The Still Secret Ballot: The Limited Privacy Cost of Transparent Election Results

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04100v3
• Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2024 16:53:29 GMT
• Title: The Still Secret Ballot: The Limited Privacy Cost of Transparent Election Results
• Authors: Shiro Kuriwaki, Jeffrey B. Lewis, Michael Morse,
• Abstract summary: We show how an analyst unravels the secret ballot by uniquely linking votes on an anonymous ballot to the voter's name and address in the public voter file. We conclude the ballot can be both public and still as secret as it is under typical reporting practices.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: After an election, should officials release an electronic record of each ballot? The release of ballots could bolster the legitimacy of the result. But it may also facilitate vote revelation, where an analyst unravels the secret ballot by uniquely linking votes on an anonymous ballot to the voter's name and address in the public voter file. We first provide a theoretical model of how vote revelation could occur under various election-reporting regimes. Perhaps counterintuitively, releasing ballot records is no more revelatory than the typical practice of releasing aggregate vote tallies by precinct and method. We then present the first empirical evaluation of vote revelation, using the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, as a case study. For 99.8% of voters, the release of ballot records led to no revelation of any vote choice. We conclude the ballot can be both public and still as secret as it is under typical reporting practices.

Related papers

• MERGE: Matching Electronic Results with Genuine Evidence for verifiable voting in person at remote locations [2.206168301581203]
  We introduce the MERGE protocol to combine the speed of electronic ballot delivery with the reliability of paper returns. This protocol allows voters to submit an electronic record of their vote quickly while simultaneously mailing a paper ballot for verification. The electronic record can be used for preliminary results, but the paper ballot is used in a Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) if received in time, ensuring the integrity of the election.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-09T09:19:01Z)
• Idiosyncratic properties of Australian STV election counting [52.669205232251585]
  Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting is used in several jurisdictions in Australia. This paper shows some of the unintuitive properties of some of these systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-18T01:19:27Z)
• Improving the Computational Efficiency of Adaptive Audits of IRV Elections [54.427049258408424]
  AWAIRE can audit IRV contests with any number of candidates, but the original implementation incurred memory and computation costs that grew superexponentially with the number of candidates. This paper improves the algorithmic implementation of AWAIRE in three ways that make it practical to audit IRV contests with 55 candidates, compared to the previous 6 candidates.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-23T13:28:00Z)
• Publicly auditable privacy-preserving electoral rolls [0.32498796510544625]
  We study the problem of designing publicly auditable yet privacy-preserving electoral rolls. The audit can detect polling-day ballot stuffing and denials to eligible voters by malicious polling officers. The entire electoral roll is never revealed, which prevents any large-scale systematic voter targeting and manipulation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-18T13:11:48Z)
• Learning to Manipulate under Limited Information [44.99833362998488]
  We trained over 70,000 neural networks of 26 sizes to manipulate against 8 different voting methods. We find that some voting methods, such as Borda, are highly manipulable by networks with limited information, while others, such as Instant Runoff, are not.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-29T18:49:50Z)
• Is your vote truly secret? Ballot Secrecy iff Ballot Independence: Proving necessary conditions and analysing case studies [0.19116784879310028]
  We formalise definitions of ballot secrecy and ballot independence by Smyth, JCS'21 as indistinguishability games in the computational model of security. Both Smyth, JCS'21 and Smyth, draft '21 improve on earlier works by considering a more realistic adversary model wherein they have access to the ballot collection.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-21T20:25:32Z)
• Adaptively Weighted Audits of Instant-Runoff Voting Elections: AWAIRE [61.872917066847855]
  Methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not risk-limiting or require cast vote records (CVRs), the voting system's electronic record of the votes on each ballot. We develop an RLA method that uses adaptively weighted averages of test supermartingales to efficiently audit IRV elections when CVRs are not available.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-20T15:55:34Z)
• Identifying Possible Winners in Ranked Choice Voting Elections with Outstanding Ballots [0.0]
  ranked-choice voting (RCV) allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds. RCV election outcomes are not always apparent on election night, and can take several weeks to be published. We present an algorithm for efficiently computing possible winners of RCV elections from partially known ballots.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-25T22:08:15Z)
• Expected Frequency Matrices of Elections: Computation, Geometry, and Preference Learning [58.23459346724491]
  We use the "map of elections" approach of Szufa et al. (AAMAS 2020) to analyze several well-known vote distributions. We draw the "skeleton map" of distributions, evaluate its robustness, and analyze its properties.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-05-16T17:40:22Z)
• Obvious Manipulability of Voting Rules [105.35249497503527]
  The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem states that no unanimous and non-dictatorial voting rule is strategyproof. We revisit voting rules and consider a weaker notion of strategyproofness called not obvious manipulability.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-03T02:41:48Z)
• Security Survey and Analysis of Vote-by-Mail Systems [0.0]
  We examine the security of electronic systems used in the process of voting by mail, including online voter registration and online ballot tracking systems. We find that online voter registration systems in some states have vulnerabilities that allow adversaries to alter or effectively prevent a voter's registration. We additionally find that ballot tracking systems raise serious privacy questions surrounding ease of access to voter data.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-18T02:18:15Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.