Who Was Watching the 0s and 1s?

On November 3, I spent the day doing my civic duty: voting, volunteering free rides, handing out flyers and ballot information, and enjoying conversations with people in the community. It was a pleasure. Once the polls closed, ABBA's “Knowing Me, Knowing You” somehow became the soundtrack for the evening. Please don't laugh at me.

Standing around watching the watchers, the ID checkers, the machine watchers, security and election officials, my brain wandered into familiar territory. Plenty of people were watching us, but who was watching the 0s and 1s as they went through the Unisyn machine counting our ballots?

Clearly, I'd forgotten to give my cybersecurity brain the day off.

What happens after the ballot goes in?

I've written before about enterprise IoT and operational technology, so I found myself wondering how this particular piece of technology was configured and secured. From where I stood, I could see only a few cables. Power, obviously, but what else? Was everything stored internally? How was the information transferred, protected and checked?

You can't answer those questions by staring at a cable, although apparently I was willing to give it a go.

Nothing I saw suggested anything untoward. Party affiliation doesn't enter into it either. I believe our elections are secure, and I appreciated the care and attention of the people working around me. I'd simply like to understand more about what happens between feeding a ballot into the scanner and having those choices included in the final count.

Verification without giving up vote secrecy

I'd also quite like to know that I did, in fact, colour inside the lines and that the machine read my decisions correctly. My first thought was a receipt showing my choices, something I could keep and use later to verify how my ballot was counted if there were a challenge.

Then comes the other side of that idea. How do you provide that reassurance while protecting the secrecy of someone's vote? A receipt that proves a person's choices could also give somebody a way to pressure them about those choices. That is a design question worth understanding before deciding that a receipt is the answer.

If you work in election technology or administration, I'd enjoy hearing how verification works and how you explain it to the rest of us. Preferably in language a tired volunteer with ABBA stuck in his head can follow.

Just some thoughts from a guy doing his duty and engaging with people in a way he enjoys. The day was a pleasure, and I hope you had the opportunity to show up for what you believe in, too. You probably knew I couldn't get through a day at the polls without asking what the machine was plugged into.