6 ms·

Voting is such a simple and cheap thing to undertake if you do it on paper. It's precise, it's easily observable, it's easy for people to understand where thei

by rawfan 10y ago

Voting is such a simple and cheap thing to undertake if you do it on paper. It's precise, it's easily observable, it's easy for people to understand where their vote goes. It's also easy to grasp how the election is protected from manipulation. With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control.

guard-of-terra 10y ago
I think that the future should lie in digital democracy, where elections and referendums will be held constantly and this will require a well-working electronic system. I have no faith in current crowd-validation elections.
- sdoering 10y ago
  Well then we will enter the era of constant populism. And politicians having permanently to validate everything against an every shifting public opinion. We will be rules by the press then, by clickbait headlines and populistic extremes I fear. I do not believe, that people are able to vote for the longer term greater good if they are able to vote for everything in an instant.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    Switz and Icelanders were able to pull it, did not they? Of course this is a skill and it will be acquired for some time. After that, we don't even need politicians that much. I'll try constant populism because today we live in the era of constant oppression.
    - tangent128 10y ago
      Generally, populism implies oppression of the unpopular.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  It's difficult enough (maybe impossible) to get a large chunk of the electorate to educate themselves about the issues once every 2, 4, or 6 years. You expect them to stay constantly up-to-date rather than choosing rational irrationality[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_irrationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_irrationality
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    No. I expect people to only vote on issues that they find pressing. By perhaps spending a replenishable "voting score".
- PKop 10y ago
  That's just what we need. More aspects of our lives relegated to the political sphere, and more of our time devoted to motivating people to one side or the other of every issue.
thecrow1213 10y ago
But you also need to scale these systems. Paper doesn't scale
- Retric 10y ago
  We did paper elections for ~100 million voters. How much more do you want to scale? Yes, it might take some time post elections to hash out results, but people don't take office the next day making that a non issue.
- chendies 10y ago
  The benefit of transparent elections outweighs the costs of counting paper. If we really wanted to do elections cheaply, we'd just hire a couple of undergrads to write a Node.js script and give polling stations some desktop PC's loaded up to the page. Would hardly cost anything. But doing elections cheaply is not the point.
  - specialist 10y ago
    For the USA, precinct-based paper mediated voting is the cheapest option. We don't need PCs. Self contained scanotronic style systems (think SAT tests) work just fine. In fact, all but the largest jurisdictions (because of ballot size, complexity) could get away with manual counting.
- vowelless 10y ago
  Which is precisely why paper voting is advantageous. A compromised scalable system can have a much larger impact than a non scalable one.
  - drusepth 10y ago
    There's an interesting analogy to things like WMDs here. Nukes can also have a much larger impact if abused or compromised, but we still built them. I expect eventually we'll have internet voting in place regardless if the benefits outweigh the potential downsides.
- 10y ago
huherto 10y ago
Right. Even if the system is fraud proof. It must be so transparent so everybody understands how it works. The US has not experienced (yet) a candidate that refuses to accept the results of an election. An unloyal candidate will claim fraud without any proof. And enough people would believe him to cause internal division or even a civil war or a coup d'etat.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  It's really not possible to have a coup in the US. Government is too distributed for a quick take over. Civil war, on the other hand, could still happen, but I think it would probably end up with just a few stand-off situations and be resolved quickly. I believe that the population of americans that view politics as reality TV are the majority. Also, Bush v. Gore, florida election results, 2000. AKA "The Hanging Chad" incident. Also happens to be the year that americans at large learned the words "enjoin" and "disenfranchise."
  - eternalban 10y ago
    Is it really viable to apply old world paradigms to USA? > It's really not possible to have a coup in the US Then what exactly happened on 9/11? In non-banana variety republics, the person in charge of national air defense would have been minimally subjected to a court martial. This still happens here too [1] for far less serious events. The general in this case, however, got promoted. [2] > US. Government is too distributed for a quick take over How about a very slow and deliberate take over. Would that work? [1]: http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/another-navy-commander-tied-to-iran-incident-relieved-of-duty-1.415931 http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/another-navy-command... [2]: http://www.jcs.mil/About/The-Joint-Staff/Chairman/General-Richard-Bowman-Myers/ http://www.jcs.mil/About/The-Joint-Staff/Chairman/General-Ri...
    - DigitalJack 10y ago
      > How about a very slow and deliberate take over. Would that work? No, that is not what a coup is.
specialist 10y ago
