[EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:32 PM 5/15/2007, Juho wrote:
>I think some very basic methods eliminate the possibility of coercion
>quite well (e.g. ballots with only few options, no write-ins, marked
>ballots rejected, voting only manually, at places well controlled by
>representatives of multiple interest groups, only one person allowed
>in the voting booth and at the ballot box at one time, and many
>enough voters per voting location).

Yes, there are ways to *reduce* the possibility of a coercer 
verifying that the victim complied. None are guaranteed to work.

If the voter can handle the ballot at all, then it is possible that 
it could be marked in a way likely to escape notice. Small pinpricks 
have been used, apparently.

Fingerprints can be used! And restricting access to ballots may seem 
to work, but, as I pointed out, who watches the watchers? The ballots 
are in the custody of someone, typically.... the government. If you 
don't trust the government, if the coercion is coming from an 
incumbent, what are you going to do?

You are going to have to rely upon the fact that keeping that 
incumbent in power through coercion depends on the fact that to be 
effective, the coercion would *usually* have to be widespread. And 
people tend to dislike being coerced.... you will be alienating 
increasing numbers of people, and, if the government is at all 
functional, and coercion is illegal, the arrest and prosecution of 
those who attempt to coerce is the best remedy.

Once again, coercion does not seem to be a problem in the U.S. I've 
never heard of it in recent times! But voter fraud is not uncommon -- 
the registration and voting of people not legally qualified, or the 
mysterious voting of people who have died -- and, perhaps even more 
common and more serious, election fraud, where ballots are altered, 
or, more frequently, casting ballots by lawful voters is impeded 
selectively, and properly cast ballots are not counted correctly. (Or 
voting machines mysteriously change votes. Selectively. It is bad 
enough when it happens at all, but when it somehow seems to 
preferentially affect voters of one political stripe, we certainly 
have grounds to suspect criminal activity. It's fairly simple: just 
cause malfunctions to machines in precincts loyal to the party whose 
votes you wish to damage. Difficult to prove.

It is this counting fraud that I am seeking to interdict. We could 
eliminate that as a source of election inaccuracy. Not reduce it, 
*eliminate* it. Now, ballots can be ambiguous, for various reasons. 
There will always be some room for disagreement, due to the nature of 
the ballots themselves and how people use them. But such ballots are 
actually fairly uncommon, under most conditions. Excepting massive 
voting method changes introduced without, duh, TESTING them with a 
sample of voters! They are not ordinarily enough to turn elections.

Using paper ballots, marked by hand, eliminates the whole access to 
voting machines problem. Devices can easily be provided that will 
print a ballot for people who need that kind of assistance. There is 
absolutely no good reason why people should not be able to show up at 
their precinct and vote quickly and easily. Steve Unger is absolutely 
correct: hand-marked paper ballots are the way to go. I think it is 
fine to make them scannable, but it is *not* necessary.

In any case, and I must apologize to Ms. Dopp, the use of advanced, 
purchased voting technology is a serious mistake, from many points of 
view. It should not be necessary to purchase *any* equipment. The 
cost of counting ballots by hand is actually quite low, compared to 
the cost of purchasing relatively expensive, special purpose 
equipment which is going to be used once a year. And once you buy 
that equipment and set up the system to require it, you then will 
have problems with broken machines and frustrated voters who can't get access.

If you must machine count, then "optical scan equipment" need not be 
purchased. It already exists! Any fax machine can quite adequately 
scan a ballot. What is needed is software to take the ballot scan and 
convert it to vote data. It is not a difficult problem. My guess is 
that the software is available off the shelf, but a cooperative 
effort by jurisdictions to design a ballot format and software, with 
the software being open source -- it practically *must* be open 
source so that people will trust it -- should in short order make 
accurate counting software widely available for a standard ballot 
design. And if there is some glitch or failure, there are now two 
independent sets of primary voting data sources: the original ballots 
and the official scan.

My suggestion is to allow public scanning or photography of the 
ballots. If it *really* is a matter of concern that extraneous marks 
on ballots will be used in some nefarious way, fine. Set up a bunch 
of PCs in the space, with a fillable PDF file and standard Acrobat 
software running, and let people use them to print filled-out 
ballots. Lots of people have the knowledge to make this secure, at 
least as secure as machines provided by private companies.

Once ballot images are public, election counting fraud becomes very 
narrow in possible scope. The time available for altering ballots 
becomes very narrow.

