the support of the oligarchs, police and military.
Posted Feb 14, 2020 18:53 UTC (Fri)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Sorry for being obtuse, maybe another way to say it is that even a flawed democratic process results in more public goods as part of the government budget, to "buy" votes, than a non-democratic process. Vote suppression, gerrymandering and other techniques to make the process less democratic hurt the efficiency of translating public opinion into public goods, by reducing the number of voters who need to be appeased. At some point if you continue toward less democracy then you cross over into not-democracy and have less people who need to be appeased with government goods, the end state being authoritarian governments where you really only need the support of the military, police and oligarchs and not the population at large. So the point where "peoples will doesn't matter at all" is much closer to a non-democracy where there are no real elections, and public goods are only handed out enough so that the police/military aren't overworked, than a system where there is just some gerrymandering and you still have to appease 51% the voting public.
Posted Jan 29, 2020 19:22 UTC (Wed)
by wittenberg (subscriber, #4473)
[Link] (6 responses)
no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives.
(text from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_the...)
Once that is understood, you can argue about which vital criterion to violate, but to claim one system is invariably better than another is simply ignorance.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 9:46 UTC (Thu)
by cyphar (subscriber, #110703)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm sure you'd agree that FPTP is an objectively better voting system than picking a random ballot that was cast and declaring the choice on that ballot the winner. Therefore, it's possible to argue that one voting system is better than another -- even though both are imperfect under Arrow's impossibility theorem.
As an Australian, I would argue that -- while imperfect, and arguably worse than the Condorcet family of systems -- IRV/STV (or "rank-choice" for Americans) is a better system than non-preferential voting systems because it results in a more democratic outcome. Arrow's impossibility theorem doesn't even apply to non-preferential systems because they are so limited in their ability to produce a democratic outcome (they fail all of the criteria except non-dictatorship).
Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:52 UTC (Thu)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link]
Don't be so sure. That system, or one very much like it (random selection of a candidate weighted by the number of votes received), has been seriously proposed. It solves some problems with lack of representation for minorities, though of course it comes with a few of its own. (Under most election systems a group consistently making up 49% of the population will never get their own candidate elected, while the stochastic approach ensures their candidate is selected about 49% of the time.) Also, random selection from the pool of all eligible citizens (sortition) is one of the earliest forms of democracy.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:53 UTC (Thu)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link]
I think it is worth noting that the improved "outcomes" are more than just the choice of who gets elected.
This will almost certainly help B win over A (my preferred outcome of the likely results), but will still be counted as a primary vote for C. This will encourage C (so maybe they will run again next time) and will let other people know that C has support. Maybe C will only get 5% of the vote. Next time they might get 10%. etc.
Also, with Ranked Choice, you wouldn't need the terrible waste of resources which is the US primaries. Each party can safely put several candidates up, and the people can then decide. There is no sense in which having more candidates will "split the vote", or that voting for a minor candidate can "waste your vote". If most people put all the republicans before all the democrats, then a republican will win - and vice-versa.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 12:03 UTC (Thu)
by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
[Link] (2 responses)
If system A violates criterion X, and system B violates both criteria X and Y, you can safely say that A is invariably better than B.
FPTP fails more criteria than most.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 17:50 UTC (Mon)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think that approval voting (put an X next to as many names as you like; whoever gets the most votes wins) is a nice simple improvement on plurality voting and keeps monotonicity.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 20:35 UTC (Mon)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link]
I have also argued in favor of approval voting. I think it does a good job of being simple enough to understand while also pushing in favor of candidates who appeal to a broad majority of voters rather than a dedicated minority.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 8:41 UTC (Thu)
by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
[Link] (25 responses)
Posted Jan 31, 2020 7:30 UTC (Fri)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (24 responses)
Picture this. It is a voting system so complex, even in an OECD country with the power of modern computing systems available to it, it can take months to count the paper ballots.
This is partially because the voting system encourages lots of bit players. In fact so many bit players the people printing the ballot paper ran into limitations of the physical size of the ballot paper. The physical size mind you, not the practical size. The practical size is a smidgen less than 800mm because that is the width of the polling booth, but that was exceeded long ago. No, we are talking the width of paper the printing presses can physically handle, which is 1020mm. Never mind the fact that laying the thing flat and so you see all the candidates at one time is now out of the question.
So, the only option is to reduce the font size. So they keep reducing it, but this introduces a new problem. It becomes so small people with normal vision can't read it. So they issue a magnifying glass with every ballot paper so people can read it.
This is insane, but the insanity gets worse. There are two ways to fill in the ballot paper: tick one box at the top and let the political parties choose who you vote for, or number every box at the bottom. There is well over 100 boxes at the bottom, and the rules say you have to number them sequentially from one without skipping or repeating a number, or your vote is invalid. No corrections are allowed. The only way to fix a mistake is walk up to polling place attendants, admit in a loud voice you made a mistake and ask for a fresh ballot paper - which you must of course fill in perfectly.
This is very, very hard to do. Which is why we have the top line: to simplify the process it's actually possible to create good vote. But ... that top line, which remember allows the political parties to horse trade is where your vote goes to, is perversely what created the incentive for many little micro parties to pop up out of the weeds. It was the underlying reason we ended up needed magnifying glasses to fill in the ballot paper.
No one foresaw this outcome of course. I don't know how anybody could have foreseen it. But that isn't the worst of it. That horse trading and a supposed reasonable by complex way of counting votes (instant run off) lead to some really, really bizarre outcomes. Candidates that only got 7 primary votes won seats.
No zero day defects you say?
And where did this happen? Australia of course - the very nation discussing how to do computerised voting here. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-20/more-magnifying-gl... What a coincidence.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 12:39 UTC (Fri)
by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
[Link]
Posted Jan 31, 2020 23:43 UTC (Fri)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link] (20 responses)
Yes, it did get crazy. It is better now.
You no longer need to number all the boxes below the line.
To quote https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm
On the white Senate ballot paper, you need to either:
. number at least six boxes above the line for the parties or groups of your choice, or
> Candidates that only got 7 primary votes won seats.
There is nothing at all bizarre about this. Primary votes are certainly interesting, but they are not the only interesting thing.
In practice, when one of these minor candidates gets appointed with only 7 votes, it is because a large number of people want to say "anyone but a major party" (aka "a plague o' both your houses") and they all got someone who was not from a major party. So they got what they wanted. Nothing bizarre about that.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 0:58 UTC (Sat)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (19 responses)
You were doing well up until that point. The problem is it wasn't a "large number of people want to say". The only thing most people did was tick one box at the top. (Because that was all you were allowed to do above the line, but as you say after that clusterf$&*k they changed things.) Who got those preferences was determined by the parties. I forget how many parties there were - lets say 40. So in essence 40 people determined where those preferences went. And surprise, surprise, they colluded to game the system.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 5:30 UTC (Sat)
by himi (subscriber, #340)
[Link] (18 responses)
If you don't like the potential for counterintuitive results then you probably won't like preferential voting at all. However, I think there's a strong objective case to be made that it gives voters the best practical way to express their democratic preferences.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 7:26 UTC (Sat)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (1 responses)
One corollary of Arrow's theorem is that as soon as you have 3 or more options, you will end up with counterintuitive results. For example, in the UK, which uses FPTP, by getting fewer votes than in 2017, the Conservative and Unionist Party went from a minority of the seats to a majority.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 9:25 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Cheers,
Posted Feb 1, 2020 7:34 UTC (Sat)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (15 responses)
Like all voting systems instant run off can sometimes have mildly counter intuitive results. But that's not what caused what I was describing, because a voting system that forces most people to tick exactly one box can not, in any way, be described as instant run off or preferential voting. It was a hand crafted voting system created by the AEC, and it was total failure by most measures - both practice and technical.
However you are right it didn't matter in the end. That's not because the system the AEC created had some saving grace - it didn't. It is because the Senate is a proportional representation system. One of the virtues of proportional representation it is pretty robust - any voting system will work with it. Even first part the post, which is what the system where you tick one box can only be described as - and that is what the AEC gave us.
That's one of my hobby horses actually. The difference between different voting systems like first past the post and concordet voting pales into insignificance compared to proportional representation and what we have now. And yet if you look at the discussion here a lot of it is about how to count votes. The more important topic of how the system chooses candidates after the votes are counted is completely ignored.
It's important because what we have now for the lower house virtually guarantees tyranny by the majority. Tranny is pretty decisive, by I mean things happen quickly and without much visible discussion. That pretty much describes how our lower house operates - what happens during it's question time is the butt of national jokes. That's because whatever is raised in question time doesn't matter - the vote outcome has pre-determined by the discussion that happened behind the scenes during the governing parties internal debate on the subject.
