Secrecy of Voting Machines Ballots At Risk 256
JimBobJoe writes "On Monday, Cnet published the findings I made as an Ohio poll worker regarding a major oversight in my state's election's system: Using a combination of public records, plus the voting machine paper trails, you can figure out how people voted. Though most agree that voting machine paper trails are a necessity, they can cause privacy problems which aren't easily mitigated. 'It's an especially pointed concern in Ohio, a traditional swing state in presidential elections that awarded George Bush a narrow victory over John Kerry three years ago. Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.'"
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
And still you don't understand why people are so afraid of saying who they voted for?
Keeping votes secret is one very important way to make sure any democracy works, since humans can easily be forced to vote for something they do not want to vote for, either by threat of violence to your own person or someone in your family, or by money. Secret votes makes sure that someone can vote how they want, not how peer pressure wants.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you voted against (candidate that won), huh? Well, you must be evil.
So, you voted independent, eh? You must be a communist, trying to subvert our system.
So, you voted for a known communist, eh? You must be a spy.
Yes, there's not a whole lot of logic there. There doesn't NEED to be, because the people that would put those lists together to see who voted what aren't USING a lot of logic.
Anonymous voted should mean that, not 'temporarily anonymous' or 'anonymous unless we want it not to be'.
Why do you need a list in the order they voted? (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like they need to save paper because election machines are so expensive and now they just record voters data in the order they appear in the voting office.
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you happen to live in a local and era where you don't have to fear for your life when you voice your support for one person over another doesn't mean it's always been like that or will continue to be like that indefinately.
Re:How long (Score:3, Insightful)
Why timestamps (Score:5, Insightful)
Fear (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How long (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe even worse yet, I says here that you voted for my opponent in the last election, As mayor of this town, I think the new low income subdivision should go in your back yard. Or maybe it is a speeding ticket that turns into a trip downtown with towing your car and everything to get something sorted out and nobody cares because you voted for the other sheriff or the other mayor candidate.
And yes, those have happed before in American history with the political bosses and such.
Re:Why timestamps (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are these records even KEPT AT ALL in Ohio?? (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO there is no difference in the privacy of who you voted for, and the privacy of if you even voted. It is your right to vote or not to vote. I mean - imagine a week after the election, your local busybody comes by your house and asks why you didn't vote. WTF? Whose business is that?
Obviously someone could just watch for you at your local polling station, but they would have to know who you were in advance for that to work.
The only reason I see for recording that information AT ALL is to ensure no one votes twice, and that function is only valid while the election is in progresss, because it is not something you can even audit afterwards.
Therefore once the election is complete that information should be permanently destroyed.
Re:Trivial solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me your vote or I'll brain ya.
Re:Why timestamps (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, say, negative votes. Or more people voting than exist in the district. Coz that'd look a little suspect too.
Re:Trivial solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Or your boss could demand your coupon as a condition of keeping your job...
Or your union leader could hint that it was in your best interests to turn over your coupon to the shop steward...
I don't think you've thought your plan all the way through.
Re:Why do you need a list in the order they voted? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm thinking the best you can do with a system like this is point to 3 or 4 votes and claim one of them might be yours. It would be real hard to say you voted a certain way unless all the people who voted around your time voted that way.
Anyways, the reason this is a mess is because people demanded the ability to track things. You even had drive by civil rights workers claiming fraud and demanding this. Of course nothing has change with it in place (no fraud has been found) but it isn't going anywhere unless we get away from electronic voting machines.
Re:Why are these records even KEPT AT ALL in Ohio? (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps technology isn't always the answer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Inability of laypersons to scrutinize computer voting -> demand for audit trail -> loss of privacy.
You can filddle around with the details, but ultimately its pretty inescapable. People won't accept a computerized black box - which is a bit of a bummer when a black box is exactly what you're trying to replicate.
You can't suddenly parachute technology into a system without completely re-evaluating the whole system.
