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Friendly reminder: electronic voting is totally unnecessary. Many highly developed democracies (e.g. France) have totally paper voting where the ballots never l

Friendly reminder: electronic voting is totally unnecessary. Many highly developed democracies (e.g. France) have totally paper voting where the ballots never leave the public eye. If the past is any indication, there will almost certainly be a lot of comments on this article proposing complicated schemes for making electronic voting secure and verifiable. Consider when evaluating these schemes whether there is any benefit or upside at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper.

liberte82 8y ago
The best benefit I've heard about paper voting is the mechanism by which trust in the count is ensured. With paper voting, all votes are counted by several people, with oversight and random recounts. It is _possible_ to cheat, but it would require a local conspiracy for a limited number of votes. With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. If it's working correctly, it should be perfect; but if the machines were hacked, it could be done through a network and the impacts could be massive. It would require a large conspiracy to pull off, but the number of votes that could be affected could change an election. So in summary: paper voting = higher chance of small irregularities, with limited impact; electronic voting = lower chance of massive irregularities with election changing consequences. In paper voting, the trust is distributed, while in electronic voting, it is centralized.
- florabuzzword 8y ago
  Overall, well put, and those points are tough to discount. > With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. Could a blockchain not address that with public/private keys? Why is this ridiculous?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - xori 8y ago
    Because your vote also needs to be private to the point where a third-party can't verify that a vote belongs to you. To prevent selling of votes, or forced votes via blackmail.
    - florabuzzword 8y ago
      Thanks. That’s the answer I was looking for. I guess there would be no way to verify privately.
      - xori 8y ago
        There's ways. A memorized "secret" that would be put on the ballot in addition to your vote could be used for you to verify a checksum. The main issue is the hardware, and added complexity. But these are interesting problems that should be talked about.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    That still counts as "done by machines".
  - ljf 8y ago
    Sorry to be there guy: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Soft...
  - lvh 8y ago
    The hard parts of voting systems are keeping 1 ratios 1 of voter and vote and preserving individual voter anonymity. Blockchains don't solve either problem better than paper, and if you're not careful you end up introducing subtle new voting problems (you should not be able to prove who you voted for -- _even_ if you hold a special credential) and shiny new operational problems like key distribution. All of this is at best a ton of risk for ostensibly very little benefit; at worst, your democracy is now owned by some rando with an Android 0day.
  - evv 8y ago
    There are a large number of technical issues with blockchain voting. The thing about public key cryptography is that it is easy to create a new identity. But in a voting system you need to trust that each voter is a citizen and that they only vote once. This means that public keys of the citizens need to be securely collected by a government authority (for example your local DMV). Plus we would need culture changes around key management, so that non-tech-literate people can create and protect keys. Which means the people would need some standard for secure hardware to generate keys and sign ballots. Which means we'd need some government standard for "trusted hardware", and that would quickly become an attack vector. Only after all of that would it be possible for the government to trust votes via public key cryptography. And as Jacob says, the important thing is that the _public_ has trust in the vote, regardless of what government officials believe.
  - beat 8y ago
    Okay, let's start with the idea that it isn't ridiculous. For the sake of argument, let's say a blockchain-based voting system could be as verifiable as paper. So what problem does it solve? What does the blockchain accomplish that a paper ballot does not? And what are the costs in terms of user interface and voter education, relative to paper?
    - dqpb 8y ago
      It makes voting faster and less expensive (practically free). That means you could have the public voting at arbitrary frequency. You could imagine a system where the public is voting every month, week, or day on what the country should do next. I'm not saying this would be good necessarily, only that such a technology would enable fast, frequent, continuous control distributed across the population. Such a country would be very different from anything that exists today.
      - sleepingpills 8y ago
        This is assuming that the system would be inherently trustworthy and trustable with no human oversight. I have a nagging suspicion that over time this system would still settle in a state where we have just as many humans involved in ensuring everything is kosher as we have now, but compounded with a system that is less transparent for someone who is blockchain illiterate. Assuming that voting would become effectively free, the second point does sound quite intriguing. It's the sort of direct democracy that is practiced by some countries (e.g. Switzerland). It does require a certain level of voter education though - so people look at the longer term. Otherwise you'll never push through an initiative that raises taxes for example.
