8 ms·

Ask HN: Why do you trust electronic voting machines?

Anyone who frequents this site should know that in any electronic system with a microprocessor there are a million and one ways that data can be tampered with in the hardware, firmware, or software. Often times in USA it’s just a regular old sql database of some type storing the results on top a regular Linux/Windows computer. I think it’s obviously a huge scandal that “electronic voting machines” have been normalized in public consciousness. Whenever I tell people it’s ridiculous that electronic machines have taken over the paper ballot box im called crazy or paranoid. Wake up people! Electronic voting machines are a scam used to undermine your democracies. The only way to fix the problem and restore faith in humanity is to scrap all electronic voting machines and go back to paper. (Or, how about an extremely simple electronic circuit, 2 buttons, printed in copper suspended in acrylic so anyone in the room can verify with their own eyes the circuit isn’t tampered with, as long as they can understand simple circuits. these circuits will be directly connected to a tabulator machine similarly implemented as a simple circuit located in a public room, suspended within acrylic, and with a visible copper connection to the voting booths, which would have extremely thin opaque walls for privacy but also ensuring that you can see it’s not being siphoned off. The open hardware folks can create the simplest most effective circuit that’s still easily be auditable by the human eye. )

detaro 4y ago
You are asking the wrong audience, fairly sure "paper ballots are better" is the dominant opinion here.
- samketchup 4y ago
  agreed
- unknownaccount 4y ago
  Is anyone doing anything about it?
  - verdverm 4y ago
    about what, that people with technical expertise think that using their buggy creations is a bad idea for something as important as choosing leaders? My main objection to electronic voting is about the general population's trust, and that it is increasingly easy to convince the losing party that the machine was compromised, whether or not it is. A voting system needs to be understood by the majority, the layman, in order for trust in the electoral process to be maintained.
- slater 4y ago
  I would've thought "machine, but also paper receipt" would be the dominant position
eimrine 4y ago
I asked a very similar question [1] it has some interesting responses from Indian citizens who seems to be the only people who trust them because of [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436338 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing
legitster 4y ago
Voting machine manufacturers and election overseers responded to the criticisms! The vast majority of electronic voting in the US today is done with a physical paper receipt paper trail: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting-system-paper-trail-requirements.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting... Notice that nearly every state requires voters to approve the paper copy of their vote. The digital record is only used to speed up tabulation. In the case of recounts or contested elections, paper records are hand tabulated by humans (a recent example were the Arizona recounts for the 2020 election). Where are you located that you didn't have a paper receipt you were asked to approve when you voted?
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  You can't compare the difficulty of faking a real human entering a ballot into an observed sealed container, during a short period of a day, versus just faking an output of a machine and then faking unobserved stacks of paper which have all be gathered into a centralized location and then left for months, and then when irregularities are found they are simply ignored. The first requires a high number of conspirators per votes faked. You will at best get a ratio of hundreds of votes per conspirator. The second only requires a handful of conspirators with good access to essentially overturn entire elections with leads of hundreds of thousands of votes. And it's not even the electronic part that is the most crucial. The fact that a single election worker is officially in charge of the integrity of tens of thousands votes, only made possible with the assistance of the machine, is the real issue here. That machine could've been 100% OK but it's not designed to protect against the election worker - on the contrary, it's designed to give him oversized power. All you need to realize the farce is just watch a video where a single person counts tens of thousands of votes, and see the officials response to the video is to admit that indeed that is what happened, but "the votes were legitimate". A single person isn't responsible for thousands of votes in a real democracy.
  - legitster 4y ago
    > versus just faking an output of a machine and then faking unobserved stacks of paper If you bothered to follow the link, you would see that most states require voters to review and sign their ballots. Again, even if you tried to sneak a small amount of fraud into the system, would no one catch it?
yuan43 4y ago
Do you realize you are preaching to the choir?
Rackedup 4y ago
The only way I would trust electronic voting is if we had a secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge proofs, so that you can verify that your vote was counted. For now, paper voting is safer.
- pydry 4y ago
  Some people think that this will automatically lead to vote buying. I think theyre very wrong, but a lot of people do think that.
  - moistly 4y ago
    Sorry, but have you met people? Vote buying is inevitable. Especially after digital cameras.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Isn't taking a pic prohibited?
      - zzo38computer 4y ago
        Maybe someone did it anyways even if it is prohibited; I don't know. I think the way to deal with this is that you can get another copy of the voting form if you want to take a picture of it, so that you won't tell if it is the real vote or not.
    - pydry 4y ago
      Yes Ive met people. If there was a small chance that that selling their vote for a £30 amazon gift card would lead to them being embroiled in a sting operation and being sent to prison a miniscule number would try. Benefit too low, risk too high. And, if political candidates were caught trying to buy those miniscule number of votes from a police sting operation were sent to prison...well, they tend to stop doing that. Benefit too low, risk too high. Historically vote buying has tended to be widespread when it is officially tolerated (e.g. in the 19th century) and then it disappears entirely even when the police only half-heartedly crack down on it.
smt88 4y ago
