I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached.
I do agree that the paper trail is a great thing. I'm not fundamentally against electronic voting, but I haven't heard of a system that can really compete with the simplicity and verifiability of the immutablility you get from paper ballots inside ballot boxes being watched over by interested parties on all sides.
> I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached.
And I like it. The simpler the design, the better. Sometimes it takes a billion dollars and a couple of smart researchers to invent the "obvious" solution to a problem.
We've got butterfly ballots, confusing electronics-only machines, and a variety of bad standards as the basis of our current voting infrastructure. Telling everybody to use a damn PDF + printer would be a gross improvement.
And suddenly I have another use case for my language for specifying scientific protocols. Counting votes in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Turns out keeping verifiable lab notebooks for legal reasons is a really similar problem to keeping verifiable vote tallies, also for legal reasons (hopefully). It is telling that we have better provenance systems for far more complex processes but we still haven't managed one for person one vote ....
I may be misunderstanding but what language "specifying scientific protocols" do you mean ? Is this published? How does it work (a generic workflow language? The t sounds interesting whatever it is)
Probably not the same thing that guy was walking about, but this is a cool project going on at University of Washington - it's made for biological science workflows but it's really quite flexible.
Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people.
DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's benefit to one of the major research institutions of this country telling the rest of the country how things should be done.
They were particularly badly arranged punch card ballots; the solutions to both the bad arrangement (“don't do that, like most people didn't do previously”) and the punch card (”use optical scan”) related problems are not only well known but pretty widely adopted.
I agree. But why did butterfly ballots proliferate in Florida?
Ultimately: the administrators weren't thinking about ballot issues. Palm Beach, Florida, was understaffed and underpaid, under-invested. They had other things on their mind when they deployed their machines.
They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to. They had the same issue in 1996 before the famous year 2000 issue. It was known, but not much could be done about it.
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I guess this printer methodology from DARPA might be too expensive. Or maybe the scanning machines can be owned by the state, so that poorer areas won't have to invest into the machines. Etc. etc.
There's a lot of issues aside from "use paper ballots". The entire voting system needs to be considered. I hope that DARPA's challenge will include these issues in their design process.
> They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to
Sure, but moving money around to deal with that problem is easy (and mostly doable intrastate, but, a federal role isn't unreasonable.)
But this isn't a problem calling for novel technology. (As has already been demonstrated by the move to e-voting that happened in many places after 2000, though some people got the wrong message and decided that we just chose the wrong technical solution—but a lot of that is due to lobbying by the people selling technical solutions.)
> Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people.
More specifically - it's a big country with a fantastic amount of decentralization. Elections are run and ballots are designed not, by national governments, not by state governments, but by county governments. The chance that someone will mess up is a lot higher.
(Of course, this does have the advantage that centralized tampering with the ballot is harder.)
In this case perhaps paper where you don't see anything, but that will trip up the scanner. You only need to have votes declared invalid. Of course, preferably just a random subset of them. You can choose for districts you don't like and distribute that paper there.
I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US to help prevent or ease people's concerns about potential voter fraud. It's simple, low-tech, and hard to screw up.
Unless if I'm missing something, which of course is possible. Can someone tell me what the downsides are to an idea like that?
> I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US
In this case, Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's Razor: The simplest explanation is malice, not stupidity. The groups who are the most hysteric about hypothetical voter-fraud are dishonest. Their actual goal is not to prevent vanishingly-rare crime, but to suppress legitimate voters in a partisan fashion.
Finger-inking at the poll-site does not offer them a useful tool for skewing the election results. It imposes no special discouragement or advantage to a particular group, and it also does not create a system for arbitrary "enforcement." (In contrast, consider poll-taxes or name-similarity databases with insanely high rates of false-positives.)
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Some might retort: "I don't suggest finger-inking because it won't stop someone from impersonating another voter." True, it won't stop that from happening the first time, but it limits it to once. This means N improper votes require N humans, and as N gets large the odds of keeping it secret go to zero.
