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I'm happy that this article recognizes the need for coercion resistance. But the second problem is stated too weakly: the issue isn't that voting software is in

I'm happy that this article recognizes the need for coercion resistance. But the second problem is stated too weakly: the issue isn't that voting software is insecure, it's that it's too complex. You could convince a person who doesn't know how to read that paper ballots are a working system (vote box is empty; votes go into box; box is emptied and all votes tallied). Only a small fraction of society could be convinced of the correctness of the tallying scheme in Fig. 2. You could argue that there are a lot of facets of modern society that the average citizen doesn't understand the details of, but voting is the cornerstone of democracy. Public trust in the voting system is crucial. The only way to reliably achieve that is through an understandable system, and so far the only understandable voting system I've seen is paper ballots.

SubiculumCode 5y ago
I agree, and I am no Luddite. The voting system cannot cryptographically secure, but beyond the comprehension of the majority of the populace.
nuerow 5y ago
> the issue isn't that voting software is insecure, it's that it's too complex. That's a great point, and quite understated. However, perhaps the key factor is not complexity itself, but being able to be trustworthy and transparent enough to ensure that the whole process is unquestionably fair. If anything, recent events demonstrate that, even if elections are free and fair, electoral systems can and will be attacked with the goal of casting doubt on the outcome to try to subvert its results. Any part of an electoral system that relies on non-trivial processes that are not easy to explain, understand, or verify is a part of the process whose credibility can and will be attacked.
henrikschroder 5y ago
If you've followed the entire "voting fraud" debacle of the 2020 presidential election, there were an absolutely brutal amount of outlandish ideas of how the vote was manipulated using technology. Something something satellites and the Vatican and CIA killing people over a briefcase in Frankfurt and Hugo Chavez' spirit and Dominion voting machines and the router logs and mysterious traffic and Chinese IP addresses and god knows what else kind if idiocy was dreamed up. But all of that, every single crazy piece of it, is completely irrelevant, because at the end of the day there exists a collection of paper ballots that represent how people voted in the election. Anyone can count and recount those ballots to their hearts content, and doing so is incredibly simple. You just divide the ballots into piles according to what their vote is for, and then you count the size of the piles. Anyone can do that. Children can do that. Senior citizens can do that. No technology required, no technological understanding is required, and no technological bullshittery can cast uncertainty on the result, as the Arizona fraudit hilariously discovered when they divided the paper ballots into piles and counted them and got the same result as before. The way to solve the problem of untrustworthy technology is not to have some geniuses come up with a bulletproof crypto-secure blockchain buzzword voting scheme that us mere nerds can understand after having it explained to us. The solution is to remove technology completely from the equation, and paper ballots and envelopes and urns are the way to do that.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  For completeness some of the theories included that paper ballots were tampered with, falsified, or not counted correctly. Seems a little less outlandish than the idea that there was some vast conspiracy involving Trump and Putin to hack the previous election, but I guess that's not a high bar.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

I agree, and I am no Luddite. The voting system cannot cryptographically secure, but beyond the comprehension of the majority of the populace.

nuerow 5y ago

> the issue isn't that voting software is insecure, it's that it's too complex. That's a great point, and quite understated. However, perhaps the key factor is not complexity itself, but being able to be trustworthy and transparent enough to ensure that the whole process is unquestionably fair. If anything, recent events demonstrate that, even if elections are free and fair, electoral systems can and will be attacked with the goal of casting doubt on the outcome to try to subvert its results. Any part of an electoral system that relies on non-trivial processes that are not easy to explain, understand, or verify is a part of the process whose credibility can and will be attacked.

henrikschroder 5y ago

If you've followed the entire "voting fraud" debacle of the 2020 presidential election, there were an absolutely brutal amount of outlandish ideas of how the vote was manipulated using technology. Something something satellites and the Vatican and CIA killing people over a briefcase in Frankfurt and Hugo Chavez' spirit and Dominion voting machines and the router logs and mysterious traffic and Chinese IP addresses and god knows what else kind if idiocy was dreamed up. But all of that, every single crazy piece of it, is completely irrelevant, because at the end of the day there exists a collection of paper ballots that represent how people voted in the election. Anyone can count and recount those ballots to their hearts content, and doing so is incredibly simple. You just divide the ballots into piles according to what their vote is for, and then you count the size of the piles. Anyone can do that. Children can do that. Senior citizens can do that. No technology required, no technological understanding is required, and no technological bullshittery can cast uncertainty on the result, as the Arizona fraudit hilariously discovered when they divided the paper ballots into piles and counted them and got the same result as before. The way to solve the problem of untrustworthy technology is not to have some geniuses come up with a bulletproof crypto-secure blockchain buzzword voting scheme that us mere nerds can understand after having it explained to us. The solution is to remove technology completely from the equation, and paper ballots and envelopes and urns are the way to do that.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
For completeness some of the theories included that paper ballots were tampered with, falsified, or not counted correctly. Seems a little less outlandish than the idea that there was some vast conspiracy involving Trump and Putin to hack the previous election, but I guess that's not a high bar.