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I spent a few years in Ireland and the Netherlands lobbying against insecure voting machines. I had so many conversations with politicians and civil servants wh

I spent a few years in Ireland and the Netherlands lobbying against insecure voting machines. I had so many conversations with politicians and civil servants where these effects were in abundance. In each country I was representing a group that included the most eminent and experienced computer scientists in the country. Whenever we briefed someone for the first time, it would only take a minute or two to cover how without a voter-verified paper audit trail, no-one knew how to build a system that provided anonymity, verifiability, and resistance to voter coercion and vote selling. But it just never clicked, so many of them refused to believe that we couldn't simply "nerd harder". And of course, there was no shortage of charlatans who would tell them that they could solve it. In Ireland, we put enough pressure on the politicians for them to create a cross-body commission to investigate. Because anyone could make detailed submissions, and because the commission treated these submissions like the clerks of the Supreme Court treat amicus briefs; it was pretty effective. The commission ended up pausing, and ultimately abandoning, the rollout. Ever since I've learned to appreciate any avenues to "de-politicize" a controversy and get it to that kind of body.

jacquesm 3y ago
That means you know Rop :)
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
How did you get that body accepted as an idea as opposed to a "kick into the long grass" solution?
kemotep 3y ago
The verifiability is the biggest one. One could conceivably develop a voting system that had perfect accountability, secrecy, and integrity, but would be far far more difficult to work out by hand. A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  Fist off where I've voted they switched from punched cards to scanning paper ballots. It's all typically run by three middle aged women with a printed book of who's registered to vote. You just tell the first one your name and they find your entry and you sign next to it. The next one hands you a scantron sheet. You mark it up. The the third one feeds your sheets into the machine as you watch. Machine records your votes and drops the sheets into a bin in the machine. That's a system I trust and it has the positive of civic engagement. And fundamentally it's not broken. You now also have the option of mailing in a ballot. That's easier to corrupt I'm sure. But at least it's still paper. All the fully computerized systems seem really really sketchy to me. Especially in low trust cultures where underhanded stuff is normalized.
  - dividedbyzero 3y ago
    Couldn't the Scantron display one thing and record another? If the paper ballots aren't manually recounted, would anyone ever know?
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      The big thing is you can do audit with original documents created by the voter themselves. Which is the problem with all the 100% electronic systems. You can't because the voter doesn't create a master copy of his vote.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems. Sometimes, it's about efficiency as well. I've been a ballot worker here in Germany for the 14 years since I was eligible. There are simple elections: electing a mayor, for example. You have a ton of DIN A4 paper sheets, but you simply sort them into heaps, count the heaps, and you're done. These don't really benefit from computerizing them, other than speed, but even for a larger polling station, you're done in an hour or two. Then there are more complex elections, like the German Bundestag, where you have two votes on one DIN A4 sheet: the "Erststimme", where you vote for the directly elected representative of your district, is just as easy to count as the mayoral elections. But then you have to go through all the ballot papers again to count the "Zweitstimme", where you vote for the party lists that make up the other half of the Bundestag. While most people vote the same in both where you can short circuit during the first phase of sorting, IME around half the people vote different (say, they vote for the SPD candidate in primary because he's the one that will most likely have success over the CDU conservative, but in secondary vote they vote Greens or Left), so it's still a sizable amount of paper you have to touch twice. And then there are the horrors: the European Parliament election [1] or regional/city elections [2], where each ballot paper can reach almost 1 m² in size making them very difficult to handle, and you have a ton of ways to distribute your votes across parties ("Panachage" [3] and others), so for the (again) about half of people actually using the complex distribution you have to painstakingly check and count votes. Having these computerized would eliminate so much trouble, particularly as there's always 5-10% of voters who mess up their maths, rendering sections or their entire vote void. And counting these can last for days of very mentally intensive work. On top of that come specialized voting schemes such as ranked choice and its countless variants, where some are very difficult to execute without having a computer that can run through vote combinations as a batch job. [1] https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckerei-fertigt-wahlzettel-fuer-ganz-bayern-7496285 https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckere... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-wahlzettel-kolumne-1.4839361 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
hu3 3y ago
You should go to Brazil and try your luck there: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-voting-critics-brazil-suspends-use-of-all-paper-ballots/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-v... From what I gather they banned any paper trail verification. Putting 100% trust in digital registry of the votes. Must be the first unhackable system in history. /s
