4 ms·

So what stops someone from tampering with a box of paper ballots and replacing them with their own, anyway? Honest question, not rethoric. I don't see how pape

So what stops someone from tampering with a box of paper ballots and replacing them with their own, anyway? Honest question, not rethoric. I don't see how paper ballots get any safer than electronic, it just seems to change what's the easiest approach to tampering. Using both methods to verify one-another sounds decent though.

matuszeg 8y ago
You cannot network together boxes of paper ballots and access them via the internet. It does not fully prevent tampering it just makes it way harder.
- kosievdmerwe 8y ago
  Also if you try to organize large scale tampering someone will fuck up and you'll realize large scale tampering happened. With electronic voting it might not be obvious.
Trombone12 8y ago
For paper ballots you can't usually manipulate them ahead of time to record an fraudulent vote, and you need to sneak around with a big box of votes which is just logistically more challenging.
a1369209993 8y ago
1: A bunch of people (from both parties and nominally anyone else who feels like showing up) look at the ballot box to confirm that it's a empty cardboard (or whatever) box with no interesting properties. (This part is what's impossible with a voting machine, for obvious reasons.) 2: People watch the box to make sure it's not tampered with as people put their ballots in. (This works to a point with voting machines, although a attacker interacts with a voting machine for much longer than the ~6 sec it takes to drop a paper ballot in a box.) 3: The ballots are taken out and counted, with more watching. Due to physical laws like conservation of mass, it's very hard to make the number of ballots coming out differ from the number that went in, and even changing existing ballots is nontrivial. (Voting machines can silently delete, alter, or add ballots matching arbitrary criteria.)

4 ms·

So what stops someone from tampering with a box of paper ballots and replacing them with their own, anyway? Honest question, not rethoric. I don't see how pape

by guhcampos 8y ago

matuszeg 8y ago
You cannot network together boxes of paper ballots and access them via the internet. It does not fully prevent tampering it just makes it way harder.
- kosievdmerwe 8y ago
  Also if you try to organize large scale tampering someone will fuck up and you'll realize large scale tampering happened. With electronic voting it might not be obvious.
Trombone12 8y ago
For paper ballots you can't usually manipulate them ahead of time to record an fraudulent vote, and you need to sneak around with a big box of votes which is just logistically more challenging.
a1369209993 8y ago
1: A bunch of people (from both parties and nominally anyone else who feels like showing up) look at the ballot box to confirm that it's a empty cardboard (or whatever) box with no interesting properties. (This part is what's impossible with a voting machine, for obvious reasons.) 2: People watch the box to make sure it's not tampered with as people put their ballots in. (This works to a point with voting machines, although a attacker interacts with a voting machine for much longer than the ~6 sec it takes to drop a paper ballot in a box.) 3: The ballots are taken out and counted, with more watching. Due to physical laws like conservation of mass, it's very hard to make the number of ballots coming out differ from the number that went in, and even changing existing ballots is nontrivial. (Voting machines can silently delete, alter, or add ballots matching arbitrary criteria.)