5 ms·

Trust as in the public trusting the vote? I'm afraid you can put political spin on and create distrust in pretty much anything.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
  - acdha 5y ago
    No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to. Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      > No, there aren’t. Yes there are, and I've documented several of them here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ If you disagree, can you please be specific what exactly do you disagree about?
      - acdha 5y ago
        That shows that in-person paper ballots are superior once you correct the system in Finland (P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper). More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.
        baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        > P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth? If not, then spouses can walk to a polling station together, and one spouse can walk inside the voting booth alone, take a picture of the filled-out ballot, and then drop the ballot to the box in view of their spouse. If there is no method of preventing photography inside the voting booth, and no method of invalidating a cast vote afterwards, then spouses can easily prove to each other how they voted. > More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. Fully agreed. > it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands I agree that more complicated systems are harder to understand than simpler systems, especially to laypersons. That said, I do not think that laypersons have a very in-depth understanding of how their paper-voting schemes currently work. There's an element of trust that goes into it, like surely some smart people have verified that the voting system in place is alright. If we had a more complicated system in place, then laypersons would need a bit more of that trust. Laypersons have trust in things like online banking, even though it's technically a flaming garbage fire. People could just as well have trust in a cryptographically verified voting scheme.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  But why wouldn't ballot handlers swap out paper votes, etc.? You can rig anything with improper safeguards.
  - acdha 5y ago
    The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places. Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered. The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.

tsimionescu 5y ago

Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
- acdha 5y ago
  No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to. Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    > No, there aren’t. Yes there are, and I've documented several of them here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ If you disagree, can you please be specific what exactly do you disagree about?
    - acdha 5y ago
      That shows that in-person paper ballots are superior once you correct the system in Finland (P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper). More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        > P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth? If not, then spouses can walk to a polling station together, and one spouse can walk inside the voting booth alone, take a picture of the filled-out ballot, and then drop the ballot to the box in view of their spouse. If there is no method of preventing photography inside the voting booth, and no method of invalidating a cast vote afterwards, then spouses can easily prove to each other how they voted. > More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. Fully agreed. > it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands I agree that more complicated systems are harder to understand than simpler systems, especially to laypersons. That said, I do not think that laypersons have a very in-depth understanding of how their paper-voting schemes currently work. There's an element of trust that goes into it, like surely some smart people have verified that the voting system in place is alright. If we had a more complicated system in place, then laypersons would need a bit more of that trust. Laypersons have trust in things like online banking, even though it's technically a flaming garbage fire. People could just as well have trust in a cryptographically verified voting scheme.
shrimpx 5y ago
But why wouldn't ballot handlers swap out paper votes, etc.? You can rig anything with improper safeguards.
- acdha 5y ago
  The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places. Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered. The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.