- sulunia 3y ago
  There is obviously no such thing as unhackable systems, but when people mention Brazilian elections and it's voting systems, it's incredible how everyone assumes it's a system developed/reviewed/audited by unexperienced people.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Besides, criticizing the system is currently de-facto a crime that can lend you in jail.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
at_a_remove 3y ago
That "nerd harder" thing is something I keep coming across in the professional world and it is something of a paradox. It comes from someone who knows you are intelligent and more knowledgeable in a given area than they are, and who wants you to solve their problem, but they are unwilling to accept that your intelligence/knowledge extends to whether or not something can or cannot be done reasonably (Reasonable here being excluding things which are technically possible, such as lifting Rhode Island into some kind of Earth orbit, but aren't really quite feasible or practical). One guy I worked for had a bad habit of starting unicorn hunts and a lot of "this looks easy from fifty thousand feet" foolishness with the phrase, "I know you're real smart but ..." and whatever followed was more a statement of how convenient it would be if something were true, rather than if it were true, possible, and so on. Nerd harder, nerds.
- mojo74 3y ago
  The single sign on https://thedailywtf.com/articles/classic-wtf-the-single-sign-on https://thedailywtf.com/articles/classic-wtf-the-single-sign...
- TheCapeGreek 3y ago
  I had a boss who wanted to learn how to decrypt another apps' data on a phone in order to access sensitive information. I told him it wouldn't work, since that defeats the purpose of encrypting that data if we don't own that app. What did he do? Installed Android Studio on an i3 laptop and tried to use the emulator with some random tutorial from some MITM app that claimed it could do the job. Then linked me some other tools that explicitly said they couldn't do this outside of device emulation or rooting the device.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  My favorite statistics quote by John Tukey seems relevant - "The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data."
hakunin 3y ago
I gotta admit, perhaps a bit naive of me, that the concept of "tech charlatans" didn't click for me until now. It's true, they are out there, and I see it now. I mean, I know there are phone scammers, but they probably been there before tech. I know there are hackers writing viruses and exploits, but those are oftentimes talented people doing bad things. However, this comment, and a couple recent experiences really drove "tech charlatans" home. One experience was a trip to a crypto conference. Many booths were making unsubstantiated, impossible claims. If you tried to ask how, they couldn't answer. Like, someone would say they made transactions instantaneous, and when I asked how they solved the problems of unpredictable networks, they'd have no answer. It got pretty frustrating. I had to dig through a few claims like these only to be convinced that they're selling snake oil. Another (less recent) experience was looking through a spreadsheet of government approved innovation/research grants. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Many of the entries seemed to make absolutely no sense, purposefully using buzzwords to sound smart, but having no meaning when unpacked. Buzzword salads. These are funded projects. And to get more money on round 2, all the "innovators" had to do is show any activity, which is very easy to fake. So yes, tech charlatans. I'm a bit on the old school side of tech, and this gives me cognitive dissonance. I'm used to thinking of software devs/engineers as honest/creative/driven, but I guess this was always inevitable. Our field is very exploitable, because many people put their livelihood in tech, while knowing very little about it.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Well, nobody likes being called a charlatan and you have to be careful with that accusation. Case in point: this article. I hate it because the argument he makes is correct and useful until the end, when he tries to claim that giving certain government agencies access to encrypted messengers is impossible without giving it to all of them "because maths". This is a good example of tech charlatanism and it's the sort of thing that will hurt our industry a lot in the long run. It's why lawmakers often end up not listening to us. There is nothing that stops tech firms doing exactly what they're being asked to do. Every claim otherwise is obfuscation because tech firms don't want to do it, mostly because of their internal internationalist politics where they don't want to be forced to pick sides and tell some governments "sorry, we're Anglos who choose to give the US/UK governments special access that you don't get because we're better than you". It's an example of the first kind of no, not the third kind. End-to-end encryption is a vipers nest of false claims like this. There's lots of ways to implement such policies, like this: for each message that's being encrypted, you encrypt it under a per-message key which is then itself encrypted under the recipient's key, and also a police (public) key. The servers forward the messages to the police so they can decrypt them. If the decryption fails too often (hacked client) then that user is denied access to the network. Yes yes I know that WhatsApp/Signal and friends use a more complex protocol, that description is a simplified textbook example, but the argument doesn't change. Cryptography is a very flexible set of tools. They can easily be used to achieve complex security goals, like empowering some parties whilst disempowering others. The resistance to doing this is legitimate and I even agree with it, but it's also political and not technological. When politicians push back and insist that their police should have access to WhatsApp, and get told it's impossible, well they are not all stupid and correctly conclude they're being bullshitted. Indeed some of the MPs in the UK have computer science degrees. Fact is, buzzword salads can be used to baffle people and get them to agree with you even if you're wrong. Technologists are especially tempted to abuse them when they want to say "no" to make a Type 1 No seem like a Type 3 No. Researchers do the same thing all the time, your complaints about grant funding are as old as the hills. Honest specialists speak clearly even when they might benefit from speaking unclearly.