It is not necessary to touch a ballot to scan it.

> > Discarding marked ballots is dangerous because it creates a ready
> > method for those bent on election fraud to invalidate ballots.
>
>In my previous mail I recommended representatives of all political
>groupings to be present when the votes are counted. If there are
>fraudsters with full uncontrolled access to the ballots they could do
>many tricks like replace some ballots with new ones.

There will always be someone with, potentially, uncontrolled access 
to ballots. I really think this is standing on one's head instead of 
just turning the paper around.

There is no serious risk to privacy introduced by public ballot 
imaging. There is a small increase, perhaps, of risk of occasional -- 
not organized -- vote coercion, due to the increased possibility of 
validation by the coercer through subtle differences in marks or 
other techniques. But any substantial increase in this would be 
detectable. The coercion risk is not a privacy risk. You cannot 
maintain privacy where the voter cooperates with the coercer. As 
another example, the voter could carry a cell phone and image the 
filled-out ballot prior to casting it. By a combination of this and 
external observation of the voter (does the voter obtain an extra 
ballot?) the coercer could be relatively certain that the voter had complied.

But simply the assertion of the coercer that the coercer has some 
unknown or mysterious means of determining how the voter has voted is 
actually enough to place pressure on some. It is not necessary for 
the coercer to actually verify it, and schemes to do so increase risk 
of exposure.

"I have paid off an officer who will be keeping custody of the 
ballots, and I'll be able to tell: rub your nose with your thumb and 
press it on the ballot." The coercer does not have to actually have 
such an officer in place, the threat need only be credible to the voter.

I'll repeat this: if the reason not to allow ballot imaging is 
"privacy," it's crazy. Ballots do not identify the voter, unless the 
voter has taken steps to make the ballot identifiable. And routinely 
we accept that risk, allowing voters to, for example, write in a 
candidate for dogcatcher, such as themselves. My wife wrote her own 
name in on a ballot in our town. I'd easily have been able, with 
access to that ballot, to tell how she voted on everything. Hmmm... 
maybe I should go ....

My point is that it is actually a non-issue. The ballots themselves 
are more connected to the voter than would be images, which have only 
extracted some superficial characteristics of the ballots, 
essentially they will be a map of reflected light within the visible. 
They will not show fingerprints or traces of DNA. They will not show 
odor. (A ballot could be identified by touching it with a perfume.) 
And *not* using images increases general access to the ballots. If 
nothing else, the official counting should be done with images, not 
with the actual ballots, which should be imaged, then sealed in 
packages designed to show tampering, and with a court order required 
to open the packages.

If the images are acquired in public view, and the public can itself 
image the ballots -- such as with a camera, which does not require 
that the imager touch the ballots -- then only ballot identification 
schemes that depend on visible marks (pinpricks can be made 
effectively invisible unless you know exactly where to look and how 
to handle the ballot to open up the hole a little) could succeed, and 
that brings them into public view, where recognition that something 
is amiss becoming much more likely. Previously, only a few election 
officials had the opportunity to detect something like that. With 
public imaging, the entire public is potentially an observer, and can 
observe in detail and at leisure.

Gad, why isn't everybody jumping on this bandwagon? I really do have 
to get the Election Methods Free Association going.... I'd have an 
answer to my question that makes sense.

> > a coercer, under present law, can already arrange to view ballots
> > directly.
>
>I guess this refers to the U.S law. This of course (in addition to
>providing some openness) introduces also some privacy and coercion
>related problems.

Yes. U.S. law. But it is true to some degree nearly everywhere. 
Somebody has to count the ballots! All you need to do is plant 
someone among the counters....

The goal of election fraud is not to get increased votes. It is to 
win. The fraud we are most concerned about, properly, is fraud which 
turns results. And if it does turn results, it may well be putting 
increased control of the election process in the hands of those who 
committed the fraud. Or those who already have power are tempted to 
use it to maintain power. The more that the process is opened to full 
public scrutiny, the less likely this is to succeed. Massive vote 
coercion can only be undertaken by heavily repressive governments. 
Not by a few individuals who want to control how their spouses voted!

(heh, heh, I demanded that my wife run as a write-in for the school 
committee so I could confirm that she actually voted for ... I think 
this was 2004. Kerry. Never can tell, after all, her father was a 
lawyer and one of them Republicans.)