Telephone Integrity November 21, 2007
Posted by Aleks Essex and Richard Carback in : Security, Voting Goals , add a commentIn trying to categorize integrity in voting systems, its become clear to me that a parallel exists between many other human-technology interactions. Consider the things that have to go right when you want to call someone on the phone:
Dialed as Intended - Given a phone number, you can figure out how to press the buttons to dial it.
Signaled as Dialed - The telephone unit must emit DTMF tones (or pulses) consistent with the buttons you pressed.
Routed as Signaled - The telephone network must correctly route your call based on the signal it received.
Putting it together your call is Routed as Intended.
Obviously the integrity chain is easy for the caller to validate, when the correct person picks up the phone at the other end. But what about when its not? I often phone my sister in the arctic and have to try several times to get through. I could’ve accidentally dialed the wrong number (i.e. not dialed as intended). I could’ve pressed the button quickly and the DTMF tone was not registered (i.e. not signaled as dialed). Or, as often appears to usually be the case, the call is not routed as signaled. The call, being routed through satellite, is often subject to reliability issues, and even bad weather (it IS the arctic!).
Obviously telephone integrity is not currently the focus of much research. But taking these ideas and applying them to electronic voting is.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
Shooting Dice November 19, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Clark and Richard Carback in : Security , 3 commentsInside Elections has an interesting post on the dice that were used to randomly select precincts for manual recount. In a Punchscan election, there is a lot more dice rolling. We need random choices of ballots to audit and sides of the tally to reveal.
Dice have their shortcomings. First, to convince yourself a die is not loaded requires a lot of rolling and statistical number crunching. Second, its fine if you are in the room to witness the rolling of the dice, but the process does disenfranchise everyone who is not.
For these reasons, Punchscan uses stock data to generate random numbers. Getting something random out of the data is a bit tricky (although, unfortunately for investors, not tricky enough) but it results in a random selection that anyone with a newspaper or the internet can check. For more details, see this paper.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
Hat tip November 15, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Clark and Richard Carback in : Misc , add a commentElection Technology lists the best of the voting blogosphere.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
Incentives and Internet Voting
Posted by Jeremy Clark and in : Economics of Voting , 1 comment so farLet me start by trying to sneak a completely heretical fact past everyone: rational people should not vote. (At the very least, I put our disclaimer to good use).
Or at least that the consensus among economists (here is Levitt/Dubner, Harford, Landsburg–OK, so maybe a consensus among economists who write great econ books).
The rational is that one vote will very rarely change an election’s outcome (Landsburg doesn’t dismiss the idea of voting, just equates the probability of it paying off to winning the lottery, while Levitt/Dubner cite the relevant empirical evidence). In terms of costs and benefits, the costs of going out of your way to vote very rarely will outweigh the political benefit from casting that one vote.
Why do people vote then? Well in Canada, parties do get a small financial compensation for each vote they receive (under certain preconditions) but for the average voter, this is unlikely a conscious factor. There is also a sort of prisoner’s dilemma at play: its safe to not vote as long as everyone else does but if everyone acted rationally, then no one would vote (making everyone worst-off, and also making it rational to vote again).
However, empirical studies suggest that people vote because of a moral incentive to perform their civic duty, and not for any direct expected benefit. This is important because it means decreasing the costs of voting will not increase turnout. Levitt/Dubner summarize the finds of Patricia Funk on Swiss elections,
The Swiss love to vote - on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years (maybe they stopped handing out live pigs there too), so a new option was introduced: the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn’t the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by mail… Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly.
So this will increase turnout, right? Amazingly, no.
In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting - which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.
Why?
If a given citizen doesn’t stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother? In Switzerland, as in the U.S., “there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls,” Funk writes. “As long as poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn’t, the benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of community.”
Conclusions: (1) Internet voting will probably not have the intending effect of increasing turnout. (2) Turnout can be increased by making the act of voting more visual to other people in society. (3) A great way to signal that you voted is a receipt.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.