Welcome back. The, the paper ballot we talked about in the last segment introduced at least some weak protections for voter privacy. If you went to extraordinary lengths you could try to keep your ballot secret. But that didn't work if the voter was lazy, if the voter was coerced, or if the voter was intimidated. It took further advances to provide strong protection for ballot secrecy in the voting process. Some of those protections were originated in Australia in the mid 1800s where election reformers introduced series of new innovations in voting technology. The most important of those, was this. The pre-printed ballot. This is what we usually refer to as the Australian ballot or Australian secret ballot. The idea here is that rather than having the voter bring their own ballot paper or having the parties provide one the election authorities, the government, is going to print at its own expense ballot papers that the, the voters then just come into the polling site and just to fill-in in secret inside a voting booth. So you can see these two styles of ballots really show off these new features. The one on the right illustrates the introduction of target for the voters mark. You have a list of all the candidates and the voter can just put an x or a check into the box next to the candidates of their choice. The ballet on the left on the other hand is a, a slightly less familiar style. In this style the voter would cross off all of the candidates they didn't want to vote for. Now which you prefer probably depends on what you're familiar with but both of these styles represent the Australian design and were in use almost interchangeably into the twentieth century. So ensuring that each voter's ballot looked the same, except for the mark that they placed to indicate the preferred candidate, helped to provide a much stronger form of ballot secrecy. Now in theory, voter's votes could be practically indistinguishable. We can see here that the, the polling place also evolved over the, the course of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Here on the left we see a, a, a voting booth. There's a voter coming out of one now, holding his, his ballot paper. We see also that now there's a desk to sign in. Voter registration was coming into use in most of the country around this time. So the voters have to come in and their name is going to be checked crossed off the list. Then we see a partially transparent ballot box another one of the security innovations at work. But despite this there were also a lot of new costs associated with the introduction of the Australian ballot and we see some of them in this illustration too. The government of course had to pay for and print the ballot papers. But is added another complication because you have to decide in advance who is going to be on the ballot. This was the first time that we needed some kind of qualification or a candidate petitioning to get people onto the ballot in the first place, required lot more advance preparation. The voting booths too were something that had to be purchased setup and then stored between elections, also the need to fill out a pre-printed ballot somewhat increased the amount of literacy that voters needed to take part in this process. We see some valid designs that try to combat that by having a symbol for each party. And this sort of design allowed voters who couldn't read to still know at least which column or which party they wanted to cast their vote for. So in introducing new security, we've also introduced new costs and complexity. As, as I said in the first lecture, security is almost never free. And some of these cost benefit tradeoffs are clearly at work. Now let's ask one more time, now that we've seen, how this style of balloting works. Let's ask what could go wrong. It turns out that there is a lot that can go wrong with the Australian ballot both violations of integrity and violations of ballot secrecy. There was just almost no end to the cleverness of the people trying to cheat. One place the things can go wrong is with the counting process. In the latter half of the 1800s some American cities were controlled by very powerful political machines. Most famously, by, by this gentleman Boss Tweed who ran the New York political machine called Tammany Hall. And Tweed and his cronies are thought to have stolen as much as $200,000,000 from the people while they controlled New York City. But they were widely believed to be corrupt and known to be corrupt as, at the time. As you can see from this, this caricature of Tweed. Here he's saying, as long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it? Which really reveals one of the, the major weaknesses here. Even though the secret ballot provided some protections at the time when the, the vote was cast. If the people doing the counting were dishonest, there was a lot of mischief they could do. There are some incredible stories about the level of corruption in vote counting under Boss Tweed's watch. His operatives controlled many of the polling places and there were numerous occasions were they would just throw all of the observers out of the room and then come back and announce whatever results they liked. They were not very shy about it. There was one instance one, one particularly egregious instance reported where the, the Tweed operative counting the ballots would, would actually chew up and spit out