Where are the untrustworthy systems you're worried about? There are no 100% digital voting systems in the US to my knowledge. Where I live, we have a printout that we can review and then hand over to be stored securely as a paper trail. There are also multiple checks and balances where they confirm that final votes make sense, and if the counts are off, they count the paper ballots. To compromise an election, you'd have to take over thousands of machines in multiple states, bypass multiple independent human reviews, and be able to predict where the important counties were going to be. It's impossible.
- theluketaylor 4y ago
  The early push to electronic voting in the US after the hanging chad debacle of 2000 did include electronic only voting machines in a number of states. Congress allocated all sorts of funds for states, but almost zero oversight or rules about secure machines and processes. Those early mistakes have been corrected and I believe you are correct, all voting machines in the US now produce a paper trail. > multiple checks and balances where they confirm that final votes make sense A term we heard a lot in the lead up and aftermath of the 2020 election was 'risk limiting audits'. It would be irresponsible not to have a strong audit program in place to verify the count, which is what I believe you're referring to. The fact the US runs 50 independent elections is an interesting double edged sword as a Canadian observer. I'm used to incredibly simple ballots administered by either Elections Canada or Elections Ontario. The US has massively complex ballots administered by their state for county, state and federal office. In some circumstances the US system makes nation-wide election fraud nearly impossible (election fraud does happen and is different from so-called 'voter fraud' that doesn't). The small scale of some offices and elections does make election fraud more achievable on some scales. A new weakness has been revealed. Various local election officials (particularly Secretaries of State) wield enormous power to affect the process and outcome of the election. Elections Canada runs exactly the same election under exactly the same rules in every polling place across the country. Experiences state to state, county to country, and even at different polling places within a county can vary wildly in the US. This is exacerbated in Presidential elections by the fact only a handful of states are actually up for grabs in the election. A Secretary of State in any of Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, or Michigan potentially has the power to throw the next election into chaos. 2024 is not going to be fun and I'm not even American.
t-3 4y ago
I don't. Neither does my voting jurisdiction. The electronic counts are only used for early estimates and everything is officially counted by hand.
codefreeordie 4y ago
As far as I can tell, largely they are trusted when they result is the desired one and distrusted when the result is not the desired one, since people mostly care about making sure that they get the result they want, not with making sure that the process is "fair".
tomohawk 4y ago
So far, none of the machines have passed the Nevada Gaming Commissions inspections. That would be the minimum criteria. Machines that don't at least pass this level of scrutiny (all of them) are not something you can trust. That commission has long experience inspecting devices to ensure that they are fair and impervious to unobservable tampering. Once someone actually manufactures such a machine, then it needs to be used in a system that can detect fraudulent behavior, just like banks do. The system must require an official id, and must ensure voting privacy (sorry - mail-in ballots fail on both of these). It does no good to have a great machine if it will be subject to adulterated or coerced input.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Isamu 4y ago
I believe there was an MIT study done after the contentious 2000 US election that compared election methods and their error rates. None had a zero error rate. Fully electronic was not preferable because of the lack of audit trail. The best system seemed to be paper with scanners. The error rate was among the lowest and it is fully auditable. After this study came out I was disappointed that my state chose fully electronic. But before this last election we went to paper with scanners. The big advantage of course is the ability to recount by hand to your heart’s content. Which of course we did.
57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
" slater 4 days ago [–] I think you've brought this up a couple of times now. Ask yourself, which is likelier: 1) It's a great big conspiracy and everyone hopes nobody sees your posts about this clear backdoor technology, and the mods try their best to delete it every time you post. -- OR -- 2) You're somehow mistaken and it's not all that big of a deal. "
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- unknownaccount 4y ago
  Is there a reason youre bringing this up?
  - 57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
    Seems you didn't hear it the first time. Your game is obvious to a lot of us. I'm posting for anyone reading this muckraking tripe.
    - unknownaccount 4y ago
      My “game”? I’m not sure what relevancy the Microsoft Backdoor Conspiracy which I’m in the process of exposing has to the electronic voting machines scandal. Either way, your pathetic attempt to suppress my speech isn’t going to influence anyone’s opinions and certainly not going to discourage me from posting about these topics.
      - 57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
        Perhaps the voting system will handle your game just fine.
rogerthis 4y ago
I really would like to hear the opinion of HN people about the Brazilian system.
specialist 4y ago
Trust is the wrong word. Confidence in the results is only possible thru mutual distrust. Meaning all belligerents recognize and honor the count. The gold standard for our Australian ballot (private voting, public counting) style system is paper ballots cast at poll sites, tabulated using optical scanners, with results posted publicly the moment the polls close. With postal ballots, the higher volume jurisdictions use image scanners. Think fax scanners with OCR software to identify the votes. Adjudication is done electronically, by updating the database. Further, many jurisdictions scan postal ballots as they are received, before election day, running daily summary reports. The fiction is that "final tabulation" is the final report. For postal ballots, signature verification is being automated. Computers automatically compare ballot's signature with voter's recorded signature. Back when I studied election integrity (20004 thru 2010), the error rate was ~10%, with no independent auditing or verification. For postal ballots, 1% are lost in transit. What the USPS calls UAA (undelivered as addressed). Meaning a fraction of voters are being silently disenfranchised every election.
IceMetalPunk 4y ago
I would counter by asking, "why do you trust paper voting?" As long as there are people in the process, there's room for corruption; that's just a fact you'll have to live with. With decent encryption, an electronic voting machine is at least as safe as paper ballots.

