The Public Ballot

Jennifer Brunner, the first Democratic secretary of state in 16 years, stressed that "with paper ballots, there is no chance that votes can be matched to the names of voters. With electronic voting, there's a minuscule chance that this matching of names and votes could take place. But that chance is so remote that Brunner's requirement is a solution in search of a problem."

Grr.

Read the full Colmbus Dispatch article here.

In a Columbus Dispatch article this morning, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (and company) advocated the use paper ballots (versus electronic) for provisional voting. More interestingly, she had this to say about the electoral system:

"The biggest concern I have here, which I am trying to protect, is the secrecy of the voter's ballot. I've got to make sure the system is one people have absolute trust in."

Well, that sounds good, I guess. In discussing provisional ballots, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Board of Elections said,

"...records linking voters' names and identifying codes are kept separately -- in buildings miles apart -- from voting machine paper tapes printed with those identifying codes and voters' ballot choices" (paraphrased by Dispatch author Barbara Carmen, and quoted by me).

Ha! Sounds like our next project.

Thanks to James Moyer for the heads-up.

A Down-to-Earth Explanation about Hacking the Secret Ballot

My previous post on the matter was just a cut-and-paste job with our press release, which was overly formal, according to Yury; others (myself included) agreed. To recap:

It is possible to see out how someone voted. This includes a particular person’s selection of candidates, as well as their decisions on ballot initiatives, referendums, etc. To be clear: this is tied to their name and address!

• Who could that ‘someone’ be?
• They reside in one of ten specific Ohio counties (or in any other state which employs a similar system).
• They voted at the polls (i.e. not by absentee ballot).
• They voted in the past decade or so.
• How accurate is your technique?
• Generally speaking, the technique is highly accurate – my best guess is 95%+, but the depth of technical analysis required for more precise figures has yet to be performed.
• What do you mean ‘anyone’ can do it?
• A person only needs to go to a county courthouse or place where an election’s ballots are stored, and perform the necessary aggregation and analysis. In our experience, it was pretty easy. We just called a county courthouse, asked to examine the ballots, and had a meeting scheduled within the week. Still, the precinct we decoded was small, which made it easy to perform the data aggregation by hand. It’s not difficult to do this on a mass scale; it would simply require some scanning/OCR equipment.
• So have you guys done this?
• Yes. In order to show people that this can actually be accomplished, and isn’t just theory, James Moyer and I have figured out how people voted on a particular ballot issue in a small precinct in Delaware County, Ohio. Immediately before voter confidentiality was breached, each voter was assigned a unique, anonymous ID.
• Wait, did you just say you can tell how people voted?
• For the second time, yes. Please read my previous post. This is a big deal.

If I can actually get people to read about this, then I’ll post an in-depth technical follow-up (“mini-whitepaper”?), which will include raw and processed poll data, as well as a step-by-step discussion of the methodology involved. Additionally, a list of affected Ohio counties will be provided.

Full article here.

"Even if the editorial safeguards that the Bancroft family have negotiated help maintain the independence and rigor of the reporting there, how many times will Murdoch or his business practices come up in the stories the paper is trying to report?"