This is a Public Service Diary. I know you don't want to think about it, but you really do need to think about it.
Over the years, I've been consistently frustrated by the failure to recognize the fundamental difference between marking a ballot and using a touch screen to cast your vote.
Are you aware that nobody using a touch screen actually knows what their voting record cast is? Nor do they know it matches their voter intent.
Nobody. Think about that for a while. Nobody. If you cast a vote with a touch screen, frankly you have no idea what your vote actually was!
Here's why:
Our voting tech has a basic problem in most implementations. I'll first explain it in terms of the chain of trust between voter intent and the record of their vote, followed by what that really means.
When people mark physical ballots, they can verify their voter intent matches the record of the vote, and that mark embodies their intent as well as exists as the record of their vote used for the tally.
This chain of trust is intact and verifiable for the voter, and where their execution of the voting record may have ambiguity, it being a direct record of their expression of their intent means it can be brought into both the public eye and a court of law to resolve equitably.
When people cast their votes using electronic voting machines, this chain of trust is broken. The voter chain of trust only extends to their interaction with the machine. Most importantly, electronic voting solutions do not actually record voter intent directly. They only record what the machine deemed that intent to actually be.
Further, unlike a physical media change associated with human readable, manual voting methods, the user has no idea what their vote record actually is. It may reflect their intent, or it may not. Additionally, that voter record isn't a unique thing, but is really just an electronic state, subject to change, copy, move.
So, what does that all mean?
A lot. First, let's think about what the core ideas are behind a trustworthy election process:
Anonymity, where a voter may cast a vote and trust it's not personally identifiable back to them.
Freedom, where a voter may choose to vote, partially vote, or not vote on a ballot at all.
Transparency, where a vote cast can be followed from it's origin in the voter intent, through the election process and into the final tally, under the public eye, with means, law and methods well understood. No secrets.
Oversight, depends very strongly on transparency, and it's the idea that we don't have secrets, they aren't necessary for a valid election, and all aspects of the process can and are reviewed by the public and courts of law as necessary to insure an election all can live with and by.
Trustworthy elections embody these four ideas to the maximum extent possible.
Some nations choose to make voting mandatory. In Brazil, for example, there are often many parody candidates used as expression within the mandatory voting. Some nations choose to personally identify votes too. Notably, the US, and the work President Carter, among others, does to improve how just and true and trustworthy elections actually are, emphasize both freedom and anonymity as means to prevent both a travesty and abuse of the election process. (coercion)
However that all might vary, the ideas themselves typically indicate how and to what degree elections can be trusted and improved.
Back to what it means...
First, it means any electronic vote isn't verifiable by the voter. Period. They all are votes by proxy. Interestingly, we get reports of people worried when the display feeds a result that differs from their intent back to them. These stories get attention, but what doesn't get attention are all the voters who saw a display agree with their intent.
Both scenarios present the same amount of information to the voter! Namely, no meaningful information!
In the State where I live, Oregon, we have manual voter intent records, physical ballots people mark. And we are joined by Washington, and the recently in the news Colorado in using vote by mail. We do use electronic machines to count human readable records, but we also have all those voter intent expressions allowing for a full human count of an entire election too. If it needs to happen, it can.
In those States where only electronic interpretation of voter intent are captured, they actually do not capture voter intent directly, and this means they really don't have any means at all to sort out a botched, erroneous, or corrupt election.
Again, here is the takeaway:
Electronic voting isn't trustworthy and cannot be made trustworthy, unless we want to surrender anonymous voting.
If we do that, we could, in theory, create an electronic system that can be trusted, but it will also be public, or at the least, the voter intent will be associated with the voter identity and that with the physical voter.
The reality is, nobody really wants to do that, and the discussion is nearly always on fraud, or bogus registrations, or machine errors, or any number of things, but it's not on the core inability to create something trustworthy.
Frankly, the whole idea is a solution looking for a problem, and it's not really an effective solution. The idea of voting with our phones, or via Internet is compelling and intoxicating, particularly given often tepid turnout, or in parts of the nation where voting is corrupt, and in general, a mess. I get it, but I can't get past the ugly implications associated with failure to record voter intent in a way the voter can trust, humans can verify without enabling technology they would be forced to trust.
We really should be recording votes on paper ballots.
Now, I want to end with this:
I submit to you this old work from the ACM: http://dl.acm.org/...
You want the PDF. Give it a good read, and then contemplate the impact of that on "Open Source" voting technology.
TL;DR version: Development tools used to make computer programs can insert arbitrary code that is difficult to identify and that may pass even extensive testing. Even Open Source voting systems fail to be trustworthy, and even if we do somehow validate the program, voter intent isn't captured, breaking the trust between voter and their vote cast.
We can write public code, we can build public machines, but it's really hard to verify the actual executable is the intended one. Worse, very extensive behavioral testing is required to understand that combination both complies with the election law and performs in a non-biased, trustworthy way. And that's assuming we give up anonymity, set aside the problem of untrusted voter records, and embrace code for voting at all!
To be perfectly frank, votes really do need to be cast on physical records in order to actually trust them. We can make them both human and machine friendly to capture the efficiencies. No worries.
But any vote cast via some electronic touch screen is an untrusted vote. No voter, no elections official, no interested third party can demonstrate it otherwise.
The process isn't transparent, trade secrets, copyright and other ugly IP considerations completely gut the idea of oversight, leaving the tepid and dangerous when standing alone ideas of anonymity and freedom.
How can we remedy this? How can we communicate the basic trust issue I've put here?
This really concerns me, because I want elections I can trust, and the vast majority of voters in the US today are not casting votes they can trust.
Given the corruption and the very large amounts of money involved, shouldn't we do something to insure voters votes are recorded accurately at the very least?
11:46 AM PT: From the comments: "Are we questioning this when we lose?"
Yes! And we have a lot more of those questions today because the vast majority of the votes cast aren't trustworthy or verifiable by the voter.
End that, and we end a whole lot of these questions.
This diary isn't about "we lost due to bad voting machines" It is all about understanding WHY WE LOST by having votes cast accurately in the first place.
Right now, we don't know, and more importantly, we really can't know. The touch screen elections didn't capture the information needed to understand what happened in the election.