Building a better ballot box

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Author Message   Lou Shupe Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Doctorlou Post Number: 1 Registered: 7-2008 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 - 9:15 am:        Throughout all of recorded history, elections have been corrupted, bought, and rigged to the detriment of the people at large. Let us look forward for a moment. If the reader were given a unique opportunity to design an open electronic election infrastructure, how would you do it? What features would you design into the system to reduce the chances and possibilities of fraud? What sort of security would you build into the system? Accountability? Accuracy?   Mike LaBonte Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Mike_labonte Post Number: 263 Registered: 12-2005 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 3 (A keeper?) Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 - 10:58 am:        If one is trying to solve the age old problem of making elections fair, I think it is best to start from the premise that "the people" conduct elections, not the government. This changes the focus to technologies that work well for all people, not just for those who are on government payrolls. After all, most of the people involved in elections are the voters and poll workers, and only a puny minority are election professionals. In that regard, solutions that require special expertise should be ruled out. Teachers know how to score tests. Service and retail workers know how to take orders and deliver. The types of skills involved in conducting an election should be skills that many people have. In my opinion, programming memory cards using special tools falls into the "unusual skills" category. Any technology used in elections should be observable by many with low risk of tampering. If BINGO ball machines had opaque walls instead of glass, would as many people play? Hmmm ... if some balls were a little heavier than others they would be less likely to reach the exit opening. There may not be many BINGO rackets, but for elections even fairly simple devices have to be inspected and guarded to preserve the public trust. How can we minimize that? So, how would I design an open electronic election infrastructure? Two possibilities come to mind quickly: 1) Have people vote on multiple systems, provided by the candidates themselves or their parties. Major downside: the many ways in which an election might be thrown by causing mismatches. 2) Design the equipment to be used for more than just elections. Use the same systems for testing in schools, for example. Even though I am an electrical engineer, I can't begin by detailing all the sophisticated electronic electronic technologies that might be used for voting. If you design the system from the top down, the system includes people and skills too.   V. Kurt Bellman Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Formerelecdir Post Number: 2621 Registered: 4-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 2 (A keeper?) Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 - 11:01 am:        Lou, Welcome. This has been noodled over here for years. You have unnecessarily rigged the game by specifying "If the reader were given a unique opportunity to design an open electronic election infrastructure". Can we take it back a level? Why necessarily "electronic"? That's not always abundantly clear as a benefit, or is it? Maybe it really is finally time to think outside the (black) box, and think inside the "ballot" box. Yes, I know we've been there, done that, got the T-shirt. But maybe we should have been improving the ballot box and its associated accompaniments, instead of eliminating them. Think bigger than limits to "electronics". Why artificially limit the universe of solutions? ========================================== http://kurtspeak.blogspot.com (some relevant to subjects here, most not)   V. Kurt Bellman Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Formerelecdir Post Number: 2622 Registered: 4-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 - 2:17 pm:        By the way, I agree with much of what Mike wrote above me, but even the task of building the proper paper ballots, with the proper races being on there for the proper voters, can be a GARGANTUANLY complicated process and undertaking. We err when we dismiss "experts" too quickly. Even a TOTALLY manually counted, publicly observed and counted election needs computers to design ballots to the legal specifications, and to ensure that the proper candidates appear under the proper contests in the proper parties given to the proper polling places and voters in them. How complex can that be, you ask? More so than 99.9% of the people could imagine in their wildest dreams, especially in this era of gerrymandered districts. Why do we need them now when we didn't before? Simple. Districting itself is done with computers now, and the number of unique ballot combinations is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more now than it was in the days before the last couple of decades of redistricting court decisions. It is folly to try to do these jobs manually in many jurisdictions. ========================================== http://kurtspeak.blogspot.com (some relevant to subjects here, most not)   Tom Borawski Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Tomb Post Number: 26 Registered: 5-2008 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2008 - 8:05 am:        I agree with Kurt -- the perfect ballot box is an extremely complex design task. It is also a "war that never ends." To me, the central issue is how the voter's wishes are recorded and preserved. Are they preserved by methods visible to the human eye, or an electrostatic charge suspended in silicon or a magnetic field on a disk ? The Bingo ball example is a good one-- for even a machine made of clear plexiglass, with millions of people watching it is subject to hacking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_scandal (I'm surprised that Kurt didn't bring that one up.)   Ami Silberman Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Jol Post Number: 240 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, July 14, 2008 - 12:26 pm:        Unless you want to get rid of the secret ballot, I recommend against trying to port solutions which rely on strongly linking user activities (test sheets, ATM actions) to artifacts (recorded scores, bank transactions.)   christine c reid Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Ctwatcher Post Number: 927 Registered: 12-2007 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - 5:03 am:        Completely changing my post because I was posting about this scandal and then noticed Tom Borawski's link to Wikipedia. This is about a daily lottery fix using latex paint to weight the balls, but there are a number of passages that relate to elections rather nicely: Perry received access to the machines and ping pong balls through the involvement of Pennsylvania Lottery official Edward Plevel. Plevel left the machines and balls unguarded for several minutes on a few occasions. Perry also got WTAE stagehand Fred Luman to actually switch the original balls with the weighted ones before and after the drawing. Bock then took the rigged balls back to his studio and burned them in a paint can a half-hour after the on-air drawing was done... In terms of insiders being willing to work to game the system, we see: Perry approached local Pittsburgh lettering expert and WTAE art director Joseph Bock about creating weighted ping-pong balls that were replicas of the official balls used in the lottery machines. Bock agreed to help, and experimented with powder and other substances until he settled on white latex paint. Bock performed careful experiments to determine just the right amount of paint to use so that the weighted balls could fly up off the bottom of the machine, but not high enough to reach the vacuum tube so the ball would be drawn out of the machine. The mastermind was said to be announcer Nick Perry. With that in mind, Perry was only an announcer and never drew the winning numbers; this was always done by a senior citizen volunteer, as the lottery benefits senior citizens in Pennsylvania. The term "magic show" comes to mind. Why do we sometimes believe that such things happen in, well, lotteries but resist believing that elections are not magically exempt from fraud?   Brant Lamb Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Brantl Post Number: 2189 Registered: 1-2005 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008 - 4:39 am:        The metaphor of a magic show has many correlations to voting; much is done in secret, much is kept out of the hands of the "audience", and plenty of manipulation can be hidden from the "audience".

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The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.