16 ms·

It's insane that anybody thought electronic voting machines were a good idea when paper ballots have worked for hundreds of years. Where paper ballots are tran

• rthille 9y ago
  It's not insane if you look at the motivations behind who was pushing them.
  • nvr219 9y ago
    Please explain I don't know anything about this
  • slavik81 9y ago
    I hope you're not implying some sort of conspiracy theory. As far as I can tell, the driving motivation seems to be saving money. We just had our municipal elections. Plenty of regular people saw the slowness and the expense of paper ballots. Some asked about switching to electronic voting, because even to a layman it's obvious how computers could potentially make tallying votes faster and cheaper. The part that's not obvious is security and making results auditable. That's much harder for electronic voting, but it's not as obvious to a layman.
    • RobertoG 9y ago
      Paper ballots are more secure, precisely because they need a lot of people in the process. If most of those people is chosen randomly between the population, as it happens in my country, the system is pretty robust. As this is HN: It's a distributed system, every node making its own checks. So, the answer to the complains is that the slowness and the expense are a feature, not a bug.
• blfr 9y ago
  More importantly, what problems are electronic machines solving? Having to wait until the next day for results?
  • space_fountain 9y ago
    Price. I gaurantee that's the problem they were brought in because of.
    • blfr 9y ago
      Because classic counting was too expensive or too cheap?
      • TheGRS 9y ago
        Classic counting being what? By hand? Does that sound like the most accurate or efficient way to go about this?
        • throwawayjava 9y ago
          This is the key comment of this thread. Assuming perfect security and absence of software bugs, we'd be insane to prefer human counters to machine counters.
          • benchaney 9y ago
            Yes, if we assume away all the problems inherent to machine counting it seems like a great solution.
            • throwawayjava 9y ago
              Yes. My point was just that there are obvious up-sides... so it's not like e-voting is some pointlessly insane thing. I happen to think it's a bad idea even with dead tree audit trails, but I can respect the position that, with appropriate audit trails, it makes the voting process more robust.
• tnorthcutt 9y ago
  FWIW, it's "tenets" (not "tenants"). I agree with your point, just thought you might want to know :)
  • klondike_ 9y ago
    Thanks, fixed the typo
• LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  The core feature of a voting system is to determine who got more votes. With paper, that's a laborious process, requiring physically adding up millions of pieces of information. And many other things - like horses, sailboats, and slavery existed for hundreds of years but have been phased out for superior technology. An electronic voting machine or computer would, in theory, be able to take votes and output a result without this effort. Electronic voting machines are, at first pass, a good idea. The presence or lack of transparency, accountability, and auditability are implementation details, not principles of electronic voting machines. In the absence of bad decision making and the presence of properly aligned incentives, the issues current voting machines suffer from could be worked around with a different implementation. Before computers were an option, paper was not chosen because of these properties it's now lauded to have.
  • monocasa 9y ago
    > With paper, that's a laborious process, requiring physically adding up millions of pieces of information. I'd argue that this isn't a huge deal since the amount of labor available scales essentially linearly with the amount of votes cast.
    • excalibur 9y ago
      Unless you follow Saudi Arabia's lead and start granting citizenship to robots. Then you can't use them as labor for counting paper ballots, as that would turn them into electronic voting machines.
      • cmurf 9y ago
        Mimic humans: some robots will be lower class, without citizenship, and they can do the counting. Oh wait...
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Doesn't change the fact that those non-core features are actually essential in practice. The core feature of a car is to go places fast, but it's also crucial it doesn't kill its occupants. Similarly, the essential aspects of a voting system are things like perception of fairness (otherwise we're back to killing each other for the seat at the table) and protecting individuals from being bribed or coerced into voting in a particular way. Electronic voting systems fail to provide those features in a reliable way.
• gervase 9y ago
  I don't disagree, but I also don't think that how long something has been done one way is indicative of that way's optimality. By such an argument, microwaves as a form of cooking and airplanes as a form of travel would both be bad ideas. I think it's more persuasive to focus on the transparency/auditability/fairness argument. Perhaps as an extension, an emphasis on the ability of the average participant/voter to understand the mechanisms behind how the system works?
  • deadmetheny 9y ago
    Fuck optimization. I want vote tallying to be slow, labour-intensive, and repeatable by independent parties with no special knowledge or equipment. Making the system more efficient opens attack vectors. We know how to count and paper ballots have been around so long that the attack vectors are known and can be planned around.
    • TheGRS 9y ago
      OK, but voting is also a very short part of the democratic process. Voting needs to be reasonably fast so that the decisions are then enacted. If recounts cause the process to take months (which I believe was the case back in 2000), then it also makes the transition process take longer and seeds ever more doubt into the process. Just look at what happened in Kenya recently.