Its a tyranny because regardless of what voting system you use, the voting groups (a voting group is a division of people that vote along the same lines - business / workers, woman / men, fiscally conservative / socialist, socially progressive / religious ...) are distributed fairly evenly across the seats the same ones will tend to win everywhere. Using preferential voting instead of first part the post might change which group wins, but regardless if the distribution of groups is uniform it will be the same group wining every seat. When one group runs things you get tyranny. That's an exaggeration of course because what really happens is you get a two party system, with both parties competing to represent the majority view and thus become the democratic despots for next electoral term. So you do get some open competition between the two parties that keeps them honest - but it's a very limited competition because there are only two choices.
In contrast if you listen to senate debates there are a lot of thoughtful points being made. (It's still about as interesting a watching paint dry, but at least you aren't watching the house or reps spending their time throwing insults at each other like they are in a kids playground.) The reason there is discussion is it's not a two party system in the senate. No one party has a majority, so there has to be a lot of discussion to reach consensus on any given point, and that discussion is very visible so the everyone's views are seen by the entire electorate. The reason there isn't one party is it's a proportional system. We all get to choose 6 people, and those 6 people very, very roughly represent the voter distribution in the state. It's very rough because the Senate wasn't designed to be proportional - they just chose the easiest way to appoint 6 people from a state, and we got lucky and it gave a roughly proportional outcome.
Anyway, instead of the only decision that matters happening every 3 years, these people have to fight for a consensus on every bill. You can see how each of the people your state voted on each bill on https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/, and there is likely to be a lot of variation between them. If you are anal like me and actually look it up this may re-order your preferences next time.
In contrast looking up your local house of reps candidate on there is complete a waste of time. It's not the information provided - it's the same. The reason is there is only one person elected from your seat, so you can't compare their voting record to somebody else you might choose. Sure you can reorder your votes at election time, but it's likely the other choices are someone you know very little about because you can't see their voting record. Worse the current candidate will be following their party line on every vote, so you have no idea what their personal position is on any particular question. The only way you could influence the governing parties position on any topic is by supporting candidates they select that match your views, but the system conspires to hide from you what their views actually are.
I don't know if you watched what has happened in NZ. They had a system like ours, but the Muldoon government was so utterly politically incompetent they allowed the voters to try another one system, and they ended up with a system whose primary design goal was to deliver a proportional outcome. When the two former ruling parties saw what happened (they had to start negotiating with other parties instead of unilaterally ramming every bill through), they desperately tried to reverse it - but once the voters had a taste of it they weren't going back. Compared to we've had to put up with in our political leaders since then, it's like black and white. Their leaders and their politics has simply been amazing - and they've come from both sides of the isle. I'm so envious, but now our major parties have seen the result it's unlikely they will make the same mistake here for a loooong while.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 0:33 UTC (Mon)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link] (12 responses)
Under PR you need multi-member districts, at least (and proponents of PR will make the districts large so as to "properly" be proportional, so it's very easy to create a situation where poor Dave, who has broadly unpopular views but has also just been violently assaulted by a police officer, finds there's nobody interested in doing anything about it and no recourse whatsoever. Every politician will say that they're concerned about the Dave situation but alas their focus today is cheese quotas or planning permission for donkey sanctuaries or whatever. They'll tell you or anybody to ask some other politician about Dave and go back to their talking points. Diffusion of responsibility ensures in practice nobody cares and it's not anybody in particular's fault.
So that's a big problem for PR. At some level you need to deal with it, or you'll create something just as unsatisfactory.
The problem of tyranny of the majority is at some level entirely unavoidable. You can do various things to try to stop it but ultimately yes if a large enough majority wants their way badly enough they will get it. In Northern Ireland for example there was a mechanism to allow either "side" to veto decisions by their local government (the Assembly), called the "petition of concern" - the idea is to avoid situations where a narrow majority of Nationalists or Unionists gets to do something their opponents strongly oppose while accepting that essentially nobody would vote for anything but these two main groups (this has improved slightly over time) but as Americans will know from their senate the practical use of such a veto is that now you "need" enough support to overcome the veto to get anything done. Things nobody opposes pass easily, but if you don't have any controversies you wouldn't need democratic elections in the first place, and such veto mechanics don't allow for resolution of those controversies.
