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Comment by FaceKicker | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what you think of the kind of people who the government would contract to develop electronic voting machines, I don't think I'd call them "laypeople". Or are you saying that every individual voter needs to understand the inner workings of the system for it to be effective?

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Or are you saying that every individual voter needs to understand the inner workings of the system for it to be effective?

Um, yea. That's what "public vote count" means.

As for the technical competence of our nation's election administrators, have you not been paying attention? I've met many many. Great at elections. Terrible at computers. Completely and utterly reliant on the vendors. Who've manifestly demonstrated their complete inability to code their way out of a wet paper bag, much less be entrusted with the foundations of our democracy.

But they don't need to understand the mathematical details of the cryptographic protocol (do they?), which seemed to be what you were implying. It seems to me the details could easily be abstracted away into a sequence of idiot-proof steps, but I don't know much of anything about public voting systems.

Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted - am I misinterpreting what specialist is saying? For another example, look at HTTPS - it secures your communication without any need for knowledge of how it's doing so, you just need to know that if you see the green lock icon you're "safe" (though I'm aware of all the usability issues, like how everyone just ignores warning messages when something goes wrong). Is there something fundamentally different about public voting systems in this regard?

I guess you're getting downvoted because that's exactly the point: Every layperson should be able to double check the vote in case of doubt. That includes the nitty gritty details, including the security of the cryptographic protocol. Paper-Ballots are simple. There's not much to understand: Make your cross, count the votes, add up, done. If in doubt, count again. You don't need to trust any expert on anything for that.

I would say that yes, every voter needs to be able to comprehend the system. Counting paper ballots is something anyone of normal intelligence can understand. Auditing them is something everyone can understand. Not so for cryptographic based systems, particularly proprietary systems.

The only electronic voting system I'd probably be OK with is one that is totally open-source, software and hardware. The implementation must be completely transparent.

Even then, fraud will happen. Always has, always will.

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