detaro 4y ago

You are asking the wrong audience, fairly sure "paper ballots are better" is the dominant opinion here.

samketchup 4y ago
agreed
unknownaccount 4y ago
Is anyone doing anything about it?
- verdverm 4y ago
  about what, that people with technical expertise think that using their buggy creations is a bad idea for something as important as choosing leaders? My main objection to electronic voting is about the general population's trust, and that it is increasingly easy to convince the losing party that the machine was compromised, whether or not it is. A voting system needs to be understood by the majority, the layman, in order for trust in the electoral process to be maintained.
slater 4y ago
I would've thought "machine, but also paper receipt" would be the dominant position

eimrine 4y ago

I asked a very similar question [1] it has some interesting responses from Indian citizens who seems to be the only people who trust them because of [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436338 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing

legitster 4y ago

Voting machine manufacturers and election overseers responded to the criticisms! The vast majority of electronic voting in the US today is done with a physical paper receipt paper trail: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting-system-paper-trail-requirements.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting... Notice that nearly every state requires voters to approve the paper copy of their vote. The digital record is only used to speed up tabulation. In the case of recounts or contested elections, paper records are hand tabulated by humans (a recent example were the Arizona recounts for the 2020 election). Where are you located that you didn't have a paper receipt you were asked to approve when you voted?