loupol 3y ago
I feel compelled to mention the still very relevant xkcd on voting software: https://xkcd.com/2030 https://xkcd.com/2030
c7b 3y ago
> resistance to voter coercion and vote selling Thanks for mentioning that issue, it's something that I don't hear mentioned enough in online/distance voting debates (maybe it just means that I'm not involved enough, but anyway good to hear this mentioned). It's so critical and at the same time fairly orthogonal to all the encryption / zero-knowledge proofs / quantum resistance and other cool math that nerds love to nerd about.
- amenghra 3y ago
  note: there's e-voting where you go vote at a voting booth and enter your ballot in a machine (with the advantage that the votes can be tallied faster) and there's e-voting where you use your browser or an app on your phone to vote remotely. People tend to conflate these two things but they are quite different. Each one has their own set of problems/challenges. On top of the voting infrastructure itself, you also have to think about how to prevent people from being denied the right to vote, how to prevent issuing two votes, etc., etc. Voting infrastructure and logistics (whether electronic or not) can be very complex.
- astrange 3y ago
  There are downsides to being too against those things, because it'd ban at-home mail-in voting, and having that is worth a lot of downsides because it lets everyone actually look up what they're voting on. Not to mention, if everyone has to travel to vote, you're mostly going to get retirees and people with a lot of free time voting.
  - idle76 3y ago
    Which is solvable by having enough voting stations spread out, and making voting day a national holiday or done on a sunday.
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      While I wouldn't object, it's not necessary. Voting in the UK is always on Thursdays IIRC, but there's lots of polling stations and they open early and close late. Queues are usually only a few minutes. However postal and proxy votes are still available
entropyie 3y ago
I remember that time, it was the only time in my life I was ever concerned enough to call into Ireland's most popular radio show "Joe Duffy", to raise my concerns about the rollout... They described me on air as a "computer expert against e-voting" ;-) I think I was a CompSci student at the time, but close enough... As I recall a lot of ordinary folks were for it originally, until the pitfalls were raised.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  You talked to Joe! The Joe Duffy show is quite strange, because I've heard people of all ages and all demographics calling into it. It really is the way the nation talks to itself. Or, at least, it was, when I was listening ... fifteen years or so ago.
  - entropyie 3y ago
    Yep, this was circa 2002...
jeroenhd 3y ago
The thing about voting machines is that they can work, as long as they also provide a paper trail that determines the actual result of an election or referendum. This means initial results will be available quickly, followed by actual results a day or two later. This takes the pressure off the counting process which should help prevent miscounts. They solve the real problem of unintentionally spoiled ballots. However, I don't think the concept of voting machines is entirely incompatible as long as we keep the paper trail authoritative. I have had to explain the obvious flaws in electronic voting to various family members ("why can't we just vote online with our government login" being the most common one). When blockchain bullshit started appearing in public media, people started pretending like they finally found a problem that blockchains solve, only to quickly be shut down again soon after. I don't think people are aware of how many layers of protections the voting system has and how well thought-out it is. Every year naive politicians try to call for modernisation, and every year they find out that paper voting is actually the best option we have been able to come up with.
- abacadaba 3y ago
  Blockchains with zk proofs fix this tho.
- philjohn 3y ago
  That's literally how Dominion voting machines work. And hand recounts are only for verification, you shouldn't rely on them because they're far less accurate.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    > And hand recounts are only for verification, you shouldn't rely on them because they're far less accurate. Voting machines can be altered. Go to any big hacker conference and you can learn how to hack the common models in thirty seconds. Humans may be fallible, but I'll always trust those fallible humans over anything automated.
    - philjohn 3y ago
mbar84 3y ago
I've come to the conclusion that the only way to convince these people that voting machines are a bad idea is to actually engage in election manipulation and then uncover it after the election has already been accepted. Consequences are the only thing they understand.
dalore 3y ago
Could one not still do voter coercion and vote selling using the existing postal vote system? You get people to do a postal vote, and they show you what they are voting for and you pay them, take away the ballot and post it yourself (or threaten them and do the same thing)

