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At the same time you have parts of a country that actively suppress votes. For example, in many deep south counties that are turning blue, the long standing maj

At the same time you have parts of a country that actively suppress votes. For example, in many deep south counties that are turning blue, the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. Organized fraud is hard, but if enough people agree that fraud is neccessary, fraud will happen at a large scale. I am not saying digital election is better, but I would like to see a formal securirty/risk assesment of both options against known voter hostile counties. With mail-in ballots for example, what if small groups of mail persons(1-5) manipulate absentee ballott mail when sent to and collected from voters, how does that risk compare to say insecure network connections and poor authentication with digital voting systems. A formal threar model for both approaches and risk assesment that is. Both methods are not secure, as a techie, the vulnerabilities of digital systems is glaring and obvious but they mean little in terms of risk wihout applying a threat model. You said paper ballots make mass fraud hard, that is because of the threat model you had in mind. The chaos of the 2000 presidential election shows a slightly diffrent threat model where organizing large number of people was not needed. Bad guys will always find a way, what I like to do is to take an empirical approach at making thier mischief harder to pull off.

hef19898 6y ago
People joked after the Florida disaster, when George W. Bush was elected, that maybe the US needs international election observers. You know, like developing countries. Not sure if that's still a joke now.
pessimizer 6y ago
> the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. This is the problem. Part of the voting system is dictating who has the right to manipulate the votes at every point in the process, and ideally, after the ballots are sealed, that group should consist of everyone who has an interest; membership in that group should be self-defined. Practically, most people will be happy with a representative rather than showing up personally, but if everybody wants to watch, everyone should be allowed to. If you abandon this principle, no technical solution is possible. It's like trying to make a computer perfectly safe against physical compromise; the only way to do it is to destroy the computer. Honestly, the main problem with digital voting for me is only obliquely related to that objection - there are not enough qualified code auditors for everyone to have an auditor they trust, and massive, system-breaking changes can happen with the change of a semicolon. So the provenance of an individual vote from the voter to the commingled pile of votes is impractical to depend on. It may be possible to get it to the standard of a paper system, but it would be extremely expensive.

hef19898 6y ago

People joked after the Florida disaster, when George W. Bush was elected, that maybe the US needs international election observers. You know, like developing countries. Not sure if that's still a joke now.

pessimizer 6y ago

> the long standing majority would make up the election commission staff and other election related positions. This is the problem. Part of the voting system is dictating who has the right to manipulate the votes at every point in the process, and ideally, after the ballots are sealed, that group should consist of everyone who has an interest; membership in that group should be self-defined. Practically, most people will be happy with a representative rather than showing up personally, but if everybody wants to watch, everyone should be allowed to. If you abandon this principle, no technical solution is possible. It's like trying to make a computer perfectly safe against physical compromise; the only way to do it is to destroy the computer. Honestly, the main problem with digital voting for me is only obliquely related to that objection - there are not enough qualified code auditors for everyone to have an auditor they trust, and massive, system-breaking changes can happen with the change of a semicolon. So the provenance of an individual vote from the voter to the commingled pile of votes is impractical to depend on. It may be possible to get it to the standard of a paper system, but it would be extremely expensive.