machina_ex_deus 4y ago
You can't compare the difficulty of faking a real human entering a ballot into an observed sealed container, during a short period of a day, versus just faking an output of a machine and then faking unobserved stacks of paper which have all be gathered into a centralized location and then left for months, and then when irregularities are found they are simply ignored. The first requires a high number of conspirators per votes faked. You will at best get a ratio of hundreds of votes per conspirator. The second only requires a handful of conspirators with good access to essentially overturn entire elections with leads of hundreds of thousands of votes. And it's not even the electronic part that is the most crucial. The fact that a single election worker is officially in charge of the integrity of tens of thousands votes, only made possible with the assistance of the machine, is the real issue here. That machine could've been 100% OK but it's not designed to protect against the election worker - on the contrary, it's designed to give him oversized power. All you need to realize the farce is just watch a video where a single person counts tens of thousands of votes, and see the officials response to the video is to admit that indeed that is what happened, but "the votes were legitimate". A single person isn't responsible for thousands of votes in a real democracy.
- legitster 4y ago
  > versus just faking an output of a machine and then faking unobserved stacks of paper If you bothered to follow the link, you would see that most states require voters to review and sign their ballots. Again, even if you tried to sneak a small amount of fraud into the system, would no one catch it?

yuan43 4y ago

Do you realize you are preaching to the choir?

Rackedup 4y ago

The only way I would trust electronic voting is if we had a secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge proofs, so that you can verify that your vote was counted. For now, paper voting is safer.

pydry 4y ago
Some people think that this will automatically lead to vote buying. I think theyre very wrong, but a lot of people do think that.
- moistly 4y ago
  Sorry, but have you met people? Vote buying is inevitable. Especially after digital cameras.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Isn't taking a pic prohibited?
    - zzo38computer 4y ago
      Maybe someone did it anyways even if it is prohibited; I don't know. I think the way to deal with this is that you can get another copy of the voting form if you want to take a picture of it, so that you won't tell if it is the real vote or not.
  - pydry 4y ago
    Yes Ive met people. If there was a small chance that that selling their vote for a £30 amazon gift card would lead to them being embroiled in a sting operation and being sent to prison a miniscule number would try. Benefit too low, risk too high. And, if political candidates were caught trying to buy those miniscule number of votes from a police sting operation were sent to prison...well, they tend to stop doing that. Benefit too low, risk too high. Historically vote buying has tended to be widespread when it is officially tolerated (e.g. in the 19th century) and then it disappears entirely even when the police only half-heartedly crack down on it.

smt88 4y ago

Where are the untrustworthy systems you're worried about? There are no 100% digital voting systems in the US to my knowledge. Where I live, we have a printout that we can review and then hand over to be stored securely as a paper trail. There are also multiple checks and balances where they confirm that final votes make sense, and if the counts are off, they count the paper ballots. To compromise an election, you'd have to take over thousands of machines in multiple states, bypass multiple independent human reviews, and be able to predict where the important counties were going to be. It's impossible.

theluketaylor 4y ago
The early push to electronic voting in the US after the hanging chad debacle of 2000 did include electronic only voting machines in a number of states. Congress allocated all sorts of funds for states, but almost zero oversight or rules about secure machines and processes. Those early mistakes have been corrected and I believe you are correct, all voting machines in the US now produce a paper trail. > multiple checks and balances where they confirm that final votes make sense A term we heard a lot in the lead up and aftermath of the 2020 election was 'risk limiting audits'. It would be irresponsible not to have a strong audit program in place to verify the count, which is what I believe you're referring to. The fact the US runs 50 independent elections is an interesting double edged sword as a Canadian observer. I'm used to incredibly simple ballots administered by either Elections Canada or Elections Ontario. The US has massively complex ballots administered by their state for county, state and federal office. In some circumstances the US system makes nation-wide election fraud nearly impossible (election fraud does happen and is different from so-called 'voter fraud' that doesn't). The small scale of some offices and elections does make election fraud more achievable on some scales. A new weakness has been revealed. Various local election officials (particularly Secretaries of State) wield enormous power to affect the process and outcome of the election. Elections Canada runs exactly the same election under exactly the same rules in every polling place across the country. Experiences state to state, county to country, and even at different polling places within a county can vary wildly in the US. This is exacerbated in Presidential elections by the fact only a handful of states are actually up for grabs in the election. A Secretary of State in any of Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, or Michigan potentially has the power to throw the next election into chaos. 2024 is not going to be fun and I'm not even American.

