[EM] The critical importance of Precinct Summability.

[Closed Limelike Curves]

>
> The two-way communication is not transparent and skeptics (or conspiracy
> nuts) will claim that the two-way communication is not secure.

It doesn't really matter whether it's secure or not. All that matters is
whether it's possible to verify whether this insecurity affected the
result, based only on the precinct results. RCV is round-by-round
verifiable: in each round, you can post the vote totals for that round, and
verify the outcome was correctly calculated by adding up all the precinct
results.

But like I said, that requires having all ballots there on election
day, and two-way communication can also be kind of a pain in the ass. I'm
willing to accept those, but this is a real cost.

I think we really need to be much more careful about precinct-summability.
If we're not careful, we're going to hit a massive wall as soon as we talk
about multi-winner systems, which usually aren't precinct-summable.
Precinct verifiability is enough. In theory, it might be possible to drop
the need for precinct verifiability, if you have some kind of end-to-end
auditable procedure? But I don't know, since I'm not an election security
expert or cryptographer, and nobody has adequately implemented
E2E-auditable voting to my knowledge.

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 7:55 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On 08/12/2024 4:59 PM EDT Closed Limelike Curves <
> closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Chris: I agree with you that the importance of precinct summability is
> often exaggerated. If you tallied all results on election night, using
> two-way communication, this would fix the problem if you've received all
> ballots by election night (since you can post round-by-round results).
>
> The two-way communication is not transparent and skeptics (or conspiracy
> nuts) will claim that the two-way communication is not secure.
>
> Either way it's unnecessary if you have Precinct Summability.
>
> > That said, it's not useless, because lots of US states don't do that.
> The main issue is whether states will in practice actually adopt practices
> required for safe IRV elections.
>
> Hare RCV (IRV) will never be as transparent nor as secure as Condorcet RCV
> when the number of candidates exceeds 3 because it lacks Precinct
> Summability.  All other things equal, there will always be a difference in
> degree of transparency and to the degree of security/integrity of the
> election.  Condorcet will always (4+ candidates) have a property of
> transparency that Hare lacks and will always have a property of
> security/integrity that Hare lacks.
>
> > So far, they haven't.
>
> FairVote and RCVRC do not help.  The difference between misinformation and
> disinformation is whether they're drinking the Kool-Aid or they're serving
> the Kool-Aid.  FairVote and RCVRC are serving the Kool-Aid.
>
> I'm sticking to my story: Precinct Summability exposed the Venezuelan
> election as stolen.  It didn't prevent it, but that's because of the
> strength and corruption of the government over the opposition.  And, in
> principle, if they didn't have precinct summability and kept the tabulation
> of the vote completely opaque (because, say, they required all the ballot
> data to be opaquely transported from polling places to the central
> tabulation location), then they could have stolen the election and none of
> us would be the wiser.
>
>
> --
>
> r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
> .
> .
> .
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>
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