4 ms·

usually many options to pick 1 from.

hannasanarion 8y ago
American elections are more complicated. A typical November ballot will have upwards of 20 choices on it, for national, state, county, anf municipal positions, judges, and referendums.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Around here, typical to have 1 to 3 federal races, 5 to 8 statewide offices, 10 to 20 county and municipal contests, a handful of judge retention questions, and 1 to 20 other referendums. About half the races are usually uncontested. It may take some time to fill out a ballot paper. But the act of voting itself is inserting the ballot paper into the locked and monitored ballot box, which takes a second or two. My polling place is filled with tables and chairs and cardboard privacy dividers, but has just one ballot box, with a scanner-tabulator on top of it. The electronic voting machines that take the place of the paper ballot are the problem. You need dozens per polling place, and each one is expected by design to be alone with a voter, with physical access and privacy, for tens of minutes. I presume by default that any jurisdiction using them is actively promoting the hacking of their own elections, and such presumption must be rebutted only by exposure of the facts of the process that would mistrust the communications coming from those boxes as compromised and potentially malicious. I cannot fathom how it would even be possible to secure such devices. At least the scanner-tabulators attached to ballot boxes can be watched continuously.
  - failrate 8y ago
    Yes, electronic voting machines are the problem. That is what this article is about.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      And I'm saying they can never not be a problem. The usage requirements make them 100% incompatible with election security. They are broken by design, and utterly unfixable. The specifics of the known exploits are therefore somewhat irrelevant, because there will always be some means of compromising them. So the only way forward would be to treat every last one of them as permanently untrusted hardware. While there may be some way to make them useful in an election, for now, until that PhD cryptography paper comes out that solves the problem, the only reasonable thing to do is toss them all in the trash, and go back to inked paper.
      - failrate 8y ago
        I didnt get the impression that anyone on this thread thought differently. Even without the theoretical impossibility of the task, the implementations we are seeing are amateur comedy, at best.

American elections are more complicated. A typical November ballot will have upwards of 20 choices on it, for national, state, county, anf municipal positions, judges, and referendums.

logfromblammo 8y ago
Around here, typical to have 1 to 3 federal races, 5 to 8 statewide offices, 10 to 20 county and municipal contests, a handful of judge retention questions, and 1 to 20 other referendums. About half the races are usually uncontested. It may take some time to fill out a ballot paper. But the act of voting itself is inserting the ballot paper into the locked and monitored ballot box, which takes a second or two. My polling place is filled with tables and chairs and cardboard privacy dividers, but has just one ballot box, with a scanner-tabulator on top of it. The electronic voting machines that take the place of the paper ballot are the problem. You need dozens per polling place, and each one is expected by design to be alone with a voter, with physical access and privacy, for tens of minutes. I presume by default that any jurisdiction using them is actively promoting the hacking of their own elections, and such presumption must be rebutted only by exposure of the facts of the process that would mistrust the communications coming from those boxes as compromised and potentially malicious. I cannot fathom how it would even be possible to secure such devices. At least the scanner-tabulators attached to ballot boxes can be watched continuously.
- failrate 8y ago
  Yes, electronic voting machines are the problem. That is what this article is about.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    And I'm saying they can never not be a problem. The usage requirements make them 100% incompatible with election security. They are broken by design, and utterly unfixable. The specifics of the known exploits are therefore somewhat irrelevant, because there will always be some means of compromising them. So the only way forward would be to treat every last one of them as permanently untrusted hardware. While there may be some way to make them useful in an election, for now, until that PhD cryptography paper comes out that solves the problem, the only reasonable thing to do is toss them all in the trash, and go back to inked paper.
    - failrate 8y ago
      I didnt get the impression that anyone on this thread thought differently. Even without the theoretical impossibility of the task, the implementations we are seeing are amateur comedy, at best.