In Northern Ireland's case (and until this week in the UK itself to some extent) there was somebody else with more authority to resolve controversies if necessary. Northern Ireland finally got legalised abortion not because its own government finally agreed that was a good idea as happened in the Republic to their South but because the UK's government changed the rules anyway while their Assembly was dissolved, from the comfort of Westminster where abortion has been legal for decades.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 2:07 UTC (Mon)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (1 responses)
Sure, and yes if they do their job well they can be an excellent advocate for the citizens they represent. (If you have seen it, the documentary / movie "Official Secrets" gives an excellent example of just that happening. I highly recommend it.) If they didn't have that icky tendency of grouping themselves into one of two parties and then voting along party lines regardless of what their electorate wanted, it would be wonderful.
The two party system doesn't happen because of anybody's conscious decision to make it that way of course. It seems to arise naturally pretty much everywhere a singe local member is elected, so it's an emergent property of the system, not something someone deliberately designed or wanted to happen. And as it happens, I think it's something most people would not want if they thought about it, and realised if we tweak the system in certain ways it will stabilise in a different configuration that makes decisions that better reflects everyone's preferences. We continue to use it merely because of inertia.
It's a solved problem. New Zealand does have electoral districts, and each district elects a local member who is their voice in parliament. But they only make up 40% of the politicians in parliament (or something - I don't recall the real number). The remaining 60% are picked so the end result ends up the proportional to the entire NZ electorate.
> The problem of tyranny of the majority is at some level entirely unavoidable. You can do various things to try to stop it but ultimately yes if a large enough majority wants their way badly enough they will get it.
Not really. When you paint it as a binary "yes / no" decision like you did there with abortion, then yes you get a binary "yes / no" outcome which likely leads to a tyranny of the majority. But these things are almost never "yes / no". With abortion it becomes when it is OK for a woman to have an abortion - is it when she was raped, through to any time before the baby takes it's first breath. When we are governed by a two party system, the ruling party make the decision all subjects pretty much without compromise or discussion. But in PR no one has 50% so there will be horse trading on every single decision. It's a really ugly business, with politicians rightly accused of making deals with the devil. So perhaps someone opposes abortion also opposes Sunday trading, and another mob is prepared to give some ground on restricting Sunday trading in order to loosen restrictions on abortion. What you end up with is the least worst option everyone can get away with, which of course everyone says is the worst possible option - except for all the other options.
In Ireland what actually happened is the the Catholic Church ruling elite's handling paedophile priests by going into denial and letting them continue destroyed their moral authority. Moral authority was the foundations their other practices were built upon so when they were swept away, it was only a matter of time before other memes took over their territory. Yes, it happened from the safety of Westminster, but we've seen what happens when Westminster tried to force something on the Irish staunchly oppose. Westminster did manage to force their way of doing things on the Irish for a while of course because they had overwhelming more resources, but imposing authority using force is hideously expensive. In the end UK could not sustain it, just as the US could not sustain it in Iraq. Change on abortion happened peacefully because that the Irish themselves changed and now they are OK with it - not because Westminster wanted it. If it is there only because Westminster wants it, then I can guarantee you it would revert to what it was before at the earliest possible opportunity, but I think we probably both agree that is unlikely.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 4:16 UTC (Mon)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-...
Posted Feb 3, 2020 11:00 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
It's even worse for the Senate, where in some states one Senate member is responsible for more than 20 million people.
Conversely, even with PR system parties still help individuals because it's a good PR.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 9:49 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (8 responses)
Actually no. My favourite system is one that doesn't, and actually doesn't tinker with FPTP much at all.
Let's make the constituency size 125K, and have one MP per 100K. The House of Commons is about 600MPs for 60M people at the moment ...
Each party submits a list of candidates to Electoral commission. The sum of all votes received by those candidates is the "party vote". After the election, a revised list is created by dropping all except the winners and runners up, who are sorted by percentage of the constituency vote. (This is to get rid of minority parties, sorry :-)
Each candidate is then allocated a PR vote, which is the total party vote divided by their position in the list, and the PR seats are allocated to those candidates with the highest PR vote.
Okay, the Lib Dems would still not have done as well as they should in 1983, but they'd have had about 20% of the seats on a 30% vote.
Cheers,
Posted Feb 6, 2020 20:08 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (7 responses)
If you want a sense of how you can make PR work well while not breaking the constituency link, look at MMPR. It's used for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, London Assembly, New Zealand Parliament, German Bundestag and more.
