9 ms·

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure elect

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.

slim 4y ago
these hacks can influence politicians after they've been voted in. If anything direct rigging of a vote is more transparent : people can notice if the vote goes against common sense.
Spellman 4y ago
Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.
- Lukineus 4y ago
  The issue is verification - how do you verify the elctronic count was accurate? And if you're going to manually count it to verify the electronic count, then why have the electronic count in the first place?
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Because the results can be statistically verified with sampling rather than a full manual recount?
  - uoaei 4y ago
    A small, statistically representative sample of the paper ballots are counted by hand and compared against the electronic count. If discrepancy arises, a more thorough audit is performed.
    - bogomipz 4y ago
      Interesting, makes sense. Is this actually the recommended resolution process by the vendors as well or is this something that needs to be approved and adopted by each voting precinct?
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Do a manual count for a random sample plus all tight races and in case of any suspicions or challenges.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Spot checks are good enough in such a case; if you manually count 1% of the votes and the margin of error is negligible, the electronic count is sound. If there's too many errors / differences, stop using the electronic counting and just count by hand. I mean it's not exactly rocket science.
- judge2020 4y ago
  This is what a lot of states get wrong, with the voting machine itself being the gateway to entering your vote and having it read. For the machines in my Georgia county, it prints a paper ballot that you drop it into a counting/scanner machine, but the issue is that the only thing on the paper is a QR code that is likely encrypted (nothing readable when scanned with a standard QR reader), so there really isn't a way to verify that the paper you got actually matched what you entered into the ballot machine. The ideal system is: ballot machine entry -> prints paper ballot scantron style, so the only information the scanner will see is what you've verified is correct -> scanner reads it and enters it into their database while also saving the paper.
  - eqtn 4y ago
    This is how it works in India: Once we click the button for a candidate, There will be light highlighting the selection on the voting machine. A printer that is connected to the voting machine prints the voted candidate symbol (and name?) and shows us the printed paper through a glass for a few seconds for verification and then drops it in. Later during the counting procedure, random ballots are counted for both. If someone arises some issues about the voting, those are then counted using printed ballot papers.
    - arlort 4y ago
      India is the only country doing electronic voting well that I'm aware of Almost certainly the only one doing it well and at scale
- rapind 4y ago
  I think the problem is who builds it. I wouldn’t trust election software that wasn’t open source with a lot of eyeballs on it. Diebold wasn’t exactly a shining example to set. Preferably a non profit organization backing it and then having it adopted as a standard. I just don’t see that happening in the US where voter obstruction is part of at least one party’s strategy.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Open source doesn’t actually matter here. A closed source electronic system should work just as well. Why? The way it should work is the machine should just print out a scantron AND a human legible copy (probably with a bar code linking the two). The person submits both by hand. You get early results by counting the scantron. Before certification, there is a statistically significant manual counting of the human legible ballots. For tighter races you recount all. The linked barcode lets you also statistically cross-validate in case there was a discrepancy between the machine readable copy printed and the hand ballot (you sample randomly). Open source means absolutely 0 here. There are too many vectors of attack (eg physically compromising a machine, chain of custody, malware etc). Better to assume the machine is compromised and build a system that doesn’t care.
    - rapind 4y ago
      Back in 2004, “Official federal voting system standards require audit logs to record all normal and abnormal events that occur on the system.” And yet at that time Diebold had a system that did NOT do that deployed all across the US. Someone was deleting votes, and it wasn’t being logged. Here’s lawmakers saying “should” do something, and an opaque reality where that didn’t happen. It was also running windows… This is an attack vector. I prefer transparency. Open source would help.
      - rat9988 4y ago
        > It was also running windows… Nothing wrong with this choice. The rest of your point still stands though.
- beprogrammed 4y ago
  I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly
  - orangepanda 4y ago
    I envision the same system to later verify the votes I bought
    - sircastor 4y ago
      This is one of the reasons it’s not legal in many places to take a picture of a filled out ballot.
  - arlort 4y ago
    That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      No, you could do it in a way where the voter can verify their vote was recorded correctly but can't prove it to anyone else. Trivial method: require the voter to assign random numbers to each candidate. They remember the number of the candidate they chose. The voting system later says "you voted for 6".
      - arlort 4y ago
        And how do you avoid a scenario in which you assign 6 to candidate X but the machine secretly assigns 6 to candidate Y?
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
