Towns are testing new ballot counting machines that use open source software

https://www.nhpr.org/politics/2022-11-07/three-n-h-towns-are-testing-out-new-ballot-counting-machines-that-use-open-source-software

by Jimmc414 • 4 years ago

116 162 4 years ago

nhpr.org

djbusby• 4 years ago

It's the https://www.voting.works/ VotingWorks project

philips4• 4 years ago

VotingWorks is doing so much good between their risk limiting audit software, their voting machines that use many off the shelf parts to lower cost/maintenance, and of course the open source nature opening up the potential for a competitive market without rip and replace.

Since the article didn’t mention the RLA stuff it is here: https://www.voting.works/risk-limiting-audits

A favorite part of watching their journey has been their case study videos which were produced after they ran their first elections in small Mississippi jurisdictions: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvehCClJUfizMrg5vyBKpqUVu...

For those in San Francisco they are doing a pilot this year: https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/2022_01_25%20PRESS%20R...

disclosure: I am a donor to VotingWorks and previously a member of the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission.

sieabahlpark• 4 years ago

Why would I trust anything with "off the shelf" parts (China) and elections in California?

You've listed two pieces that are not truly in favor of legitimate or honest elections.

hedora• 4 years ago

Talking about how these machines are open source is misleading. They (like many, many other voting machines already in use) are designed to let you run an election without actually trusting the software on the machines. From the risk limiting auditing link above:

How Does a RLA Work?
A risk-limiting audit examines a random sample of paper ballots, comparing them to the machine count to ensure that the winner actually won.
The number of votes needed to manually count depends on the margin of victory. The closer the margin, the more votes we manually count. The RLA confirms that, if a full hand-tally were performed, it would give the same outcome.

Put another way, the malicious voting machine plays a game: It makes the first move by lying about the tally and incorrectly claiming that candidate X wins.

If the machine claims X won by a large margin, then a small randomized recount exposes its lie. If the machine claims X won by a small margin, then a full recount is performed.

Crucially, with high probability (it can be set arbitrarily high), the faulty voting machines get caught the first time they attempt this, and then are thrown away.

There are some voting machines in use in the US that do not keep paper trails. There's widespread evidence of systematic fraud with those machines in swing districts, going back to a least 2004. (Old paperless mechanical machines had the same problem.)

philips4• 4 years ago

I have been involved in elections in both Oregon and California and the hardware from the incumbent vendors is mostly regular off the shelf general purpose computer hardware which as we know isnt always produced fully domestically.

The difference is that the voting machine incumbents wrap their hardware and software in unfair licenses with single source provisions so municipalities end up paying a huge markup over retail to get “certified gear”.

In San Francisco one of the voting machines I managed as a poll manager in 2018 was a early pentium machine with a BIOS and floppy. These machines were never designed to be remotely attested let alone tamper evident like modern Chromebooks.

Anyways, the VotingWorks systems are all based on paper ballots so hand counts and risk limiting audits are options if the hardware is found to be untrustworthy.

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

The nice thing is that all the votes with this system are on paper ballots. The paper ballots can then be verified against the machine counts.

It does not stop people from stuffing ballot boxes, but it does stop people from fudging the machine count too much.

systemvoltage5• 4 years ago

Would this speed up counting process?

One party continues to prepare people with "Please be patience"

The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day.

Why don't we solve this problem? Seems like it sows more division and doubts, whether legitimate or not and threatens democracy. Why don't we also ask voters for IDs like many other nations? We need to work for solutions, not gas lighting each other and make progress. Solution here should be that we have a common understanding of 1 person = 1 ballot = 1 ID. MIB should have a postmark date 4 days prior to election day, not on election day like in California.

Elections need to run like clockwork and with precision. Give no excuses to anyone sowing doubts.

philips4• 4 years ago

Oregon has been state wide mail in voting only for decades and they allow post mark date of election day.

I honestly think we all need to reset expectations that voting day means we get the result. It puts too much pressure on speed over accuracy.

I want election workers to focus in getting it right and to feel they have the space to do that if they have hardware failures or other issues.

