* Opens Cargo.lock [1] and pnpm-lock.yaml [2]
* Closes Cargo.lock and pnpm-lock.yaml
* Goes to find a Tylenol
At least with open source we can see the sausage getting made...
[1] https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite/blob/main/Cargo.lock
[2] https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite/blob/main/pnpm-lock.y...
Auditing the software isn't enough if you can't reliably verify that this is actually what's running on the machines, or if the machines weren't otherwise tampered with in some way.
Note that ananymous is also a required part of voting.
• Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI>
• Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs>
Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway.
Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately.
Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong, but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but will be more accurate its more of a psychology question than a technical question though.
Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.
The problem with the accuracy assumption of electronic voting is that a) its all coded without errors and b) someone hasn't deliberately but code into manipulate the vote numbers.
> no software or programmable hardware
That's obviously too stringent. Consider:
1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet.
2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader.
Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links!
Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.
We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election).
If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception").
Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.
The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. If this was indeed caused by fraudulent voting software, it happened without leaving any other obvious traces of tampering.
When and where was this?
- in New York there is statistical anomaly correlated with a couple small-town polling stations. Those towns are small enough that they have a huge population of one religion, and one explanation is that the Democrat party's perceived "soft on Israel" stance tilted 100% of voters in those locations away from supporting the Democrat presidential candidate.
- in Pennsylvania a standard statistical analysis tool used to detect vote disruption suggested disruption occurred. The form of the disruption could be fraud, but it can also be things like voter intimidation (which was observed and reported in Philadelphia) and sudden discontinuity in voter behavior (the aforementioned "soft on Palestine" issue).
Correlation does not imply causation, and the lack of evidence of tampering of the machines in the audit logs is lack of evidence of tampering of the machines, not indication that the audit logs were compromised.
People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember.
To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on.
So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.
And the other related issue is that in 2025, it simply should be possible to vote from your phone in a way that verifies your identity, if you'd like, using the faceId/fingerprint biometrics that most smartphones from recent years have.
Paper ballots are fine. It is not complicated at all and an election is the one thing you just cannot get wrong in a representative democracy. It can cost a bit and you only do it once every few years.
They can see whether another candidate's ballots are piling up faster than yours, they can estimate whether a table counting ballots for a district you're expected to dominate is being given way fewer ballots to count than you'd expected...
Yes, they would obviously spot if some election worker is like adding a pile of pre-marked mass produced ballots to a pile or something, or if they were just putting half of your ballots in the wrong pile - but stuff like that basically never happens, whereas somebody will win and it'd be nice to know before it's announced if that's achievable.
They don’t have stellar democracy grades from The Economist’s index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index and both seem worse off in the last ten years than the ten years before.
Enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
The cost of human labor to count all ballots by hand will be enormous. Probably worth it I suppose, but this really is something that should be primarily automated. But again, trust in software. Sigh, why can't we just have nice things?
What's important is being able to segment the population in enough voting places so that each voting place is maneaganle just by a small number of people. The Chilean system is scalable because you can always just add more voting places as the population grows.
Usually these voting places are civic centres, stadiums, schools.
It's a good system and generally for a presidential election we get the results in about 4 hours after voting ends.
Every problem Tom mentions can be worked on and overcome. Maybe not today, maybe not by the next big election, but we should still start now, rather than later. We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process, especially for the demographics that are currently not very involved, which are also the demographics that are more likely to adopt electronic methods of voting.
Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.
It would certainly be exhausting to share an opinion on every single resource you want to share with someone.
In fact, I'd argue that having 50 different voting systems with 50 different ways to prove eligibility makes our elections more resilient to large-scale voter fraud, even if it makes it more difficult to verify voter rolls wholesale.
(Splitting hairs here but) this isn't true: in some countries, but not all.
In some countries ID is an optional document you only need to acquire if you want to drive, vote or travel internationally.
This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.
Many countries have secret ballots, mine doesn't, for reasons which are extremely sketchy (and presumably why my country is blue, not dark blue like New Zealand on the democracy map)
Besides that what other scaling problems are there?
Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all.
Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable.
Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts.
That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
It's 100% paper PRSTV & so the counts are slow. Not only is this generally OK (because getting a rapid result is absolutely not a requirement of any well-functioning voting system) but it also has actual benefits.
The main benefit is predicated on the count being engaging in and of itself. Other countries put a lot of effort into jazzing up statistical presentations on constituency predictions, cloropleths aplenty, to engage viewers. In Ireland, count centres are not only manned by trained count staff, they're also flooded with volunteer tallymen who verify the counting in realtime. Count coverage is on the ground, showing a real physical process that's intricate enough to be watchable. The entire process also serves as an education-through-doing in how our voting system works, so you get a more engaged & informed electorate (when it comes to the mechanics of voting - still unfortunately not that informed on policy, that's a worldwide problem).
In practice it doesn't seem to matter that much. The counters even out the first-level effects of this, so it only matters for votes that have been transferred more than once; it can be determined statistically that it changes the result only in a very small number of cases; and there are plenty of other weird threshold effects to care about instead. But it's one property you might expect of a fair voting system that Ireland doesn't give you.
