In this course, you'll learn what every citizen should know about the security risks--and future potential — of electronic voting and Internet voting. We'll take a look at the past, present, and future of election technologies and explore the various spaces intersected by voting, including computer security, human factors, public policy, and more.
Early Paper Ballots
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From the course by University of Michigan
Securing Digital Democracy
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From the lesson
Voting as a Security Problem
Approaching voting problems with the security mindset
Meet the Instructors
J. Alex HaldermanAssociate Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Hi. Welcome back.
The security problems with voting by voice that we just talked about really became
apparent even to people at the time. And there were calls from pretty early on,
to replace voting by voice with something else.
And that something else was the paper ballot.
In France, in the 1795 Constitution, there was a demand for, for voting by, by
ballot. In, in England the People's Charter in
1838 also called for the introduction of voting by ballot.
And in the US, voting with ballots was gradually introduced in, in jurisdictions
throughout the early 1800s. Let's take a look at some of the
technology behind voting by ballots. So, voting using ballots is, is an idea
that goes all the way back to ancient Greece where for certain elections voters
would, would vote by depositing different colors of stones or pot shards into an
urn. That idea of, of voting on a, a physical
object using physical tokens carried, carried on into more modern times.
Here we see an example of a ballot box that in, involves tokens that are actually
colored balls. And the word ballot comes from the Italian
word ballota, meaning little ball, just like this.
Now, this particular voting device wasn't actually used in elections for, for public
office. It was used in a private club for
elections of new applicants for membership.
And each existing member of the club got a black ball and a white ball and would
deposit one or the other into this box, depending on whether they liked the new
person. This is where the, the, the term black
ball comes from, to black ball someone, to veto their membership, for instance would
be an actual operation with a black ball and a ballot box like this.
So, for elections, ballots typically consisted of pieces of paper.
And those ballot papers and the ballot box into which they were inserted were some of
the earliest forms of technology used by voting.
Voting by voice, we didn't really need any technology other than paper and pen to
record voters' choices. Now, voting with the ballot required the
introduction of polling technology. So, let's see some of the features with
this particular form of a, a voting technology the ballot box, this early
ballet box from about 1870 contains a lock so you could insert a key to make sure
that no one can open it up and remove the ballots.
And at the beginning of the polls, the election would start by actually unlocking
it and opening it to show that the box was empty.
Then they'd lock it, and voters would proceed to walk up to the box and cast
their votes. To cast a vote, you take your ballot and
just put it into the slot here. Voters initially, had to provide their own
ballots. And the earliest form was just a scrap of
paper on which you wrote by hand, the names of the candidates you wanted to vote
for. Now, after all the voters had inserted
their ballots into the box the officials would either open it up and count it in
front of people right there at the polling place, or if it was going to be counted
somewhere else, they might try to seal the ballot box, placing something over the,
the slot, say, a, a wax seal to prevent more ballots from being inserted.
So, this was the essence of the ballot box technology in its earliest form.
You could also look at what a count might look like, and this illustration shows the
counting process on paper ballots in a wooden ballot box.
We can see several features of the process that are that have security implications.
So here, we see that there is one man who's job it is to remove each ballot from
the box and call off the, the names for each office.
Then there are clerks once again, as in voice voting, writing down each choice and
tallying them up. Also there are observers in the background
who are watching that the right name is read and the right thing is written down.
So, there's some security implications even to this simple arrangement.
You can see that the man who is reading the ballots doesn't have a writing
implement to make it more difficult for him to, say, change what's on the ballot.
Similarly, the observers are, are from, from multiple different parties or levels
of government, as well as members of the public standing in the back.
All of this is introducing multiple security mechanisms to try to safeguard
the integrity of the vote. Now, it's time to ask one more time what
could go wrong? So, again, try applying the security
mindset and what you know, about voting on paper ballots.
And think about, what might be some of the problems with this system as it was
adopted in its earliest forms. It turns out that there's quite a lot that
could go wrong with these early applications of, paper ballots.