      • cmurf 9y ago
        All of this used to be done by horse transit in the U.S. Also, the U.S. is by design merely a polyarchy (rather than a monarchy), and only potentially a democracy. Who specifically is elected is less important than the process being accountable. It's made more democratic through participation, and made more of an oligarchy or plutocracy through less participation.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        If you vote on a decision directly, it makes sense for it to be fast. But for large elections, when you select future rulers that will hold their office for years, a few days of delay between the vote and the results makes pretty much zero difference - especially that you usually do the vote while the old politicians still have months to go.
• rdtsc 9y ago
  > They go against the core tenets of transparency and fairness that make democracy work. The reason for the existence of electronic machines is often something as mundane as the cousin of the governor owns a company which happens to make the machines.
  • walshemj 9y ago
    um voting should not be transparent you don't want "Vinny" or "Paddy" the block captain coming round and saying "Mr Falcone / Mr Murphy Is very Upset about the way you voted"
• Spellman 9y ago
  Thinking back to the Gore-Bush election and issues of ambiguous paper ballots during the very tight recount. Everyone remember hanging chads? Or double voted ballots? There's an argument to be had that digital systems are more robust and will enforce the proper rules in a non-ambiguous manner. That's not to dismiss the claims of cost (projected to be cheaper than armies of manual counters) and speed (instant results on election night!) that also likely spurred this decision. In hindsight though we are learning of the other issues we have created while trying to solve the originals.
  • jimrandomh 9y ago
    During the Bush-Gore election, the paper voting machines had ambiguities but the digital ones were actually hacked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error
• wh1te_n0ise 9y ago
  I'm confused how you can say paper ballots have any of those properties. Once you've handed off your paper ballot, it's no longer "transparent". You have no signature (physical or digital) that verifies that your vote was counted in the final tally. You also have no proof that all other votes submitted in that election were legitimate votes from real, identified eligible voters. Ballot stuffing and mis-recording of votes are both forms of fraud that have been performed under the so-called "transparent" paper voting systems... "Accountable" implies that you have adequate identification. Last time I checked (last presidential election), I only needed to provide a name and a birthday in order to vote, which are both things that are publicly available information. Without adequate identification of people (see: biometrics + smart cards, ideally), you don't have accountability or even the ability to reliably detect voter fraud. Why would you want to favor a paper system which relies on people (who can be paid off, blackmailed) when better solutions exist that get rid of some of the possibility of human error? Personally, I'd rather have a public electronic voting system where all voting transactions are stored on a public blockchain. That way I can verify the vote tallies for myself and I can also verify that the vote that I submitted was actually recorded and included on the public blockchain. You add in the assumption that all voting machines must be closed source and un-audited - but that's not an inherent property of voting machines. Governments could just as easily use open source and publicly-audited voting machines.
  • tonyztan 9y ago
    >I can also verify that the vote that I submitted was actually recorded and included on the public blockchain. Would this allow you to prove to someone else how you voted in the election? If so, that's not a desired property. Currently there is no way for you to prove, to yourself or someone else, who you voted for in an election because nobody gets to see your ballot and you cannot take a photo. This makes vote buying and coercion much more difficult. I'd like our voting system to keep this feature.
    • wh1te_n0ise 9y ago
      I can see how that would be a concern, and I'd say to that - it really depends on the implementation. You could have a blockchain-based system where everything is public (say, like Bitcoin), which from your perspective would be bad. You could have a blockchain-based system where you need a "view key" in order to actually view the details of a particular transaction (say, like Monero), which from your perspective would also be bad. In the latter system I'm describing, you could have a procedural control that you have a choice of receiving your "view key" or something along those lines to deter coercion and vote buying. Other possibilities would be allowing voters to change their votes at a later date, or creating a system that allows voters to vote remotely such that they could do so in the comfort of their own home where they'd be (presumably) free from coercion and other influences.
• cmurf 9y ago
  But profit!
• emmelaich 9y ago
  It's a premature optimisation gone malignant. It's techno-philia from the techno-ignorant.
• FooHentai 9y ago
  Both sides of this particular debate seem to be stuck in this silly false dichotomy where you either have insecure electronic voting, or entirely revert to traditional paper ballots. We can have sophisticated and safe electronic voting, but we have to introduce it gradually, with transparency and major, sustained investment. We must also do something that doesn't come naturally: Critically review and audit progress to-date, and use this information to conservatively set direction for future effort. The aviation industry's approach to technology is the kind of model that is needed here, not that of startups or big corporate.
  • TheGRS 9y ago
    The suggestions mentioned in this testimony basically recommend doing just that. Paper ballots are used to keep a record of the vote in the case of a system outage or if a manual audit is triggered, but for the most part you would never do it that way. Statistical analysis is used to trigger alerts that there may be fraud happening at a particular polling station.
