5 ms·

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 piec

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.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Transportation systems get people places. Cars get people places fast, and are so much more effective than the old methods (horses or walking) that their increased danger is worth it. They just need to be safe enough. Equivalently, it's so much easier to tabulate voting results with computers that we just need to make it reliable enough.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Yes. The point is, electronic voting systems are not good enough with respect to the trust general population will have in the system. Consider that there are, and will always be, people on the losing side that argue the elections were rigged. In the paper version, the scenario is so implausible that it's not worth much attention. In an electronic system, where maybe 1% of the electorate can actually understand how it works, and only 0.1% of that 1% have enough access to actually verify it works the way it says it works, it will be much easier to argue that the other side rigged the election. For democracy to work, it's less important who is elected, and more important that everyone accepts the result of the process.
deadmetheny 9y ago
>With paper, that's a laborious process, requiring physically adding up millions of pieces of information That is a feature of paper ballots, not a bug. We have plenty of volunteers to count ballots and there's no necessary equipment or domain knowledge to do so. The attack surface is thin and well-known with paper.
losteric 9y ago
The real risk is full digitization, which these voting machines provide. Our elections cannot be a black box. There are middle grounds. Paper doesn't have to be manually tabulated. Punch-hole ballots can be mechanically tabulated, fill-in-the-bubble ballots can be read with minimal software. Results can be aggregated by software and communicated over networks because the results can be audited with the paper trail (both cheap sampling/statistical auditing and an expensive total manual tabulation). If chads and improperly filled ballots cause problems, create a machine to fill in the paper ballot for people - but give the voter the ballot, let them verify, then walk over and drop it in a ballot box. If the NSA can't lock down their espionage weapons, we can't trust some second-rate politically-connected software vendors to run our elections. We need auditing, we need paper.
walshemj 9y ago
Doesn't seem to be a problem in the UK the US population is only 5x Of course properly implementing the civlservice reforms (of the 19th century) and not electing Judges and other positions that should be filled on merit by civil servants might help
justadudeama 9y ago
Do you think there is a world that we can safely and securely depend on electronic systems? Aka, enough open source and open hardware then anybody can ensure that the system is secure?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  (NOTE: did HN just break? It's cutting my comment in half when I try to submit/edit it...) In general, we'd have to close the loop over hardware the way we did with software. In software, you can write open-source code that depends only on other open-source code, and you write and distribute it with open-source tools. Trusting-trust-style attacks aside[0], everything on the software layer can be inspectable by anyone, and in principle you could read through all of the code and understand what's doing[1]. With hardware though, there pretty much isn't any usable open-source hardware stack that's a) fully open-source at every level, and b) verifiable. The latter is particularly damning, because chips are made in commercial factories you can't inspect, and the actual process is secret. (1/2)
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    (2/2; cut in half because HN is doing weird things tonight.) Until the day you can literally print[2] your own circuits from sand, using an open-source designed and manufactured electronics printer, you can't trust hardware without trusting people who manufactured it. Ultimately, I doubt we'll ever be able to have 100% trust in any human-created system. The one thing we can do, though, is to structure our systems to maximize cost of a successful attack, trying to push it so high that the results are not worth the effort. -- [0] - http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.pdf http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.... [1] - it's obviously not true in practice, due to complexity, bugs, and finite lifespan of humans. [2] - or "nanolathe", as we called it in the late 90s; cheers Total Annihilation fans!

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.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Transportation systems get people places. Cars get people places fast, and are so much more effective than the old methods (horses or walking) that their increased danger is worth it. They just need to be safe enough. Equivalently, it's so much easier to tabulate voting results with computers that we just need to make it reliable enough.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Yes. The point is, electronic voting systems are not good enough with respect to the trust general population will have in the system. Consider that there are, and will always be, people on the losing side that argue the elections were rigged. In the paper version, the scenario is so implausible that it's not worth much attention. In an electronic system, where maybe 1% of the electorate can actually understand how it works, and only 0.1% of that 1% have enough access to actually verify it works the way it says it works, it will be much easier to argue that the other side rigged the election. For democracy to work, it's less important who is elected, and more important that everyone accepts the result of the process.

deadmetheny 9y ago

>With paper, that's a laborious process, requiring physically adding up millions of pieces of information That is a feature of paper ballots, not a bug. We have plenty of volunteers to count ballots and there's no necessary equipment or domain knowledge to do so. The attack surface is thin and well-known with paper.

losteric 9y ago

The real risk is full digitization, which these voting machines provide. Our elections cannot be a black box. There are middle grounds. Paper doesn't have to be manually tabulated. Punch-hole ballots can be mechanically tabulated, fill-in-the-bubble ballots can be read with minimal software. Results can be aggregated by software and communicated over networks because the results can be audited with the paper trail (both cheap sampling/statistical auditing and an expensive total manual tabulation). If chads and improperly filled ballots cause problems, create a machine to fill in the paper ballot for people - but give the voter the ballot, let them verify, then walk over and drop it in a ballot box. If the NSA can't lock down their espionage weapons, we can't trust some second-rate politically-connected software vendors to run our elections. We need auditing, we need paper.

walshemj 9y ago

Doesn't seem to be a problem in the UK the US population is only 5x Of course properly implementing the civlservice reforms (of the 19th century) and not electing Judges and other positions that should be filled on merit by civil servants might help

justadudeama 9y ago

Do you think there is a world that we can safely and securely depend on electronic systems? Aka, enough open source and open hardware then anybody can ensure that the system is secure?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
(NOTE: did HN just break? It's cutting my comment in half when I try to submit/edit it...) In general, we'd have to close the loop over hardware the way we did with software. In software, you can write open-source code that depends only on other open-source code, and you write and distribute it with open-source tools. Trusting-trust-style attacks aside[0], everything on the software layer can be inspectable by anyone, and in principle you could read through all of the code and understand what's doing[1]. With hardware though, there pretty much isn't any usable open-source hardware stack that's a) fully open-source at every level, and b) verifiable. The latter is particularly damning, because chips are made in commercial factories you can't inspect, and the actual process is secret. (1/2)
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  (2/2; cut in half because HN is doing weird things tonight.) Until the day you can literally print[2] your own circuits from sand, using an open-source designed and manufactured electronics printer, you can't trust hardware without trusting people who manufactured it. Ultimately, I doubt we'll ever be able to have 100% trust in any human-created system. The one thing we can do, though, is to structure our systems to maximize cost of a successful attack, trying to push it so high that the results are not worth the effort. -- [0] - http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.pdf http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust.... [1] - it's obviously not true in practice, due to complexity, bugs, and finite lifespan of humans. [2] - or "nanolathe", as we called it in the late 90s; cheers Total Annihilation fans!