Backstory: outsourcing our election administration to corporations. With the business model switching from bulk rates to per voter (whether they voted or not). That's the driver for all these disruptive changes. With paper based precinct voting, perhaps 20% of the work is done outside. Mostly printing, ballots, pamphlets, poll books. But also buying some simple gear, like the optical (scanotronic style) scanners or punchcards (whatever is used). Adding touchscreens to the mix outsourced more stuff. With postal balloting, I'd estimate 50-60% is outsourced. For more printing. Signature matching. Ballot image scanners. A lot of bookkeeping software. With internet voting, closer to 100% of the elections will be outsourced. What jurisdiction is sophisticated enough to build, run, maintain voting systems? None. So every jurisdiction will be like the state of Georgia, where all of election administration is conducted by a corporation. -- Buddy of mine is trying to sell me on blockchain voting. Claims it'll protect privacy via some kinda tor like onion routing whatever. I don't even care. If we adopt some magical crypto voting system that actually work for our form of elections (unlikely), we'll completely forfeit the primary function of our governments, which is administrating elections. Private voting and public counting will be gone.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  > Private voting and public counting will be gone. I may be missing your point or misunderstanding your comment, but what you describe there is a by-product of a successfully developed blockchain-based voting solution. Everyone's votes are verifiably recorded, but publicly anonymous. You can still conduct public counts and everyone with access to the blockchain's ledger (or a trusted method of viewing the ledger) can confirm that the only votes that count towards the contest are those actually recorded. The additional benefit is that at any point in time, you can revisit your own vote to confirm it is still contributing to the outcome as it should. I don't see how this in any way undermines or "forfeits the primary function of our government, which is administrating elections." This may be due to our differing opinions on what the role of government is. Generally my reasoning falls closer in line with Milton Friedman's (paraphrased) view: > Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.[...][1] --- [1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/578626-government-has-three-primary-functions-it-should-provide-for-military http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/578626-government-has-three-...
mentat 10y ago
That's just it, it isn't precise, at all. No one seems to remember 2000. It was a disaster in large part due to the lack of precision of paper voting. Those who don't remember are doomed to repeat I guess.
- bsder 10y ago
  They were punchcards, not paper. At this point, there is no reason not to use actual paper. Computer scanning and counting has gotten really good.
  - Steuard 10y ago
    That doesn't really help, though. With "marks on paper" voting, you don't have to deal with the hanging chad problem, but you get whole crops of people who don't fill the bubbles completely, or who partially mark two different bubbles, or a whole litany of other potential ambiguities. I still agree that paper isn't vulnerable to the mass-scale undetectable vote-rigging that electronic machines have the potential to be! But it does have its own weaknesses: people who decided to switch to electronic definitely had credible reasons in mind at the time.
  - rawfan 10y ago
    In Germany it's all paper and actual people doing the counting. I know Germany is not as big as the US, but it's not a small country. We usually have the first results at 6pm on voting day and the final results usually don't differ much from the first results.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control. I don't know with a key tied to your vote that can be verified by yourself isn't half bad. Though then the exploit moves to the tallying of the votes since no one can independently do that... I feel like electronic voting systems have to be the future but so many seem to think it's impossible it makes me wonder what the ultimate solution will end up being.
- mathrawka 10y ago
  Isn't the blockchain technology that Bitcoin uses, perfect for this? It is 100% public, and you can review your vote easily. Each person just needs a private key, and it could actually be issued once for each election. However, I am not saying that we are ready for this, as not everyone is able to access the internet still.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    That seems like a solution that could work. Granted someone could take your key and vote but they can already do that with paper ballets or a fake ID today anyway. I'm sure there are drawbacks but that's probably closer to the final solution.
    - mathrawka 10y ago
      We should have some scannable code on the voter registration cards that allow users to easily use their private key when they vote electronically.
Shivetya 10y ago
all of it will be tallied up electronically regardless and you can manipulate it in any number of ways paper or not, challenged elections have shown as much. so I don't understand this fantasy that "paper" which is an ambiguous term is bandied about as the ideal solution. From paper ballots to punch cards, there are hundreds of stories of fraud. If you don't just up and lose them or mysteriously get different votes than the district involved would imply. If you can't find fraud you simply challenge the votes until you get the results you want, keep some polls open than longer, or take people to vote and help them. The ideal solution is getting it out of the hand of politicians into an independent board which can implement and secure it as needed. The real reason this comes up is because one side or another wants an excuse for losing over and over at various levels. It also is because it is becoming even more difficult to hide fraud that they have to scream its more rampant than ever or lurking right around the corner.
