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Voting is a human trust problem. More people can understand voting with paper and pencil than computers. And this is mostly because everyone knows someone who's

Voting is a human trust problem. More people can understand voting with paper and pencil than computers. And this is mostly because everyone knows someone who's been ripped off online with no recourse. No one really trusts computers. Pencil and paper solves the trust issue. And the issues of security around paper voting such as it's security, lots of guards, public counts etc, costing a bit more, are better understood than SSL, layer 1,2,3,4 securities, and verifiable systems.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>And this is mostly because everyone knows someone who's been ripped off online with no recourse. No one really trusts computers. Online scams are a human problem, not a computer problem. People also get scammed via telephone. If someone asks you for your CC number and you give it to them, then the medium is not that important.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Our current technology encourages human misunderstanding. There’s nothing in the human evolution that would prepare us for nonstop phishing attacks. It absolutely is a computer failure because we haven’t changed, they have.
meowfly 3y ago
I think you make a good point. Purely from the public trust perspective, paper and pencil seems so simple it makes people trust the system is secure. If the claim is it's cryptographically impossible for this system to be cheated, most of us would still have to trust the experts making those claims. However, it's beyond simply the public needing simple systems; the number of experts that would be required to lie about the certainty of a system is low enough that you really do create a less secure system. Paper ballots are harder to cheat because the systems scale in a way that you require more people in on the heist, which is the hardest part of any scam.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Additionally, paper voting is easy to administer. Anyone can volunteer to administer a paper-based election and understand all the processes involved. The same can't be said about black-box cryptographic magic. Scrutability and accessibility go a long way in establishing trust. Putting elections behind technical complexity does the opposite.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>And this is mostly because everyone knows someone who's been ripped off online with no recourse. No one really trusts computers. Online scams are a human problem, not a computer problem. People also get scammed via telephone. If someone asks you for your CC number and you give it to them, then the medium is not that important.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Our current technology encourages human misunderstanding. There’s nothing in the human evolution that would prepare us for nonstop phishing attacks. It absolutely is a computer failure because we haven’t changed, they have.

meowfly 3y ago

I think you make a good point. Purely from the public trust perspective, paper and pencil seems so simple it makes people trust the system is secure. If the claim is it's cryptographically impossible for this system to be cheated, most of us would still have to trust the experts making those claims. However, it's beyond simply the public needing simple systems; the number of experts that would be required to lie about the certainty of a system is low enough that you really do create a less secure system. Paper ballots are harder to cheat because the systems scale in a way that you require more people in on the heist, which is the hardest part of any scam.

the_snooze 3y ago
Additionally, paper voting is easy to administer. Anyone can volunteer to administer a paper-based election and understand all the processes involved. The same can't be said about black-box cryptographic magic. Scrutability and accessibility go a long way in establishing trust. Putting elections behind technical complexity does the opposite.