jacquesm 3y ago

That means you know Rop :)

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

How did you get that body accepted as an idea as opposed to a "kick into the long grass" solution?

kemotep 3y ago

The verifiability is the biggest one. One could conceivably develop a voting system that had perfect accountability, secrecy, and integrity, but would be far far more difficult to work out by hand. A zero knowledge roll up is not something your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems.

Gibbon1 3y ago
Fist off where I've voted they switched from punched cards to scanning paper ballots. It's all typically run by three middle aged women with a printed book of who's registered to vote. You just tell the first one your name and they find your entry and you sign next to it. The next one hands you a scantron sheet. You mark it up. The the third one feeds your sheets into the machine as you watch. Machine records your votes and drops the sheets into a bin in the machine. That's a system I trust and it has the positive of civic engagement. And fundamentally it's not broken. You now also have the option of mailing in a ballot. That's easier to corrupt I'm sure. But at least it's still paper. All the fully computerized systems seem really really sketchy to me. Especially in low trust cultures where underhanded stuff is normalized.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  Couldn't the Scantron display one thing and record another? If the paper ballots aren't manually recounted, would anyone ever know?
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    The big thing is you can do audit with original documents created by the voter themselves. Which is the problem with all the 100% electronic systems. You can't because the voter doesn't create a master copy of his vote.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Paper ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we desire in election systems. Sometimes, it's about efficiency as well. I've been a ballot worker here in Germany for the 14 years since I was eligible. There are simple elections: electing a mayor, for example. You have a ton of DIN A4 paper sheets, but you simply sort them into heaps, count the heaps, and you're done. These don't really benefit from computerizing them, other than speed, but even for a larger polling station, you're done in an hour or two. Then there are more complex elections, like the German Bundestag, where you have two votes on one DIN A4 sheet: the "Erststimme", where you vote for the directly elected representative of your district, is just as easy to count as the mayoral elections. But then you have to go through all the ballot papers again to count the "Zweitstimme", where you vote for the party lists that make up the other half of the Bundestag. While most people vote the same in both where you can short circuit during the first phase of sorting, IME around half the people vote different (say, they vote for the SPD candidate in primary because he's the one that will most likely have success over the CDU conservative, but in secondary vote they vote Greens or Left), so it's still a sizable amount of paper you have to touch twice. And then there are the horrors: the European Parliament election [1] or regional/city elections [2], where each ballot paper can reach almost 1 m² in size making them very difficult to handle, and you have a ton of ways to distribute your votes across parties ("Panachage" [3] and others), so for the (again) about half of people actually using the complex distribution you have to painstakingly check and count votes. Having these computerized would eliminate so much trouble, particularly as there's always 5-10% of voters who mess up their maths, rendering sections or their entire vote void. And counting these can last for days of very mentally intensive work. On top of that come specialized voting schemes such as ranked choice and its countless variants, where some are very difficult to execute without having a computer that can run through vote combinations as a batch job. [1] https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckerei-fertigt-wahlzettel-fuer-ganz-bayern-7496285 https://www.pnp.de/archiv/1/europawahl-altoettinger-druckere... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-wahlzettel-kolumne-1.4839361 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/kommunalwahl-muenchen-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting

hu3 3y ago

You should go to Brazil and try your luck there: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-voting-critics-brazil-suspends-use-of-all-paper-ballots/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-v... From what I gather they banned any paper trail verification. Putting 100% trust in digital registry of the votes. Must be the first unhackable system in history. /s

sulunia 3y ago
There is obviously no such thing as unhackable systems, but when people mention Brazilian elections and it's voting systems, it's incredible how everyone assumes it's a system developed/reviewed/audited by unexperienced people.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Besides, criticizing the system is currently de-facto a crime that can lend you in jail.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

at_a_remove 3y ago

That "nerd harder" thing is something I keep coming across in the professional world and it is something of a paradox. It comes from someone who knows you are intelligent and more knowledgeable in a given area than they are, and who wants you to solve their problem, but they are unwilling to accept that your intelligence/knowledge extends to whether or not something can or cannot be done reasonably (Reasonable here being excluding things which are technically possible, such as lifting Rhode Island into some kind of Earth orbit, but aren't really quite feasible or practical). One guy I worked for had a bad habit of starting unicorn hunts and a lot of "this looks easy from fifty thousand feet" foolishness with the phrase, "I know you're real smart but ..." and whatever followed was more a statement of how convenient it would be if something were true, rather than if it were true, possible, and so on. Nerd harder, nerds.

