The cryptography behind e-voting (and why paper ballots are still essential) | Hacker News Reader

The cryptography behind e-voting (and why paper ballots are still essential)

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46 pointsacossta14 comments

I see two main benefits of using paper ballots. The first one is that is easy to explain and everyone understand how it works. Your grandparents, probably your kids of a certain age... When you start talking about electronic voting, the system becomes much more complex, and you need to trust someone else assessment of the system.

The second one is that you can enrol interested people in the process, for instance during the vote counting. In France, any voter can register to participate during the night. This creates a sort of community engagement which is extremely important in my opinion.

Voting officials should be selected by sortition at all levels, similarly to jury pools. Allowing self-selection can allow for collusion or a biased pool of election workers and judges, especially in cities/towns with an established single-party patronage bureaucracy.

For election officials, you don't want a representative sample, you want a maximally diverse sample. If a certain party has e.g. 40% support and you randomly draw 6 election workers per polling place, the chance of giving them 50% or more on any polling place is quite high. Include some adjacent parties and you'll get some very one-sided groups.

Of course, you can't do a lottery and then demand the chosen self-identify which party they support, nor can you trust them to be honest. The result is that you can only have people who volunteer.

I think the system we have in Slovenia is quite close to optimal: every party who got at least X % in the last election gets to submit applicants and each polling place gets 6 people, who have to have been referred by different parties, with priority based on the rank of the party in the last election.

> nor can you trust them to be honest

We trust juries with locking people up for life if necessary and settling billion-dollar lawsuits. That’s the beauty of sortition. Most randomly selected people are honest instead of biased party functionaries.

Even if you got 3/4 registered Republicans at one polling location via sortition, the chances of those being people willing to cheat the election is very small as they are random citizens.

Similar to jury selection you would probably keep identity and assigned location secret by law until Election Day to prevent tampering.

> Voting officials should be selected by sortition at all levels

It's actually a pretty hard job, so I don't think that that's very realistic. I've worked as voting officer a few times in Canada, and it's a ~15 hour shift with maybe an hour of breaks total (or if you're unlucky, zero breaks), you need to be quite organized since there's so much paper, and it's quite stressful due to the volume of voters (some of whom tend to be quite angry).

The actual procedures are fairly simple, but you need to do them ~300 times in a day, without making any mistakes, while being rushed by the long lines. Anybody on HN could probably handle this (it's only a single 3-hour training course), but it's probably beyond what a substantial portion of the population is capable of, so sortition probably wouldn't lead to great results.

> Allowing self-selection can allow for collusion or a biased pool of election workers and judges, especially in cities/towns with an established single-party patronage bureaucracy.

In Canada, any candidate can send up to 2 people to each ballot booth to observe the procedures and ensure that all the rules are correctly followed, and most serious contenders tend to send at least 1 person to each polling place. So this should help to prevent collusion in most cases.

I mean, electronic voting is just as easy to explain too. You push a button, it records your vote.

The complex part comes with answering how the system maintains the integrity of the ballot rather than just "how it works". In both cases when you simplify it, its equally understandable.

How exactly do we guarantee that paper ballots prevent fraud? Explain that in a simplified way, and it gets just as complex when you look into the bureaucracies that manage this in different countries.

"there are never fewer than 4 eyes on the ballot box" doesn't seem too complex to me

> I mean, electronic voting is just as easy to explain too. You push a button, it records your vote.

It's never that simple. The beauty of pen & paper is that nothing can possibly go wrong short of having a stroke or seizure in the voting booth that will cause your vote to be miscounted or go to the wrong candidate.

A button has many things that can go wrong. Short circuit? Software bug? Neutrinos going through the earth happen to hit the circuit in such a way that your vote switches?

Electronic voting WITH paper ballot verification is a good middle ground, but no voting process should ever omit paper ballots for confirmation and hand-recounts.

Right but mail in voting kind of disproved the need for all of this ceremony. You can cast your vote remotely and it works just fine. States even hold elections entirely by mail. It would be annoying but you could exactly replicate the mail in voting system in all aspects with email. You would for free get an even better confirmation that your vote was received because they would send you back the hash of your sealed ballot attachment and you could check it against yours. It's not exactly practical or accessible but it would be exactly as secure and hand recountable after the fact.

Okay now take the exact annoying system and replace only the sending an email with uploading your sealed ballot to a web form. Changing nothing except removing a 3rd party from the delivery mechanism—even more secure. Congrats you just invented e-voting.

I can (and regularly do) explain the security of our elections in a few sentences that everyone has understood so far. I almost have a masters in CS and I can only understand like half of what Helios Voting does.

- committees are made up of 6 people that have to be nominated by 6 different parties - 3 of them must be on the polling place at all times - 2 of them must have eyes on the ballot box at all times - all 6 are present for the counting - the higher-level comission (chosen by the same system) double-checks uncounted ballots - everyone checks that their partial result is correct on the website - anyone can check that the published partial results are summed correctly

It's also a distributed system. To compromise the system you have to compromise multiple nodes which is more difficult. An electronic system can be compromised by a powerful entity if they wield influence over the individuals managing the tech.

Aged but still true:

Tom Scott: Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs

I am fascinated by the cryptography behind e-voting. That being said I am still against it for high stakes elections.

My main reason is that the purpose of elections is not just to figure out the preferences of the electorate, the main purpose is to deliver agreeable consent. And that means a big part of elections beyond the technical process of figuring out public sentiment is convincing everybody involved that the process itself is orderly. And it turns out the best way to do that is to make the process simple and understandable and involve people from all parties and from all walks of life as little cogs within the actual system.

Now yes, you can mathematically proof correctness of certain e-voting processes. But that proof does not give you the trust of the general population. We vote because we want to avoid having a civil war every time public sentiment shifts. Trust is everything. While we nerds may think there is nothing better than maths to do that, the relationship normal people have with computers is basically one where some foreign power constantly changes how their computer works. Ir is not a device that inspires incredible trust and transparency. It took me two decades to come close to understanding how computers work and even I would rather trust the paper ballot system than some e-voting system if my life and my countries future depended on it and I have to assume that the very chips on which that system runs may have backdoors. And even if I verified that they didn't, how can I know that I didn't miss anything on election day? No thanks.

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