5 ms·

I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve. If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with t

I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve. If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them. A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.

wool_gather 8y ago
> If it makes all ballots look alike Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? > If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  > Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Yeah, they definitely are. People mark them all sorts of ways.
  - ygra 8y ago
    I think that referred to the suggestion of printing every ballot after the user selects their choice on the machine.
- monocasa 8y ago
  > Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.
  - pas 8y ago
    There's no need for any sort of automation. Look at the last Russian election, there were a lot of districts where busy hands produced a lot more votes than the number of real people that actually showed up to vote. (Russian voting stations have live video feeds, and Polish journalists sat down to count the number of people who voted, and then compare that to the officially reported votes.) Or the counts could have been simply altered as they were reported. Complaining, reporting would get people an unwanted visit, so why bother?
    - monocasa 8y ago
      I guess my main concern from an election perspective is where no one is sure if the election is legitimate. There's not much you can do for this perspective when people know the election isn't legitimate, but are forced to accept the results for other sociopolitical reasons.
      - pas 8y ago
        What kinds of scenarios can you imagine when enough people call an election's legitimacy into question and somehow machines (and the log files or other data) could resolve it?
cnasc 8y ago
> If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. Maybe. But keep in mind that they know how many people voted at a given venue. So it's not sufficient to simply add a bunch of ballots, you also have to remove and destroy the same number of legitimate ballots. Maybe the ballots will be timestamped/marked in some way that can't easily be faked? Then you have to use an actual machine, and space out the ballots so it doesn't look suspicious. > A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques. That's certainly a concern, especially if the ballots are marked as I mentioned above.

wool_gather 8y ago

> If it makes all ballots look alike Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? > If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.

ForHackernews 8y ago
> Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Yeah, they definitely are. People mark them all sorts of ways.
- ygra 8y ago
  I think that referred to the suggestion of printing every ballot after the user selects their choice on the machine.
monocasa 8y ago
> Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.
- pas 8y ago
  There's no need for any sort of automation. Look at the last Russian election, there were a lot of districts where busy hands produced a lot more votes than the number of real people that actually showed up to vote. (Russian voting stations have live video feeds, and Polish journalists sat down to count the number of people who voted, and then compare that to the officially reported votes.) Or the counts could have been simply altered as they were reported. Complaining, reporting would get people an unwanted visit, so why bother?
  - monocasa 8y ago
    I guess my main concern from an election perspective is where no one is sure if the election is legitimate. There's not much you can do for this perspective when people know the election isn't legitimate, but are forced to accept the results for other sociopolitical reasons.
    - pas 8y ago
      What kinds of scenarios can you imagine when enough people call an election's legitimacy into question and somehow machines (and the log files or other data) could resolve it?

cnasc 8y ago

> If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. Maybe. But keep in mind that they know how many people voted at a given venue. So it's not sufficient to simply add a bunch of ballots, you also have to remove and destroy the same number of legitimate ballots. Maybe the ballots will be timestamped/marked in some way that can't easily be faked? Then you have to use an actual machine, and space out the ballots so it doesn't look suspicious. > A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques. That's certainly a concern, especially if the ballots are marked as I mentioned above.