The technology was designed to provide integrity and a form of protection for
ballot secrecy. But if the procedures weren't followed
quite right or if people trying to violate the security of the election were clever
enough there were many ways in which this would fail.
One example of a, a way that the security could be violated is procedure.
If the procedures weren't followed precisely, lots could, could go wrong.
For instance, it would be, it would be quite common to try to exclude those
observers that we see in the background here in this idealistic depiction of
counting. And in that case, the counters could just
announce whatever results they wanted. Another place where plenty could go wrong
was in the design of the ballot and the ballot box themselves.
These technologies introduced for the first time, with paper ballots created new
kinds of opportunities for fraud. Let's, let's look at some of those now.
So, this is really an extraordinary picture I'm showing you now.
This is an example of a real dishonest ballot box.
And this was used to cheat in by, by criminals in a, a real election in San
Francisco around 1856. Here's one example of what can go wrong.
Someone can be replacing the honest ballot box with a cheater's ballot box like this.
So, let's, let's look at how this design works.
This is incredibly clever. Ahe ballot box has a false bottom and a
false side. And before the election, the cheaters will
fill out a bunch of ballots for the candidates they want to win and hide them
behind the false bottom and false side inside the box.
With the, the bottom inside in place, it looks like the box is empty.
But after the election if the cheaters have a few minutes alone with it they can
slide out that bottom panel and that side panel and turn the box upside down and
shake it around, thereby mixing their fake ballots that they had in from the
beginning, in with all the other ballots. This is incredibly clever.
And could be quite effective. It was only caught because people
suspected that such things were going on and did a very careful examination after
the election. As if those problems weren't enough, the
cheaters had another way to cheat. And we'll see more about how this applies
even in modern voting machines. It, it turned out that the lock on the
ballot box was also just not very good. And by applying pressure in the right way,
you could cause it to open without the key.
So, fraud like this motivated several innovations in ballot box design.
Here's one example of the glass ballot box.
This was introduced to make it easier to check that the ballot box was empty and
harder to incorporate false sides or false bottoms.
Some more advanced designs for the glass ballot box basically had the votes in a, a
glass sphere. So, you could tell even that, that the
bottom of the box was not fake. Now, this kind of transparency in, in this
case, literally, but also symbolically and conceptually, turns out to be a major kind
of security mechanism we, we see in voting again and again.
It's just really, really important for voters to be able to confirm directly,
with their senses, that everything is being done fairly and, and honestly.
But ballot box transparency can't guarantee that all the votes that have
been cast will eventually be counted. And that's part of the idea behind this
other invention, the, the registering ballot box as it's called.
Now, this was a first time that a machine, a mechanism was introduced into the voting
process. The registering ballot box had a crank
and, and gears inside, so you would insert a ballot and turn the crank.
And, this would do two things. First, it would ring a bell that would
announce to everyone that a vote had been inserted into the box.
And second, it would increment a counter on the front of the box.
This counter was in public view, and would let anyone observing know how many votes
had actually been, been inserted into the box.
This was a check against ballot box stuffing and also a protection for the
counting process because you'd have to make sure that the, you could then make
sure that the number of, the total number of votes that has been counted at the end
of the day wasn't greater or less than the number of ballots that have been inserted
into the box. If that happened, it was the reason to
raise the alarm. In many ways, these modern ballot box
designs you see here are a step backwards from these ingenious transparent in
registering ballot boxes from the 1800s but they reflect other kinds of tradeoffs
in the election process. The cardboard ballot box on the left was,
was disposable. So, it, there was no need to store them
between the elections. And it was very easy to just have on hand
enough in case you had unexpectedly high voter turnout.
The metal ballot box on the right is a different set of tradeoffs.
This is probably more secure than a wooden one for, for multiple reasons but
including that. It has a metal tab at the top through
which you can attach a padlock. And they could use arbitrarily strong
locks, different locks in each election. It presented another opportunity for
security enhancement. In addition to the design of the ballot
box, the design of the ballots themselves was something that had a, a, a great
number of security features as well as opportunities for mischief.
Candidates quickly realized that it was easier for the voter if they could bring a
ballot that had the candidate's name already on it, printed in advance.
