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Question to any HNers who support electronic voting - do you have any criticisms of Tom Scott’s (two) videos against electronic voting? Videos - https://youtu.

Question to any HNers who support electronic voting - do you have any criticisms of Tom Scott’s (two) videos against electronic voting? Videos - https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs?si=INtv6_sr7_V5oxh7 https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs?si=INtv6_sr7_V5oxh7 (3 years old) & https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=vwx5xpqX3i1SVqVN https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI?si=vwx5xpqX3i1SVqVN (8 years old). (Maybe excluding the “use electronic machines for quick results and have paper votes to for a slower, “official” result” argument.)

deleted 3y ago
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gchamonlive 3y ago
The key point is attack scalability, not that either voting system is inherently superior in terms of anonymity and transparency. In Brazil, each voting machine is sealed off, air gapped. The only attack vector is in transit, when the votes for each machine are being transmitted to the regional electoral center, which then announces its results for the region. So it is possible to scale an attack if you somehow had the actor had access to the data in transit and was able to decode, tamper and sign the results again before reaching the regions servers. This for each region. So yeah, while it is possible, I don't think this scales as well as people would think. No election in Brazil had any proof of tampering up to this day. Take that as you may, you can attack me personally, you can question the government's data, you can put in check how we even audit the system, but in decades of the system there isn't any hard evidence of large scale compromise of the electoral system. Having said all that, I think all this talk serves more as a smoke screen for more pressing issues of large scale social manipulation through social media and fake news. My question then is why would anyone in their right mind attempt to compromise the electoral system itself if it is so much more effective to just manipulate public opinion by jeopardising traditional media trust, flooding message systems with fake news sources, use prominent political figures to spread anti-democratic ideas and leverage social media algorithms to radicalize voters?
- rjmunro 3y ago
  What about before the machines are sealed off and air gapped? What stops tampering with the software in advance? As long as something about the configuration lets you know it's a real election, your payload can be triggered.
rjmunro 3y ago
I think electronic OCR sorting machines are OK, where you put one pile of paper in and get multiple piles out, e.g. Republican, Democrat, Other / Errors. You can quickly flick through the piles and check they are all the right candidate. You can quickly see the size of the piles, so you can be fairly sure right away that the count is correct. If things are close, you can recount and verify the piles manually. Anything that doesn't do that (even electronic counting of paper ballots) cannot be trusted.

deleted 3y ago

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gchamonlive 3y ago

The key point is attack scalability, not that either voting system is inherently superior in terms of anonymity and transparency. In Brazil, each voting machine is sealed off, air gapped. The only attack vector is in transit, when the votes for each machine are being transmitted to the regional electoral center, which then announces its results for the region. So it is possible to scale an attack if you somehow had the actor had access to the data in transit and was able to decode, tamper and sign the results again before reaching the regions servers. This for each region. So yeah, while it is possible, I don't think this scales as well as people would think. No election in Brazil had any proof of tampering up to this day. Take that as you may, you can attack me personally, you can question the government's data, you can put in check how we even audit the system, but in decades of the system there isn't any hard evidence of large scale compromise of the electoral system. Having said all that, I think all this talk serves more as a smoke screen for more pressing issues of large scale social manipulation through social media and fake news. My question then is why would anyone in their right mind attempt to compromise the electoral system itself if it is so much more effective to just manipulate public opinion by jeopardising traditional media trust, flooding message systems with fake news sources, use prominent political figures to spread anti-democratic ideas and leverage social media algorithms to radicalize voters?

rjmunro 3y ago
What about before the machines are sealed off and air gapped? What stops tampering with the software in advance? As long as something about the configuration lets you know it's a real election, your payload can be triggered.

rjmunro 3y ago

I think electronic OCR sorting machines are OK, where you put one pile of paper in and get multiple piles out, e.g. Republican, Democrat, Other / Errors. You can quickly flick through the piles and check they are all the right candidate. You can quickly see the size of the piles, so you can be fairly sure right away that the count is correct. If things are close, you can recount and verify the piles manually. Anything that doesn't do that (even electronic counting of paper ballots) cannot be trusted.