      - nanimo 8y ago
        I haven't heard of a "practically free" blockchain yet, though.
- PJDK 8y ago
  Another major benefit of this is that the things that makes it trustable are very easy to understand. If someone asks "why should I trust this count is correct" you can say "well these are the people that counted the votes - these are the people who watched (selected by parties A, B and C) and here's some video of it all happening". That's a lot more comprehensible than "well, do you know what a blockchain is?". Being trustable is great - but it also needs to be trusted!
  - beat 8y ago
    In another electronic voting thread last week, I had a highly upvoted comment describing the Minnesota paper voting system (credentials: I have been a MN election judge). Part of the beauty is that it's so easy to understand. You see all these interlocking checks, and how they work to make large-scale manipulation/fraud impossible. I don't think my mom knows what a blockchain is.
    - ximeng 8y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735324 I assume this comment
      - beat 8y ago
        Yes, that one.
- jimrandomh 8y ago
  No, it would not require a large conspiracy to pull off. With electronic voting, a single highly skilled engineer could rig an election without needing any accomplices at all. That is why it's terrifying.
  - thevardanian 8y ago
    A paper ballot system is just as terribly ineffective as electronic voting. Look at Russia. They have a paper voting system as well. I know in other poorer nations thugs just straight stuff the ballots with votes, some even steal the box, some set it on fire, and it can be in general a complete shit show. What is simply required is a publicly available audit of elections, where any citizen can verify for themselves the outcome of their local results.
    - elefanten 8y ago
      You didn't respond to any of the logic in the comments above. Yes, you need some minimum of civil society infrastructure for paper ballots to be categorically more secure than electronic ballots. But the article is about the US. In the US, paper is simply safer.
      - liberte82 8y ago
        If the civil society infrastructure doesn't exist to secure free elections with paper balloting, then you're not really living in a democracy anyway, and you've got bigger issues to deal with.
    - rtkwe 8y ago
      That's more a problem with the system surrounding the paper ballot than the paper system itself. Switch to an electronic means in those countries won't remove the fixing problem just make it harder to see because the fix will happen before election day instead of the day of. It's not just the paper system it's that the paper system can be monitored by representatives of each party, there's no good way to do that with an electronic system that doesn't at least create a separate paper record of the vote that's counted separately.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  >With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. Can someone explain why I am ignorant here: Is it not just feasible to open source and open access everything with only obfuscating voter identity as a hash? That way people can voluntarily make public their votes for third-party investigation? Note: I'm not saying this is better than paper voting. But if voting is to be electronic then this seems like the best model?
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    How do you verify that the machine is running the same source code?
  - hibikir 8y ago
    The ability to make your own vote public is a bug, not a feature: It allows people to demand you to show them that you voted "correctly", whether for straight out vote sales, or plain old intimidation from a group. A pastor/union boss that can be sure that a bunch of people really went to vote, and voted they way they want, is pretty powerful. At some point you make the "voluntary" part of giving away your hash to not be so voluntary, as only traitors would keep it quiet. In many environments, secret votes and public votes lead to different outcomes: requests to make regularly public votes secret is not that uncommon in elections for private groups: Everyone knows that there's a big percentage of people that want to vote in an unpopular way, and suddenly either an old leader is ousted, or a very corrupt choice is made. So no, the ability to voluntarily make your own vote public and verifiable is a dealbreaker for elections in a modern state.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      Example: I usually do not vote in the party primaries in my state, because the party that primary voters selected is public. Mostly, I don't want to get tagged by Big Data as having a political affiliation. These combine with "at will" employment such that I could be fired for voting in the "wrong" primary for my company, with no laws broken. I'm not saying it has ever happened, but it could. Murphy's Law provides the rest. In the general election, the only public information is whether I voted or not. So I vote as I please. I can still be fired for wearing only the minimum required amount of flair, but at least that's not interfering with democracy. Public votes can also be sold. If you say you'll pay me $X if I vote for Y, making the Y vote public means they buyer can know that they got what they paid for.
