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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

I agree about the risk of client-side vulnerabilities. Another state-level actor could easily abuse this to influence an election.

On the counting side though, I don't fully agree. Paper voting sees some enormous mistakes. Whether they are intentional or not, but it has happened before where an entire town's votes for a candidate missed a zero. No election observers or people sent from either party noticed it until a volunteer pointed it out. Electronic voting isn't going to make such mistakes and I believe that if the process is handled well, then the secrecy of the vote shouldn't be an issue from the server side.

But again, there's nothing you can do about the client side attack vector.

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In your example it worked: a volunteer pointed it out. The volunteer probably would not have been able to with e-vote.

Who has the skill to be able to assess such a system ? And among those, who has the time ?

I've been a programmer for 15 years and I'm pretty sure I would not be able to look at such a system and feel confident there is no error. And definitly not in the reasonable time period required for voting.

This exactly - complete recountability and the fact that there actually are independent volunteers recounting are the only assurances of a transparent, legitimate voting system. Black boxes (and computer systems by their nature are black boxes) introduced into this system will always void its transparency.

> In your example it worked: a volunteer pointed it out. The volunteer probably would not have been able to with e-vote.

I believe the parent's example was to show that it was missed by the system that was intended to catch it. That the catch in itself was a fluke, lucky.

It should bring into question "How many times have we missed and not caught it?" not "Well it worked this time, it must always work." In fact, we can only recognize cases if we catch them. Therefore it is confirmation bias to use this example as a "proof of it working". It can only serve as an example of "We have caught failures in the system" and suggest that we should be wary of others existing (neither proving nor disproving fault in the system).

We can't know how many, but we know it's possible. For e-vote, i'm not sure it's possible. Hell, i can't tell with certainty my own laptop is clean.

While I agree that voting with paper ballots is prone to errors, I argue the errors are of the type that can be detected by observation. Manipulation at scale takes many conspirators and can be detected just by watching the process. You know you can't trust a vote when the watchers complain they couldn't monitor the ballot boxes at all time.

In electronic voting, you just have to trust the machine to do it right. There are multiple layers of manipulation available that are hard to detect. Sure, the bar is higher, but so are the opportunities for doctoring by the involved actors. What are the watchers to do? They simply can't watch the ballot box when it's inside a machine where no single human can fully understand its machinations.

To expand on this, "verification" or "observation" of paper voting can be done by just about anyone. Young or old, natives or transplants, left or right, comp sci majors or the high school dropout, just about anyone can count along and watch a box to make sure nobody is stuffing tons of ballots in there. That's what makes it so powerful. If you think some conspiracy is happening by "the other side", you can go down and watch for yourself, or you can gather a hundred other people to watch with you.

Exactly. The goal isn't just to minimise the number of errors, it's to minimise the estimated number of errors among the most conspiracy-prone 10% of your fellow citizens. The validity of the vote is something which resides in their heads.

It is possible to create an encrypted log of all votes, each vote encrypted with a different key. Voters would receive a decryption key printed on a slip of paper at the voting booth. Later on they could check to see if their vote was correctly counted.

Can this procedure confirm that the machine properly recorded my preferences, reported them to the central tabulator, and that the tabulator included my ballot choices in the final counts?

There are two cases. Either you can prove to other people what you voted for. And then they can extort you. Or you can't and then you how can you prove you were cheated? And if we think one more step, hostile government can start rumors of distortions and no one can know.

There is an out. If no single person can prove their vote but people in aggregate can.

That's why you have paper ballots with dumb electronic counters, as Ontario (Canada) did in its last provincial election. The ballot is a full letter size piece of paper that is fed through the counting machine while the voter watches, into a standard ballot box that can easily be recounted.

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