[EM] 3ballot - revolutionary new protocol for secure secret ballot elections

[Warren Smith]

> Ka-Ping Yee
> discussion of 3ballot at http://usablesecurity.com/

RESPONSE BY Warren D Smith:
>How hard would it be to get voters to properly mark three ballots (or
a perforated ballot with three separable columns)?  The instructions
are simple — mark one or two in each row — but it may not be so easy
to convince voters why they should do this.  I'm not convinced that
we'd be able to get voters to put a mark next to a candidate they want
to vote against.  I don't know for sure; maybe we would, but it's not
immediately obvious to me.  Pollworkers would probably be busy
answering lots of questions.

--true... definitely a worry.

>The bigger problem, it seems to me, would be convincing voters to
mark one out of three for every unselected option on the ballot.  A
San Francisco voter who just wants to cast a vote for Governor and
ignore the other contests would have to fill in over 100 bubbles
instead of just one.  (This fall, there will be over 20 offices and 24
propositions on the ballot in San Francisco.) I'd like to be less
cynical about the behaviour of typical voters, but I'm inclined to
think it will be even harder to get voters to do something really
inconvenient than to do something they don't fully understand.  The
inconvenience might be the real killer obstacle here.--true..
definitely a worry.

--Australia makes rank ordering all candidates on all races,
compulsory for every voter
(and voting also is compulsory).  So it can be done.

>Would the ThreeBallot scheme truly prevent voters from selling their
votes?  Not necessarily.  If the voter can identify all three of the
ballots they marked in the public record of ballots, that would
probably be enough to sell their vote.

--not from this vote-buyer!   hey if you are that easy to part from your money,
I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn...

>Since the voter only gets to see the ID number on the ballot they
chose to take home, but not on the other two ballots, that makes it
harder to identify the other ballots — but it might not be impossible.
 A vote-buyer might demand that the voter mark all three of the
ballots in a specific way, and then the pattern of marks might be
distinguishable, depending on how the rest of the voters behave.

--well, the govt will post on the bulletin board, not IMAGES of the ballot,
but merely an electronic record of the CONTENT of the ballots.
(The govt cannot cheat here, of course, without detection.)
So, no, this attack by you fails...  unless the vote-buyer *is* the govt...
(or in very close collusion with it)...   but if that were the case, then
the govt could, more simply, just not implement the 3ballot protocol in
the first place.

>If most voters vote uniformly (for example, always marking either the
first ballot or the first two ballots), then a specific pattern of
three ballots would stand out from the crowd.

--it is very risky for an evil govt to try to cheat based on such
statistical patterns.
YES that will work to get a higher cheat-success rate, but no, large cheating
will still be impossible without detection.

>The coercion prevention of ThreeBallot depends on the voters to
randomize how they distribute their marks among the three ballots...
Let's consider now a possible alternative...
how about a machine that marks the ballot for them?...
However, now we have a new problem: the ballot-marking machine becomes
responsible for randomly distributing the marks among the three
ballots.  If the distribution is not random, then the voter becomes
vulnerable to coercion.

--That's all totally wrong thinking.  If all voters did that, then a
Dem voter would on all
three ballots show (usually) a pro-Dem bias, and then his vote could
be reliably (in an averaged statistical sense) be bought by a Dem-Boss
vote buyer.
If you actually had a machine auto-randomizing the choices like that,
then you'd totally blow it and totally lose out on the benefits of
Rivest's scheme
for preventing vote buying.

--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement