The only correct answer should be hack them. But hack them in a way that's so obvious and outrageous nobody will ever try to claim they're "good enough" or "the only way forward".
I'm sure that even if you're doing it with good intentions getting caught hacking voting machines could put you in a lot of troubles. If people here seriously want to try that make sure you understand the risks you're taking.
I think an effective way of doing it would be to make numbers very close to an expected result but they have a simple mathematical relationship to each other, so they get widely published and aren't picked up straight away and hidden, and then show that they are all divisible by 46 or something.
You just gave me the mental image of a worm which targets voting machines and has them run pacman or space invaders. Bonus points if it quickly re-infects machines, or persists in ways they cannot remove. That'd be something to launch during a major election.
It's illegal and dangerous to whomever does this. But at some point, nothing but blunt disobedience works.
My theory is that exactly what you suggested was done in the 2016 election. The remaining patriots at the NSA and other places knew about the massive fraud and got together and fixed it right under the noses of the corrupt. That is my theory and in probably 20 years the history will be finally told after it all gets declassified.
Go back to manual count, have people count the votes, and citizens check over their shoulders, as it should be. It's still the case in e.g. France (larger voting pop than any one US state).
There should be zero trust in an election. Citizens don't have to trust the party or any machine.
No-one here seems to be asking 'WHY' there's even a need for electronic voting machines? Paper and pencil manual voting will always be safer as it's almost impossible to game the system when there's 10,000+ unpaid volunteers double checking each others counting.
Electronic Voting is a solution looking for a problem. It's only advocated by the losing parties, as they are convinced that making it 'easier' to vote (really? It's not like it's hard) will get more bums off seats and into polling stations, which will increase their chances of winning said election.
NASA spent millions on a space pen, that never worked properly;
The Soviet Union just used a pencil.
> NASA spent millions on a space pen, that never worked properly; The Soviet Union just used a pencil.
Someone has to, might as well be me. The reason you want a pen in space instead of a pencil is that graphite can chip off, and cause lethal danger to electronics and (consequently) crew.
That doesn’t truly set things right, though. It’s a compromise for you, and doesn’t fix things for the country itself. In fact the ‘good’ people leaving makes the country even worse.
It depends on the party in power. What you think should, won't matter. Most people accept the opinions, decisions, and accusations of the party they support.
impossible, Obama assured us last election that it was impossible to hack an election and that anyone complaining was just a conspiracy theorist or a sore loser.
All these conspiracy theories are making me tired, everybody should just go to sleep and stop worrying about our voting machines being compromised
I'd love to see someone hack a major election in such a way that the election is undeniably invalid. I'm guessing make the vote count 0. That is probably the only way to get this resolved. While we can endlessly bring the hacking of machines into the light, it has yet to prove itself to be enough to change anything. Especially if some of these hacks have been around for a decade.
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how - Stalin.
Apparently there is a report from Defcon that describes in more detail what the vulnerabilities are [1]. I have not yet had a chance to make a more detailed review.
I love [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI) from Tom Scott in which he explains quite well why e-voting is inherently bad. I am very happy that here in Switzerland, even if we have to vote several times every year, we still do it the old fashion way :).
Still, having few people casting two or more votes is much more secure of potentially having a successful attacker changing votes for thousands or even millions. We are talking about several orders of magnitude in difference. So yes, I take the paper system every day.
Depends how it's done. In France, we register only once in the country, in our "voting neighborhood".
Once you enter the voting building, you give your ID, sign the register, go to the voting cell, put your vote in an envelope, give your sealed envelope to be counted in a sealed box that has a mechanical counter for each envelope it gets.
Unhackable, because anyone can check the counter, count the signatures, and participate to the closing count of cast votes.
The real issue is if you can get inscribed on two different voting neighborhoods though... is that what you describe? (which shouldn't happen, given how long it takes to get your name on one voting list, since the gvt probably crosses your name out of all other voting neighborhoods when you do)
No it's not racist, it can easily be implemented in the US today without issue.