ballots he was supposed to be counting, if they have votes for an opposing candidate. This, this was incredible, incredibly malicious stuff. But beyond that there are more subtle things that people could do during counting to, to corrupt the vote and some of them are, or particularly to do with the design of the Australian ballot. So now that it was just the matter of checking of box to indicate which candidate you wanted to vote for, it was much simpler for someone in the counting process to just subtly change a ballot to change its contents. And this led to the, the growth of what are known as short pencil artists. That is, political operatives who would use a small pencil or perhaps just a small piece of pencil lead hidden under their fingernail to add marks to ballots as they were counting. One thing you can imagine doing is if a ballot comes along where the voter has left one of the, the races blank. You can easily add a vote just by adding a mark with that pencil under your nail. It's also possible to subtract votes. So if you have a ballot where the voter has voted for the, the candidate you don't like, you can just add a second mark, a second choice to that race, thereby having more than the allowed number. And in most cases if there are two marks under one race, the vote in that race is just discarded. It's called an overvote so it would be very easy to add a second mark and, and convert a ballot into an overvoted ballot for a short pencil artist. Finally part of the guarantee of ballot secrecy with the Australian ballot comes from the idea that different voter's ballots are, are indistinguishable except for the marks on them. So, the law in most places disqualifies ballots if there are distinguishing marks, like say, the voter has written their name on the ballot. That's considered an illegal vote. But because there many different ways that a voter could encode their identity on the ballot and thereby convey it to. Someone who's observing during the counting process and, and reveal who they voted for. The law disqualifies ballots that have other kinds of identifying marks to say something, something scribbled or drawn outside of the, the voting targets. Would be very easy too, for the counting people to add this kind of mark to a ballot using a piece of pencil lead under their fingernail. But the counting process isn't the only place where there are more clever opportunities to cheat now with the Australian ballot. I said in the first lecture that attackers should be considered to be lazy that is they go for the weakest link, the easiest way to, to defeat the security of the system. And, since the I-, introduction of the Australian ballot made buying votes somewhat more difficult. Since you could no longer easily make sure that the voter voted the way you paid them to vote. The criminals got more sophisticated and the, this led to the emergence of a, a very, very clever form of, of buying votes. This is something called chain voting and I'll explain it right here. So in chain voting a political operative will wait outside the poling place and let it be known that he's willing to pay people for their ballots. He starts out with one blank ballot, perhaps something he's, he's stolen in advance. That's pre-filled out for the candidate he wants to support. So along comes a voter whose willing to participate into, in this scheme and she takes the criminals pre filled ballot over to the poling place. At the polling place, she picks up a new blank ballot as, of the kind handed out to every voter, and goes to the voting booth and pretends to fill it in. But, really, she leaves that ballot blank, and just takes the criminal's pre-voted ballot and just puts it in the ballot box. Then she goes back to the criminal waiting outside and hands him this new blank ballot she has picked up in exchange for some reward. The criminal now has a fresh blank ballot, he can fill in with the candidate of his choice, and wait for the next voter to come along and repeat the cycle. So chain voting, is a very, very clever way that criminals can still buy votes. Even though the secret ballot makes one voter's ballot practically indistinguishable from the next. One of the defenses that you can apply to, to try to prevent this. Is to put a serial number on every ballot. And then make sure that the voter returns the same ballot that they picked up. This is effective, but it also weakens the secrecy of the ballots. Since now, one voter's ballot is distinguishable from the next, you just have to know the serial number. So it represents a kind of security trade off. A fancier way to do it that has a better trade off, is to have the serial number be on a detachable stump that can be pulled off of the ballot when it's put into the box, keeping the ballots looking the same. So as you can see the Australian ballot and the paper ballot more generally. Can achieve pretty good security properties if we have high integrity people doing the count and guarantee observers are there, and if we take a wide variety of procedural precautions, like the serial numbers to come back, chain voting, and voter registration and so forth. But all of this complexity added to the cost and created new questions. And this resulted in the desire to introduce even more new and different kinds of voting technology into the polling place. We're going to see some of that in the next segment.
