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Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

I think the Tom Scott video on electronic voting from years ago remains the most convincing argument to me that it's a bad idea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs). To summarize, even assuming you can solve properties like correctness, censorship resistance, privacy and coercion resistance. The fundamental problem with digital is that any exploit of any of these properties you ever have scales really well. Messing with a paper election requires a lot of people working together across the entire country. A digital hack just requires one smart person

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Electronic voting isn't a bad idea. Paperless electronic voting is a bad idea.

I will never trust voting machines that do not print and store a paper ballot. But it's practically impossible to change or remove votes with a machine that does store them.

Once the votes are recorded (on paper), you only need to do two things:

  - ensure the paper count matches the electronic counts
  - ensure the paper count matches the count of voters

You can also spot-audit or fully audit the results to ensure that the tallies for individual candidates match between paper and electronic tallies.

Personally I'm not convinced that an attack against an electronic ledger can scale in all cases.

If the model of an electronic vote relies on individual keys having cast votes (following something like a vote enrollment), the attacker will have to spoof all those keys for the result to look authentic and at the same time be malicious.

Depending on how those "keys" have been generated in the enrollment, this could be difficult to scale. The most basic premise would be that the "tallier" and the voter create this key together, and once committed to the ledger can't be tampered with by any of them. A vote must be signed with this key. The voter can override their vote at any time while the election runs. (This is something that I'm paraphrasing from the article actually)

This does not scale as it requires a malicious actor to hijack enrollment and voting for a large number of voters. If enrollment is being done based on a physical device (eg, electronic ID card) it's even less so.

Yet many rich democracies have been using electronic voting without issue. There’s an entire field of science and engineering for securing digital democracy, don’t take a single YouTuber as your source (ftr, I like Tom Scott’s videos too)

What countries except of Estonia actively using digital voting?

Russia is, albeit I wouldn't exactly call these elections democratic...

And on top of that there was massive fraud with votes due to re-voting option existing. Certainly Russia isn't a country that you want to take as example in anything related to democracy.

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