SIV Voting on Paper

[dsernst]

Jotting down notes on this idea, brainstormed w/ Josh D:

Unclear if it's feasible, viable, or desirable, but interesting to consider as like half-SIV to intro skeptics:

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SIV backed by Paper

1) Admin prepares a ballot using SIV.org 2) Admin prints out SIV paper ballots, which have the ballot questions, and a unique QR code per ballot. 3) Voters who opt-out of voting for SIV on their phone are handed a pre-printed SIV ballot, fill out their ballot with a pen. 4) To submit the ballot, the unique QR code is scanned by a smartphone. This can be done by the voter themselves, or election staff, or another volunteer. Scanning the QR brings up a SIV webpage, with instructions to then use the phone camera take a picture of the ballot itself. 5) The photographed ballot image is then converted into machine readable JSON to match a SIV electronic ballot. Notably, the input image and output JSON can be publicly viewed by all voters, to provide extra eyes are auditing the OCR process itself. [<-- question here about how reliable this is. Can GPT-4 image API do it?] 6) The ballot is included in the final SIV tally as well, to provide consolidated tallies.

Comparisons w/ Standard SIV

Advantages:

• Voter that likes casting their vote with a pen on paper can continue doing so
• Voter marked paper backup is left for record-keeping
• Voter can still get SIV-style verifiability that their correct vote is in the final tally
• Lets voters that are on the fence about SIV take baby steps towards trying it out. Should become more clear after doing this that clicking the vote buttons themselves is more direct than pen->photo->OCR
• Little risk in human vote counters screwing up addition, & system can ensure votes aren't submitted multiple times.

Disadvantages:

• Admin needs to print out paper ballots ahead of time, estimating how many they'll need
• Requires the extra processing step to snap the photo of the ballot
• Image -> JSON OCR may introduce errors (hopefully these can be caught and remedied)
• Cost to OCR the image (e.g. a penny for GPT-4 Vision API?)

Unclear

• Admin needs to keep record of which paper ballot they gave to which voter?
  • Unclear privacy implications...
  • The published ballot images could obscure a unique auth token, which stays on the paper ballot only, but still provide a Verification Number of sorts
    • Verification Number can't be generated by voter device... Perforated thing? Diffie-Hellman like combination? Write in a unique word?

[dsernst]

Recommended this purpose-built Document Photograph -> Structured Data API, that may work better: https://cloud.google.com/document-ai/docs