mojo74 3y ago
The single sign on https://thedailywtf.com/articles/classic-wtf-the-single-sign-on https://thedailywtf.com/articles/classic-wtf-the-single-sign...
TheCapeGreek 3y ago
I had a boss who wanted to learn how to decrypt another apps' data on a phone in order to access sensitive information. I told him it wouldn't work, since that defeats the purpose of encrypting that data if we don't own that app. What did he do? Installed Android Studio on an i3 laptop and tried to use the emulator with some random tutorial from some MITM app that claimed it could do the job. Then linked me some other tools that explicitly said they couldn't do this outside of device emulation or rooting the device.
PeterisP 3y ago
My favorite statistics quote by John Tukey seems relevant - "The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data."

hakunin 3y ago

I gotta admit, perhaps a bit naive of me, that the concept of "tech charlatans" didn't click for me until now. It's true, they are out there, and I see it now. I mean, I know there are phone scammers, but they probably been there before tech. I know there are hackers writing viruses and exploits, but those are oftentimes talented people doing bad things. However, this comment, and a couple recent experiences really drove "tech charlatans" home. One experience was a trip to a crypto conference. Many booths were making unsubstantiated, impossible claims. If you tried to ask how, they couldn't answer. Like, someone would say they made transactions instantaneous, and when I asked how they solved the problems of unpredictable networks, they'd have no answer. It got pretty frustrating. I had to dig through a few claims like these only to be convinced that they're selling snake oil. Another (less recent) experience was looking through a spreadsheet of government approved innovation/research grants. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Many of the entries seemed to make absolutely no sense, purposefully using buzzwords to sound smart, but having no meaning when unpacked. Buzzword salads. These are funded projects. And to get more money on round 2, all the "innovators" had to do is show any activity, which is very easy to fake. So yes, tech charlatans. I'm a bit on the old school side of tech, and this gives me cognitive dissonance. I'm used to thinking of software devs/engineers as honest/creative/driven, but I guess this was always inevitable. Our field is very exploitable, because many people put their livelihood in tech, while knowing very little about it.

nvm0n2 3y ago
Well, nobody likes being called a charlatan and you have to be careful with that accusation. Case in point: this article. I hate it because the argument he makes is correct and useful until the end, when he tries to claim that giving certain government agencies access to encrypted messengers is impossible without giving it to all of them "because maths". This is a good example of tech charlatanism and it's the sort of thing that will hurt our industry a lot in the long run. It's why lawmakers often end up not listening to us. There is nothing that stops tech firms doing exactly what they're being asked to do. Every claim otherwise is obfuscation because tech firms don't want to do it, mostly because of their internal internationalist politics where they don't want to be forced to pick sides and tell some governments "sorry, we're Anglos who choose to give the US/UK governments special access that you don't get because we're better than you". It's an example of the first kind of no, not the third kind. End-to-end encryption is a vipers nest of false claims like this. There's lots of ways to implement such policies, like this: for each message that's being encrypted, you encrypt it under a per-message key which is then itself encrypted under the recipient's key, and also a police (public) key. The servers forward the messages to the police so they can decrypt them. If the decryption fails too often (hacked client) then that user is denied access to the network. Yes yes I know that WhatsApp/Signal and friends use a more complex protocol, that description is a simplified textbook example, but the argument doesn't change. Cryptography is a very flexible set of tools. They can easily be used to achieve complex security goals, like empowering some parties whilst disempowering others. The resistance to doing this is legitimate and I even agree with it, but it's also political and not technological. When politicians push back and insist that their police should have access to WhatsApp, and get told it's impossible, well they are not all stupid and correctly conclude they're being bullshitted. Indeed some of the MPs in the UK have computer science degrees. Fact is, buzzword salads can be used to baffle people and get them to agree with you even if you're wrong. Technologists are especially tempted to abuse them when they want to say "no" to make a Type 1 No seem like a Type 3 No. Researchers do the same thing all the time, your complaints about grant funding are as old as the hills. Honest specialists speak clearly even when they might benefit from speaking unclearly.