It works by topping up from party lists when your share of the party vote is lower than the share of constituencies you've won. The idea is that you have one MP per constituency, plus a variable sized "proportional" list that's covering the whole voter base. You can end up in some versions of MMP with a temporarily oversized Parliament, due to "overhang" seats.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 22:26 UTC (Thu)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (6 responses)
So it's real name "Mixed-member proportional representation". I knew those Kiwi's weren't smart enough to think it up for themselves. Sadly they are smarter than us Ozzie's, because unlike us they use it.
It solves the three main weaknesses of the current system:
You might think that last one isn't a problem, but in the Australian State I live in the we have changed out voting system _three_ (count them: 3) times in the last decade or two because the political party notices that a given system (FPTP, IRS) favoured them.
I'm not overly familiar with most of the places that use it, but in the two places I am familiar with (eg, Germany, NZ) the outcome has been nothing short of stellar.
Posted Feb 7, 2020 10:06 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Not quite true ...
But yes this is pretty much the system I was thinking of. That's why I had the party list, sorted by percentage of the vote. That means the politicians can't choose who gets the PR seats - they go to candidates who only lost the constituency by a small margin.
Cheers,
Posted Feb 7, 2020 16:22 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (4 responses)
In Germany the current problem is that there are parties whose number of directly-elected seats is larger than the number of seats they should have according to their proportion of the vote (e.g., the conservative CDU still tends to win quite a number of direct mandates even though their total percentage of votes cast has been dropping). This is counteracted by increasing the number of available seats overall to where the correct relations between parties can be maintained. Theoretically, the Bundestag has 598 seats but the current number of representatives is 709. Apart from ballooning the size of the legislature there are also other less obvious follow-on effects that have to do with Germany's federal structure. In effect, Germany now has the second-largest parliament worldwide (after China).
Urgent election law reform has been called for (and indeed mandated by the German constitutional court) but, perhaps understandably, the bigger parties – who have most to lose if the current practice is abolished – don't fall over themselves getting rid of a system that gives them a considerable advantage.
Posted Feb 7, 2020 22:32 UTC (Fri)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link]
Posted Feb 7, 2020 23:21 UTC (Fri)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link] (2 responses)
Ensuring proportional representational by appointing new members from under represented parties isn't a solution I've come across before. Every system I've come across before in my limited experience has a fixed number of members in parliament. So there are clearly lots of variations on the MMP theme - more than enough to replace the entertainment provided by heated discussions over FPTP vs IRS.
Germany's system provides in interesting metric - how much they expended the parliament by tells you how many members PR you must elect to make it proportional. Based on the figures you gave (598 directly elected, 709 total meaning 111 had to be added to make it proportional), that's 15%. New Zealand has fixed number of members in parliament, with a fixed 40% being reserved to make it proportional. (The 60% figure I gave earlier with the IIRC proviso just proves I shouldn't trust my memory.) I would have thought 40% was low, but based on Germany's numbers it appears to be plenty.
Regardless of the imperfections you Germans see in your system, externally, from the perspective of someone who lives in a different system, it makes me envious. I guess the proof of the pudding for Germany will be when the current uninterrupted string of centre-left parties are replaced by someone on the right.
That has happened in NZ, and the outcome is what made me take notice of MMP in the first place. They were better than our current right wing government of course - but that would not be hard given they opposed any action on climate change while promoting new coal fire power plants, have handed over young drug mules to Indonesia to be sentenced to death to make a political point (we don't have the death penalty in Australia), opposed cigarette plain packaging laws (which have been a very successful in reducing smoking rates) - it goes on and on. But they were also on a practical level better than any left wing government we've had in the last 20 years. The left wing ones have also made a series gob smackingly dumb mistakes - like _after_ seeing the USA student loan crisis unfold implementing the same thing here. And locally the left mandated that only a licensed a electrician could test an electrical cord with mega ohm meter (this has to be done yearly I think), as a gift to their union financial supporters. It's the sort of thing you can get away with when you can ram anything you want through because you have a single party majority.
After watching both sides pull off stunts like that, you get heartily sick of it after a while.
