Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Search
2000 character limit reached

Privacy Violations in Election Results

Published 8 Aug 2023 in cs.CR and stat.AP | (2308.04100v5)

Abstract: After an election, should election officials release a copy of each anonymous ballot? Some policymakers have championed public disclosure to counter distrust, but others worry that it might undermine ballot secrecy. We introduce the term vote revelation to refer to the linkage of a vote on an anonymous ballot to the voter's name in the public voter file, and detail how such revelation could theoretically occur. Using the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, as a case study, we show that the release of individual ballot records would lead to no revelation of any vote choice for 99.83% of voters as compared to 99.95% under Maricopa's current practice of reporting aggregate results by precinct and method of voting. Further, revelation is overwhelmingly concentrated among the few voters who cast provisional ballots or federal-only ballots. We discuss the potential benefits of transparency, compare remedies to reduce or eliminate privacy violations, and highlight the privacy-transparency tradeoff inherent in all election reporting.

Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (70)
  1. John M. Abowd and Michael B. Hawes “Confidentiality protection in the 2020 US Census of population and housing” In Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 10 Annual Reviews, 2023, pp. 119–144
  2. E. Scott Adler and Thad E. Hall “Ballots, Transparency, and Democracy” In Election Law Journal 12.2, 2013, pp. 146–161
  3. Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan D Hersh “ADGN: An algorithm for record linkage using address, date of birth, gender, and name” In Statistics and Public Policy 4.1, 2017, pp. 1–10
  4. “100% Independent Retabulation Election Audit, Leon County, Florida” In Technical Report, 2023
  5. “Alvin Greene? Who? How Did He Win the United States Senate Nomination in South Carolina?” In Election Law Journal 11.4, 2012, pp. 358–379 DOI: 10.1089/elj.2011.0137
  6. “American election results at the precinct level” In Nature Scientific Data 9.1, 2022, pp. 651
  7. Carol Beecher “Legal Status of Cast Vote Records”, Email to Michael Morse on October 30, 2023, 2023
  8. “Public evidence from secret ballots” In Electronic Voting: Second International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2017, Bregenz, Austria, October 24-27, 2017, Proceedings 2, 2017, pp. 84–109 Springer
  9. Doug Bock Clark “A County Elections Director Stood Up to Locals Who Believe the Voting System Is Rigged. They Pushed Back Harder.” In ProPublica, October 31, 2022, 2022 URL: https://perma.cc/7Q2W-2S8X
  10. Brennan Center “Voting Laws Roundup: February 2022”, 2022 URL: https://perma.cc/4PW2-XFLX
  11. Michael Callen and James D. Long “Institutional corruption and election fraud: Evidence from a field experiment in Afghanistan” In American Economic Review 105.1, 2015, pp. 354–381
  12. Francisco Cantú “Identifying irregularities in Mexican local elections” In American Journal of Political Science 58.4 Wiley Online Library, 2014, pp. 936–951
  13. Jesse T. Clark, Lindsey Cormark and Sam Wang “Privacy Concerns in New York City Elections”, 2021
  14. Aloni Cohen “Attacks on Deidentification’s Defenses” In 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22), 2022, pp. 1469–1486
  15. David Cottrell, Michael C. Herron and Sean J. Westwood “An exploration of Donald Trump’s allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election” In Electoral Studies 51 Elsevier, 2018, pp. 123–142
  16. “Integer Subspace Differential Privacy” In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 37.6, 2023, pp. 7349–7357 DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v37i6.25895
  17. “The risk of disclosure for microdata” In Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 7.2 Taylor & Francis, 1989, pp. 207–217 DOI: 10.2307/1391438
  18. “DVSorder”, https://dvsorder.org/, October 14, 2022, 2022
  19. Cynthia Dwork “Differential privacy” In International colloquium on automata, languages, and programming, 2006, pp. 1–12 Springer
  20. Cynthia Dwork, Ruth Greenwood and Gary King “Letter to US Census Bureau:" Request for release of “noisy measurements file” by September 30 along with redistricting data products"”, 2021
  21. Andrew C. Eggers, Haritz Garro and Justin Grimmer “No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election” In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.45 National Acad Sciences, 2021, pp. e2103619118
