Privacy violations in election results.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40073116.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adt1512 and PMC identifier 11900849.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
After an election, should election officials release a copy of each anonymous ballot? Some policy-makers 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 trade-off inherent in all election reporting.