3 ms·

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 reason

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?
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  It doesn't matter, because a single postman or a single ballot box being tampered with isn't enough (in virtually all cases) to swing any major elections. Any coordination to defraud paper ballots on a scale large enough to change the result of a major election would require so many individuals that it would be implausible for them to all keep a secret. Massive election-changing widespread fraud of an electronic system could in theory be completed by a single individual acting entirely alone.

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?
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
It doesn't matter, because a single postman or a single ballot box being tampered with isn't enough (in virtually all cases) to swing any major elections. Any coordination to defraud paper ballots on a scale large enough to change the result of a major election would require so many individuals that it would be implausible for them to all keep a secret. Massive election-changing widespread fraud of an electronic system could in theory be completed by a single individual acting entirely alone.