And so to show you this example this is one of the earliest examples of a
pre-printed ballot. We see at the top here, the candidate who
paid to have these ballots printed has his name already written in there.
But there are slots for all the other offices for the voter to, to write in his
choices or her choices with a pen. Now this particular ballot you can see is
torn on the left and the bottom. It was probably printed in a newspaper as
an advertisement. A, a little free reminder of, of who you
wanted to vote for. Now, the design of these ballots evolved
quite a bit throughout the 1800s. Here we see 1880, we've gone from having a
ballot that was just sponsored by an individual candidate, to one that's
sponsored by a party that has all of the party's choices for the different races
written in at the printer's. This is the origin of the, the term, party
ticket. A party ticket or the slate of candidates
that a party is putting forward was originally, literally a, a printed piece of
paper, a ticket that the voter would take and put into ballot box.
This ballot, both of these actually show one other interesting feature that
separates US Elections from elections in most of the rest of the world which is
that we can have a staggering number of different questions on the ballot at the
same time. National races, state races, local races,
as well as referenda. And all of that vastly complicates voting
technology as, as we'll see later. But in this case, you can see in the
ballot on the left the questions, the, the voter's being asked to fill in include who
they want for, for surveyor and coroner in their local jurisdiction.
Now, the Republican ticket you see in the, in the middle, this party ticket is an
early example and it still has enough room between the choices so that if you like
most of the party's choices but not all of them, you can just cross some of them out
and write in your own. But a few years later, we see how this has
evolved. The party is wised up to the fact that,
that they were making it super easy for people to not follow all of their choices.
So, they, they decided to make it harder. These new designed ballots left no room at
all between the different candidates. It would be very, very hard to squeeze in
your own choice there. They're just trying to make it less
convenient for people to split the ticket and write in candidates of their choice,
rather than the parties. It's all or nothing.
You can see there's just one office at the bottom here where the party didn't have a
pick. And so, they've left it blank for the
voter to fill in. Another problem that this kind of ticket
introduced, that's really quite interesting, is that sometimes rival
candidates would print their own version of the party ticket but didn't have the
party's own official choices on it that would be replacing one of the choices with
the candidate's own name but still claiming to be the real party ticket.
And this sort of thing introduced a lot of voter confusion but there was no reason at
the time for it to be against the law. After, after all, maybe the, the voter
really intended to vote for that candidate.
But there was a lot trickery like that in, in the 1800s.
And the non-standard design of the ballots like these just multiplied that the
opportunities for it. Let me give you a couple of, of other
examples of places where nefarious innovations chipped away at, at the
integrity and the, especially the secrecy provided by the paper ballot.
In some cases as, as in this union party ticket a party would print a large sheet
of multiple ballots all, altogether and it was up to the voter to, to tear them out.
This just invited voters to try to vote multiple times or to try to put multiple
pieces of paper into the ballot box at the same time.
Multiple voting or repeating, as it was called was a huge security problem in, in
the 1800s and this is part of what motivated the adoption of voter
registration systems, which would make sure that the, the voter's name was on a
particular list and then, cross it out after the voter voted.
So, that was a security innovation in response to problems like this.
Another nefarious ballot characteristic was printing your parties ballot on a
distinctive color or kind of paper. As you can see here with this, this party
ballot from 1860. So, with the ballot for the party was on a
particular color than people standing around at the polling place could still
check that you were voting for the right party and not for their opponents.
This greatly reduced the amount of privacy that the, the ballot could provide.
Furthermore it represents a tradeoff in technologies like the, the glass ballot
box. So, if you have a glass ballot box, it's
easier to see whether if you've falsely inserted two tickets, easier to make sure
that the ballot box was empty at the beginning.
But it's also then impossible to conceal the color of the ballot paper as your, as
your inserting it, even if you've kept it hidden until you got up to the ballot box.
So, all of these forms of tricks gradually eroded the, the promise of increased
secrecy and integrity that the paper ballots were, were initially thought to
provide. And it took more innovations before the
system could be perfected. We'll hear about that in the next segment.
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