YHK - yet another hacker news clone

An Algorithmic Failure Beneath the Secret Ballot

37 points leecoursey 2 days ago 12 comments

allforJesse 1 hour ago | parent

When I hit the term "load-bearing" in the first sentence my mind immediately turned off. Had to forcibly reengage in reading. Claude trauma is real.

thaumasiotes 1 hour ago | parent

The report does feel like LLM output.

The biggest problem I see related to that is the marked haziness over what exactly has been accomplished. As best I can tell, this paper claims to have deanonymized primary election ballots that were cast during the early voting period. But it's written as if it was deanonymizing general election ballots cast on election day.

rosstex 9 minutes ago | parent

As an ex-CITP member, that's most definitely a human written joke.

lenerdenator 1 hour ago | parent

> this allows you to know whether your neighbor voted, but never who they voted for.

There's probably an angle I'm not thinking of here, but imho, it's absolutely not John Q. Public's damned business what a person does or does not do on election day.

allforJesse 1 hour ago | parent

I was thinking the same. It's not as if visibility into whether someone voted or not has driven voter turnout significantly. Hell, I'd assumed this was private until I learned otherwise recently.

But it's such a specific structure, clearly there was an objective in mind when it was imlpemented.

thaumasiotes 1 hour ago | parent

The registry of people who voted has to exist because you're not allowed to vote more than once. That reason doesn't require the registry to be published, but it does require it to be compiled.

mcherm 1 hour ago | parent

> It's not as if visibility into whether someone voted or not has driven voter turnout

Actually, it does. If the party you are registered with thinks are a voter who might not make it to the polls, and this is a close/important election, then there is a good chance you will receive numerous calls and/or visits reminding you to go out and vote. However, if you show up on the list of people who have voted by mail OR if you appear on the registry of people who have already voted in person, then they will stop reaching out to offer rides and reminders.

autoexec 15 minutes ago | parent

> It's not as if visibility into whether someone voted or not has driven voter turnout significantly.

It's hard to say how much impact it has, but presumably there's a degree of social pressure when people are seen wearing/posting all those "I voted today" stickers.

mcherm 1 hour ago | parent

The practice of making public whether someone has voted dates back a very long time. There were practical reasons for it when it originated, and many of those remain valid today.

Originally, everyone in town knew most everyone else and could see them physically walking into the polling place. So long before electronic records were kept, the question of who voted was public information.

Even today, I run my local polling station and I know and recognize a significant portion of the voters in my precinct.

The fact that the list of who votes is made public protects against several kinds of abuses. It goes a long way to protect against "dead people voting" and other kinds of ballot box stuffing if the list of voters is public so anyone can review it and potentially catch such abuses.

skew-aberration 1 hour ago | parent

The value of transparency goes above and beyond protecting against abuses (for which there are other methods) - it also provides assurance to the public that there is protection against those abuses, and that those abuses are not taking place.

i.e. 'Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done'

__MatrixMan__ 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect the missing angle is that people are more likely to trust claims made to the public if, in principle, those claims could be verified by the public.

Of course it's pretty impractical that a bunch of concerned citizens might gather together and check the published data against how they each remember voting. But preserving the possibility in principle makes it easier to trust the published results. It gives a would-be deceiver yet another thing to worry about.

Its a trade-off I'd have opted into had I been asked. Though I'd feel a lot better about it if I had been asked.

digitalPhonix 12 minutes ago | parent

> Undo the randomness, pair it with a record of when a person voted, and anonymous ballots reveal themselves.

... sigh

> Yet within a few hours, using AI tools and nothing but public records, I was able to

The "I" in that sentence was the AI. The AI is wrote the article. The AI did not use AI tools.

The human had AI do a thing and didn't care enough to write about it, instead they had AI write about.