Legal Beagle: Tastes like democracy
77 Responses
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and the one who did, did because I sat him down and loomed until he got it done.)
Heh... and I'm sure you can formidable when you get all loomy, Lucy. But in our house we've got a workable 'Don't ask, Don't get told to fuck off' policy in place. And as I said in a PAR piece at the time, I've got a pretty clear conscience about NOT voting in the last round of local body elections. My only regret is that I bite my tongue quite a lot on the "if you don't vote, you don't get to whinge about the results handed down by those who did" principle. :)
Re, secrecy - I can see the threats of coercion etc (although a polling booth hasn't done Zimbabwe much good on that front) but am yet to be convinced (please, give it a go!) that enforced secrecy is a critical ingredient of democratic elections?
Well, Gareth, whatever I think of the incumbent government I'd like to think the New Zealand Labour Party doesn't conduct itself like the squalid Mugabe/Zanu-PF thugocracy. But let me tell you a little story, my father didn't speak to me for six months when I came out as a card-carrying Tory. I hate to think what would have happened to our respective blood pressures if we'd had to put up our hands in a caucus.
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US elections are managed locally - at the state and county level - so each county may use a different system - it's a real mish-mash. There's no real reason why they couldn't count the votes by hand - somethings are easier than in NZ as people have to vote at a particular fixed polling place - the downside though is that they vote on so much in each election - and people expect to get results on TV that night
I forgot to add one other voter suppression thing in the US - they vote on Tuesdays and polling booths are mostly open during work hours (close at 7 so there's a 2 hour rush at the end of the day) and you have to get from work to a particular polling place to vote
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Re, secrecy - I can see the threats of coercion etc (although a polling booth hasn't done Zimbabwe much good on that front) but am yet to be convinced (please, give it a go!) that enforced secrecy is a critical ingredient of democratic elections?
A secret vote is a human right.
* Section 12 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990:
Every New Zealand citizen who is of or over the age of 18 years—
(a) Has the right to vote in genuine periodic elections of members of the House of Representatives, which elections shall be by equal suffrage and by secret ballot* Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity ... To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors
* Article 21 of the Universial Declaration of Human Rights:
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
* Article XX of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man:
Every person having legal capacity is entitled to participate in the government of his country, directly or through his representatives, and to take part in popular elections, which shall be by secret ballot, and shall be honest, periodic and free.
* The American Convention on Human Rights
Every citizen shall enjoy the following rights and opportunities:
...
b. to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters...[note that these last two are not from America the country, but from America the 'continent', as expressed by the Organisation of American States]
etc.
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"banks seem to manage"
The word "seem" is important there.
Banking systems actually fail or calculate incorrectly or drop transactions or duplicate them or create bogus new ones quite often.
If other parties notice a problem, and they point out the problem, sometimes a system gets fixed. Other times the bank refunds some money in case of problems, but keeps the system because the problems are simply a cost of doing business (credit card fraud is an example of this; the demonstrably insecure systems we all use for online banking are another).
We don't hear about this because generally things get sorted out at a customer level to everyone's satisfaction. Voting is not really a parallel proposition.
Matthew: the issue isn't security per se. The issue is how this is demonstrated.
For example, if source code is made public, that's neat, but how do you know that it's what's actually deployed? Once you've proven that, how do you know that nothing else is running on the system where it's deployed? Once you know that, how do you know that the endpoints are secure?
These problems aren't insoluble but they are expensive and difficult to get right. Most importantly, they are not transparent to the general public. "Bruce Schneier says it's ok" is reasonably persuasive to me, but I know who he is. Most people don't. And what if Matthew Poole says the system ok, and Stephen Judd disagrees? I might be quite wrong but still persuade the average person who doesn't have the technical background. Counting pieces of paper is easy to conceptualise; public key cyptography is not.
That's why I don't think the assurances that we can provide for an electronic system are nearly as transparent for the general public as the assurances in a scrutineered manual system. That's the rub for me - public faith in it.
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In the benign circumstances we currently enjoy
Yes, quite. People died and still die for the right to a secret ballot, they did so because they knew it was critical to having their voices heard in a fair and equitable manner.
