This proposal is no longer relevant and has been closed

Decidim's premise is to hybridize face-to-face and digital participation to ensure that it is as inclusive as possible. However, the use of paper combined with the digital layer presents a number of security and process integrity issues. Our recommendation is that in-person voting be done with digital supports.

This proposal is not accepted in the main project, although it can be developed as a module.

Account for paper ballots in budgets

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Virgile Deville 04/10/2018 17:01

Most large institutions require using paper ballots for participatory budgeting. We need a smart way to account for them. Best is to account for them in a seperate way, probably via the admin interface or using a csv import.

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AH 15/01/2021 18:23

This feature would be very welcome and is even necessary in some cities as said above. But the devil is in the implementation details...

The hard part would be how to store the identification data (authorizations) and how to map them to the votes. A digital identification would be required in order to store the authorized user data safely to Decidim, using Decidim's managed users. The paper ballot should be mapped with this data (a generated managed user account in the system) when the votes are imported.

There are ways to implement that by generating individual tokens when the user is authorized but that would require a printing machine at the voting locations in order to display the tokens in the ballots. And this would also make the import process really difficult as each individual token should be scanned or written down with the votes.

If identification is not necessary, it would be obviously easier, but then it opens possibilities for exploitation / voting multiple times.

AH 15/01/2021 18:25

Another problem area is how to deal with the ballots that do not meet the criteria of the voting. E.g. if someone went over the budget or if they were not allowed to vote in that budget in the first place. With these criteria conflicts, I guess those ballots could be just dismissed as invalid.

Pierre Mesure 15/01/2021 18:37

I agree with everything you say but at the same time, most cities using Decidim are not at all in this security problematic.

Huge cities like Paris (250K voters in 2019) still have over 50% paper voting and the import process is done without any sort of advanced verification. The voting booths are in charge of making sure that people write their name and sign on big files (same as traditional elections) but I'm almost sure the ballots are imported as CSV.

Here in Sweden, we have ballot boxes in public places and although we try to have people checking, the possibility of someone committing fraud is there and we balance it out with the benefit of lowering the threshold of participation.

Finally, no matter whether we agree on the required degree of security or not, developing a function to import paper ballots should start with an MVP and that MVP would be a simple import of the paper results through an easy interface. Security can be added later and be made optional.

AH 15/01/2021 18:57

Yep, it's also a possibility that the technical identification phase is omitted completely for paper ballots. Then it's obviously much easier to solve.

Here in normal elections the identification phase is separated from the ballot. You identify yourself, you are marked as "voted" and you get the ballot. With that ballot, you can do whatever you like but you only get one, that's guaranteed.

If it's done similarly, the validity check is at the voting locations and extra technical check would not be necessary in Decidim assuming there's no extra conditions on the budgets to be voted on.

For me it's not as much of a security concern. I'm mostly just concerned about the validity of the result and that sometimes we need to check the voter's eligibility based on their metadata (e.g. for district specific votings).

I do understand it's not the case everywhere, so I'm probably overthinking the whole thing.

(I looked for this proposal in the first place because this need arised in one town)

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