I’ve always wondered they we’ll get the cyberpunk future we envisioned when people decide physical media is the sweet spot between paper/written representation and digital media. Like old cdrom style discs that can only possibly be write-once, and the provenance of the data on it depends on the physical presence of the media itself. Not that I’m necessarily advocating for it. Just they seems like a plausible future.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  For voting integrity, the vote that is saved needs to be human-readable (the voter should be able to make sure that the digital part of the machine didn't change their vote), so digital storage is right out.
kromem 4y ago
Yeah, not like there's any sort of transparent way to audit a public chain of data blocks representing votes associated with an anonymous certificates that would allow end users (verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics) to check their votes were recorded correctly and for 3rd parties to easily audit the vote totals. That's a problem that hasn't been solved at all by the current applications of cryptography. Even if my computer gets hacked, as long as I can trivially search my "confirmation id" from another device to ensure it's what I cast, I'm going to see if it was or wasn't tampered with. Having public records of votes on a per vote basis with multiple layers of cryptographic signatures at each stage of processing them would be a world of improvement over the current system, both client side and server side attacks considered.
- Diggsey 4y ago
  > verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics What does "verified" even mean here? At the end of the day, you need to convert it to some cryptographic key, and then that key is vulnerable to attack: either it's kept in the voting machine, in which case the machines themselves are a single point of failure, or else it's given to voters, in which case their insecure phones, computers, etc are easily compromised to get the keys. Checking your votes doesn't help: a significant number of people do not vote. An attacker can submit votes on behalf of those people using their keys and noone will know, and even if you find someone who claimed that they didn't vote, how would you ever prove it either way? The advantage of a physical system is that there is no single point of failure: changing the overall election result requires a physical presence at multiple polling locations. All electronic voting solutions are intrinsically worse in that respect.
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  Being able to easily validate what individual people voted for is exactly the opposite of what you want in a voting system, as it make vote buying/selling trivial. I suggest looking into the huge list of previous electoral fraud for all the different kind of attacks that need to be defended against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
rdedev 4y ago
Does having a paper trail generated exactly after voting help? This is the system that's followed in India. I tried to think of ways it could fail but it seemed pretty fool proof as far as I can think. I'm pretty sure I might have missed some corner case
- Lukineus 4y ago
  If you're going to have a paper trail for an electronic system, then why not just use the paper system? It's like there's a pro-electronic movement that's looking for every excuse to move to electronic... Ok, so we go electronic. We put in all these extra checks and balances to account for it's downsides. It runs well. People start questioning the need for the checks and balances, since it's so full-proof. So we remove the checks and balances. <anakin-fun-begins.gif> <shocked-pikachu.gif> For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    I presume costs (wages vs computers) are a significant factor.
  - rdedev 4y ago
    In India at least there is a lot of votes to manually count. Electronic just makes things smoother. As for people questioning the need I didn't hear anyone raising the during the last election I followed. Besides I'm pretty sure either the election commission of India or the various opposition parties will point out the problems with having just electronic vote records. As far as electronic voting with paper trail goes I see it as just a normal paper based voting system with an automated counting system that can be easily verified
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    > "For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election." There are two ways to rig an election. The first is miscounting or changing votes but I think the other is the real risk and likely dates to the very first time we as a species ever started having votes by anonymous ballot: ballot stuffing. If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process, the entire system is vulnerable. And the number of votes required to change elections tends to be shockingly low. In the 2020 election, more than 155 million people voted, but the outcome of the presidential election itself was decided by a total of less than 43,000 votes [1]. That's a margin of victory of 0.03%. So a system that was 99.9% accurate at ensuring that each ballot was completely legitimate would be insufficient. [1] - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-gop-came-within-90000-votes-of-controlling-congress-and-keeping-the-white-house-n2584521 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-...
i67vw3 4y ago
I do not think so (my opinion, I may be wrong here). Paper ballots (pen and paper) are susceptible to more rigging. Government officials can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results. It is seen in many countries where corruption is very high in the election commission. In these places, elected candidates, voters, 'pro-democracy' individuals advocate for electronic voting (Electronic Voting Machine, EVM.) Recently, we saw the images and videos from the recent Belarus Lukashenk elections, where the officials just threw out paper ballots. In Pakistan, to curb voter fraud by paper ballots the previous Imran Khan (PTI) Government tried to install electronic voting equipments at locations particularly in rural areas where voter fraud was at a really high rate. The ruling Government can use its state power to influence the outcome of elections. By pen and paper, the actual voting happens in a 'democratic way', but, the counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud. Whereas, in electronic voting, 'Code Is Law, every single vote is counted properly. To curb the cons/disadvantages of electronic voting, which are a.) The underlying code can be tweaked by the ruling government to give them an advantage in the counting. b.) Voter fraud can be committed by abusing the actual hardware of the voting machine. To solve this particular problem, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recently tried to bring some new changes. It majorly includes, having paper proof along with electronic proof called as VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail). The way it happens is:- When you cast your vote to a candidate 'C', the machine will print a slip with the proof of your vote to candiate 'C'. So, if the opposition party alleges that voter fraud happened with the tampering of EVM, the election commission (or an independent third party, or the opposition candidate himself on his own) can then do a recount based on the VVPAT slips and cross-check the results per booth (per EVM).
- arlort 4y ago
  > can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results This is why in liberal democracies the process of casting and counting votes is usually done in the presence of at least representatives of the candidates running and more usually whoever wants to attend them You'd need total complicity in every single polling station to cheat without raising alarms In electronic/internet voting, unless there is a paper trail which can be counted in the same manner as manual voting, all you need is government officials to tweak the code/the hardware being used. Are you going to let every candidate audit every single machine independently? Unlikely since that is, in and of itself, a security risk > where the officials just threw out paper ballots And since they had to physically remove material evidence we were able to get videos of it happening. Plugging an USB while the machine is in the warehouse or in the middle of voting can be done a lot more discreetly > counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud Which is why counting is usually done with supervision The system in India works, but it works because it reduces the entire process to a paper ballot. Ultimately the security guarantees of the Indian elections are identical to the security guarantees of the traditional paper ballot system The digital component is limited to easing the logistics of getting the first results of the election in a timely manner Which is about the extent to which you should trust electronic voting
cyberei 4y ago
Plus, even with some absolutely secure digital voting system, there's no way you could explain it to most people. A huge advantage of paper voting is that everyone can understand it works and how it can be attacked. Otherwise it's going to be even easier to claim the system is rigged or foreign hackers manipulated the vote or whatever, to undermine trust.
skobovm 4y ago
There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes? Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.
  - skobovm 4y ago
    Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, so regardless of mechanism you’re in a pretty sticky situation. It’s not a perfect system, but I would personally find it comforting knowing that I could verify that my vote counted and that I could independently confirm the election results Edit: haven’t read the paper in a while, but IIRC you can see that the vote counted without revealing details of who you voted for. They definitely would have covered this case
    - gorgoiler 4y ago
      Camera bans are strictly enforced in polling stations.
      - skobovm 4y ago
        You go into a private booth with a curtain where no one can see what you’re doing. If coercion is at play, I don’t think a ban is going to stop you. That said, check the edit. This case is definitely covered, I just forgot
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, You can take a picture of a marked paper ballot, trade it in for a fresh one (original is destroyed) and mark the new one differently and turn it in. A ballot picture doesn't prove the ballot was cast and counted, a receipt that identifies the voted candidate does.
Vladimof 4y ago
We would need some voting system where each person can verify that their vote was properly counted, something like this: secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf
- yyyk 4y ago
  We should never consider any voting system that is not simple to the point of being almost-trivial. Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating which are enough to create massive instability - even when they are provably false. We see this even with the current election systems! Since there's no simple way to explain 'blockchain' to non-tech people, any voting system using it is irrelevant - and will end up discarded like nearly all the other attempts invoking blockchain hype.
  - Vladimof 4y ago
    > Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating The zero-knowledge proof avoids that... Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know
    - yyyk 4y ago
      The zero-knowledge proof avoids true accusations of a particular type of cheating. However, the biggest problem is humans, not machines. An election system must be ELI5able, or we can expect a fair amount of instability regardless of truth.
      - Vladimof 4y ago
        There are plenty of ELI5 explanations of zero-knowledge proofs

