So they open the source ... how do I know that's what's running on the voting machine? There's really no good practical solution to this problem. What matters more is that there is a voter-verified paper audit trail and that this record is actually counted. At least by spot check risk-limiting audits, but ideally just count every vote manually to verify.
> There's really no good practical solution to this problem.
Remote attestation via trusted execution environments is a thing. It is not a theoretical one either. See, for example, Graphene OS's Auditor app[0]. Solving this for voting machines in particular would be a matter of good design, not of solving fundamentally hard problems.
These files are actually cursed and I want all drives that contain their data destroyed with acid. But I have a slight feeling other voting software isn't really any better, even though in theory it should be relatively simple software in the grand scheme of things.
I would be fine if they had at least the same level of scrutiny as slot machines --- can we turn Citizens United around and argue that since dollars can be used to buy speech which influences votes, voting machine should have the same level of scrutiny/verification/auditing which applies to finance?
The software doesn't matter that much. If you want to use voting machines, you need to create a paper trail with them that can be audited.
Auditing the software isn't enough if you can't reliably verify that this is actually what's running on the machines, or if the machines weren't otherwise tampered with in some way.
Here in Germany, the Pirate Party has discussed the topic at length, since they (1) love voting innovations, and (2) have generally good knowledge on CS stuff, and so far I think no real solution is known for anonymous, confidential, secure digital voting with verifiable results, which is easy to reach with paper ballots and public observers of the counting.
Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires *any* expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipulation-proof to a 7 year old, your voting system is untrustworthy.
This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.
From a process perspective, how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted, every voter in the system was legal, and the final tally was authentic? Especially when there's no way to even audit what you voted for after the fact?
Every time I try to get to the bottom of this, it always boils down to "trust the system" which makes me uneasy.
My preference (I think) is we have a federal holiday "America Day", (call it Trump day for all I care) where we celebrate, hand out cookies, friends and family get together, etc. and we all vote in person.
One of the weaknesses in our democracy is the insistency of doing things virtually - it's the same weakness exposed by social media.
Electronic systems are always going to be subject to hacking and manipulation, and are more easy to hack and manipulate at a large scale (scaling is the point of software). In-person voting is still subject to manipulation, but you can just go back and look at the ballots on paper as they are. You get more targeted manipulation, but it's probably easier for a single person to uncover and reason about.
I live in The Netherlands. We are a reasonable modern country, where a lot of things are automated, even in governmental organizations. However, voting is still done on paper ballots. And those paper ballots are then counted manually. This has huge benefits. There always is a paper trail. It’s hard to manipulate votes without getting caught. If there’s any doubt about a certain district’s results, the votes can be recounted. This happens regularly.
Why do we need machines? Counting the votes for e.g. the parliament only takes 24 hours or so, generally. And we don’t have elections every week, right?
You should acknowledge the tradeoff: physical presence is the condition.
It might not happen much in the Netherlands, but for instance making it so fewer people reach voting stations is a classic move. That's one of the failure mode avoided by the other means.
Voting ballots straight getting lost/destroyed is another failure mode, and yes it happens more than we want it to.
The sheer time to get the vote counted is also an issue, and we've seen voter sentiment shifting while the vote is still ongoing, with the media reporting directly influencing the outcome.
It could still be the saner tradeoff in the end, but it's misleading to present it as some ideal or inherently reliable solution.
Complaining about electronic voting (absolutely valid and reasonable take btw) while living in the country with first past the post election system, is like complaining about bad wall insulation in a house which is on fire. Yes, insulation is a actual valid problem. But maybe not a Priority 1 at that particular moment.
In first past the post system, between 1% to 49% of votes are stolen and tossed by design. This actually, not hypothetically happens, in real life. Electronic voting maybe can be abused, and maybe some significant number votes may be defrauded. But in FPTP it has actually happened already and at a much worse scale. Imo the real high priority issue is obvious.
> Public Trust Demands Open-Source Voting Systems (voting.works)
Unless something has changed recently, election integrity demands a voter-verified paper ballot that is retained with security by the authority, and can be physically counted, as a check against compromised or defective digital systems.
Open source is not sufficient. Don't let marketing sound bites be a confusing diversion from the problem.
