[EM] Happy election day, fellow Americans

[Steve Eppley]

Hi,

Michael R wrote that you can call the county office to see if your vote 
has been received.  But telephones don't generally work that way.  You 
can call and hear someone tell you your vote was received.  Shouldn't 
that be considered rather weak evidence?  Wouldn't the county and the 
person you call have a strong incentive to claim your vote was counted 
(and counted accurately) regardless of whether it was?  What evidence is 
really available, and how hard is it for voters or election monitors to 
inspect?

As for voting by mail, it also has minor downsides: votes can be coerced 
or sold, and electioneering can occur near where someone is trying to 
vote.  Hopefully those behaviors can't be large enough to make a difference.

When the Caltech/MIT Voting Project issued some voting system design 
recommendations a few years ago, they ruled out publishing the votes in 
a way that would make it possible for the voter to verify her vote was 
counted accurately.  Mike Alvarez of Caltech told me the reason for that 
decision was to make it impossible to coerce or sell votes.  I think 
they overlooked an alternative: allowing each voter to submit multiple 
votes that would all be verifiable by the voter, but only one would 
count and only the voter would know which is the one that counts.  That 
would solve the coercion/sale problems since the voter would be free to 
also cast a "sincere" vote that negates the coerced/sold vote, which 
would eliminate the value of coerced/bought votes, and thereby eliminate 
the incentives to coerce or buy votes.

Regards,
Steve Eppley
----------------------------------------
mrouse1 at mrouse.com wrote:
> You can call the county election office at any time to see if your vote has been received. The ballots are only counted on election day, and are secured beforehand. There are two envelopes -- a return envelope and a sealed secrecy envelope holding the ballot. On election day, all secrecy envelopes are separated from their return envelopes to ensure the vote remains secret.
>
> Here is some more info on it: http://www.sos.state.or.us/executive/votebymail/
>
> --- raphfrk at gmail.com wrote:
>
> From: "Raph Frank" <raphfrk at gmail.com>
> To: "Michael Rouse" <mrouse1 at mrouse.com>
> Cc: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] Happy election day, fellow Americans
> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 21:40:14 +0000
>
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Michael Rouse <mrouse1 at mrouse.com> wrote:
>   
>> Well, and brag that in Oregon, we have universal vote-by-mail, so we can
>> lounge around with a beer in one hand and a voter pamphlet in the other
>> while filling out our ballot. :)
>>     
>
> ... and cross your fingers that the vote is actually counted?  ...
> though knowing nothing about Oregon, maybe that isn't an issue.
>