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Equally important to whether the vote is fair is whether people believe it is fair. No one but the world's best computer security experts have a hope of compre
by retrac 5y ago
Equally important to whether the vote is fair is whether people believe it is fair.
No one but the world's best computer security experts have a hope of comprehensively understanding a computer voting system. Even on the odd chance the entire software and hardware platform were open source and verifiable, it's probably beyond 90% of us here on Hacker News to even begin going about that independently.
The result is the election is no longer constructed out of an understandable system based on folk physics we all comprehend instinctively. We all understand the integrity of a physical ballot box, physical papers, and the difficulty of mass fraud against such a decentralized system.
Switch to fully-electronic voting and we lose that. It becomes a black box. Press a button. Get a result. With no faith in the process that rendered it. Our democratic result ceases to be the result of average citizens counting papers and becomes something just handed down by experts.
I'm not American, but if my country ever moves to eliminate paper ballots I will protest. I do like the idea of a terminal that prints your human-readable ballot for you as an assistive device, though.
- gpm 5y agoThe voting machines that americans are talking about [1] aren't "fully electronic black boxes", they're "paper ballots + a vote counting machine + maybe a machine that acts as an overly fancy pencil (but let's you verify the paper ballot afterwards, i.e. what you talk about in your last paragraph). The paper audit trail, physical ballot box, etc still exists. I don't know if these machines exactly justify their cost... but they don't seem to be security risks. [1] So by this I mean "only the republicans are complaining right now" and "they aren't complaining about states where non-paper voting machines used". In fact it looks like that of the 7 states with some form of non-paper voting machines, all but New Jersey went for Trump. New Jersey was never going to be close enough that the republicans feel like they can complain about it. [2] List of states and how they use voting machines here: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat... Kentucky, Lousiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tenessee and Texas are the ones with "DRE without VVPAT" (voting machines that are more than a fancy pencil and/or paper ballot counter). [3] Election results from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_New_Jersey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
- Ajedi32 5y agoHaving a paper record helps, but only if it actually gets used to manually validate the results from the counting machine. (And if you're doing a manual count anyway, why bother having a counting machine in the first place?)
- gpm 5y ago> And if you're doing a manual count anyway, why bother having a counting machine in the first place Because that way you can report preliminary results faster? I guess you also get the "two independent ways of counting say the same thing" benefit, but I'm pretty sure that they're primarily there because the news likes it. Doing manual counts of states that at are at all close or suspected to be at all close is... normal.
- Ajedi32 5y agoSure, why not? I have no problem with counting machines that aren't actually used to produce the official count. Doing manual counts only when it's close isn't good enough though, as that leaves you open to a vulnerability where the attacker simply arranges for it to not be close.
- b3morales 5y ago> a vulnerability where the attacker simply arranges for it to not be close. That attack, for state and federal elections, involves falsifying multiple independent organizations' poll results, including exit polling on the day of. Otherwise the "not close" results will not be credible and they will be investigated.
- lobocinza 5y agoI think they sample for validation and only do a full recount when fraud is suspected.