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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Finally an article pointing out that online banking is always "fixable", there's always a human that can look at a bunch of electronic transactions and decide if they're correct or not.

For voting, there's no such thing. Nobody knows what the result is, whatever comes out of the black box that is electronic voting is the result, for better or worse. You can't independently verify it, because that breaks the voter secrecy, and you can't allow anyone to override the results and "fix" it to whatever it "should" be, because that's outright voter fraud.

Papers and envelopes is the only way to go.

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You’ve clearly never heard of homomorphic encryption. There exists a way to cryptographically secure a vote while also preserving privacy. It’s even individually verifiable. And as a bonus, you can’t sell it even though you can verify it. Do some research, there even exists a youtube video putting it in simple terms. The answer is homomorphoc encryption.

> There exists a way to cryptographically secure

Fantastic, can you explain that to my 95 year old grandmother?

> there even exists a youtube video

She doesn't know what YouTube is.

You're showing the third weakness of online voting, and that is that because we have to trust whatever result the system produces, everyone in society also has to be able to understand the system. I'm sure I could understand your solution, but I'm a nerd, and you shouldn't have to be a nerd to understand it. It's hard enough to convince people that experts are right about trivial bullshit, why should anyone trust the experts about online voting?

The simplicity of voting through papers and envelopes and urns is its greatest strength. Everyone can look at the process, everyone is even invited to observe the process, and you can easily detect cheating or other irregularities. Everyone can be a poll worker, and that's a fundamental pillar of democracy, that we all build the voting machine together, so that we together can trust the result, even though we may have completely opposite political opinions.

But the voter does not need to understand encryption... just the designer of the system.

Are you suggesting they just trust the designer? Most ordinary people aren't going to do that. They'll just say 'no thanks'.

A once-in-a-lifetime referendum in the UK in 2011 about a change to voting systems was solidly defeated because most people said 'I don't understand this it's too complicated' - and that was just AV.

Most ordinary people don't want or trust any kind of fancy voting idea at all. I don't see that changing either.

> Are you suggesting they just trust the designer? Most ordinary people aren't going to do that

That's quite literally what people do when buying stuff from amazon.

People are just afraid of change. In places where e-voting has been implemented people generally trust that the system works, just like they trust a lock symbol in their amazon shopping cart page.

When people buy stuff on Amazon they can verify that they received the goods. They can't verify their vote was counted correctly.

Receiving your goods doesn't guarantee you weren't a victim of a scam or id theft. Package theft is also a thing, etc.

Similarly, You can't verify a paper ballot was counted correctly (see recounts and how the numbers don't match). Yet we're ok with these systems.

Clearly infallibility isn't a prerequisite for trust.

Besides, as I mentioned elsewhere, auditable e-voting systems do exist and have been used in various parts of the world.

> Receiving your goods doesn't guarantee you weren't a victim of a scam or id theft.

No it doesn't. People are frequently victims of scams and id theft because of the trust necessary to use online systems. This is something that is important to avoid in voting, or else your country collapses.

Sure. My argument is that it takes more than even people losing money (a pretty high bar already IMHO) for the trust in a system to be eroded beyond the point of outright distrust. For better or for worse, familiarity and trust correlate strongly, but technical security and trust don't correlate much (see people ignoring security warnings because kitten photos)

Take, for example, elections in Brazil. They've been electronic for decades and people trust its accuracy. There hasn't been a single known case of tampering even though the country has a notoriously corrupt political landscape (see every scandal and impeachment since the 80s)

I would even bet money that if the US rolled out nationwide e-voting somehow, within 5 election cycles the majority of americans would say they trust it in polls. Based on familiarity alone.

On the contrary, I think that's exactly what most people do.

Have you personally verified TLS? I have not, but I still use it.

I don’t use it to vote though.

By that logic, everyone must also understand how CDMA/GSM works or we can't trust that that 911 call will go through correctly.

The reality is that americans have collectively decided that e-voting cannot possibly work, perhaps due to some irrational fear that their bipartisan side will be cheated out of a rightful win in some sinister movie plot. Never mind that e-voting has been around and working just fine in other parts of the world.

> By that logic, everyone must also understand how CDMA/GSM works or we can't trust that that 911 call will go through correctly.

No, they don't, because they can call 911 and have actual police and EMTs show up, so they know the system works even if they can't understand the technical details.

There is no similar way to check a computerized voting process.

Of course there is. If the green party gets elected all of a sudden, everyone will smell a rat.

On a more serious and technical level, auditable voting systems have both been developed already, and deployed/used. Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they don't exist.

That you cite their existence without giving an actual example is a strong indication that if they do exist, you aren't aware of them either.

...or maybe I foolishly assumed in good faith that people are smart enough to google for things that challenge their preconceptions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_...

> If the green party gets elected all of a sudden, everyone will smell a rat.

Of course, but that's not the most likely failure mode.

Obviously the example is extreme, but it still applies in other scenarios since polls often predict outcomes.

Take Brazil for example. Presidential elections are about as high stakes as they come, they have been electronic for decades and election results pretty much always align with polls.

There are no known cases of tampering despite the high amount of chronic political corruption. Failure modes in the system are much more mundane: buying votes, manipulation of lower classes (so called "voto de cabresto"), smear campaigns and the like.

>> we all build the voting machine together, so that we together can trust the result

Seems like this logic could apply to any other digital or cryptographic solution as well? On that note, I doubt your grandma understands voting machines, or even what happens behind the scenes after you mail a ballot.

As in many things, I suspect all that matters is a general consensus that it's secure. For some that means experts agree it's safe, for others it means their friends, children, sheriff whatever sign off on it.

> On that note, I doubt your grandma understands voting machines,

That is an argument against voting machines.

I can't tell if you and OP are seriously suggesting we write our votes on a slip of paper and drop it in the slot.

"Public process" ultimately means a small handful of people can actually observe the process, so we're right back to trusting our officials.

> I can't tell if you and OP are seriously suggesting we write our votes on a slip of paper and drop it in the slot.

Absolutely, yes! That's basically how voting works in several countries. Observers can see votes being cast, vote counters can see that number of votes in the urn correspond to the number of voters who voted, you get a paper trail because you always have all the physical votes, and the process scales horizontally super easy.

> "Public process" ultimately means a small handful of people can actually observe the process

No, anyone can come look at the voting or vote counting, why would you prohibit that? The whole point of having a simple and open voting process is because people should be able to observe the whole system.

> I can't tell if you and OP are seriously suggesting we write our votes on a slip of paper and drop it in the slot.

I am. Why is that hard to believe?

> "Public process" ultimately means a small handful of people can actually observe the process, so we're right back to trusting our officials.

Where is that the case?

> And as a bonus, you can’t sell it even though you can verify it.

How does homomorphic encryption keep me from selling my id and password to someone who will vote for me, or keep someone from standing over my shoulder and watching me vote?

How would you know that the servers are implementing the scheme that they claim they are implementing? How would you verify that they are not counting extra votes from people who don't exist? How would you verify that a cosmic ray didn't flip a bit in a count somewhere?

And the other side: if you claimed that your vote was improperly counted, how could I (as a law-enforcement officer) verify that claim? How could the election body trigger a re-count?

Of course, these fundamental issues are all moot anyway, because of the even more fundamental issue of intelligibility. I understand exactly how the voting system works today, how the integrity of the vote is assured, how fraud is prevented. So do my grandmother and my 16 year old niece. With a system relying on homomorphic encryption and resilient, secured hardware and software, do you think that there realistically exist 1000 people in the entire world who could be personally convinced that the system is secure end-to-end, from the mathematical models to the systems running the software that is claimed?

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