Posted Feb 8, 2020 2:56 UTC (Sat)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (1 responses)
In Germany, half of the 598 seats in the Bundestag are filled by direct elections in 299 electoral districts, and the other half is filled from lists submitted by the states. Every voter has two votes – one to elect a direct candidate in their district, and another to vote for one of the lists submitted by parties in their state. This second vote decides how many seats altogether a party receives in parliament. The three basic cases are:
For most of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, there were only three or four parties in the Bundestag, with the SPD (social democrats) and CDU (conservatives) receiving the largest numbers of both first and second votes. Overhang seats were relatively rare. With the rise of the Greens as well as extreme-left (Die Linke) and extreme-right (AfD) parties, there are now more parties which can get considerable numbers of second votes (with CDU and especially SPD losing accordingly) while most directly-elected candidates are still either CDU or SPD, e.g. because people vote for one of the big-party candidates so that their vote isn't “wasted” on someone from a small party who has little chance of being elected directly, but still cast their second vote for a small party, or because a small party doesn't have enough candidates to field one in every electoral district. This leads to larger numbers of overhang seats.
The current Bundestag has 46 overhang seats – 36 for the CDU, 7 for the CSU (the Bavarian arm of the CDU), and 3 for the SPD. There are also 65 other extra “leveling” seats that have been introduced to restore the proportional representation of parties (SPD 19, FDP 15, AfD 11, Greens and Die Linke 10 each). The problem with doing this is that due to inaccuracies in the method used to allocate seats, parties with many overhang seats can gain a slight advantage (which is why the CDU/CSU is reluctant to tweak the system). The leveling seats, which were introduced in 2013, are also necessary to prevent other weird effects that have to do with the fact that list candidates are determined per state; previously, in edge cases, additional votes for a party could actually cause it to lose seats in parliament, and that was ruled unconstitutional by the federal constitutional court.
One obvious method of reducing the size of the Bundestag (which is an issue due to cost, office space, and available room in the debating hall, which was built to accommodate 600 legislators, not up to 800) would be to reduce the total number of electoral districts, but that is not a very popular approach because (a) it means that every representative has a larger swathe of the population to represent, and (b) redrafting the district boundaries invites gerrymandering, which isn't as big an issue in Germany as it is in the US but which would of course influence exactly where the districts are.
Posted Feb 10, 2020 1:42 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Actually, I have no problem with re-drafting boundaries to increase the majority of the incumbent party. One of the important measures of democracy, to my mind, is that people should be represented by the person they voted for, and measures that increase that proportion are okay.
Obviously, there are other criteria that must be met, too, hence I'm in favour of "levelling off" seats, and so on, but the two most important criteria to me are (1) maximising the number of people who are represented by the person they voted for, and (2) maximising the *real* choice of candidates to represent you - that is, a decent choice of people who have a good chance of being elected. The tension between these two is a mark of how democratic the system is, eg "One seat, one candidate" obviously guarantees a perfect mark for the first criteria, but a complete fail for the second. On the other hand, the Italians had a very good PR system that met the second criteria very well, but we all know how stable and long-lived their governments were ...
Cheers,
Posted Feb 3, 2020 1:38 UTC (Mon)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't think that "proportional representation" is really the issue. I think the issue is the ease of establishing a tyranny.
The recent Gillard government was a minority government, and I think that was an excellent outcome. Each of 2 major parties were a couple of votes short of a simple majority, and 3 "independents" made up the balance of the parliament. This meant there needed to be bargaining and compromise and, importantly, this was mostly out in the open. It was by several metrics a very effective government.
This is, I think, the real strength of our senate. The voting system supports the appointment of minor parties, so that it is rare for a major party to completely dominate. This is what encourages the meaningful debate that you mention.
I don't know anything about the NZ system. If you have a link for a "dummies guide", I know one dummy who would like to read it :-)
Posted Feb 5, 2020 12:22 UTC (Wed)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link]
:D
Posted Feb 1, 2020 5:15 UTC (Sat)
by himi (subscriber, #340)
[Link] (1 responses)
I did it myself at the last election, /twice/. It was funny, not embarrassing - everyone had a laugh, comments were made about how stupid the ballot paper was, and then I finished without messing up, folded it several times so it would fit through the slot in the ballot box, and I was done.
Yes it's right at the silly end of what you can do with paper ballots, and it's a pain in the arse, but it's still workable. Maybe /that/ particular situation would have been helped by electronic voting, but personally I'm not willing to give up all the /other/ excellent properties of Australia's electoral system just because the edge cases are bordering on impractical.
