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There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There ar

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.
      - acdha 5y ago
        > I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth? Well, this is one reason why the last three places I’ve lived don’t allow phone usage in the polling station and have processes for getting another ballot, but also none of the electronic systems can survive that level of control either — most of them make it substantially easier for the attacker, especially at scale. That last part is important because the more people are required to pull off an attack the less likely it is to be successful. > 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. Banking has key differences, though, which I think are significant: you can do non-anonymous audits, you don’t need deniability, and most importantly you can restore losses after the fact.

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.
    - acdha 5y ago
      > I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth? Well, this is one reason why the last three places I’ve lived don’t allow phone usage in the polling station and have processes for getting another ballot, but also none of the electronic systems can survive that level of control either — most of them make it substantially easier for the attacker, especially at scale. That last part is important because the more people are required to pull off an attack the less likely it is to be successful. > 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. Banking has key differences, though, which I think are significant: you can do non-anonymous audits, you don’t need deniability, and most importantly you can restore losses after the fact.