How to run a verifiable election

[nancylebov]

I'm looking at the results and the concession, and maybe Bush got more votes than Kerry and maybe he didn't. There's no way to tell. Kerry would probably have been a less bad President than Bush, but it's hard to be absolutely certain of that, either. I don't know whether were enough states with close results that there should have been recounts.

Anyway, what my mind's been on (aside from a sense of suspension because ghu knows what happens next) is how to bulletproof an election, starting from the assumptions that we want to keep secret ballots, there's a strong incentive to cheat, and there's no way to trust anything that's only in a computer.

First off, you've got to have material ballots, presumably paper. It probably makes sense to have a computer interface for the voters which prints out the ballot so the voter can check it. The ballot (with the filled out part not visible) goes into a transparent box outside the voting booth. Humans and video cameras keep eyes on the boxes. (There was an NPR piece about an African country that uses transparent ballot boxes to prevent ballot box stuffing. They also have post-election parties to celebrate voting.)

After the election, the boxes are given a good shake, and then the ballots are piled together and shuffled again. Human and video eyes stay on them through the whole process. Then the ballots are opened and put up on a public wall and the wall is broadcast on the net so that anyone can count the votes.

The ballots were shaken and shuffled because otherwise it might be feasible to tell who'd voted for what.

Afaik, this system offers very little chance of cheating with the count. Voter intimidation is still a possibility, as is physical destruction of the ballots before they're opened. So might be some cleverness with disappearing ink, I suppose, which would be an argument for people to fill out their ballots with their own pens.

Doing it this way wouldn't be cheap, but I don't think it would be horribly expensive as large projects go, either.

I can't figure out how to make voting by mail and/or email similarly bulletproof, but I'd be interested in suggestions.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Comments

Wrong question

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You're not backing up far enough: what I think you should be asking is, "how can we insure the integrity of the republic, despite the manifest incentives to obtain and abuse power that such a republic provides to the dishonest?"

The answers to this question are many and deep, and election processes are just a tiny corner of the picture. (They're also a done deal in most other democracies -- go look abroad before you start speculating about ways of defeating voter intimidation or fraud, because there are a host of working solutions to these problems that are in use elsewhere.)

I have in mind backing up and asking such fundamentals as, "is a universal franchise electing representatives to both a legislative and an executive branch an effective guarantor of the republic? If not, is the problem fixable? If not, what other mechanisms are there that might work?"

... Then take it from there.

Re: Wrong question

[zenlizard]

What he said.

Re: Wrong question

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Do you have any favorite countries for how they run elections?

I grant I was ignoring the question of how you get people to *want* to run elections meticulously.

You've got some good questions there. Do you have any answers, even if they're partial?

[darius.livejournal.com]

Video cameras watching the transparent ballot box continuously might, in principle, follow the ballots even through the shuffling. On the other hand, vote stealing is a worse danger than vote buying right now.

I think the hardest problem, though, is generating enough of a political push for reform. Last I heard, the verifiable-voting bill in Congress (the better one) had a fair number of Democratic backers and zero Republican ones. I'm going to look at groups like verifiedvoting.org and think about what I can do.