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Lessons From the Papal Conclave About Election Security
Hugh Pickens writes "The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The 'Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of the Roman Pontiff' is surprisingly detailed. Now as the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like Bruce Schneier wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote? First, the system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky. Second, the small group of voters — all of whom know each other — makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way. The chapel is cleared and locked before voting. No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel. In short, the voter verification process is about as good as you're ever going to find. A cardinal can't stuff ballots when he votes. Then the complicated paten-and-chalice ritual ensures that each cardinal votes once — his ballot is visible — and also keeps his hand out of the chalice holding the other votes. Ballots from previous votes are burned, which makes it harder to use one to stuff the ballot box. What are the lessons here? First, open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure. This kind of process works to elect a pope or a club president, but quickly becomes unwieldy for a large-scale election. And third: When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."
Anyone who has had a group of friends vote on whether to eat Chinese or Italian knows that a group who all know each other can hold a secure vote immune from multiple votes or outsiders voting too. Its also obvious that this is not scalable beyond a group in which everyone does recognise everyone else
So even in one of the oldest and most conservative institutions in the world, the black guy's votes carry as much weight as the white guys' and they aren't repressed in any way and can post their ballot in a timely fashion?
I can't see how their system would hold up when those who don't share the same intrinsic values and contradict the prevailing group think are included in the vote. Oft times with Catholics, as well as other sects, the idea is to fit the data to mold, not the mold to the data.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
As Mr. Schneier points out, this doesn't scale. There is no way you could do a US Presidential election this way.
I also think it relies some on the autonomy of the Cardinals, which wouldn't necessarily map well to a civil election. Suppose that 100 people got together to elect (say) a town mayor using this protocol, and one of them was the employer of most of the rest. Would this be sufficient to prevent him from influencing or even coercing his employees to vote his way?
OK, step back. Take a deep breath. The pope is sort-of oughtta be elected on the basis of what the Catholic god (or maybe Jesus, it ain't clear) tells the cardinals is the right choice. So how the fuck could a vote that's determined by the Almighty(s) possibly be rigged by mere mortals?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good.
It happens only when fairness is to the common interest to all participants in power.
When you get a system, where being able to cheat is in the interest to those in power, the system will develop towards enabling such cheats (Diebold machines).
Why focus on the voting mechanism? It's like testing the quality of a democracy by looking at the voting procedure in the house of commons. The weakness, as is always the case, is human accountability. This is just as true within a theocratic oligarchy as it is within a representative democracy.
Anyone who thinks that powerful interests have no sway in the election of a pontiff is uneducated in history and blissfully naive.
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Um...there goes my plans of choosing the next Pope myself...
Now if only it was possible to bribe the clergy that votes. Well, one can dream.
No, requireing a voter to identify themselves is always racist and a way to conduct voter suppression. Since all the cardinals know each other and you have to be known in order to vote it is OBVIOUSLY the method used to prevent the minority from voting, not to give them an equal vote. /. readers.
I read it here what I'm told is a relyable source according to
Of course I'm a little confused by facts though. Like you said it gives the minority an equal vote and I can't find an intelectually honest argument against that. I also have this story where a black woman voted 6 times last year where voter id doesn't exist, something the Mother Jones article said never actually happens or could happen.
But, in order to not be called a racist/bigot and tea party moron, I'll have to ignore the facts and keep with the statement that voter id continues to suppress the black vote and the Catholic church should be ashamed for suppressing the votes of minorities in this situation the way they are. After all its not about facts anymore in this world, its all about not being called names by the left as they seem to have lost this debate with facts but still can rely on their name calling.
This is incredibly important to literally dozens of people.
FOR ALL THAT COMMON SENSE
probably, americans want their pope to go with them, transfering vatican in washington.
Maybe is how is really elected the president of USA since decades ago.
Considering that this voting process has evolved in the face of thousands of years of intrigue and backstabbing that makes even politicians look like choirboys, why is this a surprise? The evolutionary pressure was most certainly there.
And of course this analysis overlooks the most reliable way of rigging an election, and one that is most certainly practiced here: hand-picking the electorate. Who appointed those cardinals in the first place, eh?
Elections like this don't get manipulated during the ballot-casting, because they're not decided during the ballot-casting. Just like the decisions of a legislative body, the vote itself is merely the result of a ton of secret politics leading up to it.
open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder.
doesn't anyone remember the Chicago political machines? if the group becomes corrupt group control is a bad thing and remember the voting all happens in front of that group ONLY no outsiders are told the vote only the result
Who knew ?
Now all we have to do is convince our politicians that they don't acutally know how to engineer a better society than one created by the collective knowledge of our ancestors which was accrued over many thousands of years.
As Mr. Schneier points out, this doesn't scale. There is no way you could do a US Presidential election this way.
This is not unique, not even very unusual. What we are seeing here is members of a parliament voting for a prime minister. That happens in a hundred places across the world. Why doesn't Schneier analyze whether you can "hack the vote" in the House of Lords?
If you do want to compare it to the US, this compares to a vote in the Senate, and is somewhat much smaller than a vote in the House of Representatives.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Has there ever been a claim of ballot stuffing in the US Senate or House? How about the British House of Commons. It doesn't take a 2000 years to figure this one out for a limited, known group. There is actually very little of this that happens even in larger elections, absent official corruption.
The real threats to fair, free elections are elsewhere. They start with efforts to discourage opponents from voting through intimidation and violence. That was how the former confederates took political control in the south after the civil war and maintained it for over 100 years. That was, in part, how Hitler came to power in Germany. And that is how many elections in unstable parts of the world are controlled by those in power. But even where threats of violence are not a problem, there are other ways to suppress voting by likely opponents.
Is what they need to elect.
No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel.