Once you start with non-transparent mechanisms, there is no end to it.
Every time I try to get to the bottom of this, it always boils down to "trust the system" which makes me uneasy.
IMO the best solution here is to have electronic counting with an auditable and traceable paper trail as a backup. Every time I've voted for the past 10 years has been like this. First, I get a ballot paper from the front desk and stick it into an airgapped ballot marking machine. I then make my choices and the machine prints them onto the ballot paper. I'm able to read the paper and verify that it matches the choices I made. I then stick it into a separate airgapped ballot counting machine, which scans my ballot and deposits the paper copy into a sealed box.
> how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted
The representative of your party plus independent observer said all votes at your polling station were counted. You know both those community members and know them to be generally honorable. Ergo your vote was counted.
> every voter in the system was legal
None of the observers at the polling station, or the station head claimed any illegal person voted.
> the final tally was authentic
The observers all signed as witnesses on the final tally.
This is not the "system. it is humans you know who are telling you what they saw. If you can't trust other humans at their word, democracy cannot fundamentally work.
This, but also, important to point out that this is a question of scale: "If you can't trust other human*s*" - plural.
It's not that developing voting software should be open-source, its that actual voting should be "open-source" in the physical sense.
Trusting the system is possible if you can (you, yourself) readily observe every part of the system. I don't think giving members of the public access to the server your voting software is hosted on is a very viable idea, but giving members of the public access to paper count centres is (it's done very successfully in many countries).
One of the weaknesses in our democracy is the insistency of doing things virtually - it's the same weakness exposed by social media.
Electronic systems are always going to be subject to hacking and manipulation, and are more easy to hack and manipulate at a large scale (scaling is the point of software). In-person voting is still subject to manipulation, but you can just go back and look at the ballots on paper as they are. You get more targeted manipulation, but it's probably easier for a single person to uncover and reason about.
Why do we need machines? Counting the votes for e.g. the parliament only takes 24 hours or so, generally. And we don’t have elections every week, right?
In first past the post system, between 1% to 49% of votes are stolen and tossed by design. This actually, not hypothetically happens, in real life. Electronic voting maybe can be abused, and maybe some significant number votes may be defrauded. But in FPTP it has actually happened already and at a much worse scale. Imo the real high priority issue is obvious.
Unless something has changed recently, election integrity demands a voter-verified paper ballot that is retained with security by the authority, and can be physically counted, as a check against compromised or defective digital systems.
Open source is not sufficient. Don't let marketing sound bites be a confusing diversion from the problem.
If the US understands anything this year, it's how important elections are. Hopefully we get another one.
Who gives a shit man, it's not going to be the end of the world or even substantially change things no matter what methods we choose. You might as well choose the ones that make things easier on people. Crazy that the world wide information network that we've built and defines our current age in history is treated like some horrible evil. It's not, it will be fine. But with vote by website now every home, school, and library in the country becomes a polling place.
There is no amount of transparency that will achieve the mythical "public trust" that's being envisioned. Our current voting system is all paper right now, actual voting fraud—meaning literal ballot stuffing is nonexistent and still people buy into conspiracy theories. Voting manipulation happens in broad daylight at the systems level and is done by carefully restricting access. Expand access and the problem vanishes.
If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.
As another example, you don’t have to swap the ballots at all. Somewhere in the chain of custody, someone could just “lose” ballots for a region that is projected to vote against whoever they’re trying to fix the election for. They could forge or lose some other accompanying paperwork that was to manage those ballots, too. Or they could not bother doing that either because what are you going to do, redo the election?
Cooking up examples is sort of pointless. There are always going to be new and unexpected ways to commit fraud. The actual root issue isn’t technological. It’s sociological trust.
And if all you want is political polling, every elected representative does this already (well, they generally pay someone else to do it). So I'm not sure what it would mean for the US gov to do it separately. Do you imagine that a "non-partisan agency" like the CBO would do it with taxpayer dollars, as a publi service for the politicians who would still vote however they do?
If the goal is public trust, open source isn't helpful for the general public.
But still it is not a way to fight a political party that will use dummy machine that counts each ballot as a vote for them, and then accusing all others that they are trying to steal the elections. It is an unbelievable stupid tactic, but I think it may work in USA, judging by people eager to believe any BS if it supports their party.
The US has the worst voting system intentionally, not accidentally. And mail-in voting shows we aren't even a little serious about election integrity. We're militantly against it: you can get people to rabidly support universal IDs for trivial, nonsensical reasons that have never resulted in significant problems; and to demand digital IDs, device attestation, and real names on social media; but to the same people showing IDs to vote is supposed to be the end of democracy.
People have made this proposal every year since the 90s, and depending on the year it was the Republicans rabidly opposing it or the Democrats rabidly opposing it. Good luck getting things accomplished with a good argument. That's not how things get done. The people who get the final say about this would love to get rid of voting altogether, but they'll settle for vendor kickbacks.
A signed affidavit or local ID should be fine to establish identity. That can be done when signing up for mail in voting (although I personally prefer in person).
Voter fraud is extremely rare under the current system.