t-3 4y ago

I don't. Neither does my voting jurisdiction. The electronic counts are only used for early estimates and everything is officially counted by hand.

codefreeordie 4y ago

As far as I can tell, largely they are trusted when they result is the desired one and distrusted when the result is not the desired one, since people mostly care about making sure that they get the result they want, not with making sure that the process is "fair".

tomohawk 4y ago

So far, none of the machines have passed the Nevada Gaming Commissions inspections. That would be the minimum criteria. Machines that don't at least pass this level of scrutiny (all of them) are not something you can trust. That commission has long experience inspecting devices to ensure that they are fair and impervious to unobservable tampering. Once someone actually manufactures such a machine, then it needs to be used in a system that can detect fraudulent behavior, just like banks do. The system must require an official id, and must ensure voting privacy (sorry - mail-in ballots fail on both of these). It does no good to have a great machine if it will be subject to adulterated or coerced input.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Isamu 4y ago

I believe there was an MIT study done after the contentious 2000 US election that compared election methods and their error rates. None had a zero error rate. Fully electronic was not preferable because of the lack of audit trail. The best system seemed to be paper with scanners. The error rate was among the lowest and it is fully auditable. After this study came out I was disappointed that my state chose fully electronic. But before this last election we went to paper with scanners. The big advantage of course is the ability to recount by hand to your heart’s content. Which of course we did.

57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago

" slater 4 days ago [–] I think you've brought this up a couple of times now. Ask yourself, which is likelier: 1) It's a great big conspiracy and everyone hopes nobody sees your posts about this clear backdoor technology, and the mods try their best to delete it every time you post. -- OR -- 2) You're somehow mistaken and it's not all that big of a deal. "

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unknownaccount 4y ago
Is there a reason youre bringing this up?
- 57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
  Seems you didn't hear it the first time. Your game is obvious to a lot of us. I'm posting for anyone reading this muckraking tripe.
  - unknownaccount 4y ago
    My “game”? I’m not sure what relevancy the Microsoft Backdoor Conspiracy which I’m in the process of exposing has to the electronic voting machines scandal. Either way, your pathetic attempt to suppress my speech isn’t going to influence anyone’s opinions and certainly not going to discourage me from posting about these topics.
    - 57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
      Perhaps the voting system will handle your game just fine.

rogerthis 4y ago

I really would like to hear the opinion of HN people about the Brazilian system.

specialist 4y ago

Trust is the wrong word. Confidence in the results is only possible thru mutual distrust. Meaning all belligerents recognize and honor the count. The gold standard for our Australian ballot (private voting, public counting) style system is paper ballots cast at poll sites, tabulated using optical scanners, with results posted publicly the moment the polls close. With postal ballots, the higher volume jurisdictions use image scanners. Think fax scanners with OCR software to identify the votes. Adjudication is done electronically, by updating the database. Further, many jurisdictions scan postal ballots as they are received, before election day, running daily summary reports. The fiction is that "final tabulation" is the final report. For postal ballots, signature verification is being automated. Computers automatically compare ballot's signature with voter's recorded signature. Back when I studied election integrity (20004 thru 2010), the error rate was ~10%, with no independent auditing or verification. For postal ballots, 1% are lost in transit. What the USPS calls UAA (undelivered as addressed). Meaning a fraction of voters are being silently disenfranchised every election.

IceMetalPunk 4y ago

I would counter by asking, "why do you trust paper voting?" As long as there are people in the process, there's room for corruption; that's just a fact you'll have to live with. With decent encryption, an electronic voting machine is at least as safe as paper ballots.