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> Since 2018, as part of a program called Defending Democracy, Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to solve the problem of trust in secret

> Since 2018, as part of a program called Defending Democracy, Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to solve the problem of trust in secret-ballot elections. No. Stop. Listen, it's possible to write secure voting software that a domain-expert software engineer understands, and a general software engineer can understand. That's not the problem. But for voting, that is not enough. The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And the most important thing to realize is that this process is infinitely parallellizable, so getting election-night preliminary results isn't hard, even though every single vote is manually counted. You just need enough people to count the votes.

cameldrv 6y ago
This, plus the inherent blessing and curse of computers -- if you can do something one time, it's usually very easy to do it 1000 times. If you want to tamper with one precinct or one county, you have to write some exploit. If you want to tamper with all of them, still, one exploit. However, if you want to tamper with a whole state of paper ballots, you have to stuff a thousand ballot boxes. The chances of getting caught are far higher.
- bl0b 6y ago
  I'm under the impression that computerized voting systems are in no way standardized nation-wide (USA, at least). But your point still stands that it seems easier to hack a computerized voting system to commit large-scale fraud than to fraud with paper ballots.
  - jablongo 6y ago
    Yes this is true: federalism being applied to control of elections is probably good for election security. But there’s only a small handful of vendors and if an attacker was able to crack one of them they might be able scale the attack to many deployments of that vendor’s systems.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Not in a two party system. You really still only need to hack just one model of voting machines to steal the election, since the margins are so small.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The same goes for the paper ballots. You don't need to fix the vote everywhere.
        hef19898 6y ago
        Which incredibly difficult to do on scale, unless you rig the whole system. In which case voting is just a fig leave anyway.
        Ma8ee 6y ago
        With paper ballots you must make sure that most people at the voting stations are part of the conspiracy, which is tricky because all major parties will have representatives on each station. It’s possible you will get away with it in a few small places, but even that is hard.
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  It's the same reason why voting via mail is very hard to exploit. Voting functions as a secure handshake (register to vote via mail, government sends confirmation, government sends ballot, you send ballot back, government sends confirmation of vote) and requires you to sign it with some identifying information like a signature. There might be some individuals trying to cheat the system at the family level, but trying to cheat it at a larger scale requires you to do so at a point of collection. It also becomes very easy to find this sort of tampering by sending voters a way of confirming who they voted for.
  - wahern 6y ago
    One of the most egregious incidents of proven voting fraud in recent American history may have been by Leslie McCrae, a hired political operative: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-... He exploited the absentee (mail-in) ballot system. OTOH, he was caught precisely because to exploit the system he had to directly or indirectly expose himself to many people in the county--the people whose absentee ballots he was fraudulently collecting. Eventually someone put 2+2 together and the scheme was discovered. OTOOH, apparently he had been doing it for many years before he got caught. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless
    - fzeroracer 6y ago
      A more traditional voting system would have the same problem. He'd instead just put himself at a polling location and do the same trick there. The fact that he had to pay people to collect individual absentee ballots means this sorta fraud is very hard to scale, easy to beat with some basic education and easily identifiable. Of course a lot of this goes out the window if you're doing it to help a party and that party has zero integrity but at least if one voting individual brings up an issue it can cause a ripple effect. Part of the problem is also that we don't seem to take absentee ballots as serious as we do when we have full vote by mail.
imustbeevil 6y ago
No one gets that day off, and voting closes before the line outside is gone. It is disturbing how much voter disenfranchisement is allowed in this system.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Every workplace I've been at allowed you to leave briefly to go cast a vote. Sounds like you worked for some really disenfranchising companies.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    "briefly" and hours long waits for voting don't really mesh up... https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Long_Voting_Lines_Explained.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/L... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-georgia-primary-election-voting-wait https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-geor...
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Ask the cleaning staff, security, or any blue collar workers at your company if they are allowed to leave to vote. You might not be the target for disenfranchisement.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    A majority of people don't have the luxury of choosing their employer.
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      Lincoln abolished slavery years ago.
- excalibur 6y ago
  Personally I make it a habit to vote first thing in the morning, before going to work. Lines are negligible, and I've never had an employer complain about me showing up a few minutes late wearing an "I voted" sticker. But YMMV.
mjevans 6y ago
That, and have an UNOFFICIAL digital count as well, the one that's done quickly for the news and everyone making planning, with the official, double-counting verified recount reaching the same numbers as the electronic and previous hand count (within a very small % for human error). If there's a disagreement the human counts are repeated until within 0.001% and then they're official.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  Except we are lazy and will come to rely on the digital system, then we will never care to recount unless there's a lot of pressure, and even then it might take so long that we will probably not wait. Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late.
  - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
    do randomly-selected sampling of paper buckets. e.g. you transmit your digital results, on a per-machine level, at t+1 minute to the central precinct. at t+5 minutes the central precinct sends back a random request to have X% of the machines audited by hand. If there is a significant abnormality, we move to a larger recount and withhold electronic results. If things match up, we announce the full electronic results around t+1 hour. Works for me?
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late. The majority of media "recounts" after the fact showed that Bush did win Florida in 2000.
cortesoft 6y ago