Don't be so patronizing to minority groups, they are just as capable as everyone else and already have to get ID for numerous other activities.
The US is less racist than most other countries on Earth, yet somehow it is the US that couldn't properly implement voter ID cards?
Racism in America has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years according to multiple lines of research, the perception that racism is on the rise is false and misguided.
It's a shame voter ID can't be implemented on a nationwide basis in the US just because people have concerns that are longer valid.
Don’t be so ignorant about the motivations and techniques behind American voter ID laws. The people writing the laws have literally studied the demographics of who possesses which kind of ID so that they can write the laws to accept forms more likely to be held by white voters and reject forms more likely to be held by minorities. And then they’ll shut down or limit the hours of ID offices in minority areas to make it more difficult for them to remedy the situation.
We absolutely could properly implement voter ID. We just don’t.
Edit: I would encourage skeptics to look up the history of voter literacy tests. How can a literacy test be racist? Are you implying that minorities can’t learn to read? And yet they were highly effective at suppressing the minority vote for a long time.
How do you know what work they've done in creating these laws? Show me recent evidence to back up your claim.
All Americans are capable of getting whatever ID they need to get. There are no recent instances of someone being barred from getting a driver's license or other form of ID due to race. The notion that it's racist to require a certain form of ID when it's eminently possible for all groups to aquire such ID is ridiculous.
Really don't have faith in minority groups do you? Liberals think they have to protect the world. Stop race baiting and virtual signalling - if you're so worried about it go babysit some 'minorities' and be their protector.
Republican politicians and lobbying groups are literally on video admitting their political and racial motivation for the voter ID laws. Do you think they're lying?
We should make it exceedingly easy it seems instead of just saying well we won't have it at all?
If anything just to avoid the time and energy spent insinuating things and discussing if IDs are racist or not.
A country like India with more poverty and issues like open defecation somehow managed to get everyone an ID but here it this insurmountable problem, that everyone talks about yet nothing is done about it.
At best, voter ID is a solution to a problem that has not been shown to exist. At worst, it is a tool to limit the number of people who are able to vote on election day. It's really as simple as that.
How would you design a system where you do need an ID to vote without unfairly disenfranchising a lot of people?
This is not an impossible question by any means. You can absolutely design such a system. But the differences between that hypothetical system and the real systems used in the US are important and instructive.
He was indeed convicted and he also didn't believe it was bad to show off like that.
For those who don't know, Switzerland sends all the material at home, you then can go to the ballot and post it or send it by post if it's not an important votation (if i remember correctly).
Here in Italy you can only vote in the commune you're registered at (main residency), once you have the required age you're automatically on the list, if you go voting you will get an entry in the list, no other voting is possible (there are always 3 people + two law enforcement helper. One of the three election helpers have one job only, write exactly down what happens, who came in, who got an voting form and ensure that the voter handed it back after coming from the voting cabinet (located in the same room).
You can only have one main residency, you cannot possibly be on two lists.
If you register for voting per snail mail you get pulled from your community list, if you come to vote the will know you mail voted and will be questioned by law enforcement.
If you want to show up twice law enforcement will get you out, if needed.
This is in a commune with ~1000 people, so it may be a bit different in bigger ones (but AFAIK, there's a certain limit to voter count at any voting point).
You effectively would need to corrupt >= 8 people (three election helpers are working any time, but they work in shifts, in total there 5 to 6 election helpers), as often outside law enforcement comes in this is particular hard to do. Also you get a fixed number of voting forms and all protocols are checked against by other gov. parts, so to pull this off without any notice would be close to impossible, IMO.
At least way easier to do this on proprietary, known error prone, voting machines... Get them open source, let them be verified and looked close upon by the public and some good pen-testers/security researches and you'd would have a really good system going....
It's worth noting that this article is not about e-voting in the sense that the video seems to be presenting [1]. This is about the machines that tabulate the results, often from paper ballots manually filled in by voters.
The report itself [2] goes into more detail on the exact nature of the vulnerabilities.
[1] I admit I didn't watch the whole video; I find video to be an extremely tedious medium for transmitting information like this, but from skimming bits of it it seems that the speaker is more focused on distributed systems for voting and online voting systems, which are both horrifying ideas; although Oregon and Washington have made a good go at absentee-only voting.
Unfortunately, the current alternative to e-voting is long, tedious and non-realtime.
Recently I had an idea about how to go at this: The elephant in the room is that you're trusting a single for-profit party with the accuracy of the result. If you want to assure much more tamper-proof results, the key would be making this an adversarial task between a voting and a verification machine. Have a voting machine count the vote and print a receipt. Standardize an interface between the voting and the verification machine which is a transparent plastic window where the voter can physically view his choice before pushing the button at the verification machine that draws in the voting ticket, verifies the vote, counts it again and stores the physical paper for retrieval (and regular, infrequent audit).
Make the voting and verification machine vendors adhere to the standard interface, let them face steep penalties for any deviation between voting and verification result, forbid any common ownership between the companies and never let any of these companies supply more than 50% of machines for any given election.
I've had the good luck to vote in elections where I just mark a paper ballot with a, uh, marker. I wouldn't call it tedious, it takes longer to read the names for a seat or an issue than it does to make a mark.
Then it goes into a scanner/lock box, so there's a count available right when the poll closes...
Come on, it's a couple of hours of work, and it's the occasion to understand the democratic process and do your civic duty by participating to the ballot count. Having fair elections beats real-time results hands down.
Not to mention that you get mandated time off (iirc 4 hours unimpeded by work) to vote on election days here in the states. There are some caveats and restrictions on getting this time but it does ensure you can get to the polls even with a odd work schedule.
This is entirely state-by-state; there's no federal law that covers it. As such, the exact terms vary pretty widely; in many cases there is no requirement if you have n hours (sometimes 2) before or after work when the polls are open; the time can be unpaid in many cases, which can make it a difficult choice for people paid hourly.
It's also not really expressed as an affirmative mandate per se; you have to request time off, in some cases it's the employer's choice when the time is taken, and if they "retaliate" or fire you then you can complain after the fact. So now you're in a dispute with your employer and you missed your chance to vote...hooray.
Thank you :) It did dawn on me only recently, when I reluctantly accepted to participate at the request of someone I know; afterwards I found the process really interesting and got to repeat the experience several times, in all positions (setting up the poll station, keeping the books all day, counting ballots, and monitoring the election as a "citizen surveyor" as permitted by law).
It's also an occasion to speak all day long with people with whom you completely disagree politically, which is much too uncommon :)
> Unfortunately, the current alternative to e-voting is long, tedious and non-realtime.
Who cares about all this, when we can avoid hacked elections with said alternatives?
- specify long. It already takes >8 hours (here in France) for voters to all come cast their vote (8am -> 4pm, and sometimes later in large cities). What's a few more hours for the final count?
- specify tedious. Taking shortcuts can't cut it, and sounds like a recipe for disaster. Counting envelopes and ballots is not the most exciting job ever, but it can be made easy if you have lots of "voting neighborhoods" with e.g. <750 voters
- non-realtime. Who cares? If TV and radio want to spread the news, they can question people coming out of the voting building. In France, we know that final vote counts are published on voting day at 8pm. (Or is it the day after?) Anything published before are estimates, as should be.
Also, why would you give any control of elections to third-parties (and require financial audits, technical limitations, etc.)? The people (e.g. randomly drawn) + the current municipal staff can handle counting envelopes.
> Unfortunately, the current alternative to e-voting is long, tedious and non-realtime.
It really isn't. But even if it were, I fail to see the importance of any of these properties when balanced against voting fraud and the validity of our representative democracy.
How many years of debugging the manual system for flaws, how many security bugs have been fixed already? The paper system has been tried and tested for many many years and we all agree that it's working and is secure. Why do we want to throw this out for having live results? Is it about saving money? How much do we save if something goes wrong?
Both systems can be broken by propaganda anyway. That one is also well tested.
The paper system is not "working and secure." Witness the election of Al Franken in MN and how trunkloads of hitherto unknown ballots arrived just in time to tip the scales in his favor. Realize that such an occurrence happens with alarming frequency in many lesser elections around the US.
Left or right, doesn't matter--I demand a better voting system first and foremost, one with with ID checks as well as fraud prevention mechanisms that are taken seriously.
BTW, my sister-in-law's first job as a prosecutor was to try voter fraud cases because that's the shit work they give to newbies. Voter fraud cases are the lowest priority type of cases in the county I reside in. Also, she was given two cases and failed to prosecute either one even though both parties were guilty as hell and had voted multiple times in the 2012 election.
It could not be more clear what is going on and who is behind it all, but nobody wants to fix it because it would expose all kinds of other wrongdoing and it would call into question the integrity of the entire system. Can't have that! It's just like when Americans lived under the British Crown--all manner of corruption and wrongdoing was swept under the rug for reasons of incompetence, covering for "old boys" in the network, or just because an aura of perfection had to be created so that the huddling masses would not rebel.
Here's the truth: The US needs to get rid of its autocrats and oligarchs and restore the power to the people.
Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.
The whole point of automation is to save on labor, at the cost of simplicity. Machines are excellent at handling complexity that some experts can come up with and can execute it reasonably well. Except that this is precisely the opposite of what's desired in an election.
Voting is one situation where it is DESIREABLE to have many people manually involved in a simple process. Auditing voting machines requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of information systems and experience with a lot of edge cases.
Proprietary voting machines only make auditing worse, basically hiding all flaws behind a curtain of marketing and legal threats. Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.
In a paper scheme, it takes more human effort to tally an election, but every citizen can participate in that process, and the others can safely observe and easily understand what's going on. The only downside is that it may take a few hours instead of seconds. But latency is infinitely preferable over opacity and potential inaccuracy.
I used to think e-voting would be OK if there was a requirement to use open-source voting software but even that is problematic. As a software engineer, it would be my pride to be able to help, however that would still be depriving non-software people from the ability to participate in the process, and I feel that is wrong. Now that my focus at work is on building resilient systems, I believe paper is the way to go, especially considering one of the other requirements is secrecy.
> Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.
Not really. If done properly they would allow faster and cheaper vote counting, a more secure audit trail and the ability for voters to verify that their vote was recorded properly.
But they do seem to be one of those things where the government is happy to just hand out bags of money to rubbish vendors and then wonder why it doesn't work. Reminds me of the NHS digitisation fiasco.
Those are just some assertions you made, most of which are considered "wrong" by experts who have spent time in this domain.
> cheaper
You realize we get to use volunteer labor here.
> more audit
That's broadly dissented unless you presume a given-by-god form of "done properly" and no-true-scotsman your way out of any constructive discussion.
> ability for voters to verify their vote
ALSO broadly dissented or at best extremely nontrivial. Blinded cryptographic operations are the territory you're talking about if you want to be in the ballpark of correct, and while the theory exists, the practice is again... not a given. I'm not even sure the theory is fully available for this domain.
Remember, one of the core concepts in a functional democracy is a secret ballot. This is essential to avoiding Some Very Nice People hovering just outside the polling place to make sure everyone in the area voted "correctly".
"Secret" means not only can the government not find out how you voted, but you can't prove who you voted for either. Both are extremely important.
If you can prove who you voted for you can collect a payment for voting a particular way. I can't believe people keep advocating for "proof" systems without recognizing this fatal flaw.
Not sure where "here" is, but everybody working the polls in California is paid, and there are a lot of us, so it isn't "cheaper" because of that. See my comment below.
> Blinded cryptographic operations are the territory you're talking about
No I am not. It is simple really - when you vote you get some kind of a receipt with a vote ID on it. And on the screen it tells you an easy-to-remember number (for example 0-9). When you want to verify your vote you go online and check that the verification digit matches.
You still can't prove to anyone else how you voted (unless you take a photo, but that is true already and is a reason taking photos is banned).
Probably nit-picky but I feel it's worth pointing out and it supports your point:
> Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.
It is WELL UNDER 5%, I would be surprised if quality security engineers constitute 0.1% of the population.
> Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.
Voting machines are pretty crap, but they can and occasionally do solve some real problems.
Voting machines can help visually disabled people vote without human assistance and potential vote manipulation. Although that's not super helpful when it often makes systematic vote manipulation easier.
Voting machines can make it much easier to handle giving eligible voters the proper ballots if they show up at a precinct other than their home precinct; which enables things like pooled early voting locations and show up at any polling place in the county. It can be a lot easier to show up during voting hours to vote somewhere near work or school or on your way than somewhere near your house; but most elections have a mix of national, state, and local issues to vote on, and districts are not always well aligned. In the 2016 Presidential election, Santa Clara County had 247 different types of ballots.
I am a pollworker in San Francisco. On voting day, there is an army of us temps working at polling places all over town from 6am until 10pm or later, for about $150. The city is having a very hard time recruiting people for those long hours on a work day.
We have very old fashioned voting machines that scan ballots marked by voters by hand. The paper ballots are retained in the machine after being scanned, and are picked up at the end of the day by sheriffs deputies.
There is another army of mostly city employees working all day and night, for several days, suporting the polling places (in a dozen languages) and processing all of the ballots. So it is indeed a costly system.
We have been able to vote by mail for many years, but for various reasona, about half of the voters prefer to come to the polling place to cast their ballot (and get an "I voted" sticker).
Meanwhile, Washington, Oregon and Colorado have only voting by mail. No voting machines no polling places, no army of workers all over town. No doubt there are issues with processing those ballots as well, but it removes the voting machines from the vulnerable spots in church dining halls and residential garages all over town.
> On voting day, there is an army of us temps working at polling places all over town from 6am until 10pm or later, for about $150.
That's generous. In Germany, the usual compensation for working 12-14 hours at a polling place is 30-50 € (35-57 $). Yet there are plenty volunteers (including me). Many like the idea of fulfilling some civic duty, especially one that's a one-day job instead of a long-term office.
Yes, and the same applies to my example, even more extremely in fact. 12 hours of minimum wage would be around 100€, so 30-50€ is not even half of that.
This is by design.. Its actually a mechanism for allowing a particular grand ole party that's not as popular as it makes out (what with shifting demographics etc) and unable to win elections (due to their insane policies) win elections.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadSome result where 10 times the voters all vote for one candidate.
It's illegal and dangerous to whomever does this. But at some point, nothing but blunt disobedience works.
There should be zero trust in an election. Citizens don't have to trust the party or any machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
No-one here seems to be asking 'WHY' there's even a need for electronic voting machines? Paper and pencil manual voting will always be safer as it's almost impossible to game the system when there's 10,000+ unpaid volunteers double checking each others counting.
Electronic Voting is a solution looking for a problem. It's only advocated by the losing parties, as they are convinced that making it 'easier' to vote (really? It's not like it's hard) will get more bums off seats and into polling stations, which will increase their chances of winning said election.
NASA spent millions on a space pen, that never worked properly; The Soviet Union just used a pencil.
Someone has to, might as well be me. The reason you want a pen in space instead of a pencil is that graphite can chip off, and cause lethal danger to electronics and (consequently) crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space
Grease pencils and felt tipped markers were among the early alternatives.
All these conspiracy theories are making me tired, everybody should just go to sleep and stop worrying about our voting machines being compromised
Compare results to statistical polls?
[1] https://defcon.org/images/defcon-26/DEF%20CON%2026%20voting%...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112172
Not the best example of "unhackable" system...
Once you enter the voting building, you give your ID, sign the register, go to the voting cell, put your vote in an envelope, give your sealed envelope to be counted in a sealed box that has a mechanical counter for each envelope it gets.
Unhackable, because anyone can check the counter, count the signatures, and participate to the closing count of cast votes.
The real issue is if you can get inscribed on two different voting neighborhoods though... is that what you describe? (which shouldn't happen, given how long it takes to get your name on one voting list, since the gvt probably crosses your name out of all other voting neighborhoods when you do)
That's racist. (According to some in the US)
EDIT: So how would you design a system where you don't need an ID to vote (like many places in the US)?
Don't be so patronizing to minority groups, they are just as capable as everyone else and already have to get ID for numerous other activities.
The US is less racist than most other countries on Earth, yet somehow it is the US that couldn't properly implement voter ID cards?
Racism in America has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years according to multiple lines of research, the perception that racism is on the rise is false and misguided.
It's a shame voter ID can't be implemented on a nationwide basis in the US just because people have concerns that are longer valid.
We absolutely could properly implement voter ID. We just don’t.
Edit: I would encourage skeptics to look up the history of voter literacy tests. How can a literacy test be racist? Are you implying that minorities can’t learn to read? And yet they were highly effective at suppressing the minority vote for a long time.
All Americans are capable of getting whatever ID they need to get. There are no recent instances of someone being barred from getting a driver's license or other form of ID due to race. The notion that it's racist to require a certain form of ID when it's eminently possible for all groups to aquire such ID is ridiculous.
Unusually, this links to the actual court result: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/29/us/document-A...
The bill was specifically and deliberately amended to choose only those specific forms of ID that African-Americans were least likely to hold.
If anything just to avoid the time and energy spent insinuating things and discussing if IDs are racist or not.
A country like India with more poverty and issues like open defecation somehow managed to get everyone an ID but here it this insurmountable problem, that everyone talks about yet nothing is done about it.
This is not an impossible question by any means. You can absolutely design such a system. But the differences between that hypothetical system and the real systems used in the US are important and instructive.
Sort of similar to all the Republican shills who get caught trying to commit in person voter fraud while "proving" how easy it I'd to commit.
He was indeed convicted and he also didn't believe it was bad to show off like that.
For those who don't know, Switzerland sends all the material at home, you then can go to the ballot and post it or send it by post if it's not an important votation (if i remember correctly).
You can only have one main residency, you cannot possibly be on two lists.
If you register for voting per snail mail you get pulled from your community list, if you come to vote the will know you mail voted and will be questioned by law enforcement.
If you want to show up twice law enforcement will get you out, if needed.
This is in a commune with ~1000 people, so it may be a bit different in bigger ones (but AFAIK, there's a certain limit to voter count at any voting point).
You effectively would need to corrupt >= 8 people (three election helpers are working any time, but they work in shifts, in total there 5 to 6 election helpers), as often outside law enforcement comes in this is particular hard to do. Also you get a fixed number of voting forms and all protocols are checked against by other gov. parts, so to pull this off without any notice would be close to impossible, IMO.
At least way easier to do this on proprietary, known error prone, voting machines... Get them open source, let them be verified and looked close upon by the public and some good pen-testers/security researches and you'd would have a really good system going....
The report itself [2] goes into more detail on the exact nature of the vulnerabilities.
[1] I admit I didn't watch the whole video; I find video to be an extremely tedious medium for transmitting information like this, but from skimming bits of it it seems that the speaker is more focused on distributed systems for voting and online voting systems, which are both horrifying ideas; although Oregon and Washington have made a good go at absentee-only voting.