wdr1 10y ago
> With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control. Seems like a double standard. With paper it is impossible to prevent manipulation & provide control as well. To wit, the countless examples of election fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud With either system is a question of risks & mitigation strategies. Neither system can guarantee the elimination of fraud.
- th0waway 10y ago
  with an electronic, Internet system it's impossible to prevent manipulation on a global level. With paper, in person voting, manipulation is restricted to the local geographical area. Also, a smaller distributed collection/collation system lends itself to less vulnerability to an system-wide attack. We keep on forgetting the lessons we learned with the Internet, and de-centralized government before that...
- ghh 10y ago
  It's about preventing easy scaling of voting fraud. To corrupt vote counting at multiple precincts when using a paper-based, manual counting system, requires the bribing of a lot of people in different locations, and is hard to keep quiet and go unnoticed the larger it gets. Using a digital voting system, if the software or firmware of any part of the voting process is compromisable, likely no-one will be able to tell, any many precincts affected.
- escape_goat 10y ago
  I would guess that the writer started with a concept along to lines of "with electronic voting systems [that are connected to an external network], it is impossible to physically prevent manipulation and maintain control", which is true. I would guess that (s)he then allowed the hyperbolic urge to switched the formulation to "physically impossible." This is trivially false in a literal sense, an appeal to a qualitative notion of "impossible", which brings the argument into a context that is very familiar to Scotsmen and their imitators. Within this context, there is indeed a double standard, as indeed it is no more possible to prevent a true Scotsman from committing electoral fraud with paper than to confound him with electrons. However, a claim may be misleading, unfair, or erroneous irrespective of whether it involves a double standard. I believe that you make an error in seeking relief from the double standard. Essentially you are establishing that if we are to accept the first patently false assertion, we must equally accept the second (which is true)... and then agreeing to accept both. So we are already quite far into the woods when we come to my reason for responding to you. What you have presented is an example of the 'appeal to link' fallacy. You have suggested (and believed, probably) that there are countless examples of electoral fraud, and offered a link. However, the document you have linked does not present or even suggest that there are countless examples of electoral fraud. It is a wikipedia article that enumerates specific methods of electoral fraud, loosely defined. Furthermore, the document implicitly assumes the truth of the original assertion that is the subject of debate, namely that there are categories of fraud to which electronic voting systems are uniquely susceptible. I was tempted to conclude that "this is why we can't have nice things", but the truth is that we could have much nicer things if we took a moment to step back and examine what we are discussing just a little more carefully.
empath75 10y ago
Seems like the best system is electronic that prints out a machine readable and human readable tape that the voter can verify, and in the event of a dispute, a human recount based on the tape is the final word on the result.
skrause 10y ago
In 2009 the German Constitutional Court (similar to the U.S. Supreme Court) had to decide about voting machines and made an interesting decision which de-facto banned them. They didn't really ban them, but simply set some requirements (apart from the usual as anonymity etc.) for voting machines which as of today none of them can meet: "When electronic voting machines are deployed, it must be possible for the citizen to check the essential steps in the election act and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowledge." So your average neighbor, grandma and co-worker must be able to understand how you came to the result because that's important in a democratic process. Your open-source voting machine software doesn't meet that requirement and neither does your fancy blockchain-based cryptographic system. But paper does: You make a cross on paper, you count them. You can find an official, full English translation of the ruling here: http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/EN/2009/03/cs20090303_2bvc000307en.html http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidu... (my quote is from paragraph 119).
ryebuck 10y ago
Australia has already crossed the Rubicon with electronic counting of votes. The sweeping changes to the preference rules just before the last election also meant all the votes are tallied by Fuji Xerox in Canberra. They produced a video of the entire process and posted it to YouTube with locked comments. I have put a copy of this on Vimeo so others can comment on it as it is the scariest thing I have seen in a long long time. Please give it a watch even from 2:10 when the scanning in batches with the Windows PC is being done... https://vimeo.com/177354514 https://vimeo.com/177354514