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US elections... There's no real reason why they couldn't count the votes by hand
Something that's said time and time again on Slashdot, whenever the broken US electoral system is raised. Marks on paper, OCR, it just scales beautifully. The larger your electorate, the larger your pool of counters and scrutineers.
somethings are easier than in NZ as people have to vote at a particular fixed polling place
"fixed" for what value? I choose my polling place, I don't have one assigned to me except by the vague boundaries of my electorate. I've been in a different electorate for every election so far, so there's no pattern, but I'll choose a polling station that's close to home. This year it'll probably be Epsom Girls again (same place I voted in '02, when I was in this electorate), because it's the closest. If there's somewhere closer, I'll go there. Votes for a particular electorate are cast in multiple locations. Don't forget the out-of-electorate votes, too.
the downside though is that they vote on so much in each election - and people expect to get results on TV that night
Americans have the attention span of a Ritalin-deprived ADD sufferer. We know this. That they choose to vote for the dog catcher through to the chief of police on the same day as they vote for "the leader of the free world" and the rest of their national government is their bloody problem. Morons, one and all. A crap solution pushed by thoroughly vested interests won't fix that problem.
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But in our house we've got a workable 'Don't ask, Don't get told to fuck off' policy in place.
Oh, I'd never dream of telling him who to vote for. (Okay, I would, but only in the context of a rousing political debate.) It was just that I was getting endless whining about the current mayor and how much he sucked. I figured "vote or shut up" was a fair ultimatum.
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Oh sure, pull the old it's in the Human Rights Act card why don't you... ;-]
OK, well doesn't that pretty much screw the concept? Although I suppose the definition of secret ballot would come into play (e.g. does it simply mean it can't be traced after it's made?)
I tried to have a look around the net for discussion points on this but it was all about technical implementation, rather than the nature of someone possibly watching you make the vote. I'm sure a company I was involved with a while ago piloted an internet solution for local body STV voting - given that is already a postal ballot it makes little difference. So what's the argument behind a central government vote being absolutely super secret while a local government one can be handled through the post?Interesting stuff.
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Counting pieces of paper is easy to conceptualise; public key cyptography is not.
That's why I don't think the assurances that we can provide for an electronic system are nearly as transparent for the general public as the assurances in a scrutineered manual system. That's the rub for me - public faith in it.
I happen to agree with you. Many voters think that "Internet Explorer"=="the Internet". They don't know, and don't want to know, about verified hardware and hashes and all the other things that can be done to ensure that a system is running what it's meant to be running. This is actually a situation where TPM would be perfect, for the assurance of the hardware, but it's way over the heads of Jo(e) Voter.
If it wasn't for the assistance to the disabled, I'd say that e-voting was an entirely pointless exercise in expense and fallibility. If there's a way that these groups can be enfranchised without having to go e-voting all the way, I'll support it to the hilt. I find it mildly unsettling that there are people whose choices are to not vote, or to tell someone else how they want their vote to be cast - and for the blind, they have no assurance that what they want is what was done! They're not a huge portion of the electorate, sure, but that doesn't make their votes any less worthy of the secrecy that the rest of us take for granted.
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Although I suppose the definition of secret ballot would come into play (e.g. does it simply mean it can't be traced after it's made?)
We don't have that now. Every ballot has a unique serial number, and it's possible to track who voted how by way of that number. It's distinctly non-trivial, as it means revealing the serial number of every voter and ballot until you find the match you're after, but it can be done.
My suggested system, involving a random time delay in hand-off between authentication and voting systems would achieve a similar level of secrecy. It would be theoretically possible to establish how someone voted, but doing so would be very involved because you'd have to correlate a voter's electorate with the votes cast at a similar point in time. -
So what's the argument behind a central government vote being absolutely super secret while a local government one can be handled through the post?
In a way that makes the local gummint ballot more secret, because unless the mail clearing person sees you drop your ballot into the post box, knows you, and opens the envelope (rendering your ballot spoiled, in any case), it's just one more ballot in a pile of tens-of-thousands. There aren't that many votes cast at any polling station in the general election.
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Matthew, my concern around secrecy for internet is not so much in the "transmission" of the vote (I imagine that has technical solutions) but in someone watching you (and therefore possibly coercing you to) cast that vote on your screen - but this same concern applies for postal votes. My wife could have watched me tick the box on a paper ballot just as she could see me do it on a screen.
Interesting that votes can currently be traced back to a voter though? That's a MUCH bigger concern than mine...
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Matthew, my concern around secrecy for internet is not so much in the "transmission" of the vote (I imagine that has technical solutions) but in someone watching you (and therefore possibly coercing you to) cast that vote on your screen - but this same concern applies for postal votes. My wife could have watched me tick the box on a paper ballot just as she could see me do it on a screen.
You're right, there are extremely good technical solutions to the security of the ballot in transit and quite good ones for the ballot in situ.
