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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

You don't digitize elections for efficiency. You do it for security. The idea that paper ballots are a secure form of voting is ridiculous. The only reason people think that they're secure is that they're so profoundly insecure that we have no way of auditing them effectively and so never uncover anything that may be happening to them.

Not to mention the fact that access and efficiency are in fact forms of election manipulation. The inefficiency of the process keeps people from voting who otherwise would. That has political consequences and is absolutely used as a means to cause outcomes that otherwise wouldn't happen.

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Uh, no. Computing is the absolute opposite of security. Doubly so for anything networked.

If you want to take anything secure, and make it unsecure, simply transform it from paper, and put it on a computer. Bam!

Paper is millions of times more secure than a computer. No piece of software is ever, ever secure. There are always, literally always thousands and thousands of hardware, and software vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited.

Compared to any form of computerized voting, ballots are insanely secure.

But what you're missing here is process. Paper voting has been around for a very, very long time. Process is well established, very simple to do, but it seems the US is always changing how to count, how to tally, and more.

But, to pause and take a step back ... I'm not sure how you think adding a computer to the mix, improves auditing. The entire point of a voting system, is that your vote remains anonymous. Therefore, the device or method that records your vote? Must not ever ever be assigned to you. And this also includes any form of anonymization.

This has also been handled for a very, very long time. Again, by process.

I wonder, how many years have you (or others advocating a computer inserted into the voting process), studied in depth the chain of trust used with paper ballots? Or precisely how ballots are counted? Or, even months? Weeks?

All I know is that when I researched paper ballots here in Canada, every aspect I could think of was covered. And that's what you'd expect, from a voting process that evolved over literally hundreds of years, with deep thought put into each voting cycle.

> If you want to take anything secure, and make it unsecure, simply transform it from paper, and put it on a computer. Bam!

In what way, exactly, do you think paper voting is 'secure'? Do you think pieces of paper cannot be forged? Do you think it's difficult to swap out election boxes or to alter ballots?

> But, to pause and take a step back ... I'm not sure how you think adding a computer to the mix, improves auditing. The entire point of a voting system, is that your vote remains anonymous. Therefore, the device or method that records your vote? Must not ever ever be assigned to you. And this also includes any form of anonymization.

Sure, if you think about it for only about 1 second, the system you might come up with sucks. However, people have thought about it for more than 1 second on occasion, and come up with some pretty good designs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

Again, you're missing the key here. Process. And current paper process includes audibility, security, and more.

Done correctly, it is insanely difficult to swap out an election box. Where would you do it?

At the polling station, where members from ALL political parties are present? Volunteers are present too. All together watch the voting process, following through to opening the ballot box, and performing the initial count.

https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&do...

How, then, are election boxes to be secretly swapped?

On top of this, all ballots are serialized. Each voting station has multiple voting boxes. Voting boxes are sealed. How are you going to compromise them?

What I find astonishing, is how intensely some people seem to want to use computing for everything. Paper ballots, and the process used to employ them, are incredibly secure. Incredibly.

Its a problem that absolutely, positively does not need to be solved. At all.

Yet people are consistently working very diligently to do so, and the only real reason for that is one. Profit.

And we don't need that motive in an election counting process.

So, you believe that because a small group of people are kinda sorta overseeing this process over a long period of time, it is secure? Large groups of people watching intently are deceived extremely effectively and reliably by magicians all the time. I see no reason to think that the mere fact that some random citizens are "overseeing" the process makes it in any way secure.

And any way, we don't have to theorize:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/upshot/mapped-why-voting-...

The point is: a properly designed cryptographic voting system would make all of this provably secure. We wouldn't need to rely on witnesses paying attention, any citizen would be able to verify the integrity of the entire election on their home computer. That is why electronic voting is the best system.

Nope. You never can audit most of it. Especially the hardware and firmware at vote time.

And that's a false arg anyway, even if you could "audit" it (ask the hardware nicely to not lie to you:), it's still a (really) bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

> And that's a false arg anyway, even if you could "audit" it (ask the hardware nicely to not lie to you:)

If individuals can audit their own votes, the hardware cannot lie.

You then have a trivially broken voting system.

I know why you think that is so. But I have already explained elsewhere in this thread why you're wrong. So why don't you look into it a little for yourself.

Nothing you wrote negates the requirement of incoercibility. In all instances, the check can lie to you OR the vote system is broken.

Electronic (aka proxy) voting is a requirement on the checklist to skip physical presense.

Of course pieces of paper can be forged... one at a time. To do so in volume requires a somewhat large operation.

I mean, sure, anyone with a laser printer can print 10,000 pieces of paper. 10,000 ballots, though... you'd have to get the right paper, the exact size, the exact font and layout. Then you'd have to move your printed ballots into the ballot stream, upstream of where they're counted. That could be done, but as I said, it's a somewhat large operation.

Compare that with changing a SIM card, where you can change multiple votes at once.

If all it takes to defeat your electronic voting system is changing a SIM card then you haven't designed a very good electronic voting system. There are cryptographic voting schemes that are much harder to defeat than that, and i've already linked them in this thread.

Affecting a(n electorally) significant number of paper votes requires the compromise of more people and leaves more evidence than for electronic votes. (In general, for the quality of voting generally seen in first world countries)

Can you do better in theory, yes. Have we seen any evidence that various US election bodies can do better through using electronic voting, no. The exact opposite in fact.

It's similar to passwords: writing down all your passwords in a notebook and keeping it in your desk draw is a bad idea. But it's usually significantly harder to break into millions of desk draws than to break any given site's security.

> Affecting a(n electorally) significant number of paper votes requires the compromise of more people and leaves more evidence than for electronic votes. (In general, for the quality of voting generally seen in first world countries)

If we didn't have an electoral college, that might be true. But the reality is that you don't need to compromise that many people in that many places to have a decent probability of tipping a close election one way or the other.

> Can you do better in theory, yes. Have we seen any evidence that various US election bodies can do better through using electronic voting, no. The exact opposite in fact.

Which is exactly why DARPA is researching the problem.

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