As part of my work on the SF Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Commission I learned a bit about how all the media companies scrape various non standard tabulation formats from all municipalities big and small all over the country. And I was simply frightened. As citizens we have enabled media companies to “call” elections via these scrapers and statistical methods instead of waiting for certified results from the municipalities. It is error prone and calling it wrong because a parser had a bug or because a random government web server was hacked seems like a silly unnecessary risk.

mikeyouse2• 4 years ago

The party that sows doubt does so intentionally because it helps them politically. In many states that are controlled by that party, they’ve passed legislation preventing the government from even opening envelopes before polls close on Election Day, much less processing the ballots or counting the votes.

geysersam7• 4 years ago

You have been duped by hysterics.

The US certainly has problems. Election integrity isn't one of them.

Read here about the Australian election. The official result can take up to ten days. https://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/how-are-the-votes-count...

That doesn't mean it will always take long before a winner is clear. But it's certainly not a one day process!

Have you seen the distribution of seats in the Japanese parlament? No wonder the counting process is not exactly nail bitingly exciting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Japanese_general_electi...

Brazil have an electronic ballot counting system. That comes with its own set of tradeoffs.

One id, one vote

If a significant portion of the electorate do not have an id this is a non-starter.

Izkata2• 4 years ago

The other party continues to sow doubt in the election integrity with "We can't even count ballots like Brazil, Japan and Australia" on the same day.

That comparison isn't even the problem, the problem is that we used to be able to. Does no one else remember staying up late on election night to see the result?

ck2• 4 years ago

Well that's one less thing about voting weaponized.

Now if only gerrymandering could be undone, it's the real nightmare.

WalterBright14• 4 years ago

Do you know about the cut-the-cake algorithm? A piece of cake is to be divided among two kids. Kid A cuts the cake, Kid B gets the choice of slice. It's fair.

I recall reading about a mathematician who devised a cut-the-cake algorithm that would work for gerrymandering. Naturally, nobody adopted it, because nobody in power wants fair gerrymandering.

cudgy6• 4 years ago

How would this work in reality? One party committee proposes 5 voting district maps that lean toward their desired outcome. The other party chooses the least damaging one. Not sure this helps much.

Or how about 5 random maps that evenly divide the state? Voters vote on the maps and most voted map wins.

wnoise• 4 years ago

"A Partisan Districting Protocol with Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781

Very cool. Though it does freeze in the two-party nature.

ShredKazoo• 4 years ago

Gerrymandering happens because districts are constantly getting redrawn for population changes.

What if we took the opposite approach, and instead of making it so every district had approximately the same population, made it so each representative's vote was weighted by the population of their district? Could then use county boundaries (assuming the number of counties is >= the number of representatives)

Could even weight by # of votes obtained rather than district population, to incentivize being the preferred representative for as many people in your district as possible. I like having a few pro-consensus forces in our politics in a time of polarization.

WalterBright14• 4 years ago

Being open source is a very good idea, but it doesn't mean the software that's actually loaded into the machines isn't compromised.

The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result.

What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago. Banking software has been compromised in the past, but the audit ability catches it.

drewbug01• 4 years ago

The way to minimize the risk of that is to have two voting machines, with independently developed software in each. Then see if the two produce the same result.

How could this possibly work, without having the precise same votes entered into each machine (an impossible to guarantee prerequisite)?

WalterBright14• 4 years ago

Start with a stack of ballots. Run the stack through one machine. Run the same stack through another machine. Check the tallies. If they differ, then the counts are discarded and the stack goes to perhaps a hand count.

Each stack is handled by two people, one from each party. One feeds the machine, the other watches him.

shagie• 4 years ago

That particular device pictured is a scanner. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/9956d4f/21474836...

It can scan a scantron sheet in which the page, side, column and row are used to generate a number. For example a bubble filled in on page 1, side 1, column 4, row 8 would generate 110408. There is some business logic here that says that "For page 1, side 1, only one of 0408, 0409, 0410 may be entered".

At the end, however, you get a number counted that is then tallied for and then that is mapped back to Bob Smith for the votes.

