Question: With respect to voters’ ability to comprehend the process, which voting system was deemed too complicated to understand?

Was it:

a) Ulrich Wiesner’s assessment of Punchscan, ThreeBallot and BingoVoting at the recent Chaos Communication Congress (25C3),

or,

b) Ontario voters’ recent assessment (via referendum) of the proposal to switch electoral systems to one modeled after Ulrich Wiesner’s country’s version of mixed-member proportional representation?

The answer is both.

So, it’s another year and another “my grandma can’t understand your system” debate. Well hopefully, dear reader, you will find some value in pushing back against an argument that underwrites the ignorance of crowds.

With respect to the various e2e systems Wiesner profiles, he concludes that:

Even if cryptography fixes auditability, transparency remains an issue as the methods are too complex.

But who decides what’s too complex, and what’s understandable? I think this is a fair question, because the fact is 60 million Germans somehow manage to understand a voting system that 3 million Ontarians convinced themselves they could not.

Ich werde sagen dass man versteht das was man schon kennt.

Of course I apologize to those readers who do not understand German. I’m sure it’s because its too complex for you, and not that you didn’t just happen to marry a nice German girl like I did.

The point is “understandability” is as much about what you already know as anything. There’s really no Platonic absolute. Often something’s not foreign if you grew up with it. Consider our German friends who are required pay a $10/month tax to be allowed to own an FM radio!

Even so, the “it’s too complicated” argument is not lost on this field and its researchers, as is demonstrated by a clear evolution in the work. Wiesner recounts some of the two year old criticisms, but discounts its progress since. Nevertheless, its evolving. It’s getting simpler. Why, we’re even writing a paper in which we show how to verify an e2e election with nothing but a spreadsheet such as OOo Calc — something we know the German government can understand.

The academic world is where this should remain.

Well prepare to be disappointed! We hope to be seeing some high profile e2e elections this year. Ben Adida and the Louvain team are bringing Helios to 25,000 students. The Scantegrity team will be making an annoucement about an election soon as well.

We can continue to use hand counting and have full transparency of what’s happening

Consider that paper-ballots cannot comprehensively address the needs of visually impaired voters. It’s also not universally verifiable–you cannot personally oversee all chains of custody at all times. I know as well as anyone who’s worked in such an election. It’s a pretty darn good system, but the notion of “full transparency” is a utopian fantasy.

Nevertheless Scantegrity was designed to incorporate a full, hand-countable, paper trail. Something to mention at the upcoming 26C3, I hope!

Update: Ben Adida contributes his perspective on this subject.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 12:48 am and is filed under Concepts in E2E, Voting Problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.