Awesome Time

I came across an op-ed piece by William Poundstone in today’s New York Times that really opened my eyes on some methods for discouraging election fraud, especially when using electronic voting machines. Poundstone, author of the shortly-to-be-released Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), highlights a system proposed by Drs. Warren D. Smith, a math professor at Temple, and Ronald L. Rivest, a professor of computer science at MIT who helped invent RSA encryption (he’s the ‘R’).

With computing power increasing exponentially, it’s continually getting easier for someone with enough computer knowledge (and you don’t need much) to break into an electronic voting machine and alter the vote counts. Even more worrisome is that the manufacturers of these machines don’t seem to be taking the security of our votes as seriously as they perhaps ought to. Remember the Diebold e-voting scandal from a few years ago? Unfortunately, even a simple paper record of how you voted is no defense against a fraud-minded election worker. It also doesn’t comfort those who prefer to keep their votes secret, and the secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of a good democracy. Or your ballot could simply be lost…

Who better, then, than two of the country’s finest minds in the field of cryptography and information security, to talk about a way to keep our elections secure? What Rivest and Smith have come up with is brilliantly elegant, pleasantly democratic, and ironically simple.

You don’t encrypt the machines. You throw the doors open on the whole system and make everyone an enforcer.

The basic idea is this:

To preserve the secret ballot, your vote is given a unique number (which you don’t know) as opposed to being tied to your name. The votes are posted online on a public site where everyone can look them up. This will become important in a moment.

After you cast your vote, a printer prints out a slip of paper with a random vote and its identifier on it. I’ll repeat that, because it bears repeating: The vote on your slip of paper is not your vote, but someone else’s at random. It’s also not exclusive: more than one voter could potentially be given the same slip of paper. That’s it from the polling station’s point of view - such a system would be dirt-cheap to implement.

What you do with that slip of paper is your own business - you can throw it away if you like and most people probably will. It would be like a receipt from a store - do you really keep those around? But if you want, you can go to the public election site, type in the number on the paper, and look up the vote. If the vote online doesn’t match the vote on the paper, you have proof positive that someone fudged the data.

Here’s the scenario they envision - I’ll use the 2000 candidates’ names because they’re both 4 letters long and therefore easy to type. I make no overt accusations of election fraud here. Certainly not about an election long since over and done with…

So, I go into the polling station, cast my vote for Gore, and the printer spits out a slip of paper that says “59F263D - BUSH” on it. Being a conscientious citizen, the next day after the results are announced I go to the elections website and look up vote number 59F263D, and the database tells me that this particular vote was cast for Bush. Great - the vote I looked up was recorded correctly and faithfully by the machines. No fraud here - or if there was, it didn’t involve this particular vote.

Someone else, as it happens, later that day, was handed a different piece of paper. “78B484F - GORE” - which happens to have been my particular vote (though of course, this being a secret ballot, neither they nor I know that). They go and look it up, and online it shows BUSH - which means somebody somewhere changed the vote. If the votes are posted online as they are cast and recorded by the computers, and the papers handed out as people vote, then this is absolute and ironclad proof of election fraud, and of course, one vote miscounted is all you need.

The security, and the beauty, of this system, lies in the fact that it’s distributed. Even the fact that most people will just throw away their slips doesn’t matter. If the margin of victory is close (and what election lately hasn’t been?), you can bet that a lot of people will be checking. This is where the beauty of statistics takes over.

I’ll use Poundstone’s example from the Times article. Let’s say there is a fraud involving 6 percent of ballots in a particular city. This isn’t entirely unheard-of. The old-school machine politicians and bosses in the early 20th century used to buy (or otherwise coerce) voters in far greater numbers. 6 percent is probably enough, in this day and age, to swing an election in your favor. It’ll look close, but legitimate.

Statistically speaking, if only about 50 people check their papers against the online data, there is a 95% chance they will catch the fraud. The population size doesn’t matter. If more people check, the odds of catching the fraud go up.  So too if the fraud is larger, of course.

What I really love about this idea is not only that it makes catching election fraud a virtual certainty (unless dozens of people are all astronomically unlucky), but it puts the ability, and responsibility, to catch election fraud into the hands of the voters themselves. Not only do we do our civic duty of voting, but we then have the power to keep the electioneers honest, and our numbers alone give us the certainty of catching anyone trying to deceive us.

I love it.

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