slim 4y ago

these hacks can influence politicians after they've been voted in. If anything direct rigging of a vote is more transparent : people can notice if the vote goes against common sense.

Spellman 4y ago

Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.

Lukineus 4y ago
The issue is verification - how do you verify the elctronic count was accurate? And if you're going to manually count it to verify the electronic count, then why have the electronic count in the first place?
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Because the results can be statistically verified with sampling rather than a full manual recount?
- uoaei 4y ago
  A small, statistically representative sample of the paper ballots are counted by hand and compared against the electronic count. If discrepancy arises, a more thorough audit is performed.
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    Interesting, makes sense. Is this actually the recommended resolution process by the vendors as well or is this something that needs to be approved and adopted by each voting precinct?
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Do a manual count for a random sample plus all tight races and in case of any suspicions or challenges.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Spot checks are good enough in such a case; if you manually count 1% of the votes and the margin of error is negligible, the electronic count is sound. If there's too many errors / differences, stop using the electronic counting and just count by hand. I mean it's not exactly rocket science.
judge2020 4y ago
This is what a lot of states get wrong, with the voting machine itself being the gateway to entering your vote and having it read. For the machines in my Georgia county, it prints a paper ballot that you drop it into a counting/scanner machine, but the issue is that the only thing on the paper is a QR code that is likely encrypted (nothing readable when scanned with a standard QR reader), so there really isn't a way to verify that the paper you got actually matched what you entered into the ballot machine. The ideal system is: ballot machine entry -> prints paper ballot scantron style, so the only information the scanner will see is what you've verified is correct -> scanner reads it and enters it into their database while also saving the paper.
- eqtn 4y ago
  This is how it works in India: Once we click the button for a candidate, There will be light highlighting the selection on the voting machine. A printer that is connected to the voting machine prints the voted candidate symbol (and name?) and shows us the printed paper through a glass for a few seconds for verification and then drops it in. Later during the counting procedure, random ballots are counted for both. If someone arises some issues about the voting, those are then counted using printed ballot papers.
  - arlort 4y ago
    India is the only country doing electronic voting well that I'm aware of Almost certainly the only one doing it well and at scale
rapind 4y ago
I think the problem is who builds it. I wouldn’t trust election software that wasn’t open source with a lot of eyeballs on it. Diebold wasn’t exactly a shining example to set. Preferably a non profit organization backing it and then having it adopted as a standard. I just don’t see that happening in the US where voter obstruction is part of at least one party’s strategy.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Open source doesn’t actually matter here. A closed source electronic system should work just as well. Why? The way it should work is the machine should just print out a scantron AND a human legible copy (probably with a bar code linking the two). The person submits both by hand. You get early results by counting the scantron. Before certification, there is a statistically significant manual counting of the human legible ballots. For tighter races you recount all. The linked barcode lets you also statistically cross-validate in case there was a discrepancy between the machine readable copy printed and the hand ballot (you sample randomly). Open source means absolutely 0 here. There are too many vectors of attack (eg physically compromising a machine, chain of custody, malware etc). Better to assume the machine is compromised and build a system that doesn’t care.
  - rapind 4y ago
    Back in 2004, “Official federal voting system standards require audit logs to record all normal and abnormal events that occur on the system.” And yet at that time Diebold had a system that did NOT do that deployed all across the US. Someone was deleting votes, and it wasn’t being logged. Here’s lawmakers saying “should” do something, and an opaque reality where that didn’t happen. It was also running windows… This is an attack vector. I prefer transparency. Open source would help.
    - rat9988 4y ago
      > It was also running windows… Nothing wrong with this choice. The rest of your point still stands though.
beprogrammed 4y ago
I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly
- orangepanda 4y ago
  I envision the same system to later verify the votes I bought
  - sircastor 4y ago
    This is one of the reasons it’s not legal in many places to take a picture of a filled out ballot.
- arlort 4y ago
  That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    No, you could do it in a way where the voter can verify their vote was recorded correctly but can't prove it to anyone else. Trivial method: require the voter to assign random numbers to each candidate. They remember the number of the candidate they chose. The voting system later says "you voted for 6".
    - arlort 4y ago
      And how do you avoid a scenario in which you assign 6 to candidate X but the machine secretly assigns 6 to candidate Y?

