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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

experts have been advising governments to not use electronic voting machines unless they can print out a paper receipt since ~1997 and nobody has listened so good luck.

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I vote in Chicago, and our electronic voting machines print a paper receipt. The process is as follows: 1) Write your name and address on a piece of paper. 2) Hand it to the worker, who looks you up on the computer. 3) The worker writes your ward/precinct on the piece of paper and asks you to confirm and sign. 4) The ballot is loaded onto a smart card and given to you. 5) You choose any open voting machine and insert the smart card. 6) The voting machine presents your ballot and you press a button to confirm it is the correct one. 7) You do your voting. 8) The voting machine shows you all of your votes, screen by screen and you confirm them. 9) The voting machine prints your votes, page by page on a roll of paper (behind clear plastic) and you confirm them. 10) The voting machine asks if you are really, really sure and you confirm. 11) The smart card pops out of the machine and you drop it in a box on the way out.

If you do early voting, you can only vote electronically. If you vote on election day, you can choose a paper ballot if you wish. Early voting is electronic only because you can vote anywhere in the city (if you work downtown you can do so on your lunch break no matter where in the city you live) and there are dozens of different ballots because we vote on things at the neighborhood level in addition to state and national candidates. Having paper ballots would be quite challenging.

This really seems like the ideal. I don't understand places that don't use machines like this, it' not like Chicago/Illinois are rolling in money.

Since all politicians operate reactively and not proactively with these sorts of things, it will take someone actually compromising an election and changing the outcome by manipulating vulnerable electronic voting machines before any action is taken. Even then, we'll probably just end up with a new model of electronic voting machine that fixes the one vulnerability used. So, good luck indeed.

Actually, it will take someone actually compromising an election in a way that is unassailably and unquestionably broken. At that point the elected officials (who presumably have succeeded under the existing broken voting system) will rise up to fix the problem based on scientific evidence and their understanding of statistics.

Thankfully we can be sure that our votes have not been compromised in the past and there are no actors in the system who might benefit from avoiding looking into possible compromises.

Oh wait..

> At that point the elected officials (who presumably have succeeded under the existing broken voting system) will rise up to fix the problem based on scientific evidence and their understanding of statistics.

What motivation do they have to fix a system that put them in office in the first place? (hint: none, there is no motivation)

I thought references to scientific evidence and "understanding of statistics" made it sufficiently clear that I was joking.

Yea I know you were joking, but I was highlighting a major problem with the current system we have: the only people who can fix it tend to benefit most from having it broken in their favor.

The punchline should be "the Supreme Court," but I'm guessing it's "Russia."

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