How does that work in the middle of a pandemic, where people shouldn't gather at a location like that? How does it handle people who can't leave their home? Or people who are away on the voting day?
- andreareina 6y ago
  Carefully. Singapore just went through a general election, ~2.5M votes cast at 1,100 polling stations. Citizens were assigned a polling station and a 2-hour window to go vote. Masks required, distancing enforced, sanitizer and disposable gloves provided. (Not a citizen so I can't comment on how it actually all went down) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect... https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singapore-polling-stations-added-safety-12918076 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singap...
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
I'm a pretty technical guy. Given enough time I'm confident that regardless of what technology stack/language you wrote the voting system in I could have reasonable confidence it was error-free enough and probably not deliberately backdoored. Do I have that kind of time? No. Am I going to give more than a cursory glance at open source voting software? No. Am I going to catch 100% of accidental bugs? No way! Even if I do, am I going to catch 100% of deliberate and obfuscated bugs? Hell no. Even for me, a very technical person, purely electronic voting is fatally flawed in terms of trust.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Or even side channel stuff not related to the voting code itself, or bugs in whatever ui people look at aggregated results in.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  You don't know that the ballot box wasn't switched in transit, nor presumably that the postman in your area didn't switch all the voting papers. Any system that's anonymised seems to require trust.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    That's why you count locally and centrally. And you keep paper records for the counts at each level. And the ballot boxes. With observers from all parties being allowed to witness the counting. Again, paper ballots and mail ballots are solved problem in almost every western democracy. Multitudes of solutions out there. Just pick one. Not having anonymous votes is the first step into totalitarianism, if you ask me.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Don't you need a large group prepared to enact revenge on people for voting "wrongly" for non-anonymous voting, in general, to be a problem? That seems like it's not a problem until you've got a large group of fascists/totalitarians already?
techntoke 6y ago
> The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Can you tell me how current voting systems work, because it is a black box to me and I can't even verify that my vote counted for the person I picked. From what I can tell, the local election officials can tally the votes however they want.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  GP's critique is not a defense of the status quo. Please do not construe it as such. See https://freeandfair.us/# https://freeandfair.us/# for voting technology that still wisely involves much paper.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    So where is the explanation of how it works, because I could go to a Bitcoin website and learn more about how it works quickly than on that site.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not. But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly. I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once. Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority. Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat. After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history. As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/01/80/3616/index.html https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0... I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret. Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.
dilap 6y ago
is there some reason you can't get a random id associated w/ your ballot? then just list all results (by that id) on a website somewhere. you hang onto your id stub, and can tell if your vote was mistallied or left out. this can work w/ a digital or traditional analog system. (maybe need some more work to figure out how to ensure there aren't just extra "ghost" votes padding the results.)
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  That allows vote buying/coercion. You show me your receipt, I verify that you voted the way I wanted, and you get money. Or, if the receipt shows you didn't vote like I told you to, I punch you in the face.
  - dilap 6y ago
    No more so than vote by mail which we already have though (and is all Oregon does), right?
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      Which is why vote by mail is so controversial; it eliminates the secret ballot. This would really hurt Trump, since he seems to have an unusually high percentage of “shy” voters.
      - hef19898 6y ago
        Mail voting is totally normal in Germany. And secret. Just because one country didn't solve it, doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
        Spivak 6y ago
        It’s secret but not private. I really don’t care if my name is attached to my vote in a way that the gov’t potentially knows how I vote but it seems a lot of people do.
luckylion 6y ago
> Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And it doesn't always work. I assume you're German, so I'm inclined to remind you of Bremen's election 2015 where a group of students change votes to advance one party. When you have a very politicized election, you're going to need more than trust in procedures. I don't know that some software will help there, but "we're doing it on paper" doesn't solve the problem.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Ah, one case out of how many elections? It would also be nice to explain what happened and how. The AfD insisted, together with more right leaning media, on a recount. The happened and gave, initially, one additional seat. The SPD, who lost one seat, challenged that. It went to court, all 33k vote were recounted, roughly 500 corrections were necessary. 13 votes were lost. The AfD lost one seat (they failed to gain more than 5% of the vote). The election was deemed legit, not reelection was necessary. So yeah, we are doing it on paper pretty much solved that problem.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Ah, one case out of how many elections? One prominent case that was _not_ caught by election officials and analytical measures. We have no way to tell how many others didn't get caught because nobody challenged them and our general systems failed. I'm not arguing that it's a catastrophic failure of the election system. The point is that paper ballots aren't protecting you from manipulation. Had they not challenged the election, the fraud would've gone unnoticed. And, importantly, it doesn't require coordination, there's no huge conspiracy required for this kind of fraud (and this specific instance also wasn't discovered because one of the perpetrators "spilled the beans"), so "large conspiracies are impossible to pull of" doesn't really apply.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      A quick Google search showed alleged voter fraud, always claimed by our right wing AfD. And every time these allegations were investigated, it turned out everything was in order. Last case 2019, Thüringen and Sachsen. So how many cases are there, in your opinion? EDIT: You do know, that there was no voter fraud involved? After an investigation and court rulings one year after the election?

