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Paper based elections are the only way to ensure and verify elections are taking place honestly and fairly.
by kennydude 9y ago
Paper based elections are the only way to ensure and verify elections are taking place honestly and fairly.
- wakeywakeywakey 9y agoWhy? Can you provide more detail?
- kennydude 9y agoIt can be inspected and visible. You cannot verify a computer is running the exact same code you want it to be.
- lima 9y agoIt's also totally unnecessary to use computers. Paper ballots work just fine.
- drdaeman 9y agoIn a properly designed end-to-end verifiable voting system, you don't need to verify the code. Black boxes work just fine, you need to be able to verify that the output had indeed matched your input. I'm not advocating use of computers, though. Believe paper ballots with some math attached are the way to go. That way there are both anti-fraud properties baked in the system (one can verify that their vote wasn't messed with), and the classic hard copies so any person who can do some basic arithmetic can count and re-count votes just fine. Unfortunately, I think all the systems I've read about either were found to have some issues (usually, it's about vote secrecy) or just too new (essentially, not so well reviewed).
- kennydude 9y agoIn order to verify the output matched the input, you will need paper and to verify it by hand. Which, is just a waste of time adding computers...
- drdaeman 9y agoNot really. To verify, you need to perform the computations using the tools you can trust. It can be pen-and-paper-and-brain, or it can be a personal computer.
- thde 9y agoI really like Tom Scott's explenation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
- lorenzhs 9y agoThe use of voting machines has been ruled unconstitutional in Germany: http://www.bverfg.de/e/cs20090303_2bvc000307en.html http://www.bverfg.de/e/cs20090303_2bvc000307en.html (English version of the ruling!). Only paper ballots are used in Germany, and they are counted by hand. This article is about the software used to tabulate and transmit the hand-counted vote counts. On the supreme court decision: the key section is "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." - since it's just about impossible to build a voting machine in a way that anyone can convince themselves of its proper operation without special expert knowledge, voting machines are effectively unconstitutional. Everyone can follow the process of counting votes on a paper ballot.
- josefresco 9y agoI'm old enough to remember "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads"... Paper isn't perfect but I tend to agree.
- jlebrech 9y agoeven then those counting the paper ballots can be biased.
- mantas 9y agoThat's why literally anybody can volunteer and there're lots of people from different backgrounds counting the ballots and checking each other.