[2] https://defcon.org/images/defcon-26/DEF%20CON%2026%20voting%... (discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112172)
Recently I had an idea about how to go at this: The elephant in the room is that you're trusting a single for-profit party with the accuracy of the result. If you want to assure much more tamper-proof results, the key would be making this an adversarial task between a voting and a verification machine. Have a voting machine count the vote and print a receipt. Standardize an interface between the voting and the verification machine which is a transparent plastic window where the voter can physically view his choice before pushing the button at the verification machine that draws in the voting ticket, verifies the vote, counts it again and stores the physical paper for retrieval (and regular, infrequent audit).
Make the voting and verification machine vendors adhere to the standard interface, let them face steep penalties for any deviation between voting and verification result, forbid any common ownership between the companies and never let any of these companies supply more than 50% of machines for any given election.
Then it goes into a scanner/lock box, so there's a count available right when the poll closes...
It's also not really expressed as an affirmative mandate per se; you have to request time off, in some cases it's the employer's choice when the time is taken, and if they "retaliate" or fire you then you can complain after the fact. So now you're in a dispute with your employer and you missed your chance to vote...hooray.
It's also an occasion to speak all day long with people with whom you completely disagree politically, which is much too uncommon :)
Votes happen what, every few months at most? I would say saving a few hours every 100 days isn't worth that investment.
Who cares about all this, when we can avoid hacked elections with said alternatives?
- specify long. It already takes >8 hours (here in France) for voters to all come cast their vote (8am -> 4pm, and sometimes later in large cities). What's a few more hours for the final count?
- specify tedious. Taking shortcuts can't cut it, and sounds like a recipe for disaster. Counting envelopes and ballots is not the most exciting job ever, but it can be made easy if you have lots of "voting neighborhoods" with e.g. <750 voters
- non-realtime. Who cares? If TV and radio want to spread the news, they can question people coming out of the voting building. In France, we know that final vote counts are published on voting day at 8pm. (Or is it the day after?) Anything published before are estimates, as should be.
Also, why would you give any control of elections to third-parties (and require financial audits, technical limitations, etc.)? The people (e.g. randomly drawn) + the current municipal staff can handle counting envelopes.
Why trust every single voter individually (peer into the glass window), when you can have a "hive" check what they do? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111861)
It really isn't. But even if it were, I fail to see the importance of any of these properties when balanced against voting fraud and the validity of our representative democracy.
That was in 2009.
That was in 2007: https://www.ccc.de/system/uploads/3/original/nedapReport54-1...
Both systems can be broken by propaganda anyway. That one is also well tested.
Left or right, doesn't matter--I demand a better voting system first and foremost, one with with ID checks as well as fraud prevention mechanisms that are taken seriously.
BTW, my sister-in-law's first job as a prosecutor was to try voter fraud cases because that's the shit work they give to newbies. Voter fraud cases are the lowest priority type of cases in the county I reside in. Also, she was given two cases and failed to prosecute either one even though both parties were guilty as hell and had voted multiple times in the 2012 election.
It could not be more clear what is going on and who is behind it all, but nobody wants to fix it because it would expose all kinds of other wrongdoing and it would call into question the integrity of the entire system. Can't have that! It's just like when Americans lived under the British Crown--all manner of corruption and wrongdoing was swept under the rug for reasons of incompetence, covering for "old boys" in the network, or just because an aura of perfection had to be created so that the huddling masses would not rebel.
Here's the truth: The US needs to get rid of its autocrats and oligarchs and restore the power to the people.
The supposed impetus for the change was the hanging chads controversy in florida in 2000.
The whole point of automation is to save on labor, at the cost of simplicity. Machines are excellent at handling complexity that some experts can come up with and can execute it reasonably well. Except that this is precisely the opposite of what's desired in an election.
Voting is one situation where it is DESIREABLE to have many people manually involved in a simple process. Auditing voting machines requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of information systems and experience with a lot of edge cases.
Proprietary voting machines only make auditing worse, basically hiding all flaws behind a curtain of marketing and legal threats. Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.
In a paper scheme, it takes more human effort to tally an election, but every citizen can participate in that process, and the others can safely observe and easily understand what's going on. The only downside is that it may take a few hours instead of seconds. But latency is infinitely preferable over opacity and potential inaccuracy.
I used to think e-voting would be OK if there was a requirement to use open-source voting software but even that is problematic. As a software engineer, it would be my pride to be able to help, however that would still be depriving non-software people from the ability to participate in the process, and I feel that is wrong. Now that my focus at work is on building resilient systems, I believe paper is the way to go, especially considering one of the other requirements is secrecy.
Not really. If done properly they would allow faster and cheaper vote counting, a more secure audit trail and the ability for voters to verify that their vote was recorded properly.
But they do seem to be one of those things where the government is happy to just hand out bags of money to rubbish vendors and then wonder why it doesn't work. Reminds me of the NHS digitisation fiasco.
> cheaper
You realize we get to use volunteer labor here.
> more audit
That's broadly dissented unless you presume a given-by-god form of "done properly" and no-true-scotsman your way out of any constructive discussion.
> ability for voters to verify their vote
ALSO broadly dissented or at best extremely nontrivial. Blinded cryptographic operations are the territory you're talking about if you want to be in the ballpark of correct, and while the theory exists, the practice is again... not a given. I'm not even sure the theory is fully available for this domain.
Remember, one of the core concepts in a functional democracy is a secret ballot. This is essential to avoiding Some Very Nice People hovering just outside the polling place to make sure everyone in the area voted "correctly".
If you can prove who you voted for you can collect a payment for voting a particular way. I can't believe people keep advocating for "proof" systems without recognizing this fatal flaw.
But it is pretty easy to have a system that lets you verify to yourself that your vote was recorded correctly.
No I am not. It is simple really - when you vote you get some kind of a receipt with a vote ID on it. And on the screen it tells you an easy-to-remember number (for example 0-9). When you want to verify your vote you go online and check that the verification digit matches.
You still can't prove to anyone else how you voted (unless you take a photo, but that is true already and is a reason taking photos is banned).
> Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.
It is WELL UNDER 5%, I would be surprised if quality security engineers constitute 0.1% of the population.
Voting machines are pretty crap, but they can and occasionally do solve some real problems.
Voting machines can help visually disabled people vote without human assistance and potential vote manipulation. Although that's not super helpful when it often makes systematic vote manipulation easier.
Voting machines can make it much easier to handle giving eligible voters the proper ballots if they show up at a precinct other than their home precinct; which enables things like pooled early voting locations and show up at any polling place in the county. It can be a lot easier to show up during voting hours to vote somewhere near work or school or on your way than somewhere near your house; but most elections have a mix of national, state, and local issues to vote on, and districts are not always well aligned. In the 2016 Presidential election, Santa Clara County had 247 different types of ballots.
Paper plus optical scan is probably the best thing going: Quick tallies, on-the-spot verification, complete paper trail.
Sure, you can hack the optical scan machines, but if you do, a double-check of paper ballots will quickly show the problem.
We have very old fashioned voting machines that scan ballots marked by voters by hand. The paper ballots are retained in the machine after being scanned, and are picked up at the end of the day by sheriffs deputies.
There is another army of mostly city employees working all day and night, for several days, suporting the polling places (in a dozen languages) and processing all of the ballots. So it is indeed a costly system.
We have been able to vote by mail for many years, but for various reasona, about half of the voters prefer to come to the polling place to cast their ballot (and get an "I voted" sticker).
Meanwhile, Washington, Oregon and Colorado have only voting by mail. No voting machines no polling places, no army of workers all over town. No doubt there are issues with processing those ballots as well, but it removes the voting machines from the vulnerable spots in church dining halls and residential garages all over town.
That's generous. In Germany, the usual compensation for working 12-14 hours at a polling place is 30-50 € (35-57 $). Yet there are plenty volunteers (including me). Many like the idea of fulfilling some civic duty, especially one that's a one-day job instead of a long-term office.