Note the alignment guides on the sides - https://www.amazon.com/Official-SCANTRON-Brand-Answer-Sheet/...

If the scanner detects a barcode page being entered (that was generated by a touch screen system), then one of the barcodes encodes the number 110408, and the barcode is read rather than trying to go from the scantron page guides.

---

In the case, you've got the scanner here, you enter them into the scanner and get the vote counts "live". Then, you take them out of the secured spot and scan them all in to the other machine and compare the vote tallies.

There is a paper ballot that is recording this.

In the event that there is a recount, then the paper ballot is examined and the name next to the bubble is what the human auditor uses to count votes.

jjeaff2• 4 years ago

That's why almost all voting machines leave an auditable paper trail.

okanat• 4 years ago

Congrats for inventing the most expensive pen in the world.

theptip3• 4 years ago

I believe the generally accepted way of solving this problem is to do Risk Limiting Audits of the system; randomly sample districts, and then manually recount until you're confident to X sigma that the results are correct (or, if the audit diverges, you trigger a full manual recount). Citation: https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/

There's a recent report that goes into a lot of details on the various improvements that should be prioritized in the current system: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the....

WalterBright14• 4 years ago

Banks don't randomly apply banking controls to check for fraud, they do it for all the money flows.

The original idea of double entry bookkeeping was to:

1. catch errors

2. make fraud much more difficult

It's been in continuous use since the 13th century. It works. The reason it works is because an error, to remain undetected, requires a matching error somewhere else.

That's what "balancing the books" means.

somenameforme4• 4 years ago

I don't really understand why we are always stuck in the past on things like this. 155 million votes, spread out over thousands of polling stations is a minuscule number. Why not have each voting station digitally scan/print every ballot cast, and then once the stations close - upload everything to a centralized and publicly accessible server organized by station and their reported polling result. If anybody wants to do a recount, they can - to whatever degree of confidence, and using whatever method they prefer.

One might still make claims of ballot stuffing or exclusion, but there would be literally zero doubt that the count itself was accurate.

ravel-bar-foo2• 4 years ago

A fundamental limitation of RLAs is that they don't follow the ballot chain of custody, only the counting procedure. So if you have an old-fashioned political machine with dead people voting or people in nursing homes being scammed out of their votes it will not appear in RLAs.

matrix_overload• 4 years ago

The problem isn't in the technology, the problem is with people. The idea of voting is that 2 groups with opposing views agree on a compromise - a fair set of rules that determines which side won. So if the losing is convinced that they've lost fair and square, they will focus on a better campaign next time, rather than on starting a revolt.

Except for the past half-a-decade the media is increasingly pitting people against each other. Each side considers their rivals evil or crazy and is not ready to respect their opinion, listen or compromise. This creates incentives to cheat and legitimate reasons to suspect cheating. No matter what algorithmical or organizational approach you take, there will be always human factor, and hence reason for doubt. And the only way to resolve it is to make sure that you can always recheck the results in a way that satisfies the losing party, rather than screaming "blasphemy" to shut them up.

squarefoot• 4 years ago

The damage is done. Currently I don't think there are ways to convince people that vote results are legit, short of eliminating secrecy and have every single person put their preference on a record that can be accessed anytime from anywhere. That however has its pros and cons, and is considered anti democratic.

devindotcom• 4 years ago

Placing the blame on "the media" over the last five years is not really correct. People have been undermining basic election rights and processes for quite a while and while both parties engage in it the right is far more active and devious in gerrymandering, eroding legal protections, etc. Trust in government in general is low but elections have been quite fairly run and provably so to a reasonable doubter. But doubters have been given free rein to be unreasonable, hence they doubt the auditors, and the auditors of the auditors, all the way up. Losing fair and square is no longer something many people think is possible for their party.

The media has covered this with varying effect but we hardly conjured it into existence. In fact the media can barely keep the lights on, let alone fund the lawsuits, "grassroots" redistricting efforts, organized disinfo campaigns, etc that have shaped politics at the state level — including anti-media campaigns that paint the elite mainstream media as the authors of the present electoral crisis.

cm21872• 4 years ago

That's why you need a process so transparent there is no possible suspicion of cheating. Software is exactly the opposite of transparency. Paper ballots opened locally and counted publicly is the only solution.

adlpz2• 4 years ago

Auditable is the key.