The problem of someone watching you is harder to address, but the proposal is that ballots could be reviewed and re-cast at any point until the close of polling. So if thug hubby watches over wifey's shoulder to ensure she votes "proper", wifey could at some future point get away from his scrutiny and change her vote. Which, unlike local body, is possible as proposed. Local body votes are set once the envelope is sealed.Interesting that votes can currently be traced back to a voter though? That's a MUCH bigger concern than mine...
As I said, it's non-trivial and cannot be done secretly. It requires the ballot papers, and the voter books, and it permanently alters both of them because the serial number is obscured initially.
It's essential to deal with fraud. If an electorate has five polling stations and someone votes at all of them, and then the vote is by a margin of four, how do you achieve a valid result? You need a way to determine which of the ballots shouldn't be in there. That's why the possibility exists. -
"fixed" for what value?
I think Paul was referring to the USA. You can vote at any polling booth here in NZ, indeed as Matthew pointed out, you can adopt the McGillicuddy slogan and 'vote early, vote often...'
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OK, well doesn't that pretty much screw the concept? Although I suppose the definition of secret ballot would come into play (e.g. does it simply mean it can't be traced after it's made?)
Not necessarily. People have a right to vote secretly, but a fair proportion of us don't (or at least tell each other who they voted for).
The paper from the Chief Electoral Office suggested that people should be able to vote electronically, then turn up at a polling booth on election day and cast a paper (?) ballot that would override their on-line vote.
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Morons, one and all.
50% of me is horribly offended!
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50% of me is horribly offended!
You had the sense to leave!
Seriously, I don't understand Americans who wail about how many things they have to vote for at every election. It's the way you do it, if you don't like it have it changed. I'd rate the election of central government as of such importance as to be worthy of its own day. Vote on the dog catcher and sheriff and the ordinance on dogs crapping on the pavement some other time.
That probably also has a significant impact on voter turnout. When you spend an hour at the polling station ticking boxes, every two years, it's hardly a process that's going to get the apathetic champing at the bit. -
In 2005 I worked at one of our local polling booths, and two things struck me, reflecting on the day. One, the simplicity of the book with names and addresses, the ruler and the red ball point pen to keep account of who had voted. None of your "hanging chads" there. And two, local MP and Minister of the Crown turning up in Saturday morning casuals to vote (well, not that casual). (Apparently Recount is a jolly good watch, if intensely upsetting.)
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When you spend an hour at the polling station ticking boxes
You can also just pull the 'All Democrat' or 'All Republican' lever (whole 'nother kettle of fish, I know). It's not that onerous, really...
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I'm not denying the technical challenges or that our current voting system works well for many people.
As our population ages, we can expect more disabled voters for whom getting to a physical polling place and reading a ballot in tiny print are a significant - and blatantly unfair - barrier to their democratic rights and obligations. Stroppy baby boomers are not going to meekly take that lying down.
Add younger voters being used to very low transaction costs (time, effort, access) in any activity.
Resistance to online voting does not seem like a viable long-term proposition - for political, not technical reasons.
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Resistance to online voting does not seem like a viable long-term proposition - for political, not technical reasons.
Sadly, I think that people will sacrifice the surety of our current system for the convenience (as in blatant laziness, not assistance of the disabled) of electronic voting. One of the few things (that used to be) in the US school curriculum that I wish we had is civics. We do far too little to teach children about why democracy is important, our rights, the structure of governance (Commercial Law 101 at U.Auck does a once-over-lightly of NZ's civic structure, as an introduction to the law and how it's passed, and from what I heard in my tutorials some students who were born here have no idea about the three arms or any of those other fundamentals), etc. Fitzgerald v Muldoon should be required knowledge for every person who leaves high school in this country!
Without the knowledge of how the system works, it's impossible to get people to care about ensuring it continues to work.
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Amen, Matthew.
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Matthew, I agree we need a big investment in understanding about civics alongside introduction of technology that (as others have noted) makes voting just too easy to stay valuable for most.
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What Graham said.
Plus "optional secrecy" isn't secrecy, because anyone (parent, partner, ward heeler) can require one to vote unsecretly and show/give them the ballot paper. There have been numerous cases in the UK of party workers collecting postal votes.
I'd also argue for the abolition of postal elections for councils. Why not have the council and general elections on the same day?
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Why not have the council and general elections on the same day?
For one thing, they're currently on different cycles and aligning them would mean some pretty dramatic tinkering with term limits - 18 months one way or the other!
Also, it's not just councils. It's councils, DHBs, and probably one or two other bodies. Before you know it we're like the Yanks, where voter turnout is abysmal because nobody wants to wade through a 10-page voting sheet while standing at a polling booth.
General elections are of sufficient importance to justify their own day, IMO, and I think many people who know of the idiocy of American elections would agree.
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