Posted Feb 1, 2020 5:49 UTC (Sat)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link]
You've lost me. What would you be giving up?
Posted Jan 31, 2020 8:16 UTC (Fri)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link]
But ... sometimes the problem is so broad and wide you don't need Zumwalt class destroyer to point it out. That is the case here. The problem appears to be the technical gulf between the technical people people who understand and build these systems and the people charged deploying them is so vast, the deployment people don't know there is a gulf or an other side, or that there are people who have crossed it, or that they need those people to get them across safely - let alone what they look like or how to contact them. When you are trying to tell the emperor he has no clothes an unassailable torrent of facts and proofs isn't always the right approach. Just stating the simple facts, with a dash of humour can do a better job. [0]
And as it happens, this years LCA had one of those talks too, although I suspect LWN won't cover it. It's titled "New Phone, Who Dis?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD7wU5ct1dI If you want your co-worker, or even your mother to understand the seriousness of the problem, show them this one.
[0] Vanessa had prepared her talk for technical littératie, of course. But LCA's videos get around 1M or so views each year, so not everyone who sees them fits that description.
Posted Feb 4, 2020 21:25 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (7 responses)
I've avoided replying on this story because it was getting tedious. But these will be my final remarks:
Iowa caucus.
That kind of royal fsck-up can only happen when computers are involved. All the theoretical attacks against paper ballots pale into insignificance with the inevitable mess that will result from computer voting.
Posted Feb 4, 2020 21:55 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
This was also compounded by the regular Iowa caucus circus. The attendees elect the leader and then they vote multiple times in person, eliminating one (or more) candidates each time.
So the leader (basically a random Joe, often senior) had to first install the phone app (with bad data connection, it's Iowa) and familiarize themselves with it. Then conduct multiple rounds of voting.
Not a recipe for success.
Posted Feb 4, 2020 21:59 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
Most media reports call the vote a debacle.
It failed in a way paper ballots couldn't have.
Posted Feb 4, 2020 22:56 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
So yay for electronic voting uncovering sloppiness (fraud?) that has always existed with paper workflow.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 16:51 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Yes and no, software commissioned for election events is often of low quality and poorly scoped because work can only start when the money is available during the election and stops once the event happens, a very short timetable, but in this case they had a backup paper process, so we can kind of ignore the software once it was abandoned, and look at how the paper process went and that was it's own mess due to the unnecessary complexity of the caucus process and denial of service attacks carried out by the opposition party on the phone infrastructure used to collect results.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 21:28 UTC (Thu)
by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 7, 2020 19:42 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (1 responses)
All links in the chain need to be secure, or else the votes aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Posted Feb 7, 2020 20:15 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Mar 10, 2020 2:19 UTC (Tue)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link]
According to her the University came under significant pressure from the government for her role in discovering and making the Health department aware of how Australians can be re-identified from anonymised health care data. The two sources of data are Medicare (Australian's public health insurance system) and the PBS (government subsidised drugs - another part of the public health system). All Australian's will have contributed to the data Professor Teague showed could be de-anonymised on occasion.
Quoting Professor Teague:
> “The uni has to make some kind of decision about trading off the obvious necessity of staying on the right side of the federal government with its funding and its health datasets, versus standing up for [academic freedom],” she said.
https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/mar/08/me...
For non-Australians, what Professor Teague is alluding to is a change how Australian Universities are funded. The model has changed from direct government funding via independently overseen grants towards selling their expertise and research capabilities. (In the past Australian Universities have a very poor track record of commercialising their research - I'm not sure what the state of play is now.) The government remains a major funder, however under this new system the arrangement has become one of government departments shopping around and purchasing the research. In this case, the government Health department was purchasing research from the Universities heath researchers and supplying them the data to do the research on.
There may well be more to the story than has been revealed so far, but nonetheless I suspect many who heard Professor Teagues' talk at LCA will be disappointed by this turn of events. For me it was a sharp reminder that while responsible disclosure is almost a daily routine it seems we've got a way to go in bringing even the highy educated liberal elite who run our educational institutions around to that viewpoint.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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In Canada, with paper ballots, it rarely takes more than 15 minutes to go to a polling station before or after work.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
I don't understand your position.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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E-vote advocates still don't get it...
