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But with absentee voting, the votes are still counted by hand. That's the part that has to be the most secure. With any paper voting system, votes can be impact

But with absentee voting, the votes are still counted by hand. That's the part that has to be the most secure. With any paper voting system, votes can be impacted by some criminal scheme, yes, but only one at a time and with great individual effort. You have to blackmail a LOT of people to swing an election. Whereas with an electronic election, one attacker can change millions of votes with a single bit of malware code, with nobody the wiser.

the_snooze 6y ago
>But with absentee voting, the votes are still counted by hand. The verification is manual, but the counting probably isn't. At least in California, absentee (mail) ballots are exactly the same ones you get at the polling place. You put them in an unmarked envelope, which you place inside another envelope with your information and signature. The counting center verifies the information on the outer envelope and ensures you didn't already vote elsewhere in-person. If it's good, then the inner (unmarked) envelope is taken out and a machine processes the ballot as if you were in the physical precinct.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  Nonetheless, there is a physical paper record of every vote that can be counted by hand, the machine is just for a quick estimate of the count. There are only 2 points of trust in a mail election: the vote itself which could be compromised by blackmail or whatever (low risk because only one vote can be influenced at a time), and the scantron machine (low risk because the ballots can still be counted by hand to verify). But if your vote is just a byte getting added to a database on a server from your personal computer over the internet, there are a hundred high-risk trust points. You have to trust the user, but also the website, the browser, the operating system, the network, the hardware, the server, the software running on the server and everybody who has ever worked on it, the counting software, the people operating the counting software, and a compromise at any single one of these points could change millions of votes without any possibility of detection. In other words, in a scantron election, the legal vote is the paper, the electronics are just convenience. In an internet election, the legal vote is the ephemeral machine-generated bits on a wire, and that's where the problem comes from.

the_snooze 6y ago

>But with absentee voting, the votes are still counted by hand. The verification is manual, but the counting probably isn't. At least in California, absentee (mail) ballots are exactly the same ones you get at the polling place. You put them in an unmarked envelope, which you place inside another envelope with your information and signature. The counting center verifies the information on the outer envelope and ensures you didn't already vote elsewhere in-person. If it's good, then the inner (unmarked) envelope is taken out and a machine processes the ballot as if you were in the physical precinct.

hannasanarion 6y ago
Nonetheless, there is a physical paper record of every vote that can be counted by hand, the machine is just for a quick estimate of the count. There are only 2 points of trust in a mail election: the vote itself which could be compromised by blackmail or whatever (low risk because only one vote can be influenced at a time), and the scantron machine (low risk because the ballots can still be counted by hand to verify). But if your vote is just a byte getting added to a database on a server from your personal computer over the internet, there are a hundred high-risk trust points. You have to trust the user, but also the website, the browser, the operating system, the network, the hardware, the server, the software running on the server and everybody who has ever worked on it, the counting software, the people operating the counting software, and a compromise at any single one of these points could change millions of votes without any possibility of detection. In other words, in a scantron election, the legal vote is the paper, the electronics are just convenience. In an internet election, the legal vote is the ephemeral machine-generated bits on a wire, and that's where the problem comes from.