cameldrv 6y ago

This, plus the inherent blessing and curse of computers -- if you can do something one time, it's usually very easy to do it 1000 times. If you want to tamper with one precinct or one county, you have to write some exploit. If you want to tamper with all of them, still, one exploit. However, if you want to tamper with a whole state of paper ballots, you have to stuff a thousand ballot boxes. The chances of getting caught are far higher.

bl0b 6y ago
I'm under the impression that computerized voting systems are in no way standardized nation-wide (USA, at least). But your point still stands that it seems easier to hack a computerized voting system to commit large-scale fraud than to fraud with paper ballots.
- jablongo 6y ago
  Yes this is true: federalism being applied to control of elections is probably good for election security. But there’s only a small handful of vendors and if an attacker was able to crack one of them they might be able scale the attack to many deployments of that vendor’s systems.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Not in a two party system. You really still only need to hack just one model of voting machines to steal the election, since the margins are so small.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      The same goes for the paper ballots. You don't need to fix the vote everywhere.
      - hef19898 6y ago
        Which incredibly difficult to do on scale, unless you rig the whole system. In which case voting is just a fig leave anyway.
      - Ma8ee 6y ago
        With paper ballots you must make sure that most people at the voting stations are part of the conspiracy, which is tricky because all major parties will have representatives on each station. It’s possible you will get away with it in a few small places, but even that is hard.
fzeroracer 6y ago
It's the same reason why voting via mail is very hard to exploit. Voting functions as a secure handshake (register to vote via mail, government sends confirmation, government sends ballot, you send ballot back, government sends confirmation of vote) and requires you to sign it with some identifying information like a signature. There might be some individuals trying to cheat the system at the family level, but trying to cheat it at a larger scale requires you to do so at a point of collection. It also becomes very easy to find this sort of tampering by sending voters a way of confirming who they voted for.
- wahern 6y ago
  One of the most egregious incidents of proven voting fraud in recent American history may have been by Leslie McCrae, a hired political operative: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-... He exploited the absentee (mail-in) ballot system. OTOH, he was caught precisely because to exploit the system he had to directly or indirectly expose himself to many people in the county--the people whose absentee ballots he was fraudulently collecting. Eventually someone put 2+2 together and the scheme was discovered. OTOOH, apparently he had been doing it for many years before he got caught. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    A more traditional voting system would have the same problem. He'd instead just put himself at a polling location and do the same trick there. The fact that he had to pay people to collect individual absentee ballots means this sorta fraud is very hard to scale, easy to beat with some basic education and easily identifiable. Of course a lot of this goes out the window if you're doing it to help a party and that party has zero integrity but at least if one voting individual brings up an issue it can cause a ripple effect. Part of the problem is also that we don't seem to take absentee ballots as serious as we do when we have full vote by mail.

