Great Article

It's all about the chain of trust, IMHO.

When the record of the vote is one and the same with the act of voting, the chain of trust is complete between the voter and the record of their vote. Intent is preserved and this is why:

When one changes physical media to indicate the vote, the intent of the vote, the action and the record of that action are all embodied in the changed media. Secondly, physical changes, we all can observe, are very difficult to modify, without leaving behind some evidence of a less than perfect vote record.

In this, the vote moves from the voters mind to the ballot, becoming the vote cast, in a trustworthy way.

When we let a machine record a vote record, then the chain of trust is then broken between voter and vote cast. This is a vote by proxy, which breaks the chain of trust between the voter and their vote cast. What then is recorded is what the machine thought the voter intent was, not the actual vote itself. This is not trustworthy and does not allow for variations in intent as the actual action of the voter is not recorded, but only an interpetation of the voters action.

Where modification of the vote record is concerned, it gets ugly when electronic voting is involved. Electrons can simply change states without leaving behind physical evidence. If this were not true, computers would be very different today, if not impossible.

This broken chain of trust is why we should not be allowing companies to:

make a profit on recording and counting votes

, and

render any aspect of the process secret.


Here's an exit strategy:

Whenever the issue of cost comes to the table, point out that democracy has a price. That cost can be dollars, if we are willing to hire untrustworthy proxies to handle our voting issues, or it can be in terms of time and effort by the citizens involved and impacted by the democratic process.

All proxies are untrustworthy, simply because their presence in the process breaks the chain of trust between voter and their vote cast, and also the chain between votes cast and the final tally. Any process whereby the public cannot follow a single, specific vote record from the voter to the final tally, is not a trustworthy process. How practical it is to do this does not matter, the ability to do so does as this insures the chain of trust remains intact.

Where a voter needs a proxy, let the voter make their own trust decision to their satisfaction. They could use a machine, or have another trusted person help them cast their vote. We are a nation of free people, we should not be making trust decisions like this for everyone on principle alone.

The cost in terms of people and time is a far easier and more meaningful burden to meet if we consider the merits of our general awareness of our civic duties. Making elections fast and easy detracts from their importance and that, in turn, marginalizes the debate as a whole, as if it's something we cannot be bothered with in lieu of more important things.

Democracy is only as good as the people want it to be. If our focus is on making the process as quick and easy as possible, is that not putting the focus on the wrong elements, thus diminishing the value for all?

For a solid means of voting, take a look at Oregon and their vote by mail system. All four core elemets of a trustworthy election are properly embodied in a solid balance between time, labor, cost and trust.

It's transparent in that the voter can easily know how their vote ends up in the final tally. It uses a physical vote record directly for the count, which is done by machine, but under the public eye with audits. Perfectly accpetable balance overall.

Oversight comes from the transparency and the public being able to deliver their votes directly, or by mail. Physical records at all levels allow for the necessary check on corruption inherent in electronic records.

Freedom comes from being able to deliver ones vote directly, or by mail. Being able to vote within a wide window also adds to this. Of course, one can easily vote or not, completing the picture here.

Finally, anonymonity is assured in that a sealed ballot system is used. Each voter certifies their vote by placing it within a container, sealed and signed for verification. Verifying a vote as being from a valid registered voter is kept seperate from the vote itself. Votes are kept sealed until it is time for the count where they are unsealed, counted and audited by hand to check the counter machines accuracy.

All votes are physically recorded for recounts later on, and these votes are not personally identifiable.

One other advantage of this is the large time window for voting.

It is very difficult to discourage voting when voters are not aggragated in one particular place and time. Turnout is higher in general because voting is easy and can be done when it makes sense for the voter.

Challenges, poorly crafted polls, last minute commercial slams, and other means to discourage or manupulate the votes cast are all costly as a result.

We need greater awareness of this.

(Sorry, this got really long. Maybe I'll stuff it in a diary for later....)

by Doug Dingus (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 6 diaries, 15 comments) on Friday, August 25, 2006 at 10:37:03 AM
 

"Chain of Trust" solution fatally flawed

This comment makes some worthy points, but like the Oregon vote-by-mail system it comends, it overlooks some serious problems.

Any scheme that enables a voter to determine whether his/her vote was counted correctly suffers from an inherent flaw-- it also enables the voter to prove how s/he voted to someone else. That ability opens the door to vote buying and voter coercion. It's to prevent such inducements that we have polling places where voters' privacy is protected and voters' ballots are secret (Oregon's mail-in voting suffers from the same flaw-- what were they thinking?).

This is one of those problems that's easier to solve if it is generalized. If a voter is convinced that the system's design and implementation guarantee that all votes are counted correctly, it follows that his/her own vote must be counted correctly. This calls for a system in which vote counting is open and transparent, based on paper ballots (not necessarily marked by hand) which can be counted as many times, in as many different ways, as necessary to satisfy skeptics.

As the comment notes, mail-in voting offers a large time window for voting, which confers the substantial benefit of making it harder to discourage voters by skimping on equipment (as in Ohio in 2004). But mail-in voting is not the only way to achieve this worthy goal. In Travis County, Texas, polls are open for early voting as much as two weeks before the official election day. There aren't as many polling places as on election day, but they are open for longer hours, and in convenient locations such as libraries and supermarkets. Electronic voting stations make it easy to furnish each voter with the ballot style appropriate for her precinct. Unlike mail-in balloting, ballot secrecy is preserved.

Electronic voting stations make it conceivable to extend this early-voting idea beyond the boundaries of a single county. Imagine being able to vote for your own precinct's dogcatcher regardless of where you happen to be in your state --or even the entire US or at a US embassy, consulate, or military base abroad. Suitable standardization of ballot formats would enable your precinct's ballot form to be downloaded into the machine on which you make your selections. When you've made your choices, the machine prints your filled-in ballot; you check it, seal it in an envelope, and hand it to the election official, who takes the necessary steps to get it to your own precinct, where it is counted along with the ballots cast locally on election day.

With a system like that, mail-in ballots --and the attendant threats of vote buying and voter coercion-- would be unnecessary.

by Hamilton Richards (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments) on Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 4:28:54 PM
 

E-voting: the pluses without the minuses

To eliminate electronics from voting would be to discard the baby with the bathwater. By thinking a little more carefully about the problem, we can separate the bathwater from the baby, i.e., we can retain the benefits of electronic voting while eliminating its risks.

Electronic voting technology's advantages over hand-marked paper ballots are substantial-- e-voting caters nicely to diverse languages and multiple ballot styles, saving the cost of printing and securely storing and transporting thousands of blank ballots. They also enable many voters with disabilities to vote without assistance, i.e., privately.

The trouble starts when e-voting machines are also given the responsibility of tallying the votes. To deserve voters' trust, the process of counting the votes must be open and transparent, and there's nothing transparent about silicon circuitry. As has been said before, the purpose of counting votes is to convince the losers that they lost; if the losers can't see the votes being counted, the arguments can never be settled.

So how can we have both the benefits of e-voting and the transparency of open vote counting? Easy-- just restrict the job of the e-voting machines to printing each voter's filled-in ballot. Note that I'm not suggesting the dinky reel-to--reel "toilet paper" audit-trail printers now being retrofitted to DREs in many states. The ballots I'm suggesting would be printed in large friendly letters on 8.5 x 11 paper. They would be easy for voters to read, check, and drop into an ordinary ballot box. Would this be expensive? Suitable laser printers can be bought at retail for under $150.

After the polls close, the machine-printed ballots would be counted by hand or by optical scanning. Either way, the machine-printed ballots would eliminate the judgment calls often necessary to infer the voter's intent from ballots marked by hand. They would be free of overvotes and disqualifying stray marks. And like all paper ballots, they would remain available for recounting until the losers are finally convinced.

A system like the one I've described has been designed and prototyped by the Open Voting Consortium. You can read all about it at www.openvoting.org.

by Hamilton Richards (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments) on Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 3:30:43 PM