If the US understands anything this year, it's how important elections are. Hopefully we get another one.
The technology forum that despises technology, what a world. We should be expanding voting access, not taking it back to the 19th century. Vote with whatever means you have: wanna show up physically and hand-write your ballot, great!, wanna mail it in, go for it!, wanna vote via website or app, have fun!
Who gives a shit man, it's not going to be the end of the world or even substantially change things no matter what methods we choose. You might as well choose the ones that make things easier on people. Crazy that the world wide information network that we've built and defines our current age in history is treated like some horrible evil. It's not, it will be fine. But with vote by website now every home, school, and library in the country becomes a polling place.
There is no amount of transparency that will achieve the mythical "public trust" that's being envisioned. Our current voting system is all paper right now, actual voting fraud—meaning literal ballot stuffing is nonexistent and still people buy into conspiracy theories. Voting manipulation happens in broad daylight at the systems level and is done by carefully restricting access. Expand access and the problem vanishes.
I don’t really understand the blind trust in paper in person ballots. Historically and currently, elections are stolen all the time whether paper or not. Off the top of my head some recent ones: election irregularities in Venezuela and the Russian referendums in Crimea.
If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.
I've been saying it for years. We are more than capable of creating an official USA app that every American can download, test their knowledge on a topic, and vote. If X.com can implement polling, why can't the US Gov? In my opinion, they want to portray the illusion of democracy, not actually implement it.
I think, that there is only one way to make voting machines to be trustworthy. If anyone can run ballots through their own machine to verify results, AND there will be multiple parties doing exactly this, then you can trust the outcome.
But still it is not a way to fight a political party that will use dummy machine that counts each ballot as a vote for them, and then accusing all others that they are trying to steal the elections. It is an unbelievable stupid tactic, but I think it may work in USA, judging by people eager to believe any BS if it supports their party.
The US has the worst voting system intentionally, not accidentally. And mail-in voting shows we aren't even a little serious about election integrity. We're militantly against it: you can get people to rabidly support universal IDs for trivial, nonsensical reasons that have never resulted in significant problems; and to demand digital IDs, device attestation, and real names on social media; but to the same people showing IDs to vote is supposed to be the end of democracy.
People have made this proposal every year since the 90s, and depending on the year it was the Republicans rabidly opposing it or the Democrats rabidly opposing it. Good luck getting things accomplished with a good argument. That's not how things get done. The people who get the final say about this would love to get rid of voting altogether, but they'll settle for vendor kickbacks.
Under appreciated benefit of hand-counting paper ballots: it is an opportunity for participation in your democracy.
I had the privilege of helping count votes in my small town 2012. Volunteers stayed up after voting ended and all of the ballots were double checked - counted by two separate people, working together at a long table. Cheating or manipulation was inconceivable, and there were many layers of double checking.
The beauty of this system is it is infinitely scalable. The more voters there are, the more vote counting volunteers there are. For larger cities you can split up by blocks or per polling place. There should be many polling places to make voting easy and accessible.
It isn’t fast or fancy or glamorous. But communities ignore the power of communal activities at their peril.
49 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadRemote attestation via trusted execution environments is a thing. It is not a theoretical one either. See, for example, Graphene OS's Auditor app[0]. Solving this for voting machines in particular would be a matter of good design, not of solving fundamentally hard problems.
[0] https://attestation.app/
* Opens Cargo.lock [1] and pnpm-lock.yaml [2]
* Closes Cargo.lock and pnpm-lock.yaml
* Goes to find a Tylenol
At least with open source we can see the sausage getting made...
[1] https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite/blob/main/Cargo.lock
[2] https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite/blob/main/pnpm-lock.y...
Watch out that you don't catch the autism :) /s
> [1] https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite/blob/main/Cargo.lock
> [2] https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite/blob/main/pnpm-lock.y...
These files are actually cursed and I want all drives that contain their data destroyed with acid. But I have a slight feeling other voting software isn't really any better, even though in theory it should be relatively simple software in the grand scheme of things.
Auditing the software isn't enough if you can't reliably verify that this is actually what's running on the machines, or if the machines weren't otherwise tampered with in some way.
• Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI>
• Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs>
Here in Germany, the Pirate Party has discussed the topic at length, since they (1) love voting innovations, and (2) have generally good knowledge on CS stuff, and so far I think no real solution is known for anonymous, confidential, secure digital voting with verifiable results, which is easy to reach with paper ballots and public observers of the counting.
how then should voters who are not physically present in their voting district cast their votes?
There is fundamentally no difference between a mail-in ballot and a ballot you drop at an arbitrary box somewhere.
This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.
Every time I try to get to the bottom of this, it always boils down to "trust the system" which makes me uneasy.
One of the weaknesses in our democracy is the insistency of doing things virtually - it's the same weakness exposed by social media.
Electronic systems are always going to be subject to hacking and manipulation, and are more easy to hack and manipulate at a large scale (scaling is the point of software). In-person voting is still subject to manipulation, but you can just go back and look at the ballots on paper as they are. You get more targeted manipulation, but it's probably easier for a single person to uncover and reason about.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
Why do we need machines? Counting the votes for e.g. the parliament only takes 24 hours or so, generally. And we don’t have elections every week, right?
It might not happen much in the Netherlands, but for instance making it so fewer people reach voting stations is a classic move. That's one of the failure mode avoided by the other means.
Voting ballots straight getting lost/destroyed is another failure mode, and yes it happens more than we want it to.
The sheer time to get the vote counted is also an issue, and we've seen voter sentiment shifting while the vote is still ongoing, with the media reporting directly influencing the outcome.
It could still be the saner tradeoff in the end, but it's misleading to present it as some ideal or inherently reliable solution.
In first past the post system, between 1% to 49% of votes are stolen and tossed by design. This actually, not hypothetically happens, in real life. Electronic voting maybe can be abused, and maybe some significant number votes may be defrauded. But in FPTP it has actually happened already and at a much worse scale. Imo the real high priority issue is obvious.
Unless something has changed recently, election integrity demands a voter-verified paper ballot that is retained with security by the authority, and can be physically counted, as a check against compromised or defective digital systems.
Open source is not sufficient. Don't let marketing sound bites be a confusing diversion from the problem.
If the US understands anything this year, it's how important elections are. Hopefully we get another one.
Who gives a shit man, it's not going to be the end of the world or even substantially change things no matter what methods we choose. You might as well choose the ones that make things easier on people. Crazy that the world wide information network that we've built and defines our current age in history is treated like some horrible evil. It's not, it will be fine. But with vote by website now every home, school, and library in the country becomes a polling place.
There is no amount of transparency that will achieve the mythical "public trust" that's being envisioned. Our current voting system is all paper right now, actual voting fraud—meaning literal ballot stuffing is nonexistent and still people buy into conspiracy theories. Voting manipulation happens in broad daylight at the systems level and is done by carefully restricting access. Expand access and the problem vanishes.
If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.
If the goal is public trust, open source isn't helpful for the general public.
But still it is not a way to fight a political party that will use dummy machine that counts each ballot as a vote for them, and then accusing all others that they are trying to steal the elections. It is an unbelievable stupid tactic, but I think it may work in USA, judging by people eager to believe any BS if it supports their party.
The US has the worst voting system intentionally, not accidentally. And mail-in voting shows we aren't even a little serious about election integrity. We're militantly against it: you can get people to rabidly support universal IDs for trivial, nonsensical reasons that have never resulted in significant problems; and to demand digital IDs, device attestation, and real names on social media; but to the same people showing IDs to vote is supposed to be the end of democracy.
People have made this proposal every year since the 90s, and depending on the year it was the Republicans rabidly opposing it or the Democrats rabidly opposing it. Good luck getting things accomplished with a good argument. That's not how things get done. The people who get the final say about this would love to get rid of voting altogether, but they'll settle for vendor kickbacks.
I had the privilege of helping count votes in my small town 2012. Volunteers stayed up after voting ended and all of the ballots were double checked - counted by two separate people, working together at a long table. Cheating or manipulation was inconceivable, and there were many layers of double checking.
The beauty of this system is it is infinitely scalable. The more voters there are, the more vote counting volunteers there are. For larger cities you can split up by blocks or per polling place. There should be many polling places to make voting easy and accessible.
It isn’t fast or fancy or glamorous. But communities ignore the power of communal activities at their peril.