  22. Christopher S Elmendorf, Kevin M Quinn and Marisa A Abrajano “Racially polarized voting” In University of Chicago Law Review 83.2 University of Chicago, Law School, 2016, pp. 587–692 URL: https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/agispt.20201222041649
  23. “Statistically valid inferences from privacy protected data” In American Political Science Review, 2023
  24. Jen Fifield “A bill to enable do-it-yourself election audits sparks rare bipartisan interest in Arizona” In Votebeat, March 14, 2023, 2023 URL: https://arizona.votebeat.org/2023/3/14/23638888/ken-bennett-diy-election-audit-bill-public-ballot-images
  25. Caitriona Fitzgerald, Pamela Smith and Susannah Goodman “The Secret Ballot At Risk: Recommendations for Protecting Democracy”, 2018
  26. Adrian Fontes “Bipartisan SB1324 would help restore trust in election’s process”, 2022 URL: https://electfontes.com/bipartisan-sb1324-would-help-restore-trust-in-elections-process/
  27. Jie Gao, Ruobin Gong and Fang-Yi Yu “Subspace differential privacy” In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 36.4, 2022, pp. 3986–3995
  28. “One person, one vote: Estimating the prevalence of double voting in US presidential elections” In American Political Science Review 114.2 Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 456–469
  29. Philippe Golle “Revisiting the uniqueness of simple demographics in the US population” In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, 2006, pp. 77–80
  30. Rebecca Green “FOIA-Flooded Elections” In Forthcoming, Ohio State Law Journal, 2024
  31. D. James Greiner “Ecological Inference in Voting Right Act Disputes: Where are we now, and where do we want to be?” In Jurimetrics 47.2 American Bar Association, 2007, pp. 115–167
  32. Richard L Hasen “Vote buying” In California Law Review 88 HeinOnline, 2000, pp. 1323
  33. Michael C. Herron “Mail-in Absentee Ballot Anomalies in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District” In Election Law Journal 18.3, 2019, pp. 191–213
  34. “Bad Ballot Design and Electoral Legitimacy”, N.D.
  35. Eitan D Hersh “Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters” Cambridge University Press, 2015
  36. Katie Hobbs “Re: HB2560, May 19, 2023”, 2023 URL: https://azgovernor.gov/sites/default/files/veto_letter_hb2560_0.pdf
  37. “Balancing data privacy and usability in the federal statistical system” In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119.31 National Acad Sciences, 2022, pp. e2104906119
  38. Matthew Houck “Letter to South Carolina Election Commission, Office of the Attorney General, State of South Carolina” 2020 WL 5985610, 2020
  39. Matthew Houck “Opinion Letter to South Carolina Representatives” 2022 WL 4229451, 2022
  40. “What Effect do Audits Have on Voter Confidence?” In Working Paper, 2023
  41. “Comment: The Essential Role of Policy Evaluation for the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System” In Harvard Data Science Review Special Issue 2, 2023, pp. 1–16
  42. “Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the US Census Bureau’s Privacy Protection Methods” In arXiv preprint, 2023 URL: https://arxiv.org/2306.07521
  43. Alexander Keyssar “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States” Basic Books, 2009
  44. Seo-young Silvia Kim and Bernard Fraga “When Do Voter Files Accurately Measure Turnout? How Transitory Voter File Snapshots Impact Research and Representation”, N.D. URL: https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/6321ef75faf4a4ba6f1213ef
  45. Shiro Kuriwaki “The Administration of Cast Vote Records in US States” OSF Preprints, 2020 URL: https://osf.io/epwqx
  46. Rachel Leingang “Election activists are seeking the “cast vote record” from 2020. Here’s what it is and why they want it.” In Votebeat, September 7, 2022, 2022 URL: https://arizona.votebeat.org/2022/9/7/23341640/cast-vote-record-data-ballot-tabulator-images
  47. “ℓℓ\ellroman_ℓ-diversity: Privacy beyond k𝑘kitalic_k-anonymity” In ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD) 1.1, 2007 URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1217299.1217302
  48. Isabela Mares “From Open Secrets to Secret Voting: Democratic Electoral Reforms and Voter Autonomy” Cambridge University Press, 2015
  49. Maricopa County Elections Department “Correcting the Record: Maricopa County’s In-depth Analysis of the Senate Inquiry” In Technical Report, 2022 URL: https://elections.maricopa.gov/voting/just-the-facts.html
