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DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

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Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#271

Post by Freak_NL »

jfnixon wrote: post #256
liquidify wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason an electronic count can't be kept along with the paper ballots.

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.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#272

Post by tmaly »

simongr3dal wrote: post #19
nathan_long wrote: post #8

> Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con…

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.

seems like it would be easier to print out thousands of ballots to stuff.

If you have to fill something out by hand, it makes it hard to do this.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#273

Post by 7952 »

bdamm wrote: post #33
nathan_long wrote: post #8

> Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con…

The paper trail is not so wonderful. What we saw in 2016 was that even if a candidate were to contest a result, none of the election committees were willing to commit to a full hand recount; instead, the only options were to retabulate through the very same tabulation processes and machines that had produced the questionable results in the first place. Without low barrier to recount by hand, the electronic systems pr…

Not sure why hand counting is so difficult. In the UK we hand count elections. It is just a matter of sorting ballot papers into a pile for each candidate. This pile can then be easily checked to make sure that no vote has been mis-recorded.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#274

Post by kavalg »

hansjorg wrote: post #77
sverige wrote: post #60

Why does this keep coming up? What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? There is no need for results to be known immediately, so how does making voting an exercise done by computers make anything better, particularly when computers are much more vulnerable to remote interference?

Because paper ballots increase the cost of manipulating elections.

Not always true. Where I live, small parties have the problem of not being able to allocate sufficient resources to monitor all voting rooms. Then if it happens that only representatives of two of the biggest political parties are observing the counting, strange things can happen (e.g. the small parties not getting any votes).

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#275

Post by newsgremlin »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #130
sverige wrote: post #60

Why does this keep coming up? What is the compelling argument against paper ballots? There is no need for results to be known immediately, so how does making voting an exercise done by computers make anything better, particularly when computers are much more vulnerable to remote interference?

Aren't counting ballots always wrong? Like every time there is a recount the number changes... What's wrong with electronic ballots? If we can have a secure and audit-able banking system (and every other aspect of our lifes), surely we can have the same for voting?

That's the paradox with e-voting/internet voting. You need to verify the voter is who they say they are, but it also has to be completely anonymous. The banks know who you are and what you do with your bank account, you can't have that with voting.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#276

Post by specialist »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #250

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVmHruNg6m0 This amazing talk by Ben Adida is really relevant. He has worked on solving voting for a long time now and does a great job here of breaking down some of the salient parts of the problem.

I have the impression that Ben Adida is no longer advocating cryptographic voting technologies. Which is encouraging.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2019/presentation/ad...

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#277

Post by snuxoll »

Freak_NL wrote: post #271
jfnixon wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#278

Post by Fjolsvith »

adestefan wrote: post #123
hx2a wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the purple finger thing? 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?

Because voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the US. Now election fraud is a different issue.

When a National Voter ID is required all the big blue states will flip back to red.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#279

Post by specialist »

7952 wrote: post #273
bdamm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper trail is not so wonderful. What we saw in 2016 was that even if a candidate were to contest a result, none of the election committees were willing to commit to a full hand recount; instead, the only options were to retabulate through the very same tabulation processes and machines that had produced the questionable results in the first place. Without low barrier to recount by hand, the electronic systems pr…

Not sure why hand counting is so difficult. In the UK we hand count elections. It is just a matter of sorting ballot papers into a pile for each candidate. This pile can then be easily checked to make sure that no vote has been mis-recorded.

Sort and stack is pretty good. When done at poll sites, it's fairly manageable (many hands make light work).

In the USA, federal, state, and local contests are all on the same ballot. Where I live, general election ballots have 30+ items.

For manual counting to be feasible, we'd have to split into separate ballots.

Of all the people I've spoken with over the years, there's been no objections to this. But it is a big change and there's been no advocacy.

Re: DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

#280

Post by specialist »

tivert wrote: post #149
nathan_long wrote: post #8

> Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con…

> The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. That seems backwards. Touch screens suck. Why not build a validation machine that voters can feed manu…

"Why not build a validation machine that voters can feed manually-completed optical scan ballots into, before they go to the tabulator?"

That's precisely how poll-based opscans work.

Central count (for postal ballots processing) is necessarily different, because that sanity check cannot be done, so voter intent must be adjudicated when ballots (or individual votes) are unreadable. It's a sausage factory.

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