imustbeevil 6y ago

No one gets that day off, and voting closes before the line outside is gone. It is disturbing how much voter disenfranchisement is allowed in this system.

Fjolsvith 6y ago
Every workplace I've been at allowed you to leave briefly to go cast a vote. Sounds like you worked for some really disenfranchising companies.
- edoceo 6y ago
  "briefly" and hours long waits for voting don't really mesh up... https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Long_Voting_Lines_Explained.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/L... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-georgia-primary-election-voting-wait https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/atlanta-geor...
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Ask the cleaning staff, security, or any blue collar workers at your company if they are allowed to leave to vote. You might not be the target for disenfranchisement.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  A majority of people don't have the luxury of choosing their employer.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Lincoln abolished slavery years ago.
excalibur 6y ago
Personally I make it a habit to vote first thing in the morning, before going to work. Lines are negligible, and I've never had an employer complain about me showing up a few minutes late wearing an "I voted" sticker. But YMMV.

mjevans 6y ago

That, and have an UNOFFICIAL digital count as well, the one that's done quickly for the news and everyone making planning, with the official, double-counting verified recount reaching the same numbers as the electronic and previous hand count (within a very small % for human error). If there's a disagreement the human counts are repeated until within 0.001% and then they're official.

ta1234567890 6y ago
Except we are lazy and will come to rely on the digital system, then we will never care to recount unless there's a lot of pressure, and even then it might take so long that we will probably not wait. Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  do randomly-selected sampling of paper buckets. e.g. you transmit your digital results, on a per-machine level, at t+1 minute to the central precinct. at t+5 minutes the central precinct sends back a random request to have X% of the machines audited by hand. If there is a significant abnormality, we move to a larger recount and withhold electronic results. If things match up, we announce the full electronic results around t+1 hour. Works for me?
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >Already a US presidential election was decided on the wrong count, when the proper count came out it was too late. The majority of media "recounts" after the fact showed that Bush did win Florida in 2000.

cortesoft 6y ago

How does that work in the middle of a pandemic, where people shouldn't gather at a location like that? How does it handle people who can't leave their home? Or people who are away on the voting day?

andreareina 6y ago
Carefully. Singapore just went through a general election, ~2.5M votes cast at 1,100 polling stations. Citizens were assigned a polling station and a 2-hour window to go vote. Masks required, distancing enforced, sanitizer and disposable gloves provided. (Not a citizen so I can't comment on how it actually all went down) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect... https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singapore-polling-stations-added-safety-12918076 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ge2020-singap...

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago

I'm a pretty technical guy. Given enough time I'm confident that regardless of what technology stack/language you wrote the voting system in I could have reasonable confidence it was error-free enough and probably not deliberately backdoored. Do I have that kind of time? No. Am I going to give more than a cursory glance at open source voting software? No. Am I going to catch 100% of accidental bugs? No way! Even if I do, am I going to catch 100% of deliberate and obfuscated bugs? Hell no. Even for me, a very technical person, purely electronic voting is fatally flawed in terms of trust.