doombolt 8y ago
Paper voting means that you can hold very few elections and the like. This means choosing between representatives who nobody likes, and only discussing major questions. With electronic voting (not the black box kind of course) there's hope that democracy becomes more direct.
- beat 8y ago
  That's actually a good point, better than the usual blockchain fetish nonsense. But two points... First, that requires a new Constitution, throwing out our existing representative democracy and starting over with a new model. Second, not everyone agrees direct democracy is a good idea. Adding a layer of focused expertise in the form of representation is arguably a very good thing.
  - doombolt 8y ago
    There are other locales other than the US. Anyway, I guess you can eventually vote in such congress that they see their only mission in providing platform for direct democracy & safeguarding its availability. Other than that, what I have seen in representative democracies (and authoritarian states) worldwide have never sparked the "expertise" feeling in me.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >First, that requires a new Constitution, throwing out our existing representative democracy and starting over with a new model. There are all sorts of changes that wouldn't require a new constitution, just likely an amendment. They're unlikely to happen though, as our current representative democracy would need to voluntarily give up some of their power. >Second, not everyone agrees direct democracy is a good idea. Adding a layer of focused expertise in the form of representation is arguably a very good thing There is a massive amount of room between a pure direct democracy and our current system. Our two party system removes any semblance of Democratic choice on issues the parties agree on.
    - beat 8y ago
      If both parties agree on something without significant contention, odds are a strong majority of the population also agrees with it. Which may or may not be a good thing (see racism, history of), but it does suggest that this idea that a handful of opposition can affect change through direct democracy is wrongheaded. It might matter for issues where the parties are well behind the public (ie the War on Drugs), but most of the time, it won't matter at all.
8ytecoder 8y ago
What is HN's view on the Indian Electronic Voting Machines? These machines are not connected to any network. They reduced invalid votes by a huge margin, increased trust in the system by making it almost impossible to stuff ballots, reduced the time to get the results by a very significant margin - even a full recount can be done in just a few hours. There are risks. IMHO, those risks existed with paper ballots as well. Also to note that this works well in India (so far no major complaints) primarily because it's accompanied by an independent Election Commission i.e., national/state/local sitting officials don't oversee elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_India
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  I can't speak for all of HN, but my own opinion is that if the machines don't produce a voter-verifiable physical paper trail, they are insecure.
umvi 8y ago
> at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper. I think regardless of if paper or digital is used, we need an anonymous verification method. i.e. I can confirm that my vote was cast and tallied for X candidate. And if you got your whole community together, you could prove there are no injected or altered votes. The receipt of a vote could be a UUID that you can then use later to verify your vote, for instance.
- skrause 8y ago
  The verification method is called public counting. Here in Germany you can stand next to the ballot box all day to verify that nobody tampers with it and then attend the public counting of the votes.
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
>Consider when evaluating these schemes whether there is any benefit or upside at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper. Just because there is no immediate benefit doesn't mean there won't one day be benefit. Initial versions of many forms of technology were near useless and only became better after refinement. Just look at how useless the original electric cars were. But electronic voting, if someone could make it safe and secure, could have benefits we can't recognize. The risk is implementing an incomplete system and the very likely possibility that any government attempt will be very lacking (and often filled with the standard amount of corrupt in similar large IT projects). I would not support removing the paper process currently, but I would support development going into electronic voting so that one day the technology will be mature enough for us to see benefits that current paper voting can't provide. A few examples of what may one day be possible is massively lowering the cost to vote (for many poor people getting a few hours off of work to go vote ends up costing them far more than they value their vote being worth), making it possible to do voting a more regular event which would allow more direct democratic versions of government, the ability to have something we can trust more than slips of paper that have to be hand tallied (current systems are far less trustable, but future systems may be able to become more trustable than paper).
paulddraper 8y ago
> good old fashioned unhackable paper I agree with you, but let's not kid ourselves. "Vote early, vote often" did not originate with electronic voting. Paper systems are hackable as well.