There have been lots of reports of non-citizens being registered to vote in the US. It is very rare, but elections are also generally very close races.
I dont get how people can just shrug off reports of dead people and non-citizens being registered to vote as a non-issue.
How many of those dogs registered to vote showed up and cast a ballot?
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If anyone actually cares enough to have a mostly accurate cost effective voter registration database, they'd reuse any one of our existing national demographic databases. But they don't. Because the recurring drama caused by our existing fragmented poorly funded more error prone system is too useful.
Yeah I'm sure all of them are false, and our voter registration systems with practically zero layers of authentication have proven to be infallible over the years.
Voter fraud of that form basically doesn't exist. You are already marked as voted at your designated polling place. A purple finger is just for show, even in other countries. Its like a "I Voted" sticker.
How will the voters who are (reportedly) unable to obtain ID be able up get their prints into the verification system?
I have been informed by social scientists that requiring voter ID is racist, so it seems that fingerprint checks would also be racist via the same logic.
> I have been informed by social scientists that requiring voter ID is racist
Do you have a personal opinion on that? I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody.
We have a few basic rules for voters in this country, one is that they are citizens, two is that they are registered. Being able to demonstrate that you are the registered voter you claim to be seems to me to be essential to a fair election process.
> I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody
Would you say the same thing about poll taxes?
The idea of ID laws is not inherently racist. It's the implementations that are problematic.
For example, one jurisdiction that got in trouble for its voter ID law (I forget which one) was found by the courts to have, when writing their law, did a study of what forms of ID voters had, found out which of those had the biggest differences between prevalence among whites and among blacks, and then picked as the allowed forms of ID those that would most favor whites and disfavor blacks.
Places that aren't as blatant about it (or at least aren't dumb enough to actually talk about it in legislative committees for which subpoenable records are kept...) often leave hints that their motive is racial. For example, they might limit the number of places that can issue IDs, and reduce their operating hours, so that a poor person without a car (more likely to be black than white) has to take a long bus ride there and back, and has to take time off work to do so. This can be a serious hardship. (Worse, it might take more than one trip if there is any problem with the supporting documentation for the ID application. Unsurprisingly, it has been found that minor errors that tend to be overlooked when a middle class white person applies are much more likely to derail things for a poor black person).
Another hint that their motives are suspect is that such efforts are usually accompanied by efforts to make it harder for minorities to vote that have nothing to do with ID, such as closing polling places in minority neighborhoods and limiting voting hours, or reducing the number of voting machines at minority neighborhood polling places so that lines will be long.
If voter ID laws were actually about preventing voter fraud rather than about suppressing legitimate votes from poor and minorities, they would be accompanied by changes to make it cheap and easy for people to get the appropriate ID.
Also, they would be about registration ID, not voting ID, since what little fraud there actually is usually takes place via absentee ballots.
>Do you have a personal opinion on that? I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
In practical terms, there are a lot of people in the US that simply cannot afford to buy an ID - both because of the actual cost and because of the logistics and documentation required. Trying to get a certified birth certificate from another state when you are homeless is, I imagine, pretty damn hard and relatively expensive to do.
If the US had a system where ID was available to all completely without cost (and only taking a trivial amount of time) then I’d agree with you more.
Usually you need that ID to exercise your constitutional right to bear arms. If we can demand an ID for a right that is actually listed in our constitution, then surely we can demand one for voting.
If requiring the ID is really so discriminatory, then it has to go away for bearing arms as well. Is this something you want?
BTW, in terms of potential hazard, voting is a lot worse. Voting can lead to wars.
> Usually you need that ID to exercise your constitutional right to bear arms.
12 states have constitutional carry laws. I can buy and carry with no ID needed.
As for voting and issues in obtaining valid ID, I can guarantee if you're on HN, you are not the group being talked about getting an ID.
