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With voting, the simplest solution is the best solution: paper and ink. A few people to tally locally from each opposing party, report the numbers on up. Unhack

With voting, the simplest solution is the best solution: paper and ink. A few people to tally locally from each opposing party, report the numbers on up. Unhackable. Verifiable.

WillPostForFood 7y ago
At this point, you might be right this is a better solution, but it is hackable. Add or remove paper ballots, mark existing ballots with your own pen to change or invalidate it. But at least the physicality of it creates some limit on the scale of fraud.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
  What if each opposing party watches the box and a few other choke points for casting ones vote? I mean, we’re only talking twice a year events!
- smitop 7y ago
  The recent Canada federal election used paper ballots (all of them have), and those attacks are mostly preventable. Ballots are counted by two people from Elections Canada, and all candidates can watch. The match up the number of ballots with the number of people crossed off on the list of people who were eligible to vote at that polling station. They also compare it to the number of ballots at the start of polling and end of polling. If votes were added or removed, those checks wouldn't work out (and there would probably be a re-vote for people who voted at that polling station). Adding marks before people vote wouldn't work since voters would probably notice, and it'd be hard to add marks between marking the ballot and it being put in the ballot box. Ballots also need to be signed by the chief returning officer.
swalls 7y ago
It's the best solution because attempts on it don't scale; any attempt at it requires either everyone in the room be in on the fraud (and it takes just one person to break that) and even then, going through ballots by hand takes a long time, where the crime can be found at any point due to physically being there. E-voting? One hacker can reprogram thousands of machines, possibly not having to even be in the country, anonymously. It gets even worse when you have online voting, because then you have a whole host of potential exploits, like MITM, DDOSing targets like libraries, gathering IDs, etc. When you consider the amount of money running on elections, it's not unthinkable to consider there could be state-sponsored hackers, so there's no problem of resources there. And this is all assuming the hardware and software aren't already compromised by the manufacturers; considering we've seen compromised hardware coming from China it's a very likely possibility.

With voting, the simplest solution is the best solution: paper and ink. A few people to tally locally from each opposing party, report the numbers on up. Unhackable. Verifiable.

WillPostForFood 7y ago

At this point, you might be right this is a better solution, but it is hackable. Add or remove paper ballots, mark existing ballots with your own pen to change or invalidate it. But at least the physicality of it creates some limit on the scale of fraud.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
What if each opposing party watches the box and a few other choke points for casting ones vote? I mean, we’re only talking twice a year events!
smitop 7y ago
The recent Canada federal election used paper ballots (all of them have), and those attacks are mostly preventable. Ballots are counted by two people from Elections Canada, and all candidates can watch. The match up the number of ballots with the number of people crossed off on the list of people who were eligible to vote at that polling station. They also compare it to the number of ballots at the start of polling and end of polling. If votes were added or removed, those checks wouldn't work out (and there would probably be a re-vote for people who voted at that polling station). Adding marks before people vote wouldn't work since voters would probably notice, and it'd be hard to add marks between marking the ballot and it being put in the ballot box. Ballots also need to be signed by the chief returning officer.

swalls 7y ago

It's the best solution because attempts on it don't scale; any attempt at it requires either everyone in the room be in on the fraud (and it takes just one person to break that) and even then, going through ballots by hand takes a long time, where the crime can be found at any point due to physically being there. E-voting? One hacker can reprogram thousands of machines, possibly not having to even be in the country, anonymously. It gets even worse when you have online voting, because then you have a whole host of potential exploits, like MITM, DDOSing targets like libraries, gathering IDs, etc. When you consider the amount of money running on elections, it's not unthinkable to consider there could be state-sponsored hackers, so there's no problem of resources there. And this is all assuming the hardware and software aren't already compromised by the manufacturers; considering we've seen compromised hardware coming from China it's a very likely possibility.