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

I’ve always wondered they we’ll get the cyberpunk future we envisioned when people decide physical media is the sweet spot between paper/written representation and digital media. Like old cdrom style discs that can only possibly be write-once, and the provenance of the data on it depends on the physical presence of the media itself. Not that I’m necessarily advocating for it. Just they seems like a plausible future.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
For voting integrity, the vote that is saved needs to be human-readable (the voter should be able to make sure that the digital part of the machine didn't change their vote), so digital storage is right out.

kromem 4y ago

Yeah, not like there's any sort of transparent way to audit a public chain of data blocks representing votes associated with an anonymous certificates that would allow end users (verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics) to check their votes were recorded correctly and for 3rd parties to easily audit the vote totals. That's a problem that hasn't been solved at all by the current applications of cryptography. Even if my computer gets hacked, as long as I can trivially search my "confirmation id" from another device to ensure it's what I cast, I'm going to see if it was or wasn't tampered with. Having public records of votes on a per vote basis with multiple layers of cryptographic signatures at each stage of processing them would be a world of improvement over the current system, both client side and server side attacks considered.

Diggsey 4y ago
> verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics What does "verified" even mean here? At the end of the day, you need to convert it to some cryptographic key, and then that key is vulnerable to attack: either it's kept in the voting machine, in which case the machines themselves are a single point of failure, or else it's given to voters, in which case their insecure phones, computers, etc are easily compromised to get the keys. Checking your votes doesn't help: a significant number of people do not vote. An attacker can submit votes on behalf of those people using their keys and noone will know, and even if you find someone who claimed that they didn't vote, how would you ever prove it either way? The advantage of a physical system is that there is no single point of failure: changing the overall election result requires a physical presence at multiple polling locations. All electronic voting solutions are intrinsically worse in that respect.
ben-schaaf 4y ago
Being able to easily validate what individual people voted for is exactly the opposite of what you want in a voting system, as it make vote buying/selling trivial. I suggest looking into the huge list of previous electoral fraud for all the different kind of attacks that need to be defended against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud

rdedev 4y ago

Does having a paper trail generated exactly after voting help? This is the system that's followed in India. I tried to think of ways it could fail but it seemed pretty fool proof as far as I can think. I'm pretty sure I might have missed some corner case

Lukineus 4y ago
If you're going to have a paper trail for an electronic system, then why not just use the paper system? It's like there's a pro-electronic movement that's looking for every excuse to move to electronic... Ok, so we go electronic. We put in all these extra checks and balances to account for it's downsides. It runs well. People start questioning the need for the checks and balances, since it's so full-proof. So we remove the checks and balances. <anakin-fun-begins.gif> <shocked-pikachu.gif> For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election.
- uoaei 4y ago
  I presume costs (wages vs computers) are a significant factor.
- rdedev 4y ago
  In India at least there is a lot of votes to manually count. Electronic just makes things smoother. As for people questioning the need I didn't hear anyone raising the during the last election I followed. Besides I'm pretty sure either the election commission of India or the various opposition parties will point out the problems with having just electronic vote records. As far as electronic voting with paper trail goes I see it as just a normal paper based voting system with an automated counting system that can be easily verified
- somenameforme 4y ago
  > "For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election." There are two ways to rig an election. The first is miscounting or changing votes but I think the other is the real risk and likely dates to the very first time we as a species ever started having votes by anonymous ballot: ballot stuffing. If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process, the entire system is vulnerable. And the number of votes required to change elections tends to be shockingly low. In the 2020 election, more than 155 million people voted, but the outcome of the presidential election itself was decided by a total of less than 43,000 votes [1]. That's a margin of victory of 0.03%. So a system that was 99.9% accurate at ensuring that each ballot was completely legitimate would be insufficient. [1] - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-gop-came-within-90000-votes-of-controlling-congress-and-keeping-the-white-house-n2584521 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-...

i67vw3 4y ago

I do not think so (my opinion, I may be wrong here). Paper ballots (pen and paper) are susceptible to more rigging. Government officials can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results. It is seen in many countries where corruption is very high in the election commission. In these places, elected candidates, voters, 'pro-democracy' individuals advocate for electronic voting (Electronic Voting Machine, EVM.) Recently, we saw the images and videos from the recent Belarus Lukashenk elections, where the officials just threw out paper ballots. In Pakistan, to curb voter fraud by paper ballots the previous Imran Khan (PTI) Government tried to install electronic voting equipments at locations particularly in rural areas where voter fraud was at a really high rate. The ruling Government can use its state power to influence the outcome of elections. By pen and paper, the actual voting happens in a 'democratic way', but, the counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud. Whereas, in electronic voting, 'Code Is Law, every single vote is counted properly. To curb the cons/disadvantages of electronic voting, which are a.) The underlying code can be tweaked by the ruling government to give them an advantage in the counting. b.) Voter fraud can be committed by abusing the actual hardware of the voting machine. To solve this particular problem, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recently tried to bring some new changes. It majorly includes, having paper proof along with electronic proof called as VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail). The way it happens is:- When you cast your vote to a candidate 'C', the machine will print a slip with the proof of your vote to candiate 'C'. So, if the opposition party alleges that voter fraud happened with the tampering of EVM, the election commission (or an independent third party, or the opposition candidate himself on his own) can then do a recount based on the VVPAT slips and cross-check the results per booth (per EVM).

arlort 4y ago
> can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results This is why in liberal democracies the process of casting and counting votes is usually done in the presence of at least representatives of the candidates running and more usually whoever wants to attend them You'd need total complicity in every single polling station to cheat without raising alarms In electronic/internet voting, unless there is a paper trail which can be counted in the same manner as manual voting, all you need is government officials to tweak the code/the hardware being used. Are you going to let every candidate audit every single machine independently? Unlikely since that is, in and of itself, a security risk > where the officials just threw out paper ballots And since they had to physically remove material evidence we were able to get videos of it happening. Plugging an USB while the machine is in the warehouse or in the middle of voting can be done a lot more discreetly > counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud Which is why counting is usually done with supervision The system in India works, but it works because it reduces the entire process to a paper ballot. Ultimately the security guarantees of the Indian elections are identical to the security guarantees of the traditional paper ballot system The digital component is limited to easing the logistics of getting the first results of the election in a timely manner Which is about the extent to which you should trust electronic voting

cyberei 4y ago

Plus, even with some absolutely secure digital voting system, there's no way you could explain it to most people. A huge advantage of paper voting is that everyone can understand it works and how it can be attacked. Otherwise it's going to be even easier to claim the system is rigged or foreign hackers manipulated the vote or whatever, to undermine trust.

skobovm 4y ago

There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out

gorgoiler 4y ago
If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes? Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.
- skobovm 4y ago
  Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, so regardless of mechanism you’re in a pretty sticky situation. It’s not a perfect system, but I would personally find it comforting knowing that I could verify that my vote counted and that I could independently confirm the election results Edit: haven’t read the paper in a while, but IIRC you can see that the vote counted without revealing details of who you voted for. They definitely would have covered this case
  - gorgoiler 4y ago
    Camera bans are strictly enforced in polling stations.
    - skobovm 4y ago
      You go into a private booth with a curtain where no one can see what you’re doing. If coercion is at play, I don’t think a ban is going to stop you. That said, check the edit. This case is definitely covered, I just forgot
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, You can take a picture of a marked paper ballot, trade it in for a fresh one (original is destroyed) and mark the new one differently and turn it in. A ballot picture doesn't prove the ballot was cast and counted, a receipt that identifies the voted candidate does.

Vladimof 4y ago

We would need some voting system where each person can verify that their vote was properly counted, something like this: secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf

yyyk 4y ago
We should never consider any voting system that is not simple to the point of being almost-trivial. Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating which are enough to create massive instability - even when they are provably false. We see this even with the current election systems! Since there's no simple way to explain 'blockchain' to non-tech people, any voting system using it is irrelevant - and will end up discarded like nearly all the other attempts invoking blockchain hype.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  > Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating The zero-knowledge proof avoids that... Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know
  - yyyk 4y ago
    The zero-knowledge proof avoids true accusations of a particular type of cheating. However, the biggest problem is humans, not machines. An election system must be ELI5able, or we can expect a fair amount of instability regardless of truth.
    - Vladimof 4y ago
      There are plenty of ELI5 explanations of zero-knowledge proofs