NegativeLatency 6y ago
Or even side channel stuff not related to the voting code itself, or bugs in whatever ui people look at aggregated results in.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
You don't know that the ballot box wasn't switched in transit, nor presumably that the postman in your area didn't switch all the voting papers. Any system that's anonymised seems to require trust.
- hef19898 6y ago
  That's why you count locally and centrally. And you keep paper records for the counts at each level. And the ballot boxes. With observers from all parties being allowed to witness the counting. Again, paper ballots and mail ballots are solved problem in almost every western democracy. Multitudes of solutions out there. Just pick one. Not having anonymous votes is the first step into totalitarianism, if you ask me.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Don't you need a large group prepared to enact revenge on people for voting "wrongly" for non-anonymous voting, in general, to be a problem? That seems like it's not a problem until you've got a large group of fascists/totalitarians already?

techntoke 6y ago

> The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system. Can you tell me how current voting systems work, because it is a black box to me and I can't even verify that my vote counted for the person I picked. From what I can tell, the local election officials can tally the votes however they want.

Ericson2314 6y ago
GP's critique is not a defense of the status quo. Please do not construe it as such. See https://freeandfair.us/# https://freeandfair.us/# for voting technology that still wisely involves much paper.
- techntoke 6y ago
  So where is the explanation of how it works, because I could go to a Bitcoin website and learn more about how it works quickly than on that site.
henrikschroder 6y ago
I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not. But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly. I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once. Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority. Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat. After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history. As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/01/80/3616/index.html https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0... I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret. Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.

dilap 6y ago

is there some reason you can't get a random id associated w/ your ballot? then just list all results (by that id) on a website somewhere. you hang onto your id stub, and can tell if your vote was mistallied or left out. this can work w/ a digital or traditional analog system. (maybe need some more work to figure out how to ensure there aren't just extra "ghost" votes padding the results.)

henrikschroder 6y ago
That allows vote buying/coercion. You show me your receipt, I verify that you voted the way I wanted, and you get money. Or, if the receipt shows you didn't vote like I told you to, I punch you in the face.
- dilap 6y ago
  No more so than vote by mail which we already have though (and is all Oregon does), right?
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    Which is why vote by mail is so controversial; it eliminates the secret ballot. This would really hurt Trump, since he seems to have an unusually high percentage of “shy” voters.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Mail voting is totally normal in Germany. And secret. Just because one country didn't solve it, doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        It’s secret but not private. I really don’t care if my name is attached to my vote in a way that the gov’t potentially knows how I vote but it seems a lot of people do.

luckylion 6y ago

> Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And it doesn't always work. I assume you're German, so I'm inclined to remind you of Bremen's election 2015 where a group of students change votes to advance one party. When you have a very politicized election, you're going to need more than trust in procedures. I don't know that some software will help there, but "we're doing it on paper" doesn't solve the problem.

hef19898 6y ago
Ah, one case out of how many elections? It would also be nice to explain what happened and how. The AfD insisted, together with more right leaning media, on a recount. The happened and gave, initially, one additional seat. The SPD, who lost one seat, challenged that. It went to court, all 33k vote were recounted, roughly 500 corrections were necessary. 13 votes were lost. The AfD lost one seat (they failed to gain more than 5% of the vote). The election was deemed legit, not reelection was necessary. So yeah, we are doing it on paper pretty much solved that problem.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Ah, one case out of how many elections? One prominent case that was _not_ caught by election officials and analytical measures. We have no way to tell how many others didn't get caught because nobody challenged them and our general systems failed. I'm not arguing that it's a catastrophic failure of the election system. The point is that paper ballots aren't protecting you from manipulation. Had they not challenged the election, the fraud would've gone unnoticed. And, importantly, it doesn't require coordination, there's no huge conspiracy required for this kind of fraud (and this specific instance also wasn't discovered because one of the perpetrators "spilled the beans"), so "large conspiracies are impossible to pull of" doesn't really apply.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    A quick Google search showed alleged voter fraud, always claimed by our right wing AfD. And every time these allegations were investigated, it turned out everything was in order. Last case 2019, Thüringen and Sachsen. So how many cases are there, in your opinion? EDIT: You do know, that there was no voter fraud involved? After an investigation and court rulings one year after the election?