I had to obtain a birth certificate from my state. I had to drive 3 hours away, and pay $25, and drive 3 hours back to get it. And for someone who doesn't have a car, lives in the city, and lives week to week, they won't be getting a valid ID anytime soon.
Oh yeah, and they're primarily black and poor. That's why the racist claims are made.
>I don't see it as racist in any way, because it applies equally to everybody.
To build a little on what the other commenters are saying, I recently watched a talk about equity and how it compares to equality. There's a famous image of people of different heights looking over a fence[0] that shows well how equality does not always lead to justice. I have found it worthwhile, every time I see "equality" featured, to ask about how this is different than equity. In this case, it's inequitable (to a degree) because it is disadvantageous for the poor or other marginalized groups to jump through these hoops even if they're the same hoops that the advantaged groups have.
I'll also note this equality-equity distinction is making its way into mainstream American politics. On page 6 of the Green New Deal[1] is a provision that the federal government has the duty of promoting equity and justice for people oppressed because of their race or circumstance. This is noteworthy because (as far as I'm aware) federal law has only been providing equality so far, but now there's a shift in policy to provide equity and not ask for equality.
No strong opinion! But I understand there exists a legal precedent of disparate impact, such that a policy "applies equally to everyone" can end up being illegal because it effectively targets a protected class even though it doesn't have any language to that extent.
> I hate being outright dismissive but it sounds like an expensive html/pdf form with a printer attached.
I don't think that's dismissive at all. That's what it is, and it sounds good to me. Basically the computer is a scribe with perfect handwriting that fills out the paper ballot for the voter while the voter watches. Absolutely any voter is qualified to assert whether the ballot contains the votes they intended to cast.
From there, you could have the voter carry the ballot and drop it in a box that's being observed by any number of interested parties, providing old-fashioned accountability. Counting by scanner is an optional time saver, with hand counts as the alternative / double-check.
Don't forget that electronic voting machines can have accessibility features that paper ballots lack - having a glorified form printer is actually a sound design that lets us gain these benefits without the negatives.
How does that help? The paper ballots still need to be counted as they are the authoritative source of the final tally. An electronic tally does nothing useful and adds complexity.
Speed. One of the reasons some politicians want electronic voting is to have the tentative results in as fast as possible, so they can sod off to their respective celebration/mourning shindigs and call it a night. That the actual, lawful count follows in the course of hours or even days is, to them, then acceptable.
Having these machines do a preliminary tally gives you a more accurate forecast of the votes cast than exit polls.
Optical scan machines solve that issue quite nicely and more robustly, especially when a ballot needs to be spoiled due to error (it can be physically destoryed before tally instead of needing to support deletion or modification of records in the voting machine).
This is missing two completely unnecessary failure modes that pen and paper don't have:
1. You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret. Mind you that in addition to an attack inside the device, this can also happen via simple electromagnetic side channels inherent in the device--as has been demonstrated quite a while ago for Nedap voting computers by the dutch campaign against voting computers, where you could distinguish selected candicates by tuning an AM radio to the right frequency.
2. When the device malfunctions, whether due to a defect or sabotage, and only particular candidates can not be selected, that creates a side channel where the voter is effectively forced to unveil who they want to vote for.
Neither of those failure modes exist with paper ballots.
> Neither of those failure modes exist with paper ballots.
Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room? I mean, they really don't. It depends on your threat-model. A lot of things will come down to trust.
> 2. When the device malfunctions, whether due to a defect or sabotage, and only particular candidates can not be selected, that creates a side channel where the voter is effectively forced to unveil who they want to vote for.
See Butterfly ballots. Paper ballots in USA (Florida specifically) which basically had this flaw. It was confusing to know which circles and lines were going to the correct candidate you wished to vote for. Asking for help on the ballot would leak information on who you wanted to vote for.
A poorly done paper-ballot has its own set of issues.
> Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room?
And neither do touchscreens. Paper is better if it's not done comically wrong.