loupol 3y ago

I feel compelled to mention the still very relevant xkcd on voting software: https://xkcd.com/2030 https://xkcd.com/2030

c7b 3y ago

> resistance to voter coercion and vote selling Thanks for mentioning that issue, it's something that I don't hear mentioned enough in online/distance voting debates (maybe it just means that I'm not involved enough, but anyway good to hear this mentioned). It's so critical and at the same time fairly orthogonal to all the encryption / zero-knowledge proofs / quantum resistance and other cool math that nerds love to nerd about.

amenghra 3y ago
note: there's e-voting where you go vote at a voting booth and enter your ballot in a machine (with the advantage that the votes can be tallied faster) and there's e-voting where you use your browser or an app on your phone to vote remotely. People tend to conflate these two things but they are quite different. Each one has their own set of problems/challenges. On top of the voting infrastructure itself, you also have to think about how to prevent people from being denied the right to vote, how to prevent issuing two votes, etc., etc. Voting infrastructure and logistics (whether electronic or not) can be very complex.
astrange 3y ago
There are downsides to being too against those things, because it'd ban at-home mail-in voting, and having that is worth a lot of downsides because it lets everyone actually look up what they're voting on. Not to mention, if everyone has to travel to vote, you're mostly going to get retirees and people with a lot of free time voting.
- idle76 3y ago
  Which is solvable by having enough voting stations spread out, and making voting day a national holiday or done on a sunday.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    While I wouldn't object, it's not necessary. Voting in the UK is always on Thursdays IIRC, but there's lots of polling stations and they open early and close late. Queues are usually only a few minutes. However postal and proxy votes are still available

entropyie 3y ago

I remember that time, it was the only time in my life I was ever concerned enough to call into Ireland's most popular radio show "Joe Duffy", to raise my concerns about the rollout... They described me on air as a "computer expert against e-voting" ;-) I think I was a CompSci student at the time, but close enough... As I recall a lot of ordinary folks were for it originally, until the pitfalls were raised.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
You talked to Joe! The Joe Duffy show is quite strange, because I've heard people of all ages and all demographics calling into it. It really is the way the nation talks to itself. Or, at least, it was, when I was listening ... fifteen years or so ago.
- entropyie 3y ago
  Yep, this was circa 2002...

jeroenhd 3y ago

The thing about voting machines is that they can work, as long as they also provide a paper trail that determines the actual result of an election or referendum. This means initial results will be available quickly, followed by actual results a day or two later. This takes the pressure off the counting process which should help prevent miscounts. They solve the real problem of unintentionally spoiled ballots. However, I don't think the concept of voting machines is entirely incompatible as long as we keep the paper trail authoritative. I have had to explain the obvious flaws in electronic voting to various family members ("why can't we just vote online with our government login" being the most common one). When blockchain bullshit started appearing in public media, people started pretending like they finally found a problem that blockchains solve, only to quickly be shut down again soon after. I don't think people are aware of how many layers of protections the voting system has and how well thought-out it is. Every year naive politicians try to call for modernisation, and every year they find out that paper voting is actually the best option we have been able to come up with.

abacadaba 3y ago
Blockchains with zk proofs fix this tho.
philjohn 3y ago
That's literally how Dominion voting machines work. And hand recounts are only for verification, you shouldn't rely on them because they're far less accurate.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  > And hand recounts are only for verification, you shouldn't rely on them because they're far less accurate. Voting machines can be altered. Go to any big hacker conference and you can learn how to hack the common models in thirty seconds. Humans may be fallible, but I'll always trust those fallible humans over anything automated.
  - philjohn 3y ago

mbar84 3y ago

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to convince these people that voting machines are a bad idea is to actually engage in election manipulation and then uncover it after the election has already been accepted. Consequences are the only thing they understand.

dalore 3y ago

Could one not still do voter coercion and vote selling using the existing postal vote system? You get people to do a postal vote, and they show you what they are voting for and you pay them, take away the ballot and post it yourself (or threaten them and do the same thing)