by rawfan 10y ago

guard-of-terra 10y ago

I think that the future should lie in digital democracy, where elections and referendums will be held constantly and this will require a well-working electronic system. I have no faith in current crowd-validation elections.

sdoering 10y ago
Well then we will enter the era of constant populism. And politicians having permanently to validate everything against an every shifting public opinion. We will be rules by the press then, by clickbait headlines and populistic extremes I fear. I do not believe, that people are able to vote for the longer term greater good if they are able to vote for everything in an instant.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  Switz and Icelanders were able to pull it, did not they? Of course this is a skill and it will be acquired for some time. After that, we don't even need politicians that much. I'll try constant populism because today we live in the era of constant oppression.
  - tangent128 10y ago
    Generally, populism implies oppression of the unpopular.
CWuestefeld 10y ago
It's difficult enough (maybe impossible) to get a large chunk of the electorate to educate themselves about the issues once every 2, 4, or 6 years. You expect them to stay constantly up-to-date rather than choosing rational irrationality[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_irrationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_irrationality
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  No. I expect people to only vote on issues that they find pressing. By perhaps spending a replenishable "voting score".
PKop 10y ago
That's just what we need. More aspects of our lives relegated to the political sphere, and more of our time devoted to motivating people to one side or the other of every issue.

thecrow1213 10y ago

But you also need to scale these systems. Paper doesn't scale

Retric 10y ago
We did paper elections for ~100 million voters. How much more do you want to scale? Yes, it might take some time post elections to hash out results, but people don't take office the next day making that a non issue.
chendies 10y ago
The benefit of transparent elections outweighs the costs of counting paper. If we really wanted to do elections cheaply, we'd just hire a couple of undergrads to write a Node.js script and give polling stations some desktop PC's loaded up to the page. Would hardly cost anything. But doing elections cheaply is not the point.
- specialist 10y ago
  For the USA, precinct-based paper mediated voting is the cheapest option. We don't need PCs. Self contained scanotronic style systems (think SAT tests) work just fine. In fact, all but the largest jurisdictions (because of ballot size, complexity) could get away with manual counting.
vowelless 10y ago
Which is precisely why paper voting is advantageous. A compromised scalable system can have a much larger impact than a non scalable one.
- drusepth 10y ago
  There's an interesting analogy to things like WMDs here. Nukes can also have a much larger impact if abused or compromised, but we still built them. I expect eventually we'll have internet voting in place regardless if the benefits outweigh the potential downsides.
10y ago

huherto 10y ago

Right. Even if the system is fraud proof. It must be so transparent so everybody understands how it works. The US has not experienced (yet) a candidate that refuses to accept the results of an election. An unloyal candidate will claim fraud without any proof. And enough people would believe him to cause internal division or even a civil war or a coup d'etat.

DigitalJack 10y ago
It's really not possible to have a coup in the US. Government is too distributed for a quick take over. Civil war, on the other hand, could still happen, but I think it would probably end up with just a few stand-off situations and be resolved quickly. I believe that the population of americans that view politics as reality TV are the majority. Also, Bush v. Gore, florida election results, 2000. AKA "The Hanging Chad" incident. Also happens to be the year that americans at large learned the words "enjoin" and "disenfranchise."
- eternalban 10y ago
  Is it really viable to apply old world paradigms to USA? > It's really not possible to have a coup in the US Then what exactly happened on 9/11? In non-banana variety republics, the person in charge of national air defense would have been minimally subjected to a court martial. This still happens here too [1] for far less serious events. The general in this case, however, got promoted. [2] > US. Government is too distributed for a quick take over How about a very slow and deliberate take over. Would that work? [1]: http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/another-navy-commander-tied-to-iran-incident-relieved-of-duty-1.415931 http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/another-navy-command... [2]: http://www.jcs.mil/About/The-Joint-Staff/Chairman/General-Richard-Bowman-Myers/ http://www.jcs.mil/About/The-Joint-Staff/Chairman/General-Ri...
  - DigitalJack 10y ago
    > How about a very slow and deliberate take over. Would that work? No, that is not what a coup is.