And even the worst paper ballots have a much smaller attack surface for plain old analog rumors than the best possible electronic system. The most powerful way to undermine a democracy is not flipping some votes to one candidate in perfect secrecy, it's making all candidates/camps believe that the other did. This could destroy a democracy even without a single vote having actually been tampered with.
Electronic voting, only understood by experts, is perfect soil for such rumors and no amount of open sourcing can change that. The many human counters involved in a hierarchical paper vote counting scheme are not just an unfortunate inefficiency left over from a time when machines could not count yet, they also serve as witnesses, not only for keeping their peers in check but also for dampening any unfounded rumors that might come up. They increase trust even when they are not actively speaking up against rumors, just by being there, in numbers, as passive dampening elements like the moderator rods in a fission plant.
And the solution to the flaws of butterfly ballots was the proliferation of insecure, dangerous touchscreen machines. Screw that. Give me a well-designed paper ballot.
> Paper ballots stop secret cameras in the ballot room?
Ballot rooms are just about as decentralised and non-standard as it's possible to get your head around. Voting machines are the exact opposite.
Are we actually discussing that someone could or would roll out a (nationwide?) network of hidden cameras across church halls, schools, and other places[0] where people go to cast paper ballots. Undetected?
Distributing compromised software - or designing your attack into the hardware - for voting machines would be child's play by comparison.
> You cannot know whether the device leaks your vote, i.e., whether your vote is secret.
The electronic voting machine never is granted your identity. But I'll grant it's possible that records of the voter identity with the ballot identity exist and could be used to map the voter's vote.
These might be good arguments for letting people fill the ballot in manually, if they wish. Based on the design as I understand it, it seems like users aren't prohibited from printing a blank ballot and taking a pen to it themselves.
The part I don't like is the printer. They're woefully unreliable devices. Having been an election judge, handling a bunch of flaky tech in polling places is the last thing the poll workers need. They have a lot to do already.
In MN, we use paper ballots with Scantron readers for excellent results. I'm not sure what problem this new system is supposed to solve that the Scantron model doesn't.
My grandma has shaky hands. She can’t really fill out a scantron. I have no problem with people filling out their own ballots. The pristine filled out and verified by the voter ballot seems harder to spoil than a hand filled out ballot.
My preference is for plenty of machines available to fill out paper ballots, but give voters the option of filling out by hand.
That’s why anyone should be permitted to watch the process from start to finish. Heck, videotape the collection box from the moment it is shown to be empty and sealed till the ballots are retrieve. Videotape the counting process. Do all this in the public square, televised and streamed.
If you live in a place like I do, we’re a one party place where primary elections are the real elections, and you don’t have the competitive pressures that are inherent to a multi-party contest.
We also had a huge upsurge in “write in” votes, as the paper forms are difficult to interpret.
Poll based opscans are (should be) configured to reject spoiled (or unreadable) ballots.
So ballot marking technologies have marginal utility. Expensive fix for a non-problem.
For complying with HAVA mandated accessibility, the Automark is slightly less bad than the others. The only solution which actually fulfilled all the requirements and was preferred by the disabled community is a non-electronic protective ballot sleeve called the Vote-PAD. Alas, it hasn't been available for quite some time. Being cost effective, meaning less pork, it didn't have any champions.
Fortunately, a new ballot marker, twenty years too late, doesn't help with the increasingly fashionable postal balloting, so there's no danger this latest noble effort will have any benefit.
I'd say that the massive investment is necessary because of how uncomplicated this particular system is. Without a large, sprawling, and well-funded project backing it, a simple (and probably far more reliable) solution can lack credibility when compared to more complicated alternatives.
I do agree that the paper trail is a great thing. I'm not fundamentally against electronic voting, but I haven't heard of a system that can really compete with the simplicity and verifiability of the immutablility you get from paper ballots inside ballot boxes being watched over by interested parties on all sides.