Challenge accepted!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That can be done on a large scale, too. It's known as gerrymandering and is done by both parties. It's especially common for congressional districts. If you look at the national map, you see all kinds of bizarre shapes designed to give one party or the other a majority. They don't follow any natural or geographic boundaries. You end up with all kinds of loops, horseshoes, dumbells, and other weird shapes. The composition of congress would be quite different if the districts were restrcited to existing counties or a plain grid.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
senator palpatine
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
That's the key, and makes for clean elections - I've observed elections in the UK, Kosovo and Ukraine.
This tends to mean manual counting of physical pieces of paper that have been marked by the voter by hand, as that's vastly easier for lay people to observe and verify than hidden things going on inside computers or other machines. (I'm not saying that proper independent observation by lay people of what goes on inside a machine isn't possible, just that nobody has worked out how to do it yet.) If I'd observed an election involving machines I would have had to write in my report that I had no confidence in the outcome of the election because I had no visibility of what was going on inside the machines.
The big problem with the cleanliness of the UK voting system is postal votes - and this is in my view precisely because this is a part of the process which is *not* independently observed - you don't know for sure who applied for the postal ballots, who acquired them, or who filled them in under what pressure.
I read a really neat paper about the implications of the Doge election protocol to distributed systems. There the focus was more on preventing bribary and less on more general fraud, but it was a pretty cool system. [pdf] www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The real lesson I learned here is, you can't trust a Cardinal of the catholic church. They certainly don't trust each other...
There is an avalanche of evidence and CONVICTIONS for multiple votings, fraudulent registrations, and the like.
Exactly what percentage of the eligible voting population is your "avalanche"? From the figures I've seen, it's less than 0.0001%. Seriously, the weather in Pennsylvania on election day has more than one hundred times as significant an effect.
Is this the same Benedict who presided over the largest cover-up of paedophile activity in that organization for centuries?
The book "Sex Lives of the Popes" documents numerous instances of corruption in the election process. During the 10-11th century, one mother and daughter pair got 7 popes onto the papal chair, by having affairs with, or giving birth to them.
Excellent simple explanation of the beauty of paper ballots. In any sensible setting (lacking truckloads of armed goons stealing ballot boxes etc) you can't beat paper ballots and scrutineers overseeing the counting. Plus you can actually go back and recount.
Of course voting technology is the least of the problems with our current electoral and government systems.
Three Squirrels
> security people like Bruce Schneier wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote?
Just for the record, the first bishop of Rome to follow St. Peter was named Linus. (*)
When you'll hear the Pope Linus the Second has been elected to follow Benedict XVI, you will know that Bruce Schneier succeded in his plot.
(*) Some traditions hold that St. Linus was a negro. Apparently there was no skin-color based racism yet in the antiquity, it is a newer invetion of hate.
You can hack it when the ballots are being counted. How? Because it's unclear if the scrutineers are really randomly chosen.
What is the process of selection? Do they draw the names out of a hat? Easy: the person picking the names can substitute any name they want. They just need 3 scruitineers, and they can tally the votes any way they'd like.
Taking a step back, how are candidates selected? You don't have to hack the process if you manipulate the selections or compromise the candidates.
"When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."
Love it how the system developed and not evolved......
... rent (or own as I do) the movie "The Shoes of the Fisherman" from 1968. It shows in detail the process of a fictional papal conclave including the steps the cardinals take to ensure fairness. Quite revealing.
On a completely different subject, for those movie geeks of you out there who love "2001: A Space Odyssey" as I do, this film is where Alex North recycled some of his rejected score for 2001.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
This article is a waste of time. How could this system possibly be applied on any kind of scale, and how is it distinct from any other organization where only a few dozen people vote and everyone knows each other?
I don't care where he is born or his faith or what not but I do want to know the chief of staff has balls.
You no longer get to have an opinion.
Obviously, merely putting extra bollots in would not work. If the number of ballots exceeds the number of cardinals, they would immediatly would know something was not right, To make it work you would have to also remove the appropriate number of ballots.
was even better -- multiple layers to prevent a single faction from monopolizing the results. Fascinating stuff, see Norwitch's "History of Venice" for details.
All Catholics should have the vote, not just a few geriatric perverts ...
This type of election scales *very* poorly.
It isn't a single vote, but a series, until someone gets two-thirds (under the newer rules, the super-majority eventually drops).
And "conclave" is *quite* literal: con clave; "with key."
This comes from two occasions when the cardinals did not get around to electing a pope, living the good life.
The people of Rome locked them in a leaky building, sending in only bread, wine, and water until they elected a Pope.
And there is not, nor has there ever been, a claim that the *outcome* is Divinely inspired (with such a belief, the right of the Emperor to confirm would have been pointless). It is believed that the Holy Spirit *guides* the cardinals, but it is up to them to them to accept the guidance (and, demonstrably, they have notably failed to do so at times).
hawk
I first read the headline as "Lessons From the Paypal Conclave About Election Security"
Does all this blah blah mean Dennis Leary is the new Pope or not? If not, who gives a flying rat's ass.
makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way
I take issue with this. In history there are many examples where rich families have bought themselves a pope by bribing and intimidating the cardinals. Theory is one thing, in practice Conclave is not completely shut off from the rest of the world.
QuantumPete
In UK elections it would theoretically be possible to establish who voted for whom.
When collecting a ballot paper from the counter the serial number from the paper is recorded against your name on the electoral roll. With paper ballots and manual counting it would be a laborious process to match these up, with electronic counting coming in (scanning ballot paper at the count) it would be possible to record the paper serial number and votes made.
You feel surprisingly good in the end.
Can't we just get Nate Silver to do some math and figure this election out for us? He already gave us the president and the oscars.