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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Why the fuck do we need electronic voting.

I post this on every thread involving electronic voting and nobody has yet successfully responded.

Paper is secure by default.

Some electronic voting systems would allow the voter to confirm their vote was counted and correct after the fact. Imagine if a webpage posted all the votes (crypto secured of course) such that any voter could verify their vote. IMO this would help end the corruption. If a statistically significant enough people stand up after a vote and say "I didnt vote that!" the we can be made aware of corruption.

If I understand you correctly, wouldn’t that open up an avenue for vote buying? Confirm what you voted for at home?

If you can verify your own vote after the fact, then you can be compelled to prove what you've voted, thus making vote selling and vote under threat possible.

Deniable voting — aka not being able to verify a single vote — is a feature of paper-based voting, not a drawback.

It's easy to subvert that. The Nazis established compliance through a mix of rumor and intimidation; creating the belief that ballots were secretly marked or numbered in some contexts, or simply forcing open voting in others.

http://www.newsweek.com/tainted-electoral-victory-hitler-554...

https://books.google.com/books?id=iG4ud0PxeDMC&pg=PA110&lpg=...

It doesn't matter whether you actually mark the ballots or not if a sufficiently large number of people believe you might have done so. And considering how we're regularly reminded that laser printers leave tiny microdot patterns that allow the identification of which individual unit printed something, what makes you think voters could not be persuaded to believe the same thing about ballots, regardless of the fact that they're produced by offset lithography? Most people already live in a world where the technology is indistinguishable from magic. Rationalists often mistakenly believe that everyone or at least a substantial majority of the population are as rational and well-informed as they are. They're not.

> If you can verify your own vote after the fact, then you can be compelled to prove what you've voted, thus making vote selling and vote under threat possible.

That's not the case. Imagine this system: upon receiving your ballot at the polling place, you find n candidates, each with random numbers from 1 to n associated with them. You pick candidate #i, submit that vote, and take home a receipt saying you voted for candidate #i. Then proof is later posted that your vote was counted for candidate #i (using some fancy crypto). Then you can verify that your vote was indeed counted for the correct candidate, but no one (not even you, were you to forget) can tell who that candidate is.

For more information on these sorts of voting systems, see https://www.usvotefoundation.org/sites/default/files/E2EVIV_.... It's intended as a review of remote voting systems, but a lot of it apply to other types of systems as well.

That's pretty clever.

I've been reading this discussion off and on a lot today because I'm pretty fascinated that so many people feel so strongly against electronic voting and would rather have paper. On Hacker News of all places. Yes there are ways to manipulate any system, but being software developers we should all know that there are ways to fix these things and make it better.

That's what we're all here for, not for regression to old systems that seem great on paper (ha!), but for progression and new systems that work better.

I'd argue that “being software developers we should all know that there” is no way “to fix these things” reliably.

I can understand non-technical people buying bullshit about so-called “secure” software, but anyone having an idea of what software looks like should know that there is no such thing and feel responsible for teaching people about it.

Plus, voting machines in use so far have been so blatantly insecure (eg. requirement to use a well known insecure old version of Java-in-the-browser for French people abroad at the French elections of 2012) that it's just impossible to trust people currently working on these matters.

This doesn't actually solve the problem in any meaningful sense. If you have no way of checking to make sure who candidate #i is, you have no way of verifying that your vote was counted correctly, regardless of what you read on a screen when you voted. "fancy crypto" doesn't magically solve this problem.

> Imagine if a webpage posted all the votes (crypto secured of course) such that any voter could verify their vote.

That can't ever happen. It will create a market for buying/selling votes because it's possible to prove who you voted for. It will also create a system that allows for individuals to be threatened & coerced into voting a particular way.

We already have that for all practical purposes.

Although I don't think the current implementation of electronic voting is needed, some kind of electronic voting may be needed to facilitate novel developments in representation.

For example, why do we select our representatives based on where we live, and then have them represent us on every possible issue? This leads to issue voting, where a voter may choose a representative based solely on their stance on a single issue (for example, abortion), even if that representatives does not reflect their stances on all other topics.

An issue-based representative system where you select several representatives, with each assigned a particular topic or subtopic of voter-selected granularity, would allow you to rank your interests and allow your overall political views to be better reflected by your elected representative(s).

For example, you might rank privacy very highly as one of your topics, and elect someone from the EFF to represent you on privacy-related issues (but nothing else, as the EFF knows nothing about these other topics). As a secondary priority, you also care about low taxes, so you choose a fiscal conservative to represent you on most economic and spending issues. However, you also want to ensure that your local community is represented, so you finally elect a local politician to represent you on all other issues.

For additional information on what such a system might look like, you may want to read this article. [0]

However, as such a system has many scalability problems (logistically) if based on paper-based voting, it is only possible to implement practically using an electronic/digital system. However, the transparency and fairness of such an electronic system are no less important in this case than they are under our existing political structure, and possible more so.

Hopefully this has illustrated some potential long-term benefits of electronic voting systems, even if it doesn't address the short-term problems generated by the closed-source, unaudited systems being deployed now.

[0]: https://bford.github.io/2014/11/16/deleg.html

Paper isn't secure by default. You have people miscount, steal, forge, destroy, and do other unscrupulous things to change the results.

But it's much harder to do any of those things undetected on a scale that would actually affect the results.

This is a very good point.

Electronic voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.

No voting paradigm is secure, that's inevitable. But voting machines are /efficiently/ insecure (ie. you can miscount, steal, forge, destroy and change the results /at scale/).

Secure by what standard? Its fairly easy to forge paper ballots or mis-report counts.

Not at scale.

It doesn't need to be at scale if the elections are won by very small margins. Successfully executing voter fraud on a few key districts can sway an entire election.

Even in fptp systems like the UK and the US correctly predicting the precise polling stations to infiltrate and compromise to stuff the required 1000-100000 ballots is tricky. And in the UK your whole plot would probably fail anyway - as random people and representatives of the other parties would be present observing you.

How? you only get the ballot sat the poling station and tampering with the boxes is hard as all parties have observers and the boxes are sealed before transport.

We don't.

People want it because it is faster to count.

Results in places like France and the UK are known within a few hours.

Even there people occasionally suggest electronic voting as a means to speed things up.

Are they the real results or the exit polls?

Exit polls are instant. The national implications of elections are usually declared around 3-5am (counting starts around 10pm). The last constituencies usual declare by midday the next day. In the last UK general one constituency took two days - there were about 12 votes between the top two parties so they did a few recounts.

in the UK That's part of the fun staying up to watch the returns come in even more so if your actually working I got home after dawn one time

Do they vote for as many electoral offices and ballot propositions at the same time as is typical in American elections? Comparing American and European election mechanisms is like comparing a truck with a bicycle.

Not sure. In UK often local, European and e.g. police commissioner elections will be held on the same day. But these are handled using multiple ballot papers. So the counting process scales purely horizontally.

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