The myth of paper trail, and why I don't use check-in kiosks

This was in the pre-chip era and the card didn't have a chip and PIN. So you needed to sign a paper slip to confirm each transaction. Which I of course didn't do myself for the frauded transaction. So we challenged the issuing bank with my company and asked them to confirm that it was really me who did the transaction and to provide the signed slip, or else return us our money.

The bank said, "yeah, we don't have the slip. We obtained it from those guys, but the signature was really bad. But you know what... we couldn't care less. We'll still make you cover the damage."

And since the cost to sue them would have been much more than swallowing the damage, we just left it at that.

What this story is meant to illustrate is that very often, paper slips and paper trails do a good job at providing the illusion of security, but in actual trouble situations, they don't help that much. The banks make you sign a transaction slip for each credit card statement because they want you to believe that your signature on the slip is worth something. As it turns out, it isn't. (See also the signature prank.) The same, I believe, is true for the paper slips in US e-voting. What are they good for? What do they do? I have yet to understand this.

I'd be damned if I remembered if I got any "transaction ID" after my e-vote. I'll be sure to check this out when they launch the test system for people to try out the system of next spring's parliament e-vote, which should happen in just a few weeks.

Inevitably, elections, whether paper-based or online, come down to you "trusting the system", and this is where the real focus should be. You need to believe that your vote will be accurately counted. Unless you're in a local election committee, you really don't have a way to check it in either case, you just need to believe that the people who are put in place to do all that can be trusted.

There's a reason why Estonian online system, be it e-banking or e-tax are successful. Well, I'm sure there are many, but I believe that one of them is that all the electronic transactions have a brick-and-mortar "old-fashioned" counterpart that you can use if you for some reason don't want to use the electronic channel. Don't want to use the online payment form? Walk to a bank branch and do a paper-based payment order. Feel uneasy about filing your taxes on the Internet? The tax office is there. Sure, it might cost you more and be inconvenient and time-consuming, but you always have the choice of going to an actual physical location and having human assistance.

This is also why I don't like the idea of having "voting machines". It takes choice away from people. (See Danah's experience.) You are forced to use a machine. In the Estonian system, you will always (at least for the foreseeable future) have a choice of whether to use the Internet, or whether to go with the old good paper ballot.

Interestingly, this is also why, although I'm a pretty tech-savvy person, do NOT use self-service check-in kiosks at airports. I would use an Internet-based check-in facility. I haven't yet, since the airlines I usually use in the EU don't offer this. This gives you enough time before the flight to print out your papers from home or office — and if you mess up, you still have a fallback solution of going to the airport and using a human agent. The last part for me is critical. But I don't expect the online check-in to fail because I'm doing something wrong — doing things on the Internet is something that I've gotten used to, and I know how to operate my computer. This is NOT the case for those check-in machines, which feel like they will just eat your ticket and die on you. And this would be pretty inconvenient to be left without a ticket or any other remorse at the airport just a few hours before your flight. I don't understand how those machines work — for example, can I bail out at any point in the process if I change my mind. And they instruct me to insert my "passport" and have an image of a passport on them. Well, in intra-EU flights, I use my identity card instead of my passport. I don't understand if my card is compatible with the machine or not. And so on.

So, while paper slips from a voting machine might be a good idea to increase the illusion of security and trust of voting, I have yet to understand how they actually do that, should things go wrong.