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Comment by ygra | Hacker News Reader

Of note in general regarding elections in Germany is that there's constitutional right to be able to follow the process of elections including the vote count. That's also the reason behind electronic voting machines being banned because, while counting votes by hand is cumbersome, it's a process that everyone can follow and understand. You can actually watch the counting process if you want to.

And as the article states, at least one state apparently don't trust this software enough that they mandate verification that the correct results have been transmitted and obtained via an independent channel.

The only benefit all this has is that a preliminary result of an election can be obtained a few hours earlier. Whether that's worth having an election that can be manipulated without anyone noticing is anyone's guess, but I believe the BVerfG may have a say in that, as it did for voting machines.

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Out of curiosity, to what extent are German political parties involved in the voting process? In the US, it's usually state governments that run it and they can be susceptible to whichever political party controls the government then. Sounds like Germany may handle this issue better?

There's basically an independent part of the administration that oversees elections. Voting points are manned by volunteers and counting happens by volunteers as well. Every citizen is allowed to witness the counting and visit the voting point. Since it's all paper ballots, this doesn't require any knowledge beyond mostly simple math (local elections can have some more elaborate rules on what constitutes a valid vote, but federal elections are fairly simple in that regard.) The tally is announced locally before transferred to the regional and higher offices.

I'd be surprised if someone manages to slip in an invalid count and not be detected: Most crucial voting points are monitored by people from polling institutes that want results as early as possible. Significant differences would likely raise flags. (I did that a few times for infratest, it's actually fairly ok paid for sitting there and watching).

n.B.: The software seems to be an absolute clusterfuck and it's probably possible to sow discord and confusion, I just don't believe that you can actually change the election result with these issues - just make people question it, which is bad enough.

It's kind of "volunteers", as the adminstration sends you a letter and asks you. It's sometimes not easy to get out of that.

My uncle did it for years and he was a member of the SPD, so I guess parties are involved quite a bit.

Yeah, but there are also members of all the other parties there. Also, when I volunteered, I got the feeling that most (if not all) election assistants take their duty seriously and emphasize their neutrality while performing it.

Yes, he was very neutral and forbade every political activity in the election rooms.

But what can I say, politically interested people are more likely to be party members, so it's more likely that they work there.

I had the same impression.

Whenever I've been observer I never had the slightest feeling that any of the volunteers would place party allegiance over diligent work. But that's exactly why we're all invited to go and observe.

This happens if there are insufficient "real" volunteers. Before every election, there are calls for people to staff the voting places and do the vote counting. Only if that doesn't bring enough people, you'll get drafted.

(same as with the volunteer fire brigade by the way. there, too, you can be volunteered)

"same as with the volunteer fire brigade by the way. there, too, you can be volunteered"

Do you have any information? Counting votes is easy, fire fighting isn't :-)

It's called Pflichtfeuerwehr and I think we currently have five of them. Before you actually fight fires you have to take part in mandatory courses. I don't think those five brigades have problems, a team of conscripts is still better than no fire fighters at all.

> I'd be surprised if someone manages to slip in an invalid count and not be detected: Most crucial voting points are monitored by people from polling institutes that want results as early as possible.

That particular part does not protect from rigging. What the polling institutes do is taking a very small representative sample of voters and conducting an exit poll (they essentially have another voting office set up where people can vote a second time in secret for their exit poll). However, if you're clever about how you rig the election, exit polls won't notice that because of the small sample size.

You're right about exit polls not being particularly effective here, unless you're being very obvious with the rigging.

Luckily, the published results can also be cross-checked by the volunteers - often, but not exclusively representatives of parties up for election - that actually count the paper ballots and observe the process. This process ensures that a very large number of people from diverse political groups would have to be in on it in order to rig the election.

Any attack via this software would be detected with very high likelihood. However, the bigger problem would be the impact on the public's trust in the voting process. It's very likely that such an election would have to be repeated (as has happened recently in Austria, due to procedural reasons).

Your last paragraph is essential to making sense of this whole story. The same sentiment is also present in the original report, on page four.

The institutions who bought that software were like aware of those safety nets, which is why they had no problem buying from a vendor that basically looks like a two-man Delphi shop (no idea what they actually used). Had the system been more critical, we would probably be talking about a whole different set of shocking security problems, in some absurdly overengineered T-Systems monstrosity. Personally I feel less unsafe with paper and the obvious insecurities of a glorified excel sheet than with a titanic money-sink twenty layers deep that is feeding an army of salespersons and lobbyists paid to silence every voice of concern.

What the institutions who bought this thing underestimated is the terrible impact a caught manipulation (and even this preemptive disclosure, despite being orders of magnitude preferable to only finding out after a caught manipulation) would have on trust, and the spring time for radicals that would follow. A caught manipulation could destabilize the country more than a cruise missile hitting the Reichstag.

No, polling institutes do not only do exit polls. They also collect the final numbers. I've had that job a fair number of times and my mother actually does that this year at her polling station. They want the official numbers as early as possible, before they are announced on the official site.

Interesting, thanks for that insight.

Citizens are asked to manage the voting process and counting.

I've helped in this role for a long time, but considered my duty done as it sometimes was a lot of work deep into the nights especially if several elections and referendums where conducted at the same time.

Everyone can attend the voting process and counting process.