liberte82 8y ago

The best benefit I've heard about paper voting is the mechanism by which trust in the count is ensured. With paper voting, all votes are counted by several people, with oversight and random recounts. It is _possible_ to cheat, but it would require a local conspiracy for a limited number of votes. With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. If it's working correctly, it should be perfect; but if the machines were hacked, it could be done through a network and the impacts could be massive. It would require a large conspiracy to pull off, but the number of votes that could be affected could change an election. So in summary: paper voting = higher chance of small irregularities, with limited impact; electronic voting = lower chance of massive irregularities with election changing consequences. In paper voting, the trust is distributed, while in electronic voting, it is centralized.

florabuzzword 8y ago
Overall, well put, and those points are tough to discount. > With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. Could a blockchain not address that with public/private keys? Why is this ridiculous?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- xori 8y ago
  Because your vote also needs to be private to the point where a third-party can't verify that a vote belongs to you. To prevent selling of votes, or forced votes via blackmail.
  - florabuzzword 8y ago
    Thanks. That’s the answer I was looking for. I guess there would be no way to verify privately.
    - xori 8y ago
      There's ways. A memorized "secret" that would be put on the ballot in addition to your vote could be used for you to verify a checksum. The main issue is the hardware, and added complexity. But these are interesting problems that should be talked about.
- pjc50 8y ago
  That still counts as "done by machines".
- ljf 8y ago
  Sorry to be there guy: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Software https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2030:_Voting_Soft...
- lvh 8y ago
  The hard parts of voting systems are keeping 1 ratios 1 of voter and vote and preserving individual voter anonymity. Blockchains don't solve either problem better than paper, and if you're not careful you end up introducing subtle new voting problems (you should not be able to prove who you voted for -- _even_ if you hold a special credential) and shiny new operational problems like key distribution. All of this is at best a ton of risk for ostensibly very little benefit; at worst, your democracy is now owned by some rando with an Android 0day.
- evv 8y ago
  There are a large number of technical issues with blockchain voting. The thing about public key cryptography is that it is easy to create a new identity. But in a voting system you need to trust that each voter is a citizen and that they only vote once. This means that public keys of the citizens need to be securely collected by a government authority (for example your local DMV). Plus we would need culture changes around key management, so that non-tech-literate people can create and protect keys. Which means the people would need some standard for secure hardware to generate keys and sign ballots. Which means we'd need some government standard for "trusted hardware", and that would quickly become an attack vector. Only after all of that would it be possible for the government to trust votes via public key cryptography. And as Jacob says, the important thing is that the _public_ has trust in the vote, regardless of what government officials believe.
- beat 8y ago
  Okay, let's start with the idea that it isn't ridiculous. For the sake of argument, let's say a blockchain-based voting system could be as verifiable as paper. So what problem does it solve? What does the blockchain accomplish that a paper ballot does not? And what are the costs in terms of user interface and voter education, relative to paper?
  - dqpb 8y ago
    It makes voting faster and less expensive (practically free). That means you could have the public voting at arbitrary frequency. You could imagine a system where the public is voting every month, week, or day on what the country should do next. I'm not saying this would be good necessarily, only that such a technology would enable fast, frequent, continuous control distributed across the population. Such a country would be very different from anything that exists today.
    - sleepingpills 8y ago
      This is assuming that the system would be inherently trustworthy and trustable with no human oversight. I have a nagging suspicion that over time this system would still settle in a state where we have just as many humans involved in ensuring everything is kosher as we have now, but compounded with a system that is less transparent for someone who is blockchain illiterate. Assuming that voting would become effectively free, the second point does sound quite intriguing. It's the sort of direct democracy that is practiced by some countries (e.g. Switzerland). It does require a certain level of voter education though - so people look at the longer term. Otherwise you'll never push through an initiative that raises taxes for example.
    - nanimo 8y ago
      I haven't heard of a "practically free" blockchain yet, though.