specialist 10y ago

Backstory: outsourcing our election administration to corporations. With the business model switching from bulk rates to per voter (whether they voted or not). That's the driver for all these disruptive changes. With paper based precinct voting, perhaps 20% of the work is done outside. Mostly printing, ballots, pamphlets, poll books. But also buying some simple gear, like the optical (scanotronic style) scanners or punchcards (whatever is used). Adding touchscreens to the mix outsourced more stuff. With postal balloting, I'd estimate 50-60% is outsourced. For more printing. Signature matching. Ballot image scanners. A lot of bookkeeping software. With internet voting, closer to 100% of the elections will be outsourced. What jurisdiction is sophisticated enough to build, run, maintain voting systems? None. So every jurisdiction will be like the state of Georgia, where all of election administration is conducted by a corporation. -- Buddy of mine is trying to sell me on blockchain voting. Claims it'll protect privacy via some kinda tor like onion routing whatever. I don't even care. If we adopt some magical crypto voting system that actually work for our form of elections (unlikely), we'll completely forfeit the primary function of our governments, which is administrating elections. Private voting and public counting will be gone.

Mtinie 10y ago
> Private voting and public counting will be gone. I may be missing your point or misunderstanding your comment, but what you describe there is a by-product of a successfully developed blockchain-based voting solution. Everyone's votes are verifiably recorded, but publicly anonymous. You can still conduct public counts and everyone with access to the blockchain's ledger (or a trusted method of viewing the ledger) can confirm that the only votes that count towards the contest are those actually recorded. The additional benefit is that at any point in time, you can revisit your own vote to confirm it is still contributing to the outcome as it should. I don't see how this in any way undermines or "forfeits the primary function of our government, which is administrating elections." This may be due to our differing opinions on what the role of government is. Generally my reasoning falls closer in line with Milton Friedman's (paraphrased) view: > Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.[...][1] --- [1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/578626-government-has-three-primary-functions-it-should-provide-for-military http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/578626-government-has-three-...

mentat 10y ago

That's just it, it isn't precise, at all. No one seems to remember 2000. It was a disaster in large part due to the lack of precision of paper voting. Those who don't remember are doomed to repeat I guess.

bsder 10y ago
They were punchcards, not paper. At this point, there is no reason not to use actual paper. Computer scanning and counting has gotten really good.
- Steuard 10y ago
  That doesn't really help, though. With "marks on paper" voting, you don't have to deal with the hanging chad problem, but you get whole crops of people who don't fill the bubbles completely, or who partially mark two different bubbles, or a whole litany of other potential ambiguities. I still agree that paper isn't vulnerable to the mass-scale undetectable vote-rigging that electronic machines have the potential to be! But it does have its own weaknesses: people who decided to switch to electronic definitely had credible reasons in mind at the time.
- rawfan 10y ago
  In Germany it's all paper and actual people doing the counting. I know Germany is not as big as the US, but it's not a small country. We usually have the first results at 6pm on voting day and the final results usually don't differ much from the first results.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

> With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control. I don't know with a key tied to your vote that can be verified by yourself isn't half bad. Though then the exploit moves to the tallying of the votes since no one can independently do that... I feel like electronic voting systems have to be the future but so many seem to think it's impossible it makes me wonder what the ultimate solution will end up being.

mathrawka 10y ago
Isn't the blockchain technology that Bitcoin uses, perfect for this? It is 100% public, and you can review your vote easily. Each person just needs a private key, and it could actually be issued once for each election. However, I am not saying that we are ready for this, as not everyone is able to access the internet still.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  That seems like a solution that could work. Granted someone could take your key and vote but they can already do that with paper ballets or a fake ID today anyway. I'm sure there are drawbacks but that's probably closer to the final solution.
  - mathrawka 10y ago
    We should have some scannable code on the voter registration cards that allow users to easily use their private key when they vote electronically.

