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Online voting is a horrible idea, anyone who tells you it's secure has no idea what they're talking about. Even if we were to assume a hypothetical future where

Online voting is a horrible idea, anyone who tells you it's secure has no idea what they're talking about. Even if we were to assume a hypothetical future where it's implemented as an immutable smart contract on a widely used blockchain that's large enough to be too costly even for state actors to attack. Then the attacker just targets the devices citizens use to access the vote. Currently we have two mobile OS and not much more in the PC world. An exploit in just a single one of them would open the door for massive manipulation. On top of that there's the trust issue, which I find absurd that this isn't more often discussed even with other forms of voting. For example in the US they use those idiotic electronic voting machines with catastrophic consequences for people's trust in the system. All this should be banned and only paper ballots allowed. Then when it comes to counting, citizens need to be allowed to observe the process (without interfering of course). That's the only way to do it and ensure both security and trust. The process must be easy enough that most voters can understand it. Electronic voting is the exact opposite, almost no one understands how it works on a technical level and even fewer people are going to be able to verify the code. Such a system is begging for collusion and fraud.

nwellinghoff 4y ago
I don't get it. Why do you have any more faith in a paper based system? At the end of the day the vote is tallied and entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded to a central place. Where it is once again tallied, put into a spreadsheet and uploaded to a more central place. With all kinds of humans, computers etc. in the process. It's fully trust based. No one has any idea that its actually accurate. It probably is mostly accurate due to the good faith of "most" people. But that ain't a system ya know? Why not have a fully electronic system but still retain the distributed nature of the paper system. E.g. you have to login to the server in your voting district. Its a separate instance and you have to verify with photo id over video conference. The SAME risk level more or less but does not require a wasteful drive and wait. We have the technology!
- car_analogy 4y ago
  > At the end of the day the vote is tallied and entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded to a central place. There's no inherent need for spreadsheets or computers. It takes much less effort to manually, on paper, sum the vote totals from N districts, than it did to count the votes in each district (given the reasonable assumption that N < number of people per district). From here it's an easy divide-and-conquer to get the sum for the whole country. > Why do you have any more faith in a paper based system? Because attacks against paper are much harder to scale and much easier to detect. > It's fully trust based. No, each step has multiple observers, independents and competing parties, to make sure there is no cheating. At least it should have. At least it can have them, while a computer system cannot - it's a black box, and no one knows fully how it works, or if it was swapped with a different black box since the last time it was used. Even the vanishingly few people who understand the formal proof that the program running on it is correct (something no computer voting system has in practice yet had, but let's be generous) can't say for sure the compiler wasn't backdoored, or if silicon trojans were inserted at the factory, or if the CIA asked Intel to make use of their management engine to compromise the machines of the people who implemented the voting algorithm, or if Microsoft or a state-sponsored hacker altered the votes of a significant number of people at time of voting, since they connect to the voting server using their laughably insecure personal computers. You have made your democracy rely on a massive supply chain, where compromising any link would give an attacker at minimum massive influence on the outcome of your elections. And for what benefit? What is so valuable that is worth this massive risk? Saving one drive per voter, every 2-4 years?

nwellinghoff 4y ago

I don't get it. Why do you have any more faith in a paper based system? At the end of the day the vote is tallied and entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded to a central place. Where it is once again tallied, put into a spreadsheet and uploaded to a more central place. With all kinds of humans, computers etc. in the process. It's fully trust based. No one has any idea that its actually accurate. It probably is mostly accurate due to the good faith of "most" people. But that ain't a system ya know? Why not have a fully electronic system but still retain the distributed nature of the paper system. E.g. you have to login to the server in your voting district. Its a separate instance and you have to verify with photo id over video conference. The SAME risk level more or less but does not require a wasteful drive and wait. We have the technology!

car_analogy 4y ago
> At the end of the day the vote is tallied and entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded to a central place. There's no inherent need for spreadsheets or computers. It takes much less effort to manually, on paper, sum the vote totals from N districts, than it did to count the votes in each district (given the reasonable assumption that N < number of people per district). From here it's an easy divide-and-conquer to get the sum for the whole country. > Why do you have any more faith in a paper based system? Because attacks against paper are much harder to scale and much easier to detect. > It's fully trust based. No, each step has multiple observers, independents and competing parties, to make sure there is no cheating. At least it should have. At least it can have them, while a computer system cannot - it's a black box, and no one knows fully how it works, or if it was swapped with a different black box since the last time it was used. Even the vanishingly few people who understand the formal proof that the program running on it is correct (something no computer voting system has in practice yet had, but let's be generous) can't say for sure the compiler wasn't backdoored, or if silicon trojans were inserted at the factory, or if the CIA asked Intel to make use of their management engine to compromise the machines of the people who implemented the voting algorithm, or if Microsoft or a state-sponsored hacker altered the votes of a significant number of people at time of voting, since they connect to the voting server using their laughably insecure personal computers. You have made your democracy rely on a massive supply chain, where compromising any link would give an attacker at minimum massive influence on the outcome of your elections. And for what benefit? What is so valuable that is worth this massive risk? Saving one drive per voter, every 2-4 years?