  50. “Preserving Anonymity of Cast Vote Record”, 2018, pp. 1–11 URL: http://bit.ly/2LcuCOQ
  51. Walter R. Mebane “Election forensics: The second-digit Benford’s law test and recent American presidential elections” In Election fraud: Detecting and deterring electoral manipulation Brooking Press Washington, DC, 2008, pp. 162–181
  52. National Conference of State Legislatures “Secrecy of the Ballot and Ballot Selfies”, 2022 URL: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/secrecy-of-the-ballot-and-ballot-selfies
  53. Brendan Nyhan, Christopher Skovron and Rocío Titiunik “Differential registration bias in voter file data: A sensitivity analysis approach” In American Journal of Political Science 61.3 Wiley Online Library, 2017, pp. 744–760
  54. Marilyn Odendahl “Requests for ‘cast vote record’ create havoc for state officials” In Indiana Lawyer, November 9, 2022, 2022 URL: https://www.theindianalawyer.com/articles/requests-for-cast-vote-record-create-havoc-for-state-officials-hoosier-voters-demand-access-to-2020-election-materials
  55. Paul Ohm “Broken promises of privacy: Responding to the surprising failure of anonymization” In UCLA Law Rev. 57 HeinOnline, 2009, pp. 1701
  56. Richard H Pildes “Election Law in an Age of Distrust” In Stan. L. Rev. Online 74 HeinOnline, 2021, pp. 100
  57. Anthony Rentsch, Brian F Schaffner and Justin H Gross “The elusive likely voter: Improving electoral predictions with more informed vote-propensity models” In Public Opinion Quarterly 83.4 Oxford University Press US, 2019, pp. 782–804
  58. Rebecca Rivas “Election deniers ramp up public records requests in Missouri, across the country” In Missouri Independent, 2022 URL: https://missouriindependent.com/2022/10/24/election-deniers-ramp-up-public-records-requests-in-missouri-across-the-country/
  59. Miguel Rueda, Guy Grossman and Shuning Ge “Do More Disaggregated Electoral Results Deter Aggregation Fraud?”, N.D. URL: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4621504
  60. Miguel R. Rueda “Buying votes with imperfect local knowledge and a secret ballot” In Journal of Theoretical Politics 27.3 SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England, 2015, pp. 428–456
  61. Charles III Stewart “Trust in Elections” In Daedalus 151.4, 2022, pp. 234–253
  62. Latanya Sweeney “k-anonymity: A model for protecting privacy” In International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems 10.05 World Scientific, 2002, pp. 557–570
  63. “Re-identification Risks in HIPAA Safe Harbor Data: A study of data from one environmental health study” In Technology science 2017 NIH Public Access, 2017
  64. VEST “Voting and Election Science Team, 2020 Precinct-Level Election Results” In Harvard Dataverse, 2020 DOI: 10.7910/DVN/K7760H
  65. John P Wack “Cast Vote Records Common Data Format Specification Version 1.0” In National Institute of Standards and Technology John P. Wack, 2019 DOI: 10.6028/NIST.SP.1500-103
  66. “The butterfly did it: The aberrant vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida” In American Political Science Review 95.4 Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 793–810
  67. Jack Williams, Samuel Baltz and Charles Stewart III “Votes Can Be Confidently Bought in Instant Runoff Elections, and What to Do About It” In Working Paper, 2023 URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4387782
  68. “Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience” In Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 21.1, 2018, pp. 209
  69. “Risks to patient privacy: a re-identification of patients in Maine and Vermont statewide hospital data” In Journal of Technology Science 2018, 2018, pp. 2018100901
  70. York County “Ballots, Ballot Images and CVRs are not subject to FOIA – FOIA07062022.01”, 2022 URL: https://www.yorkcountygov.com/1013/FOIA---Freedom-of-Information-Act-Respon
Citations (1)
View on Semantic Scholar

Summary

No one has generated a summary of this paper yet.

Sign Up to Summarize

Paper to Video (Beta)

No one has generated a video about this paper yet.

Sign Up to Generate All Videos Subscribe on YouTube

Whiteboard

No one has generated a whiteboard explanation for this paper yet.

Sign Up to Generate

Open Problems

We haven't generated a list of open problems mentioned in this paper yet.

Generate Now

Continue Learning

We haven't generated follow-up questions for this paper yet.

Generate Now

Collections

Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.

Sign Up

Tweets

Sign up for free to view the 5 tweets with 15 likes about this paper.

Sign Up for Free