I had the privilege of helping count votes in my small town 2012. Volunteers stayed up after voting ended and all of the ballots were double checked - counted by two separate people, working together at a long table. Cheating or manipulation was inconceivable, and there were many layers of double checking.
The beauty of this system is it is infinitely scalable. The more voters there are, the more vote counting volunteers there are. For larger cities you can split up by blocks or per polling place. There should be many polling places to make voting easy and accessible.
It isn’t fast or fancy or glamorous. But communities ignore the power of communal activities at their peril.
Even with that utopian scenario the remaining problem is that the goal of elections is agreeable consent. Mewning the goal isn't just to get a decision. The goal is to get a decision, people can agree with because they trust the process must have been okay. If your vote is low stakes, like where you go for lunch with your collegues, then that trust doesn't matter, who cares if it was wrong? But if it is high stakes even a perfect digital system is problematic, because even intelligent, technological expert voters have no chance of understanding which of the moving parts might influence what in which way in practise.
Meaning a paper ballot with the right process can more or less be understood by everybody who can count and has mastered the cognitive skill of object permanence.
A Rust project with a 30k Cargo.lock file filled with dependencies on an even more complex operating system, running complex (in a different way) hardware, that might differ for each voting location isn't that. And that isn't about the programming language or the tech stack. It is about the intransparent nature of electronic systems themselves.
I spent a three quarters of my life learning programming and electronics including hardware design and I teach that stuff on a university level. Even I would have a hard time ensuring there is really no backdoor in the whole stack. And this fact means even if there is no backdoor in it, there might be and there is no realistic way for a normal person to check. I understand the nerd appeal. It is cool to toy around and figure that problem out. But the core of the problem is not technological it is sociological.
That is such a big flaw that IMO it is not worth it for high stakes elections.
Anyone who talks about election security should be required to spend at least a few moments walking around Defcon in the election machine hacking village. Even absent electronic voting machines we still need to apply that same level of rigor to security across all domains of the election system no matter what format is used.
More fundamentally, the epistemic meaning of a ballot, a vote, or an option on the ballot, how options are even decided for inclusion or their exclusion, which outcome deciding algorithms are used, and how "the result" is interpreted by society or implemented by a political agent is deeply confused. The vote itself has very little resemblance to what actually happens. Such things likely cannot be formally specified anyway. Massive amounts of ambiguity, noise, error rate, and insecurity are to be expected in these kinds of systems. So what then are we even doing with all this? I am not referring to what we say we are achieving, or what we say we are intending to achieve, but rather what kind of actual outcomes be can supported by careful engineering of all these components?
Blockchain is no solution here. See:
"Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting" https://www.dci.mit.edu/s/VotingPaper-RivestNarulaSunoo-3.pd...
The voter needs to be able to see their vote on the paper.
Reading the rolls needs to be done by machines, but by several different machines reading the same rolls. So we can verify.
Software is not the problem. The medium of persistence is.
For those who don't know the VotingWorks software is both Open Source and uses paper ballots. You can read about it here: https://www.voting.works/machines
Essentially they have a computer, a ballot marking device, that people can use to mark their ballot. That ballot is printed on paper. Then the paper can be validated visually. Then fed into a machine.
The ballot marking device has a number of advantage over pre-printed ballots:
- ADA compliant using standard web technologies
- Translatable to applicable language without lots of translated papers on hand
- Errors or typos in ballots can be fixed days before election instead of weeks
- Complex races where things like ranked choice, choose three, etc rules can cause people to mismark and then have their ballots rejected for races
The entire system runs offline. It is open source.
They also have separate open source software for running risk limiting audits using the paper ballots: https://www.voting.works/audits
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa...
AndyMcConachie•1h ago
astroflection•1h ago
goda90•1h ago
fabian2k•1h ago
It is possible to do small-scale fraud with paper ballots, you can never fully eliminate that option. But it is exceedingly hard to do larger scale fraud without it being extremely obvious to any observer.
brendoelfrendo•1h ago
fabian2k•1h ago
vlovich123•1h ago
0x457•1h ago
mjparrott•1h ago
horacemorace•59m ago
kelnos•1h ago
Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical systems, people had to count ballots by hand. There were many fewer people voting then, and regardless, that's not really the point: they counted by hand because they had no alternative.
Electronic voting certainly brings new problems into the mix. I don't think those problems are insurmountable. The problem isn't the technology itself. It's the legal and social landscape around voting technology. Open source, with reproducible builds and a method to verify that the code running on a machine was built from a particular version of source, is a start. Verification of that software's functionality, on par with the verification done of critical software (medical devices, things that go into space, slot machines, etc.) would be another good move.
Voters can also receive paper receipts, and I'm sure we can come up with some sort of scheme to take a representative sample of the electronically-recorded votes and validate them against the paper receipts, while maintaining voter privacy.
mjparrott•1h ago
luxuryballs•1h ago
fabian2k•1h ago
Other countries do paper ballots and manual counting without issues. The US isn't that special or unusual.
dogleash•1h ago
As soon as you try to be more clever than electronic counting of paper ballots, yes they are.
You can either audit the count by replaying the input event stream, or you can't.