However I actually advocate for fully manual, several-humans-in-the-loop counting as it's been done forever and is still done in many other first world countries.

That and scrupulous chain-of-trust on the actual ballots is , in my opinion, the only truly safe way.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Exactly. The problems in the US run way deeper than just the technicalities of voting. Both sides have been trying to bend the processes and rules their way for decades. Gerrymandering, campaign financing, elaborate propaganda campaigns, special interest lobbying (including by companies making voting machines), foreign interference (e.g. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/11/07/putin-linked-busin...), etc.

There is no basis for trust here that parties are even trying to play by the rules. They are actively using every trick known to them to gain an advantage and the financial stakes are high enough for people to look the other way given enough plausible deniability.

So, start with making the voting process as transparent as possible and just go back to counting votes manually. It won't solve all the issues but it will reduce the endless bickering about who actually won the votes that were issued.

2Gkashmiri2• 4 years ago

why can't voting happen on machine-online in realtime basis?

we can do polls for thousands and millions on facebook for example and the results are instant. everyone gets one vote and there is no double spend problems so why is political voting living in dark ages?

sure it has open source software now but in india for example, machines are transported physcially, they are tampered with in the interim, machines get lost on and on

isn't this a solved issue for any online portal?

josephcsible• 4 years ago

The difference between Facebook polls and elections is that there aren't severe consequences of a Facebook poll indicating the wrong winner.

34675904565• 4 years ago

Facebook polls are neither secret nor verifiable. Facebook knows how everyone voted, and voters cannot verify that Facebook is reporting the correct result. Those problems can theoretically be solved with cryptography (assuming the voter has full control of the device used to cast their vote), but not in a way the average voter can understand and verify.

Another problem with online voting is that malware can infect a voter's device to spy on how they vote and/or change their vote. I don't think there is a solution to that problem.

Online voting is a terrible idea. The only way to have secure elections is to publicly count every ballot by hand. If you think that's too expensive, you think electoral democracy is too expensive.

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Why even bother with that? Could just release instant results and always do a manual count of the paper ballots in the background.

h4kor2• 4 years ago

The way to minimize the risk is to not use voting machines.

eastbound• 4 years ago

The insistence of pro-machines is tiring. There is no argument in favor, in France with <5% voting machines, we know who’s the president with 95% certainty at 20:00:02 through television (through surveys, of course). So the argument “but it’s a big country!” doesn’t stand - France is already 67m.

OTOH, if I were a foreign power intent on falsifying an american election, I’d push as hard as I can for voting machines.

kaba0• 4 years ago

Technology strangely enough doesn’t solve voting — if there are publicly available machines, you can’t verify what is actually ran there, if they are some decentralized crypto-based “smart contract” you lose the ability to refrain from voting (e.g. an agressive husband can make her wife vote as he pleases, while with the traditional approach she can just go inside and say that she voted, while it’s truly up to her what she does.

I think paper votes with people who count votes (getting representation from every party, as well as volunteers) is a fair and okay system — it’s not like it will scale. The problem is parties (their very limited number, and tendency to find small, often unimportant differences and use “us vs them” against us), electorates and that humans are dumb as a whole. Not sure how to solve these.

simonh• 4 years ago

Paper voting has scaled for many decades, in many countries just fine by being decentralised.

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

What's important for voting confidence is having the count be auditable, which is much more important than having the machines be secure. After all, banks learned how to do that with money long ago.

Having the count be auditable doesn't really help you. If you have a pile of ballots, and you can prove with certainty that you've correctly counted what they say, you've made zero steps toward legitimacy. Where did the ballots come from?

This is a huge problem for secret ballots, where the goal of the system is that ballots can't be audited. It is not a problem for cash counting machines, because the only problem they're trying to solve is determining how much cash you have.

cm21872• 4 years ago

They need to be counted locally. In France the ballot boxes are translucide and counted at the voting station by members of the public.