Schools etc. for places to vote, voting booths, paper etc. is supplied by the administration as is the selection of citizens who manage the voting and counting process. The Federal Returning Officer is responsible for organizing elections (for federal elections, similar posts exists for state elections and I assume local ones).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Returning_Officer

> Everyone can attend the voting process and counting process.

As a sidenote, this is not just a theoretical right. People are exercising it.

I volunteered as an election assistant in one of the previous elections in Germany. We were a team of five assigned to a constituency of about 1000 voters, and when we counted the votes, three citizens were present to observe the counting. As I submitted the results (via phone) to the next-higher level, I also noted the numbers down for myself and checked, later in the evening, that the numbers on the website of the returning officer matched those that I recorded. (They did.)

"As a sidenote, this is not just a theoretical right. People are exercising it."

Same experience here.

Thank you for volunteering and verifying!

there's something similar in Belgium. Many people from the general society, from various political parties are involved and are checking that everything is going smooth.

they've tried eVoting but had to stop in one of the region because it's too expensive (i.e. the totally unrelated reason to stop it, but anyway, it's gone)

See http://www.poureva.be

This is a misleading description of how US elections work.

On the ground, the election is run by local volunteers. You can sign up to check peoples' voter registrations and count votes yourself.

The state 'runs' the election in that the state and the state's Secretary of State establish the rules and certify the results.

Why can't voting just be done on the blockchain with a public ledger? Any vote could be verified. I'd feel more secure with this than paper ballots, which are very insecure and have been tampered with so many times.

What? Pen-and-paper, with the ability to observe, is a provably secure system, and its security is easily observable by anybody. That

Blockchains are voodoo, and I'd really think the ongoing disaster of Ethereum should have cooled some of these absurd claims of perfect security.

Pen-and-paper is not observable by anybody. It's a complete black box, and there's no way for me to verify that my vote went through.

With a blockchain on the other hand, anybody could verify that their vote went through (just like anybody can verify any Bitcoin/Ethereum transaction). I'd feel much more confident in this than some black box pen and paper because there's zero way to verify anything under a pen-and-paper system.

What disaster of Ethereum? Ethereum is doing pretty well.

With a blockchain, you could verify that your vote went through but so can your neighbour. Even if you find some way around that: If you can see how you see how your vote was counted, you are able to prove to someone else how you voted making vote selling possible. These are two big reasons not to use such a system.

Personally, I know for certain that my vote in the last election went through because I have seen the complete process myself and have verified that the published vote counts match the once counted in the polling station. There is no black box left.

You would need a hash to verify the transaction, and hashes wouldn't be publicly tied to one's identity. Thus if I claim that a hash represents me, then there'd be no way for anybody else to verify that. It's a legitimate concern, but not a hurdle that can't be overcome.

So you worked at a polling station that had it's shit together? Great, but that doesn't inspire me much confidence. Though really the main reason I want electronic voting is for convenience (it really is a hassle, and election days aren't national holidays), increased participation, and so that we could move more towards direct democracy and liquid democracy.

Election days are always Sundays and even if you work on that day, your employer must let you vote. Voting by letter also exists if you absolutely can't make it.

You'd need an elaborate operation involving hundreds of people to tamper with paper ballots in a meaningful way. There's no way such operation would go unnoticed. How many people are needed to hijack e-voting system?

You would also need an elaborate operation involving tons of people to hijack a blockchain-based e-voting system. The beauty of blockchain is that anybody could verify their own vote on the public ledger (eg. like etherscan.io for Ethereum).

I don't know why people have so much faith in black box paper-based voting systems. There's absolutely no way for any of us to verify that our own votes really went through. If there was vote rigging in Florida or New Mexico in 2000, then none of us would know.

In South Korea's 2012 presidential election (won by Park Geun-hye who's now in jail), there's reasonable reason to suspect that the voting may have been manipulated [1]. There was even a documentary made on it called "The Plan". Even if one dismisses this as mere conspiracy, the reality is that there's absolutely no way for us to verify it.

The move to electronic voting is inevitable, and I long for the day that this is commonplace because then it would enable us to do cool things like direct democracy and liquid democracy.

[1] http://mengnews.joins.com/view.aspx?aId=3032435

Actually it is good that nobody can get proof for their own vote. Thus votes selling is harder - provider cannot provide anything to seller. And yes, taking pictures of your own ballot is not allowed over there. Camera shutter sound may cause quite an issue.

Another issue is employers pressing workers to vote for certain politician etc. They could flat-out ask for one's blockchain ID. With paper voting, there's no way to valid way to get proof.

Paper voting trust is based on crowd trust. Anyone can check voting make sure everything is going smoothly. Don't trust your local voting committee? Go and sign up to volunteer!

Either way, we need to move to electronic voting eventually, and inevitably will. The reason being that our political system is broken, and the people don't feel represented. In this day and age, we have the technology to accommodate a real direct democracy instead of our broken representative system, but this isn't feasible without e-voting.

Why do we "need" to? I'm yet to hear a single reason. Pen&paper just works. And it's as good as electronic voting regarding representation.

Direct democracy has more issues than technical challenges. #1 being education. And that very few people would bother to put enough time to go over proposals and cast in informed vote. Even in today's loose voting cycles, a lot of people vote based on feels and shitty advertising.

We can't expect a major chunk of population to participate in day-to-day politics and vote frequently. We'd be stuck with low participation and only "interested" votes which would very likely not be representative of whole population. And paper&pen works pretty well for voting once a year or so.

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