Shivetya 10y ago

all of it will be tallied up electronically regardless and you can manipulate it in any number of ways paper or not, challenged elections have shown as much. so I don't understand this fantasy that "paper" which is an ambiguous term is bandied about as the ideal solution. From paper ballots to punch cards, there are hundreds of stories of fraud. If you don't just up and lose them or mysteriously get different votes than the district involved would imply. If you can't find fraud you simply challenge the votes until you get the results you want, keep some polls open than longer, or take people to vote and help them. The ideal solution is getting it out of the hand of politicians into an independent board which can implement and secure it as needed. The real reason this comes up is because one side or another wants an excuse for losing over and over at various levels. It also is because it is becoming even more difficult to hide fraud that they have to scream its more rampant than ever or lurking right around the corner.

wdr1 10y ago

> With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control. Seems like a double standard. With paper it is impossible to prevent manipulation & provide control as well. To wit, the countless examples of election fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud With either system is a question of risks & mitigation strategies. Neither system can guarantee the elimination of fraud.

th0waway 10y ago
with an electronic, Internet system it's impossible to prevent manipulation on a global level. With paper, in person voting, manipulation is restricted to the local geographical area. Also, a smaller distributed collection/collation system lends itself to less vulnerability to an system-wide attack. We keep on forgetting the lessons we learned with the Internet, and de-centralized government before that...
ghh 10y ago
It's about preventing easy scaling of voting fraud. To corrupt vote counting at multiple precincts when using a paper-based, manual counting system, requires the bribing of a lot of people in different locations, and is hard to keep quiet and go unnoticed the larger it gets. Using a digital voting system, if the software or firmware of any part of the voting process is compromisable, likely no-one will be able to tell, any many precincts affected.
escape_goat 10y ago
I would guess that the writer started with a concept along to lines of "with electronic voting systems [that are connected to an external network], it is impossible to physically prevent manipulation and maintain control", which is true. I would guess that (s)he then allowed the hyperbolic urge to switched the formulation to "physically impossible." This is trivially false in a literal sense, an appeal to a qualitative notion of "impossible", which brings the argument into a context that is very familiar to Scotsmen and their imitators. Within this context, there is indeed a double standard, as indeed it is no more possible to prevent a true Scotsman from committing electoral fraud with paper than to confound him with electrons. However, a claim may be misleading, unfair, or erroneous irrespective of whether it involves a double standard. I believe that you make an error in seeking relief from the double standard. Essentially you are establishing that if we are to accept the first patently false assertion, we must equally accept the second (which is true)... and then agreeing to accept both. So we are already quite far into the woods when we come to my reason for responding to you. What you have presented is an example of the 'appeal to link' fallacy. You have suggested (and believed, probably) that there are countless examples of electoral fraud, and offered a link. However, the document you have linked does not present or even suggest that there are countless examples of electoral fraud. It is a wikipedia article that enumerates specific methods of electoral fraud, loosely defined. Furthermore, the document implicitly assumes the truth of the original assertion that is the subject of debate, namely that there are categories of fraud to which electronic voting systems are uniquely susceptible. I was tempted to conclude that "this is why we can't have nice things", but the truth is that we could have much nicer things if we took a moment to step back and examine what we are discussing just a little more carefully.

empath75 10y ago

Seems like the best system is electronic that prints out a machine readable and human readable tape that the voter can verify, and in the event of a dispute, a human recount based on the tape is the final word on the result.

skrause 10y ago

In 2009 the German Constitutional Court (similar to the U.S. Supreme Court) had to decide about voting machines and made an interesting decision which de-facto banned them. They didn't really ban them, but simply set some requirements (apart from the usual as anonymity etc.) for voting machines which as of today none of them can meet: "When electronic voting machines are deployed, it must be possible for the citizen to check the essential steps in the election act and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowledge." So your average neighbor, grandma and co-worker must be able to understand how you came to the result because that's important in a democratic process. Your open-source voting machine software doesn't meet that requirement and neither does your fancy blockchain-based cryptographic system. But paper does: You make a cross on paper, you count them. You can find an official, full English translation of the ruling here: http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/EN/2009/03/cs20090303_2bvc000307en.html http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidu... (my quote is from paragraph 119).

ryebuck 10y ago

Australia has already crossed the Rubicon with electronic counting of votes. The sweeping changes to the preference rules just before the last election also meant all the votes are tallied by Fuji Xerox in Canberra. They produced a video of the entire process and posted it to YouTube with locked comments. I have put a copy of this on Vimeo so others can comment on it as it is the scariest thing I have seen in a long long time. Please give it a watch even from 2:10 when the scanning in batches with the Windows PC is being done... https://vimeo.com/177354514 https://vimeo.com/177354514