WalterBright14• 4 years ago

Where did the ballots come from?

The same way the cops do it. Each bag of ballots has a chain-of-evidence protocol like the cops do.

Ballot boxes are opened by two people, one from each party. The ballots are put into the ballot bag, which is sealed. Both people then sign the bag and log its serial number. Every transfer up to the voting machine is witnessed and logged and signed for by two people, one from each party.

specialist5• 4 years ago

This is a novel take on the problem of election integrity.

Auditing in elections is called a full manual recount.

Verification in elections is the phrase for inspecting the hardware, software, processes, results. Which is probably why election integrity focused orgs have names like Election Verification Network and Verified Voting.

You did say "confidence", which is the correct framing, rather than "trust".

Much like our Constitution, confidence in our elections are built on "an orgy of mistrust", eg I watch you and you watch me, and when ultimately all the participants abide by the final results.

Which is moot when one party's platform is to reject the results, regardless of objective reality.

I don't have a clue how to address the cultural, sociological, and realpolitick parts of our country's current discord wrt election integrity. Though I do know there's no technical fix. Perhaps someday that party's voters will stop rewarding such belligerence.

schimmy_changa• 4 years ago

Discussed here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770

It's a great idea - transparent, able for anyone to verify, with a paper trail.

woah• 4 years ago

Why does voting need to be automated at all? Elections have run fine for hundreds of years with manual counts.

timeimp• 4 years ago

How else can the TV networks know on the day!?!?

I mean, run the elections on Saturday instead. Then you'd have a whole weekend to count without work getting in the way

adlpz2• 4 years ago

In other countries it's done manually and results are published as the counting happens and finished within the same day.

Of course the US is large, but I don't see how that's a limiting factor, being the process naturally very parallel.

encryptluks23• 4 years ago

Have they though? You deposit your vote, and have no way to know if it was counted as you intended. Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO.

hirundo2• 4 years ago

Having some way to anonymously verify your vote is an important part of election integrity IMO.

If you can verify your own vote you can use the same method to verify your vote to someone else, opening up the voter to the pressures that motivated voter privacy. Like payments for voting right or threats for voting wrong. So in some measure individual vote verification would trade transparency for vote coercion and selling.

_HMCB_• 4 years ago

In the end, a certain segment (and growing) will still say elections are rigged. “Transparency“ will be meaningless going forward; even after a code audit. The allegations: Someone intercepted the count in those few milliseconds after the voter submits; Someone siphoned votes away after the fact.

evolve2k• 4 years ago

The voting machine source code repo:

https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite-complete-system

Like what they are doing? Give them a star.

hayst4ck3• 4 years ago

The number 1 most important property of voting by far is that the results are believable.

Voting machines irreparably damage the believability that an election was fair. They require trust, they require operation, and they increase the blast radius of bad actors. They are fundamentally a black box, open source or not, because the operation of them is subject to human malfeasance. There is no guarantee the open source software itself is what is running on those machines.

I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify. I cannot even begin to explain the details or process of how an election is run. I can't even think of edge cases for voting and how they are addressed because there is too much I don't know I don't know. I can't tell you what prevents double voting, voting on behalf of non voters (for example if I knew 10 people who haven't voted in 30 years, I might be able to submit a ballot on behalf of them), or what prevents ballot interception. Some states use "signatures" yet my signature is not even remotely distinct.

It doesn't have to be this way.

In Taiwan, you go to your voting location, you vote in a booth, you put your ballot into a box, the box is opened after polling hours and votes are tallied publicly with anonymous ballots shown publicly as they are tallied. Ambiguous ballots are subject to public review. All unambiguous votes are counted. Everything except filling out the ballot itself is public.

When conservatives spew forth the big lie, that is not something that can be thrown under the rug. That is not a Trump problem, that is not a conserative problem, that is an America problem. If election results are not fairly undeniable, the basis of democracy (that those in the minority should submit to majority rule) is violated.

The fact that election officials are more concerned with "counting the vote" than "our voting integrity is unimpeachable" is a big problem.

bilekas• 4 years ago

The fact that there has been no evidence of any significant voter fraud, machine malfunction etc is a conservative problem.

