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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

> The public needs to believe it, and hypertechnical solutions are a hard sell.

Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

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> Public doesn't need to know the details. Production of paper, printers is quite complex and so production of the pen. Yet people are not concerned about that when voting and we don't publish schematics of a printer that printed the ballots.

Except that people know what paper looks and feels like, they know how it absorbs ink, they know its various properties, they can _read_ whatever is printed on them, and they can see that the marks they make (or a ballot marking device does for them) are faithfully visible on the paper. With paperless machines there is nothing comparable.

The public can observe that they choose their ballot/mark their ballot and drop it in a sealed box when they vote. If they want to they can hang around and observe how the box is brought in to another room and each ballot is counted and that the result is reported in to the bigger system where they later can see the results from all other districts and that the result from their district match with the result they can see in the official results. It's easy to understand. It's easy to understand and observe. If you digitize the voting process it's much much harder to understand and only computer scientists and mathematicians really understands what's going on. That's not sustainable imo.

Also although fraud is possible with paper ballots, it's very hard to scale.

That depends on who is doing the fraud and what qualifies as success. There is this weird failure mode where make-believe elections happen, they are obviously rigged, but fuck-nothing happens except people going in circles telling each other that elections were rigged. Had a shit neighbor like that.

but its also easy to scale vote validation for voters with evoting. how to you validate that your vote is counted correctly with paper voting?

You don’t, but you can validate the system as a whole. If you wish you can show up in the morning, confirm the ballot box is empty, look at the ballot box all day, follow the box out back and observe the ballots are poured onto a table, sorted in stacks and counted first electronically and then manually and see that the result is the same that shows up in the official tally. Validating that my single vote is counted correctly is worthless if the result is manipulated on the backend and it’s much harder (impossible) for any regular Joe to validate that an entire cryptographically secure voting system doesn’t manipulate the count somewhere.

> how to you validate that your vote is counted correctly with paper voting?

You go in on election day and count yourself.

The problem is much simpler. If people could verify if their votes were counted correctly, at least 1 out of 20,000 would claim that their vote was counted incorrectly while it wasn't. Some are malicious, some pushed the wrong button, some just forgot that they changed their opinion since then.

That would be a very vocal minority that would immediately destroy any trust in the system.

Most verification systems involve a receipt kept by the voter used for verification for this reason.

That would make coercion pretty easy.

*blinded

Maybe the great filter is civilization's ability to deal with "vocal minorities" in non-genocidal fashion by threading the middle way. Somehow it's either total fash to 11 or death by 1000 nimby cuts that want neither kerncentrale nor windturbines but 100% green energy cheaply at around the clock.

Excellent point!

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