2. You have both postal voting and on-the-day voting (the latter overrides the former)
3. You only have on-the-day voting
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
"casting an invalid vote (which is not advertised as an option and a lot of people don't know it exists, and there's a lot of misinformation flying around about it)"
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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A $50 used smartphone will be able to run any realistic election software. Including smartphones distributed through the government's "Lifeline" program (that rightwing nutters used to call "Obamaphones", I guess it's "Trumpphone" now).
This will not work for more than 1 election cycle. People will complain, lawsuits will follow, software will get fixed.
Voting takes about 5 minutes. I guess last minute rush will be problematic, but even a minimum wage cashier can get a 15 minute break.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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And lots of places have long queues for voting.
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But this has to happen among several hundred counties in multiple states, independently of each other. There's no real election authority in the US anymore that can force these changes.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
But this has to happen among several hundred counties in multiple states, independently of each other. There's no real election authority in the US anymore that can force these changes.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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Not in North Carolina: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/15/1822483...
Wrong again. It's sometimes called a "sleepover" and is still common for regular ballot boxes ( https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=938... ). The boxes are sealed, of course.
It's not just possible, it's happening all the time.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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Computer systems have their problems. But if you do online banking, if you store your money in banks period, you're showing that you don't believe that someone can waltz into your bank's systems and undetectably transfer all the money out.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
Moreover, you keep casting aspersions on the US, and I don't believe that there's that much difference on the ballot box level.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
Oh yeah, I remember that time when I was nullifying ballots for opposition by making extra marks on them!
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
Oh, you mean the guys that were helping me? It's amazing how FPTP system can be subverted with just a handful of ballots.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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How magicians do it
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
If the sealed box disappears along with the associated separate box, it's like they never existed.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
> If the sealed box disappears along with the associated separate box, it's like they never existed.
* people have both added and removed ballots, so the number of ballots printed for each place can be recorded, and the number of resulting successful, spoiled and unused ballots can be audited to make sure none are added or missing
* the ballots have seals and chain of custody documentation at each step of the process, so you'd have to subvert all of the people involved at one of the steps, in a way that wouldn't be caught down the line by an audit check
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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What's stopping you from taking a photo of your ballot paper in the voting booth and sharing it with everyone?
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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Not only must an e-voting system be reliable and verifiable, it must be seen to be so by people who don't have any advanced technical education.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
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It kinda does.
Uh... What?
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
It also allows me, the voter, to have more of a say.
Suppose that I believe it highly likely that either Candidate A or B will win, but I really like candidate C,
(and despise candidate A), then I can sensibly Vote
A - 3
B - 2
C - 1
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
Ranked Choice voting is not a panacea
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
How could this ever go wrong...
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
. number at least 12 boxes below the line for individual candidates of your choice.
If 30% of people want Mickey, but Minnie is OK. and 35% want Donald, but Minnie is OK, and 35% want Pluto, but Minnie is OK - then it is perfectly sensible to appoint Minnie without hir getting *any* primary votes.
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
Wol
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
Why PR is a problem
Why PR is a problem
> So that's a big problem for PR. At some level you need to deal with it, or you'll create something just as unsatisfactory.
Why PR is a problem
https://pol.is/
https://blog.pol.is/
https://github.com/pol-is/
Why PR is a problem
You have a very optimistic view of the FPTP system. Right now each House representative is responsible for about 750000 people. This means that they likely will not care about you little petty problems (unless they are accompanied by a hefty bribe^W campaign contribution).
Why PR is a problem
Wol
Why PR is a problem
Why PR is a problem
- Unlike a single member per electorate, it doesn't devolve into the 2 party system virus.
- It's pretty much immune to gerrymandering.
- Different voting systems (FPTP, IRS, Condorcet, ...) don't have a huge effect.
Why PR is a problem
Wol
Why PR is a problem
Why PR is a problem
Why PR is a problem
Why PR is a problem
Only parties with either 5% or more of second votes cast or three directly-elected candidates are entitled to
seats in parliament in the first place.
Why PR is a problem
Wol
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
Having a two-party system and a "simple majority" rule for making decisions, means that tyranny is easy to establish.
Either more successful (un-allied) parties, or a higher bar for decision making would remove the tyranny.
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A vote without a paper trail can never be trusted
A powerhouse of a talk, but ...
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Cryptography and elections
Under pressure from the Australian Government, Professor Teague leaves the University of Melbourne
>
> They were really stuck in a hard place, which they shouldn’t have been put in, I feel."