  • jstewartmobile 9y ago
    Schneier once wrote[0], "The worst enemy of security is complexity", and I'm inclined to agree with him. "Sophisticated and safe" is an almost guaranteed contradiction. [0] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/1999/11/a_plea_for_simplicit.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/1999/11/a_plea_for_...
    • FooHentai 9y ago
      Ah, my intent with the use of sophistication was more in the sense of being greatly worked on over time, and adapted based on real-world experience and the complexity of the environment in which it exists. It was not my intent to suggest that the system itself would need to be greatly complex. Perhaps my use of the term was incorrect.
      • jstewartmobile 9y ago
        Don't feel embarrassed. There are professional security people who disagree, at least in practice, with Mr. Schneier, and would make Rube Goldberg envious with the needless complexity of their constructions.
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  No it isn't. Electronics actually work just great when the vast majority of actors are behaving cooperatively, as when you use your credit card to buy something on the internet. Most of the time your order arrives as specified, you pay the amount expected, and nothing bad happens. It's great. The problem with voting is that trust doesn't really exist, you have large blocs that are historically willing to undermine the integrity of the process itself because the risks of getting caught the penalties associated with same are low and mild compared to the potential payoffs of success. I would argue that too much power is concenrtated in elective offices, such that the incentives for cheating so vastly outweight the downside risks that shenanigans become inevitable. The American approach to this has been to distribute power across as many elective offices as possible. This may have been a mistake, and furthermore it makes voting enormously elaborate and complex. American ballots are huge. That's better than the paternalism that obtains in parliamentarian systems, where you get to vote for a small number representatives once every few years and on a referendum maybe once a decade, which makes it easy to do all the ballot-counting by hand. Paper ballots can't be counted by hand in the US. I mean, yeah, it's theoretically possible, but when ballot papers in a general election can have 40 ro 50 candidates and referendum items, counting has to be automated (eg by scanning) and recounts are limited to specific races in specific precincts. To be frank, it would be very easy for a determined attacker to throw an entire election into doubt by subverting just a few key points. All I need to do is force votes close enough to trigger the recount threshold in multiple (>=3) disparate races in multiple (>=3) busy precincts and then have a few Outraged Citizens show up to protest the injustice simultaneously. To be honest you could probably do that with ad buys and not even use knowing operatives. The amplifying effect of the media will do the rest. On top of the commercial impulses that drive the media to seek spectacle first and substance alter, the wide availability of camera and communications technology is a double-edged sword; on one level it provides an economic and cultural stimulus which is great, but that also means that it's extremely subject to manipulation as the capacity for media production outstrips that of critical consumption - that is to say, our capacity to create rumors often exceeds our capacity to filter them out, and leveraging this at a critical time like an election makes it easy to provoke political instability. Sp, while paper ballots seem to have greater integrity than electronic voting, they're really not that much harder to undermine and require the acceptance of all kinds of practical problems that come with fetishizing tradition. Could we not instead have voting machines with open source and audited software, or better yet voting software that we could all have on our phones that met the same standards? That'd be the ideal, but it hasn't happened until now because procurement and the political process itself are deeply corrupted, and in addition to the basic corruption of two sides spending vast sums of money to struggle over power, there's the bigger issue that if you could gain popular acceptance for a solid verifiable open-source voting mechanism we wouldn't need much of our political infrastructure; that is to say, instantaneous, reliable, and credible electronic voting is a threat to the existence of the political class, and by extension to the buyers of said political class's services.
• DannyB2 9y ago
  Your words about paper ballots being transparent, accountable, etc are exactly how paper ballots have NOT worked for hundreds of years. At least not "worked" the way some people wish they would "work". Hence electronic paperless voting with no tamper proof audit trail.
• warrenm 9y ago
  Luddite much? It's insane anybody thought electronic baking was a good idea when paper money has worked for hundreds of years. Electronic voting machines aren't problem. Bad implementations are the potential problem.
• rhino369 9y ago
  Well, one type of paper ballot probably tipped a presidential election. There was a sudden push to get rid of any ambiguity. It was an overreaction but that is why it happened.
  • boomboomsubban 9y ago
    The ambiguity wasn't necessary in that election, politics made the ballots confusing and they can do the same thing with electronic ballots. And even with that ambiguity, a recount would have solved the issue. The Supreme Court decided that election by stopping the recount.
• jdietrich 9y ago
  In the video below, Tom Scott explains why paper ballots are intrinsically more secure than electronic voting. If you're reading this and don't think that electronic voting is a terrible idea, I urge you to spend the next eight minutes of your life watching it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI