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Comment by ekimekim | Hacker News Reader

Manual vote counting takes significant time and effort, and a properly implemented electronic system would have advantages in tamper-proofness. It also could have advantages in being interactive so users can't fill things out incorrectly, can be guided through the process, etc, which is especially important for people with disabilities.

Unfortunately, all the advantages rely on implementing a good system, so I doubt we'll be seeing them any time soon.

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Electronic voting machine implementation, testing and deployment also takes a significant time and effort. Tamper-proofness obviously has a original and natural physical implmentations that do not require first chosing two large prime numbers: tape and sign the damn box! Though you didn't raise the point, some argue that the time it takes to manually count is a problem, as if people seriously can't wait an extra half-day. Just WAIT. It's important.

The clear advantage of paper voting is everyone--the entire electorate-- can see and understand the process. The legitimacy of the outcome depends on this understanding and trust.

Electronic systems introduce single-points-of-failure into the voting process - figure out a way to compromise the machines / vote collection process, and you can steal the election. Doing the same thing with a manual system requires cheating on a massive scale, which is pretty much impossible to do discretely, making it much safer.

I agree with your conclusion. Some remarks though.

I don't think the voting process itself gets sped up a lot just because you tap a screen instead of crossing a field.

The tamper-proofness is certainly attractive, however what we have on the market today is so far from that goal that one has to consider it less secure than paper by several orders of magnitude.

Slighty oftopic: I just found out how embarissing little I knew about accessibility processes in elections. Therefore thank you for mentioning that ;)

Can they really be tamper proof? How do you know they're tamper proof? The only way to really be sure is if anyone can check the correct functioning of the machine. If it's only in the hands of a company and a few officials, there's no way for us to check. There has to be a verifiable paper trail that can be checked to verify everything happened correctly.

As convenient as it might be, I fear electronic voting will always remain vulnerable.

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