Electronic voting systems are generally an attempt to get something faster and cheaper.
As implemented nearly everywhere that is not fully auditable. I have no way of verifying that my particular ballot was actually included and counted correctly.
We can do much better, while still staying with paper ballots, as shown by some of the proposed system in this article [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
I think there's a really serious communications challenge to a system based on sophisticated cryptography. It's hard to explain and get people to trust it.
It has existed for several years. Paper optical scan ballots, augmented by some printing using a special ink and a special marker used to mark them when voting, with some clever cryptography going into what to print on the ballots with that special ink.
See:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
Like, totally open society, man. If you can't stand and cast your vote among your peers in a public and 100% open form/manner, you're not doing your job, citizen.
Change my mind ..
We'll make sure to check the public logs, hence you forget, which I'm sure you won't, right, Jimmy?
We could of course save us both the trouble. I"ve got your mail in ballot papers right here. Just sign on the dotted line and we'll post them for you, no biggy.
Voting can be assisted by digital technologies, but should not be impinged upon by them.
Having an auditable trail, with paper, means that when the lights go out, the count can still go on.
Always remember, none of this works without the grid. We have built extremely fragile, frangible society upon a highly specious assumption: that up (or down) always means on ..
In order to manipulate this, you would need the entire polling place staff to be in on the conspiracy, and they would need to cook up numbers and ballots that all match. All to mess with an election at a precinct with no more than ~1500 registered voters. Where those voters are likely of the same political persuasion as the poll workers themselves. High cost, low reward.
To manipulate paper votes you need to have presence in enough voting booths and influence the votes there.
With paper it might be easier to sneak in a handful of fraudulous votes, but it will be near impossible to commit fraud at a scale that influences the elections. With software it is harder to get that access (although the article shows that one mistake by a dev can make getting access a matter of one hour...), but much easier to then commit election influencing fraud.
The fact that you do not recall any fraud either means it didn't happen (let's hope for the best) or didn't get detected. The latter is obviously very scary.
There's btw more problems with online voting specifically. It's impossible to guarantee the secret of voting. This is not an issue when voting electronically in voting booths.
Videos - https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs?si=INtv6_sr7_V5oxh7 (3 years old) & https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=vwx5xpqX3i1SVqVN (8 years old).
(Maybe excluding the “use electronic machines for quick results and have paper votes to for a slower, “official” result” argument.)
In Brazil, each voting machine is sealed off, air gapped. The only attack vector is in transit, when the votes for each machine are being transmitted to the regional electoral center, which then announces its results for the region. So it is possible to scale an attack if you somehow had the actor had access to the data in transit and was able to decode, tamper and sign the results again before reaching the regions servers. This for each region.
So yeah, while it is possible, I don't think this scales as well as people would think. No election in Brazil had any proof of tampering up to this day. Take that as you may, you can attack me personally, you can question the government's data, you can put in check how we even audit the system, but in decades of the system there isn't any hard evidence of large scale compromise of the electoral system.
Having said all that, I think all this talk serves more as a smoke screen for more pressing issues of large scale social manipulation through social media and fake news. My question then is why would anyone in their right mind attempt to compromise the electoral system itself if it is so much more effective to just manipulate public opinion by jeopardising traditional media trust, flooding message systems with fake news sources, use prominent political figures to spread anti-democratic ideas and leverage social media algorithms to radicalize voters?
Anything that doesn't do that (even electronic counting of paper ballots) cannot be trusted.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
