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Re: Boulder County DA Should Investigate County Elections Office, Instead

Ralph,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I see where you are coming from. You don't want anything that makes corruption easier. I agree. My point is that there are always tradeoffs in design. If a unique identifier make vote buying slightly easier, but lowers the vote error rate from 2% to 1%, then you have to ask yourself if it is worthwhile. I know you don't want to get into the details, but I feel compelled to mention a few things.

1. Most people can remember about 7 digits. If the codes are longer than that (and they are not sequenced in an obvious way) it would be difficult to remember an entire ballot number. Also, if a voting employee went to the bathroom to make a cell phone call every 15 minutes, it would be pretty obvious that something was up. Now, you could argue that an entire group of corrupt voting officials (such as those damned PRPers) could just write down the IDs. But again, if they want to be blatent about it, like that, they could just remove the curtains from the voting booths and actually watch people fill out there ballots. Or they could screen the ballots before they went in the box.

2. Better than an orthographic number, a bar code (still a unique ID) would be nearly impossible to remember. Without some sort of miniature photographic equipment, a bar code would be pretty darn safe. With this miniature equipment you could surruptitiously place one in a voting both, so again, the point of a identifying mark is moot.

3. Don't get me wrong. If a precinct had ballots marked sequentially, 1,2,3,... I agree, it would be pretty darn easy for a polling place employee to link a voter and a ballot. I don't know how Boulder (or any other) county does it. But that would be a pretty stupid thing to do. You can argue that it is the existance of the mark that is the culprit (in fact, that's what the constitution says), but I feel like we can focus our criticism a little more in such a case. It's the poor design that we should be worried about.

4. Just to get some terminology straight. When people say "vote buying" I assume they mean that the voter is complicit in the act. Is there a separate term for the strong-arm tactics you desribe? (e.g. "Vote coersion"). I think it is important to make a distinction. In order for vote buying to have a real impact, a significant portion of the voters must be amoral enough to accept money for their vote. And really, vote buying at the polls is not that much different from, "If you vote for me, I'll cut your taxes!" In either case, we deserve whatever government we elect. Vote coersion is a much more insidious problem. Maybe the fact that I don't feel all that strongly about vote buying is that I put it in a different category than vote coersion.

5. The argument for uniquely ID ballots is that makes debugging easier. If there is a problem with the electronic version, you can go back and look at the paper, or vise versa. I can imagine ways to get this same benefit without pre-marking the ballots. If you are interested in this (largely academic) issue, I'd love the opportunity to discuss it offline.

6. A little bit off topic (and entirely too pedantic) but government spending is not 1/3 of the economy. The government budget is currently about 18% of gross domestic product (GDP). Down from 22% during Reagan/H. Bush terms and 20% during Clinton's. You can read all about it in Matt Miller's book "The 2% Solution."

Nick



Ralph Shnelvar wrote:

Dear Nick:

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 17:30:11 -0600, you wrote:



Maybe I'm being stupid,



No, you are not.



but I still don't get it. If I want to buy somebody's vote, I offer to pay them some money if they vote for my guy. I tell them to make a special squiggle on the ballot. Then I get that extra disk you talked about. I don't need that mark to be on the ballot beforehand.



Because a special squiggle is easily identifiable.  It may send up a flag
that something is afoot ... especially if there are similar squiggles on
multiple ballots.

A special "squiggle" (bar code/serial number) inserted by the government
makes such detection much harder because no special squiggle is needed.



Or, if we're assuming that I have help from an unscrupulous employee, why don't I just ask that employee to help me set up a hidden video camera in the polling places?



Because that would be - using current technology - obvious.  It may be,
though, that in the future such technology would be much easier to hide.
Think about the currently popular camera cell phones.



Or better yet, if I'm buying votes, why not just ask someone to video casting their own ballot?



Because they can get paid and then get a new ballot.



I would argue that whether or not the mark exists on the ballot beforehand is moot. If people want to buy votes now, they can. Since vote buying can be accomplished either way, I think that it is more important to look at other issues. Like this one, if I WANT to keep my ballot a secret I should be able to do that. So, does having this mark on my ballot make it possible for someone to link me to me ballot without my consent?



It is difficult.

But consider that even though it is difficult, it may not be impossible.

I don't want to go into gory details, but everyone in your precinct does not
vote the same ballot.  There are

	English and Spanish (and other languages?)
	District level ballots (Fire/School, etc.)
	Party ballots in primaries.

Which makes identifying you without your consent easier. 


I wrote the above last night.  I gave the problem a little more thought.
Let me paint a scenario that you may or may not consider far-fetched.

Consider that in mythical Pebbles County that power is about to shift from
the Permanent Revolutionary Party (PRP) to the Socialist Democratic Party
(SDP) because of all the Boulderites moving into Pebbles.

The PRP is panicking because the books have been cooked for thirty years.
There have been huge payoffs, lots of illegal contracts, a minor TABOR
violation, and three parking tickets waived.

The PRP decides to take decisive action.  In the primary they get a few of
the PRP members to memorize names and ballot numbers as the ballots are
removed from "security envelopes".  Or, even more simply, every hour on the
15-minute mark, a corrupt PRP worker looks at the ballot, remembers the
name, and then remembers the unique sequence number.  The worker then goes
to the bathroom or goes out for a smoke and calls PRP headquarters on
his/her cell to give a name and ballot number.

Let's say its 5 PRP members who do this once per hour during the primary.

After the primary, the PRP gathers the names and gets a copy of the scanned
images of all the ballots.

Couple that with the Secretary of States voter registration list and you
have a list of party affiliation.  The PRP then eliminates the names of PRP
members and focuses on registered SDP members.

A few anonymous phone calls are made and a few letters are sent out to the
press and they say something like, "Mr. Bernstein, this is SDP party
headquarters and we know how you voted in the primary.  You voted for Mr. X,
Ms. Y, and Ms. Z.  We thank you for voting and want you to know that we'll
know how you vote in the general election.  Click."

A few dozen calls like that and you will likely affect the results of the
election.  Some (many?) of the registered SDP members in Gamma County will
feel intimidated.


Nicholas, the point to all of this is that government now spends 1/3 of the
money generated by this economy.  A "small" realignment of contracts can
make some enormous individual fortunes.  This provides enormous incentive to
rig elections and _anything_ that makes elections easier to rig should be
avoided.

Someone, somewhere, more clever than I will find a way to use those
government-issued identifying marks to rig elections.









Ralph Shnelvar wrote:



A 100 gigabyte drive can be purchased for about $100 and easily fits in a
coat pocket.

A relatively simple computer program could scan those 100,000 JPEG images in
a few hours for the identifying marks.

Now it becomes trivial for people to sell their votes and easy for an
unscrupulous vote buyer to determine if what the buyer paid for was actually
delivered.  All it takes is an unethical worker at the County CLerk's office
to make an extra copy of the scanned images and then tuck the extra disk
drive in the worker's pocket for sale to a vote buyer.

Very, very scary.





Nick






Ralph




--
My razor-sharp wit was confiscated at airport security.