I only see Left and Liberal believing in the data. And pushing for people to vote. Instead the right say "if we win it's good, if not we need to investigate". So I don't buy your line personally.

What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections? Serious question I'm curious. Because this is a fairly recent phenomenon that has exploded exponentially thanks to conservatives. Most famously Trump.

hayst4ck3• 4 years ago

I cannot verify or convince myself of the believability of an election. Therefore, it is reasonable for conservatives to not be able to convince themselves of the believability of an election. Therefore, while I believe that the conservative effort to deny elections is done in bad faith, there is a good faith argument to be made that there is a very serious problem with our elections.

The moral hazard is that because conservatives are bad faith, I can't imagine a good faith effort to improve election integrity.

What has you concerned by the integrity of the elections?

What has me concerned is that our elections are complex beyond a layman's ability to communicate a meaningful story about how elections are conducted and why they are to be trusted. A layman is left with only one option: trust.

"Trust us" is not a good foundation to build a democracy upon. Especially if "us" is someone who has declared themselves an enemy, if not in words, definitely in action.

If that's not enough, the highest office in our land, literally called an election official on tape and asked for votes, and there has been no consequences. A system incapable of producing consequences for bad actors cannot maintain integrity.

The end result of that saga was a person making the ethical choice, but what prevented the secretary of state from finding those votes? I don't know what would have prevented it or what safeguards there were. Even if he "found" those votes, and even if it were caught, there would have been chaos, and that chaos would have been used as a ladder. History is always written by the winners as they say, so history will always report elections as legitimate, regardless of how chaos was used as a tool to shift outcomes.

Do you think Americans decided the outcome of the 2000 election, or do you think the judicial branch did?

What do you think happened to Raffensperger after he chose to do the right thing and deny trump his request to corrupt the election? The state voted to remove him (the secretary of state position itself) from the state election board chair.

As one last final note, there has been considerable effort to attack elections, the whole DeJoy thing alone should be worrying. "I trust our elections" liberals are going to look awfully silly when the conservative assault on election integrity starts showing fruit. Gerrymandering and limited polling locations alone are an assault on election integrity without being a "direct" attack on integrity. If that can be done consequence free, what makes you feel so secure?

philips4• 4 years ago

I consider myself extremely liberal and I don't believe America's elections are legit. I cannot go verify for myself that votes are tabulated reasonably, so I have to trust without the ability to verify.

How could one person ever do that though?

Have you considered becoming a poll worker or doing election observations or getting hired by a precinct as temp?

Just this week I spent 2 hours watching election workers unpack ballots, verify signatures, etc.

There are opportunities to see with your own eyes but it requires learning how the process should works and showing up to see if things are being done correctly.

hayst4ck3• 4 years ago

Our entire election system as it exists today has integrity as an assumption, not as a guarantee.

Voting machines require integrity as an assumption, they offer no guarantee. They actively damage trust, and yet a trade off was made in exchange for cheaper, less complex (to run, not understand) elections?

This means our election officials, with the presumption of integrity, optimized for getting the most people voting (in blue states), not for trust. Choosing to use voting machines when there is significant dissent about their use alone is enough to damage the integrity of an election.

It doesn't matter how many people vote if you can't trust the votes. It doesn't matter if some people trust the votes if the loser of an election does not trust the votes.

Democracy means the loser sees they are the minority and submits to someone else's authority because they recognize that they are the minority. If the loser does not trust the integrity of the system, then democracy has failed.

I watched an election in Taiwan (paper ballot system) happen, and I feel pretty comfortable that I can think about and reason how it operates or how it might be attacked.

I really don't think our election would be that hard to attack an election in a state that would shield the attackers from consequences. We have not seen any consequences for a flagrant attempt to attack our elections in Georgia.

I am a fairly well educated product of the American public education system. I am almost certainly in the top 15% of Americans as far as education goes, and I do not have a firm understanding of how elections operate. I think 70% is a lowball estimate of Americans that probably couldn't tell you a very good story about how elections actually work and why we should believe they are legitimate. That is a real problem.

