4 ms·

I think the onset of election season has caused these types of articles to become in-vogue. I have been surprised by the reactions of what is mostly a tech savv

I think the onset of election season has caused these types of articles to become in-vogue. I have been surprised by the reactions of what is mostly a tech savvy community. Full disclaimer, I work at a voting tech company as an engineer, and just wanted to give my 2 cents. - Paper ballots and Risk limiting audits do not actually constitute a perfect solution to this problem. They do not constitute what is considered an End to End verifiable voting system. You cannot actually definitively know that your vote was counted in the final tally, and cast as intended. The Risk limiting audits as currently structured can only verify that a computer counted a small sample size of votes as a human would. It cannot confirm all the votes were counted, or that your vote was not tampered with. - Paper ballots also do not address the needs of folks voting over seas, or those affected with disabilities. - When current election systems are often described as easy to hack, the systems referenced are often hardware that is 10-20 years old. If you look at the landscape of the Election's industry, there are only 3 vendors that account for over 90% of the public election market share in America. These system's were put through certification many years ago, and continue to operate through those certifications. The result of an inability to innovate in this space, is that we will continue to use those systems (that many perceive as vulnerable) for the foreseeable future. - Smaller election vendors are encouraging the idea of recurring certification, as well as more stringent certification requirements. Most people who use these forums are very capable of understanding concepts like Asymmetric encryption, checksums, and other tamper proof methodologies for high value data. If you can trust the idea of an Encrypted e-mail server ( e.g. Lavabit ), or encrypted chat servers (Signal), it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet. Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election.

pedrocr 8y ago
> it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet It's hard to imagine because it's completely impossible. In most of the world not being able to prove you voted for someone in particular is considered a key characteristic of the vote. No internet based voting guarantees this. > Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election. Throwing around claims of wrong side of history would be just an insult it wasn't so dangerous. Paper voting is not secure because you "observe some votes being cast in your polling station". It's secure because each polling station is staffed by political adversaries that do the count together of every single ballot. This is much better than the level of systematic verification than you can ever even attempt to do to your huge stack of software and hardware. It's also a kind of verification that everyone understands and so it effectively convinces the losing candidates they actually lost. Which is as much of an important characteristic of a voting system as getting good counts. So get off your high horse. Apparently you design these systems and don't understand the actual safety characteristics of the paper count. The kinds of attack surface electronic systems add is huge and yet they provide no actual advantages to properly run elections. The thread is already full of examples so I won't add more but it's telling that in most of the world this isn't an issue at all because we just run our simple, cheap, reliable and fast process like we've always done and forget about it.

pedrocr 8y ago

> it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet It's hard to imagine because it's completely impossible. In most of the world not being able to prove you voted for someone in particular is considered a key characteristic of the vote. No internet based voting guarantees this. > Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election. Throwing around claims of wrong side of history would be just an insult it wasn't so dangerous. Paper voting is not secure because you "observe some votes being cast in your polling station". It's secure because each polling station is staffed by political adversaries that do the count together of every single ballot. This is much better than the level of systematic verification than you can ever even attempt to do to your huge stack of software and hardware. It's also a kind of verification that everyone understands and so it effectively convinces the losing candidates they actually lost. Which is as much of an important characteristic of a voting system as getting good counts. So get off your high horse. Apparently you design these systems and don't understand the actual safety characteristics of the paper count. The kinds of attack surface electronic systems add is huge and yet they provide no actual advantages to properly run elections. The thread is already full of examples so I won't add more but it's telling that in most of the world this isn't an issue at all because we just run our simple, cheap, reliable and fast process like we've always done and forget about it.