Not compromising privacy when few voters per precinct

[arianabuilds]

In Summit County's case they only have 26 UOCAVA voters & 65 different precincts.

We don't know the exact details yet, but seems somewhat likely that some of the voters might be the only one that receives their ballot design.

Once votes are unlocked, it'll be easy to tell which unlocked votes correspond to which ballot designs, which could have the effect of leaking voters' identity & how they voted publicly.

[dsernst]

Two possible solutions:

1) disable verification for these small k-anonymity groups

2) create additional artificial votes (like the script we wrote for 200 voters in demo video) to increase the set size. Voter would still be able to verify their own vote. We would know the artificial Verification #'s, and would tell them to the election admin to omit from combining w/ the paper totals. This is relying quite a lot on the election admins though. They would need their own accountability checks to ensure they’re following this process correctly, and they would still know the smaller anonymity set.

[dsernst]

It's similar to this case:

https://nypost.com/2021/09/21/board-of-elections-snafu-reveals-dante-de-blasios-mayoral-election-votes/

And would be very embarrassing

[npfoss]

damn this feels like fundamentally a political problem that they chose precincts badly or something. doesn't seem like there are satisfying technical ways around this :P