Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

If we assume that:

- how do you know the code running on these machines on day X is actually the code they tested?

- how do you know the code running does the same thing the code they tested does, even if it is the same code (e.g. hardware instructions could be doing different things on the machine, the OS could provide different functionality, other programs could interfere)?

- how do you (and for that matter: every single voter) know their vote was counted towards the correct candidates in the whole process towards the end results, which likely involves transmitting data through the internet and/or people carrying USB thumb drives and sticking them into computers

I am not saying it can't be done, but I say you can tell appart who knows computers really well (hackers) from those who know it kinda (geeks), by how doable they think this is.

View on HN

The voting system you described is not a verifiable voting system. If you have a verifiable voting system, you don't need to know what code is running on the election machines. That's the whole point of having a verifiable voting system.

You asked "how do you know your vote was counted". You can google for examples of how this works in verifiable voting systems.

In a verifiable voting system, voter usually get a recipe that he can verify, in later time, their vote have been counted. But what stop same recipe is handed out twice? Do you do transparent log? Second system to audit those? How general voters are supposed to understand this?

Just pick a voting station with lower computer literacy, and you can do whatever you want ..

> But what stop same recipe is handed out twice?

Cryptography. Your receipt is presumably only valid for yourself. So if you got someone else's receipt, it wouldn't be valid for you.

I support paper voting for political elections for most of the reasons you mentioned, but I don't think that automatically makes all arguments for paper voting good and valid, and all arguments for alternative voting systems null and void.

And even if political elections are better done on paper, there's plenty of other elections (eg in companies and clubs etc) with different requirements and threats, and they might benefit from the research and experimentation.

> In a verifiable voting system, voter usually get a recipe that he can verify, in later time, their vote have been counted. But what stop same recipe is handed out twice?

Different solutions exist for this problem, which is known as a "clash attack". For example, in the Floating Receipts voting scheme, those things that you call "recipes" are pre-printed on ballots and hidden under scratch strips. The scratch strip is removed at the time when the ballot is dropped into the ballot box. If the manufacturer of the ballots were to pre-print the same "recipe" on multiple ballots, it would be discovered during the verification phase, because you would in some cases have 2 different votes cast on 2 different ballots which would contain the same "recipe". So both voters look up the "recipe" online and they are supposed to discover only one vote corresponding to the "recipe".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com