8 ms·

Finally an article pointing out that online banking is always "fixable", there's always a human that can look at a bunch of electronic transactions and decide i

Finally an article pointing out that online banking is always "fixable", there's always a human that can look at a bunch of electronic transactions and decide if they're correct or not. For voting, there's no such thing. Nobody knows what the result is, whatever comes out of the black box that is electronic voting is the result, for better or worse. You can't independently verify it, because that breaks the voter secrecy, and you can't allow anyone to override the results and "fix" it to whatever it "should" be, because that's outright voter fraud. Papers and envelopes is the only way to go.

codeguro 6y ago
You’ve clearly never heard of homomorphic encryption. There exists a way to cryptographically secure a vote while also preserving privacy. It’s even individually verifiable. And as a bonus, you can’t sell it even though you can verify it. Do some research, there even exists a youtube video putting it in simple terms. The answer is homomorphoc encryption.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > And as a bonus, you can’t sell it even though you can verify it. How does homomorphic encryption keep me from selling my id and password to someone who will vote for me, or keep someone from standing over my shoulder and watching me vote?
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  > There exists a way to cryptographically secure Fantastic, can you explain that to my 95 year old grandmother? > there even exists a youtube video She doesn't know what YouTube is. You're showing the third weakness of online voting, and that is that because we have to trust whatever result the system produces, everyone in society also has to be able to understand the system. I'm sure I could understand your solution, but I'm a nerd, and you shouldn't have to be a nerd to understand it. It's hard enough to convince people that experts are right about trivial bullshit, why should anyone trust the experts about online voting? The simplicity of voting through papers and envelopes and urns is its greatest strength. Everyone can look at the process, everyone is even invited to observe the process, and you can easily detect cheating or other irregularities. Everyone can be a poll worker, and that's a fundamental pillar of democracy, that we all build the voting machine together, so that we together can trust the result, even though we may have completely opposite political opinions.
  - Gunax 6y ago
    But the voter does not need to understand encryption... just the designer of the system.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Are you suggesting they just trust the designer? Most ordinary people aren't going to do that. They'll just say 'no thanks'. A once-in-a-lifetime referendum in the UK in 2011 about a change to voting systems was solidly defeated because most people said 'I don't understand this it's too complicated' - and that was just AV. Most ordinary people don't want or trust any kind of fancy voting idea at all. I don't see that changing either.
      - lhorie 6y ago
        > Are you suggesting they just trust the designer? Most ordinary people aren't going to do that That's quite literally what people do when buying stuff from amazon. People are just afraid of change. In places where e-voting has been implemented people generally trust that the system works, just like they trust a lock symbol in their amazon shopping cart page.
        anoncake 6y ago
        When people buy stuff on Amazon they can verify that they received the goods. They can't verify their vote was counted correctly.
        lhorie 6y ago
        Receiving your goods doesn't guarantee you weren't a victim of a scam or id theft. Package theft is also a thing, etc. Similarly, You can't verify a paper ballot was counted correctly (see recounts and how the numbers don't match). Yet we're ok with these systems. Clearly infallibility isn't a prerequisite for trust. Besides, as I mentioned elsewhere, auditable e-voting systems do exist and have been used in various parts of the world.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  How would you know that the servers are implementing the scheme that they claim they are implementing? How would you verify that they are not counting extra votes from people who don't exist? How would you verify that a cosmic ray didn't flip a bit in a count somewhere? And the other side: if you claimed that your vote was improperly counted, how could I (as a law-enforcement officer) verify that claim? How could the election body trigger a re-count? Of course, these fundamental issues are all moot anyway, because of the even more fundamental issue of intelligibility. I understand exactly how the voting system works today, how the integrity of the vote is assured, how fraud is prevented. So do my grandmother and my 16 year old niece. With a system relying on homomorphic encryption and resilient, secured hardware and software, do you think that there realistically exist 1000 people in the entire world who could be personally convinced that the system is secure end-to-end, from the mathematical models to the systems running the software that is claimed?

codeguro 6y ago

You’ve clearly never heard of homomorphic encryption. There exists a way to cryptographically secure a vote while also preserving privacy. It’s even individually verifiable. And as a bonus, you can’t sell it even though you can verify it. Do some research, there even exists a youtube video putting it in simple terms. The answer is homomorphoc encryption.

pessimizer 6y ago
> And as a bonus, you can’t sell it even though you can verify it. How does homomorphic encryption keep me from selling my id and password to someone who will vote for me, or keep someone from standing over my shoulder and watching me vote?
henrikschroder 6y ago
> There exists a way to cryptographically secure Fantastic, can you explain that to my 95 year old grandmother? > there even exists a youtube video She doesn't know what YouTube is. You're showing the third weakness of online voting, and that is that because we have to trust whatever result the system produces, everyone in society also has to be able to understand the system. I'm sure I could understand your solution, but I'm a nerd, and you shouldn't have to be a nerd to understand it. It's hard enough to convince people that experts are right about trivial bullshit, why should anyone trust the experts about online voting? The simplicity of voting through papers and envelopes and urns is its greatest strength. Everyone can look at the process, everyone is even invited to observe the process, and you can easily detect cheating or other irregularities. Everyone can be a poll worker, and that's a fundamental pillar of democracy, that we all build the voting machine together, so that we together can trust the result, even though we may have completely opposite political opinions.
- Gunax 6y ago
  But the voter does not need to understand encryption... just the designer of the system.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Are you suggesting they just trust the designer? Most ordinary people aren't going to do that. They'll just say 'no thanks'. A once-in-a-lifetime referendum in the UK in 2011 about a change to voting systems was solidly defeated because most people said 'I don't understand this it's too complicated' - and that was just AV. Most ordinary people don't want or trust any kind of fancy voting idea at all. I don't see that changing either.
    - lhorie 6y ago
      > Are you suggesting they just trust the designer? Most ordinary people aren't going to do that That's quite literally what people do when buying stuff from amazon. People are just afraid of change. In places where e-voting has been implemented people generally trust that the system works, just like they trust a lock symbol in their amazon shopping cart page.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        When people buy stuff on Amazon they can verify that they received the goods. They can't verify their vote was counted correctly.
        lhorie 6y ago
        Receiving your goods doesn't guarantee you weren't a victim of a scam or id theft. Package theft is also a thing, etc. Similarly, You can't verify a paper ballot was counted correctly (see recounts and how the numbers don't match). Yet we're ok with these systems. Clearly infallibility isn't a prerequisite for trust. Besides, as I mentioned elsewhere, auditable e-voting systems do exist and have been used in various parts of the world.
tsimionescu 6y ago
How would you know that the servers are implementing the scheme that they claim they are implementing? How would you verify that they are not counting extra votes from people who don't exist? How would you verify that a cosmic ray didn't flip a bit in a count somewhere? And the other side: if you claimed that your vote was improperly counted, how could I (as a law-enforcement officer) verify that claim? How could the election body trigger a re-count? Of course, these fundamental issues are all moot anyway, because of the even more fundamental issue of intelligibility. I understand exactly how the voting system works today, how the integrity of the vote is assured, how fraud is prevented. So do my grandmother and my 16 year old niece. With a system relying on homomorphic encryption and resilient, secured hardware and software, do you think that there realistically exist 1000 people in the entire world who could be personally convinced that the system is secure end-to-end, from the mathematical models to the systems running the software that is claimed?