Brad Ideas - Giving up the unprovable ballot - Comments

No identity

brad — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:48:42 -0700

Proposals afoot are for the elimination of the unprovable ballot, not the full secret ballot. In such proposals, voters get to take home a receipt, which has a magic number on it, and the published ballots have this magic number, so one can go and look and see your ballot, with appropriate number, in the published list an be sure your vote was counted as you meant it to.

However, this does not reveal to anybody else, unless you choose, which ballot was yours, and you can destroy the receipt so nobody can ever learn. As such, somebody trying to challenge the eligibility of voters can't have that alter the results of the published ballots.

The first problem to be

Paul O — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:08:50 -0700

The first problem to be resolved is with the voters list itself. There are always going to be people on the list whose legal right to vote is in question, and there are likely to be advocates on both sides of that debate for each individual case. Elimination of the secret ballot completely changes the nature of those debates, and can leave elections undetermined for years after the fact.

How do we know

brad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:31:45 -0700

Well, simply, when a crime becomes widespread, we do seem to know that it exists. You're going to know about, or hear about, instances of the crime, even if you can't get prosecutions, and you're going to get at least some prosecutions started, if not convicted. I'm sure that the law finds only 1% of the pot smokers out there, but we are not unaware as a society that lots of pot smoking is going on. Vote buying requires a secret conspiracy of hundreds, even thousands to be effective, and reports of it, even rumours, are extremely low. (On the other hand we have lots of rumours of all sorts of election manipulation, some of which may be going on but much of which probably isn't going on at all.)

It's the sort of thing you would hear rumours about, even if you couldn't nail them down. People would be claiming, even falsely, that they got offered money for a ballot.

Vote buying usually requires you find people who don't care that much about their vote, are very poor and of course would not have voted for you otherwise. Not the world's best secret conspirators.

How do we know...

Michael Kohne — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:21:42 -0700

How do we know that vote selling isn't a big problem in those districts that have wide-spread mail-in ballots? You state that it isn't a big problem, and I certainly haven't noticed anyone complaining, but does that mean it isn't a problem? How do we know how much mail-in ballot fraud is going on? How many reports do we have of such fraud?

I'm VERY scared of giving up the secret ballot. To me, the secret ballot is the basis of the whole system, and without it, the ability to count ballots correctly or not is irrelevant. It seems to me that the human nature of corrupt people makes the lack of a secret ballot just as dangerous as a black-box voting system that can't be examined or recounted. Either way can lead to a well organized and prepared criminal controlling an election.

I think some of your ideas have a lot of merit. Anything we can do to add accountability while preserving anonymity is a good thing.

Past or future

brad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:27:37 -0700

This is the big question. The political and social climate of the vote buying days is clearly gone, but this does not mean it can't arise again, and we must be on the watch. Oregon is not so special -- any state that allows mail-in or offsite voting is vulnerable.

Actual vote buying, for cash, seems a harder crime to get away with in the modern world, especially if we did set up a program where any vote seller could turn in a vote buyer and get amnesty for that particular vote-sale. (Those who did not turn in a vote buyer in time would not get amnesty.) We also have facilities for anonymous whistleblowing as an alternative. If the vote buyer is a mobster who will break your legs for turning you in, however, amnesty doesn't help.

Of course, it must be cheaper to buy a vote outright than it is to get one through legal means, such as advertising and get-out-the-vote techniques. With 50% turnouts, get-out-the-vote (such as driving known supporters to the polls, calling them on voting day) seems much cheaper at vastly lower risk.

Of course the goal of vote-at-home, like Oregon, is higher turnout. In this case I presume workers, rather than driving voters to the polls, just stop by and ask in person if they voted, which might be very persuasive.

As noted, I have more concern over pressuring voters, with force or peer pressure, than doing it with actual cash. That's much harder to stop or make illegal. If a group/church/union/party has any excuse to ask for your ballot receipt, this could generate a large increase in such pressure.

However, in this debate there will be a lot of discussion about which threats are truly the most dangerous. If we look at vote buying, which is close to non-existent today, how do we scale the risk of its return over quantities which are much larger today, such as the number of people who don't vote at all for various reasons, or box stuffing, or voting machine manipulation. Should we fail to address a real threat doing real damage because of fear of something that might become worse someday? It's a hard question.

Doomed to repeat

Tom Duff — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:42:04 -0700

The secret ballot has made vote buying essentially impossible in the US for more than 100 years. No one alive today remembers a time when it was a serious problem, so of course many people think it can't be very important. I suspect that the citizens of Oregon will soon rue the day they gave up the secret ballot, and I hope the rest of the country shows more electoral fortitude.

Giving up the unprovable ballot

brad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:39:28 -0700

Yesterday, I wrote about election goals. Today I want to talk about one of the sub-goals, the non-provable ballot, because I am running into more people who argue it should be abandoned in favour of others goals. Indeed, they argue, it has already been abandoned.

As I noted, our primary goal is that voters cast their true desire, independent of outside pressure. If voters can’t demonstrate convincingly how they voted (or indeed if it’s easy to lie) then they can say one thing to those pressuring them and vote another way without fear of consequences. This is sometimes called “secret ballot” but in fact that consists of two different types of secrecy.

The call to give this up is compelling. We can publish, to everybody, copies of all the ballots cast — for example, on the net. Thus anybody can add up the ballots and feel convinced the counts are correct, and anybody can look and find their own ballot in the pool and be sure their vote was counted. If only a modest number of random people take the time to find their ballot in the published pool, we can be highly confident that no significant number of ballots have not been counted, nor have they been altered or miscounted. It becomes impossible to steal a ballot box or program a machine not to count a vote. It’s still possible to add extra ballots — such as the classic Chicago dead voters, though with enough checking even this can be noticed by the public if it’s done in one place.

The result is a very well verified election, and one the public feels good about. No voter need have any doubt their vote was counted, or that any votes were altered, miscounted, lost or stolen. This concept of “transparency” has much to recommend it.

Further, it is argued, many jurisdictions long ago gave up on unprovable ballots when they allowed vote by mail. The state of Oregon votes entirely by mail, making it trivial to sell your ballot or be pushed into showing it to your spouse. While some jurisdictions only allow limited vote by mail for people who really can’t get to the polls, some allow it upon request. In California, up to 40% of voters are taking advantage of this.

Having given up the unprovable ballot, why should we not claim all the advantages the published ballot can give us? Note that the published ballots need not have names on them. One can give voters a receipt that will let them find their true ballot but not let anybody who hasn’t seen the receipt look up any individual’s vote. So disclosure can still be optional.