[EM] The critical importance of Precinct Summability.

[robert bristow-johnson]

I was away from home in my previous reply and using my phone.  About the other part ...

> On 08/26/2024 11:44 AM EDT Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
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> 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.

If you're doing PR (which I think is the purpose of RCV in multi-winner election), then it's gonna be something like the Gregory method with Droop quota and surplus votes transferred and runoffs eliminating the weakest candidates.  And it's not 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?

In the U.S. serialized ballots ain't gonna cut it.  Then we lose our vote by secret ballot.

> 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.

The first part of the information path, where the voter inserts their ballot into the tabulator and ballot box, that part has to be opaque to protect the voter's ballot secrecy.  We can't see any intermediate tallies until the end-of-day closing.

The first visible part of the information path is the tally printout at each polling place at the end-of-day closing.  Then post this paper tape of tallies at the polling place for everyone to see.  Like we do now with FPTP.

Publishing these precinct tallies on site essentially causes the rest of the information path to be transparent.  Knowing all of the precinct tallies is enough information to know who wins the election.  It would be pretty hard for someone to "just ... find 11780 votes" after the precinct tallies are all published.

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r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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