Of course, here in the UK we just have to put one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes - I appreciate that, in the US, the zeroth amendment ("if some is good, more is better") applies to democracy, and if you're also electing the school board, agonizing over who to choose as second assistant dog-catcher and whether to support propositions 4096-8192 inclusive then you may need a voting machine...
(Here, though, the fun is over postal - and maybe internet - voting, which some politicos seem to think will encourage people to vote but - surprise surprise - has proven vulnerable to ballot stuffing...)
Re:How long (Score:2, Insightful)
By the way, I encourage everyone to try their hand at working the polls for several reasons:
Re:How long (Score:5, Insightful)
I call shenanigans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do you need a list in the order they voted? (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole paper trail issue is mitigated by using a paper ballot that is marked with a pencil in the circles and then counted by a machine. No timestamp on the ballot. The machine produces a summary paper report of the votes placed. The ballots go into a box for recount or manual counting if required. This completely eliminates all of the problems that are currently being faced. The technology is very mature and is in use in Ohio.
Re:How long (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why are these records even KEPT AT ALL in Ohio? (Score:3, Insightful)
There may be ways around the problem, but none of them involve publishing the results on the web in any form.
Re:Wear a wire (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't want voting machines. We want nice pens. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the way modern voting should work:
1) Show up, 'prove' (in the definition of whatever state you're in) you're an eligible voter, receive ballot.
2) Go to electronic voting machine. Place ballot in machine.
3) Enter your votes in the touch screen.
4) Once you are satisfied with your votes, press the 'Print Ballot!' button.
5) Machine prints your votes on the ballot in human-readable and machine-readable form.
6) Take ballot. Review your votes on the ballot. If your votes are correct, place ballot in ballot box. If not, take your ballot to an election worker, where it is marked void and you get a new ballot and try again.
If you want to be REALLY cool, make it so that each ballot can be filled out by hand as well, so if you have a technical failure in the voting machines, or an insufficient number of voting machines, you can continue the voting the old-fashioned way.
At the end of the election day, feed the ballots through your vote counting machines. In case of doubt, count the ballots by hand.
See, that wasn't that hard, was it?
Re:We don't want voting machines. We want nice pen (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you hope that? It doesn't matter.
Think of it this way. What if we recorded your vote in English and German (assuming for a moment that an average American can read the english vote record and not the german vote record), and then we had Germans count the German vote record.
So we run our election, give the ballots to the Germans in groups of 1000, and the Germans give us a count of votes for each group.
Now we want to check that the count the Germans gave us is accurate. So what do we do? We pick a few of those groups of 1,000 and we count the English records on those ballots and make sure they match the count the Germans gave us. Setting aside the issue of whether what's written on the ballots in German matches what is written in English, this audit is the only way to make sure the Germans aren't lying when they give us the final count. And looking at the issue of the German votes matching the English votes, while each voter can't check this, it would be pretty obvious to someone who knows English and German that the ballots were wrong with casual observation.
Now, lets say that instead of having Germans count German vote records, we just had Americans count the votes? Then what would we do to make sure the vote count was accurate? The same thing: We'd give the votes to the counters in groups of 1,000, then pick a couple groups and recount them to make sure they match.
In this analogy, the bar code (or whatever) is the vote record in German, and the Germans are the vote counting machines. It doesn't matter that the voter can't verify that the German written on their ballot is accurate, because the voter can't verify that the Germans themselves are accurate either, just like the voter can't verify that the vote counting machines are accurate. The only way to verify that is to do an audit and make sure that the totals of hand-counted English voting records match the totals of machine-counted machine-coded voting records.
So, it doesn't matter if every voter can verify that the machine-readable record matches their human-readable record, as long as both are on the ballot. A quick check by someone who can read the human and machine readable portions of the ballots will make it obvious if they don't match, and separate from that, you have to do other checking to verify that the counting machines are accurate anyway, and that check will also detect any ballots where the machine records don't match the human-readable records as well.
Re:why bother with voting machines? (Score:3, Insightful)
So it is in the US.