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> With electronic voting systems it is physically impossible to prevent manipulation and provide control. Seems like a double standard. With paper it is impos

by 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.

by wdr1 10y ago

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.