PJDK 8y ago
Another major benefit of this is that the things that makes it trustable are very easy to understand. If someone asks "why should I trust this count is correct" you can say "well these are the people that counted the votes - these are the people who watched (selected by parties A, B and C) and here's some video of it all happening". That's a lot more comprehensible than "well, do you know what a blockchain is?". Being trustable is great - but it also needs to be trusted!
- beat 8y ago
  In another electronic voting thread last week, I had a highly upvoted comment describing the Minnesota paper voting system (credentials: I have been a MN election judge). Part of the beauty is that it's so easy to understand. You see all these interlocking checks, and how they work to make large-scale manipulation/fraud impossible. I don't think my mom knows what a blockchain is.
  - ximeng 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735324 I assume this comment
    - beat 8y ago
      Yes, that one.
jimrandomh 8y ago
No, it would not require a large conspiracy to pull off. With electronic voting, a single highly skilled engineer could rig an election without needing any accomplices at all. That is why it's terrifying.
- thevardanian 8y ago
  A paper ballot system is just as terribly ineffective as electronic voting. Look at Russia. They have a paper voting system as well. I know in other poorer nations thugs just straight stuff the ballots with votes, some even steal the box, some set it on fire, and it can be in general a complete shit show. What is simply required is a publicly available audit of elections, where any citizen can verify for themselves the outcome of their local results.
  - elefanten 8y ago
    You didn't respond to any of the logic in the comments above. Yes, you need some minimum of civil society infrastructure for paper ballots to be categorically more secure than electronic ballots. But the article is about the US. In the US, paper is simply safer.
    - liberte82 8y ago
      If the civil society infrastructure doesn't exist to secure free elections with paper balloting, then you're not really living in a democracy anyway, and you've got bigger issues to deal with.
  - rtkwe 8y ago
    That's more a problem with the system surrounding the paper ballot than the paper system itself. Switch to an electronic means in those countries won't remove the fixing problem just make it harder to see because the fix will happen before election day instead of the day of. It's not just the paper system it's that the paper system can be monitored by representatives of each party, there's no good way to do that with an electronic system that doesn't at least create a separate paper record of the vote that's counted separately.
wallace_f 8y ago
>With electronic voting, the counting is done by machines and the mechanism is obfuscated and unverifiable. Can someone explain why I am ignorant here: Is it not just feasible to open source and open access everything with only obfuscating voter identity as a hash? That way people can voluntarily make public their votes for third-party investigation? Note: I'm not saying this is better than paper voting. But if voting is to be electronic then this seems like the best model?
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  How do you verify that the machine is running the same source code?
- hibikir 8y ago
  The ability to make your own vote public is a bug, not a feature: It allows people to demand you to show them that you voted "correctly", whether for straight out vote sales, or plain old intimidation from a group. A pastor/union boss that can be sure that a bunch of people really went to vote, and voted they way they want, is pretty powerful. At some point you make the "voluntary" part of giving away your hash to not be so voluntary, as only traitors would keep it quiet. In many environments, secret votes and public votes lead to different outcomes: requests to make regularly public votes secret is not that uncommon in elections for private groups: Everyone knows that there's a big percentage of people that want to vote in an unpopular way, and suddenly either an old leader is ousted, or a very corrupt choice is made. So no, the ability to voluntarily make your own vote public and verifiable is a dealbreaker for elections in a modern state.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Example: I usually do not vote in the party primaries in my state, because the party that primary voters selected is public. Mostly, I don't want to get tagged by Big Data as having a political affiliation. These combine with "at will" employment such that I could be fired for voting in the "wrong" primary for my company, with no laws broken. I'm not saying it has ever happened, but it could. Murphy's Law provides the rest. In the general election, the only public information is whether I voted or not. So I vote as I please. I can still be fired for wearing only the minimum required amount of flair, but at least that's not interfering with democracy. Public votes can also be sold. If you say you'll pay me $X if I vote for Y, making the Y vote public means they buyer can know that they got what they paid for.