"It can't happen here" is American exceptionalism, and I've got some very bad news. It can happen here. It is happening here.

squokko3• 4 years ago

There is a simple solution here: everyone gets a serial number with their ballot, the list of serial numbers for each candidate is published, and you can verify that your vote was counted in the right spot.

Yes, this is susceptible to coerced voting where your family member can force you to vote a certain way, but guess what, the entire vote-by-mail system that we've gone to is already susceptible to that, so as far as I'm concerned the ship is sailed.

DarthNebo• 4 years ago

Tax funded equipment should be running open source software out of the gate. Gujarat government in India also made the push for public WiFi hotspot software to be FOSS

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Serious question: why not count them manually?

charlieyu1• 4 years ago

Agreed. I don’t know why counting is so slow in the US. If you have resources to hold an election, you have resources to make sure that ballot counting is done in a reasonable time

coffeeblack3• 4 years ago

Another aspect I don’t get is, why are voted in the U.S. shipped to central counting facilities, instead of counting decentralized in each voting station?

Not sure if it’s common in the U.S. I just remember the videos from that Detroit counting centre (the one where they tapped over the windows, so observers couldn’t look inside).

wildcow• 4 years ago

We need a way confirming that the source code i look at on fx GitHub is the software that runs on the machine.

teddyh• 4 years ago

Machines of any kind have absolutely no place in any voting system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

piokoch• 4 years ago

What is that crazy pull for ballot counting machines? Election is not happening every week, has to be supervised by humans anyway, this additional cost of having two more people here and there to count votes, sign the papers and put ballot results on the doors for transparency is negligible as compared to the problem that distrust in the election process is causing. USA knows this best, yet they dance around "better" and "more secure" voting machine solving problems that are already solved.

"Secure" voting machines is indeed interesting engineering problem, so I am not surprised this is being discussed on HN, but let's face it, we don't need to solve this engineering problem.

Progress is not always something good. X-Raying foot while purchasing shoes was also very cool in the '50, but it turned out this is not such a great thing.

say_it_as_it_is• 4 years ago

FYI: written in Typescript

reese_john• 4 years ago

Meanwhile in Brazil, the land of electronic voting, they hired Oracle's "Cloud at Customer" offering to count votes on a "Exadata X8 Full Rack" server ...

I wonder if that decision really was a technical one.

[0] https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2020/Novembro/no...

jefurii• 4 years ago

We need to have a system where all the code is open source and available for download. All the code, from the registration servers to the voting machines to the tallying servers. Everything made available along with the SHA256 checksums. The public should be able to clone repositories of all the software, run the checksums on their own hardware, and examine software checksums on every piece of voting equipment they have access to. Checksums for each piece of hardware used by the government should be made public.

Digital representations of votes need to be in text, and they need to exactly match a printed receipt given to the voter at the moment they vote. The data would include a digital signature, some hash of the vote values, the precinct, the datetime, and a salt, and would be anonymized. The data should go into Git repositories. You wouldn't put an entire state's data into a single repository, you'd have separate repos for e.g. the district or even precinct level. Git repositories would be initiated before voting begins, and updates could come in via network or via physical storage transported with the same security as ballot boxes.

[Before all the Git haters descend to say that the public will never be able to use Git for themselves, I agree with you that that would never work. Nobody would be using Git directly, the software would use Git under the hood to manage the vote data.]

Once the repositories of vote data are conveyed to the district level, the public should be able to browse all the votes, and each person should be able to enter the digital signature from their paper receipt (via typing, or QRCode, semacode, barcode, or whatever) and find their vote. If they want and if they are organized enough, they should be able to confirm that the votes of whole communities are in fact all in the system. The public should be able to download the vote tallying software along with as much of the vote data as they want, and run the counts on their own hardware.

If the data is in Git repositories, every single vote will have a digital signature. Every modification of the data that is committed would have a signature, and would have its own signature. Every piece of data, every modification, and every bit of the history would be perfectly transmissible, and if it's not perfect it will become immediately apparent.

Towns are testing new ballot counting machines that use open source software

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