doombolt 8y ago

Paper voting means that you can hold very few elections and the like. This means choosing between representatives who nobody likes, and only discussing major questions. With electronic voting (not the black box kind of course) there's hope that democracy becomes more direct.

beat 8y ago
That's actually a good point, better than the usual blockchain fetish nonsense. But two points... First, that requires a new Constitution, throwing out our existing representative democracy and starting over with a new model. Second, not everyone agrees direct democracy is a good idea. Adding a layer of focused expertise in the form of representation is arguably a very good thing.
- doombolt 8y ago
  There are other locales other than the US. Anyway, I guess you can eventually vote in such congress that they see their only mission in providing platform for direct democracy & safeguarding its availability. Other than that, what I have seen in representative democracies (and authoritarian states) worldwide have never sparked the "expertise" feeling in me.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >First, that requires a new Constitution, throwing out our existing representative democracy and starting over with a new model. There are all sorts of changes that wouldn't require a new constitution, just likely an amendment. They're unlikely to happen though, as our current representative democracy would need to voluntarily give up some of their power. >Second, not everyone agrees direct democracy is a good idea. Adding a layer of focused expertise in the form of representation is arguably a very good thing There is a massive amount of room between a pure direct democracy and our current system. Our two party system removes any semblance of Democratic choice on issues the parties agree on.
  - beat 8y ago
    If both parties agree on something without significant contention, odds are a strong majority of the population also agrees with it. Which may or may not be a good thing (see racism, history of), but it does suggest that this idea that a handful of opposition can affect change through direct democracy is wrongheaded. It might matter for issues where the parties are well behind the public (ie the War on Drugs), but most of the time, it won't matter at all.

8ytecoder 8y ago

What is HN's view on the Indian Electronic Voting Machines? These machines are not connected to any network. They reduced invalid votes by a huge margin, increased trust in the system by making it almost impossible to stuff ballots, reduced the time to get the results by a very significant margin - even a full recount can be done in just a few hours. There are risks. IMHO, those risks existed with paper ballots as well. Also to note that this works well in India (so far no major complaints) primarily because it's accompanied by an independent Election Commission i.e., national/state/local sitting officials don't oversee elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_India

ScottBurson 8y ago
I can't speak for all of HN, but my own opinion is that if the machines don't produce a voter-verifiable physical paper trail, they are insecure.

umvi 8y ago

> at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper. I think regardless of if paper or digital is used, we need an anonymous verification method. i.e. I can confirm that my vote was cast and tallied for X candidate. And if you got your whole community together, you could prove there are no injected or altered votes. The receipt of a vote could be a UUID that you can then use later to verify your vote, for instance.

skrause 8y ago
The verification method is called public counting. Here in Germany you can stand next to the ballot box all day to verify that nobody tampers with it and then attend the public counting of the votes.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

>Consider when evaluating these schemes whether there is any benefit or upside at all over good old fashioned unhackable paper. Just because there is no immediate benefit doesn't mean there won't one day be benefit. Initial versions of many forms of technology were near useless and only became better after refinement. Just look at how useless the original electric cars were. But electronic voting, if someone could make it safe and secure, could have benefits we can't recognize. The risk is implementing an incomplete system and the very likely possibility that any government attempt will be very lacking (and often filled with the standard amount of corrupt in similar large IT projects). I would not support removing the paper process currently, but I would support development going into electronic voting so that one day the technology will be mature enough for us to see benefits that current paper voting can't provide. A few examples of what may one day be possible is massively lowering the cost to vote (for many poor people getting a few hours off of work to go vote ends up costing them far more than they value their vote being worth), making it possible to do voting a more regular event which would allow more direct democratic versions of government, the ability to have something we can trust more than slips of paper that have to be hand tallied (current systems are far less trustable, but future systems may be able to become more trustable than paper).

paulddraper 8y ago

> good old fashioned unhackable paper I agree with you, but let's not kid ourselves. "Vote early, vote often" did not originate with electronic voting. Paper systems are hackable as well.