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You speak as if I'm advocating for e-voting systems over paper voting systems. I'm not. In general, most paper voting systems that are used in practice are more

You speak as if I'm advocating for e-voting systems over paper voting systems. I'm not. In general, most paper voting systems that are used in practice are more secure than most e-voting systems that are used in practice. > 1. Paper ballots are in some ways more ambigous, because there are many ways to scribble a sign into a circle, a fraction of which will not result in the intended outcome Look, I tried to cover all aspects of how the integrity of the voting results can be compromised. There are big issues, like a foreign superpower attempting to hack the results, and then there are small issues, like this one: people accidentally spoiling ballots. I'm struggling to understand why you feel the need to attack this minor point in my thesis with words like "ridiculous", "disingenuous" and "unscientific". Accidental spoiling is a real issue that happens and I even have a photograph of an ambiguously marked ballot in my thesis. > 2. Understanding these handwritten symbols is harder than understanding the electronic system, because of that ambiguity I wrote in Appendix B about how accidental spoiling could be resolved by adding electronics, but _only_ adding them to fix this specific issue (_not_ replacing the whole voting scheme with black box computers that can be hacked). When you say "the electronic system", it sounds to me like you are imagining something more. Let me try to illustrate this specific point from Appendix B. A) Fully paper system. You walk into a voting booth. You scribble down the number "7" on paper. You walk out of the booth and put the paper in the ballot box. Later some election official is counting the votes and they look at your scribble and they wonder, hmm, is this a "7" or is this a "1". Your vote is disqualified. B) Same system but augmented with simple electronics to prevent accidental spoiling. You walk into a voting booth. You scribble down the number "7" on paper. Inside the booth you insert your paper into a scanner which interprets your scribble and prints out a new paper that is supposed to contain your vote. You look at the new paper to verify how your vote is going to be interpreted and you see... what the heck, it's a "1"? Why is it a "1"? I wrote down "7"! So you take a new paper, and now you very clearly write down "7" on the new paper and scan it again. The computer now prints out a paper that has a "7" on it. Good. So now you walk out of the voting booth and then drop the paper with the computer-written "7" on it into the ballot box. See how B) is exactly the same system as A) except it offers voters the ability to see how their vote is going to be interpreted, before they cast the vote into the ballot box? The machine inside the booth doesn't have to be connected to the internet and it doesn't have to do anything more complex than read a number on a paper and then print the same number. If somebody hacks the machine to "misinterpret" votes, it will be caught very fast. > 4. Trust in voting systems does not primarily arise from understandability but from trust in other people. > And as computers can be reprogrammed, potentially remotely, even your experts can't be sure – especially in elections where powerful nation state actors seek to destroy the public trust in your election. This is a problem – just claiming that it isn't doesn't cut it. And people who claim that it isn't should not be the ones designing such systems. The whole point of a verifiable voting system is that you don't have to trust the election computers. Even if all the official computers are hacked by Russia, I can still run the data on my own machine to verify the results of the election. As long as there is one clean computer in the world and one nerd who cares, the truth will come out. And I'm not "just claiming that it is [verifiable]" - I wrote a whole thesis on these voting schemes. I did my best to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each scheme and as you can see in the comparison table, each scheme does have their weaknesses. A "perfect" verifiable voting scheme does not exist. That said, it sounds to me like you are imagining all electronic voting schemes to be "black box" schemes relying on blindly trusting both authorities and computers, and that is not the case at all. I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with at least one of these "verifiable" voting schemes before criticizing them. If you are interested in further discussing the specific weaknesses of a specific scheme which incorporates some electronic aspects, I would suggest that you read the description of "Floating Receipts" scheme from my thesis and then we can discuss specifics of that if you like.

atoav 2y ago
> You speak as if I'm advocating for e-voting systems over paper voting systems. I'm not. In general, most paper voting systems that are used in practice are more secure than most e-voting systems that are used in practice. Keep in mind that my point was specifically about high stakes elections and you reacted to it without making that limitation. Don't you think my conclusion about your comment follows kind of naturally from that context? I also would argue there is a niche for E-voting to exist, but it is the responsibility of us technically literate to make it very clear for which purposes it is not suitable and why. > There are big issues, like a foreign superpower attempting to hack the results, and then there are small issues, like this one: people accidentally spoiling ballots. The slowness and amount of people needed for the paper ballot is a feature not a bug as it makes wide scale attacks extremely complex, labour intensive and risky AND regular people (those that need to believe in the results!) can understand what is going on if they want to. This comes at the cost that the correctness of the result can be not always guarantueed. A huge number of spoiled ballots isn't necessarily a sign that people don't understand how to make a cross, it is a sign of protest and used as such. > Fully paper system. You walk into a voting booth. You scribble down the number "7" on paper. You walk out of the booth and put the paper in the ballot box. Later some election official is counting the votes and they look at your scribble and they wonder, hmm, is this a "7" or is this a "1". Your vote is disqualified. I have never seen an election where a vote isn't ticking or checking a ballot box, maybe this is different in Finland? Also: The elections I voted in, in 2 different countries always came with precise pictured instruction how a valid vote looks like and what would be invalid. I am not sure if I should be worried about the vote of people who fail to put an X into a box when given pictured instructions. This is a weakness with one specific implementation of a paper ballot, not a inherent weakness of the system. If we are to look for a good comparison we should compare the best way to do paper based elections to the best way to do it digitally and draw our comparisons from that. > See how B) is exactly the same system as A) except it offers voters the ability to see how their vote is going to be interpreted, before they cast the vote into the ballot box? This isn't without it's own risk either. Having worked with computer vision systems and programmed them I can tell you there is no 100% guarantuee that the result that air-gapped machine showed the voter in the voting both is the same as what is reached later – not even if we assume the exact same machine to be used for the count. Also: That isn't necessarily what I'd call a E-Voting system. > That said, it sounds to me like you are imagining all electronic voting schemes to be "black box" schemes relying on blindly trusting both authorities and computers No you get me wrong. What I said is that for the majority of the electorate it would be that way. I can readily imagine building an electronic voting system that I can trust – and maybe even one where independent experts would trust it. But that is the easy part. The hard part is building a system into which the bloke from the pub that struggled with undergraduate math and stopped thinking about it since he left school two decades ago can trust. And not just by trusting an authority, but by checking for himself. As much as I like the idea and challenge of such projects, I can't help put think that the inclusion of those who are less capable to understand is worth more than the potential gains in efficiency or interface-correctness of E-voting systems – especially if the fate of nations hinge on the fact that people trust it.

atoav 2y ago

> You speak as if I'm advocating for e-voting systems over paper voting systems. I'm not. In general, most paper voting systems that are used in practice are more secure than most e-voting systems that are used in practice. Keep in mind that my point was specifically about high stakes elections and you reacted to it without making that limitation. Don't you think my conclusion about your comment follows kind of naturally from that context? I also would argue there is a niche for E-voting to exist, but it is the responsibility of us technically literate to make it very clear for which purposes it is not suitable and why. > There are big issues, like a foreign superpower attempting to hack the results, and then there are small issues, like this one: people accidentally spoiling ballots. The slowness and amount of people needed for the paper ballot is a feature not a bug as it makes wide scale attacks extremely complex, labour intensive and risky AND regular people (those that need to believe in the results!) can understand what is going on if they want to. This comes at the cost that the correctness of the result can be not always guarantueed. A huge number of spoiled ballots isn't necessarily a sign that people don't understand how to make a cross, it is a sign of protest and used as such. > Fully paper system. You walk into a voting booth. You scribble down the number "7" on paper. You walk out of the booth and put the paper in the ballot box. Later some election official is counting the votes and they look at your scribble and they wonder, hmm, is this a "7" or is this a "1". Your vote is disqualified. I have never seen an election where a vote isn't ticking or checking a ballot box, maybe this is different in Finland? Also: The elections I voted in, in 2 different countries always came with precise pictured instruction how a valid vote looks like and what would be invalid. I am not sure if I should be worried about the vote of people who fail to put an X into a box when given pictured instructions. This is a weakness with one specific implementation of a paper ballot, not a inherent weakness of the system. If we are to look for a good comparison we should compare the best way to do paper based elections to the best way to do it digitally and draw our comparisons from that. > See how B) is exactly the same system as A) except it offers voters the ability to see how their vote is going to be interpreted, before they cast the vote into the ballot box? This isn't without it's own risk either. Having worked with computer vision systems and programmed them I can tell you there is no 100% guarantuee that the result that air-gapped machine showed the voter in the voting both is the same as what is reached later – not even if we assume the exact same machine to be used for the count. Also: That isn't necessarily what I'd call a E-Voting system. > That said, it sounds to me like you are imagining all electronic voting schemes to be "black box" schemes relying on blindly trusting both authorities and computers No you get me wrong. What I said is that for the majority of the electorate it would be that way. I can readily imagine building an electronic voting system that I can trust – and maybe even one where independent experts would trust it. But that is the easy part. The hard part is building a system into which the bloke from the pub that struggled with undergraduate math and stopped thinking about it since he left school two decades ago can trust. And not just by trusting an authority, but by checking for himself. As much as I like the idea and challenge of such projects, I can't help put think that the inclusion of those who are less capable to understand is worth more than the potential gains in efficiency or interface-correctness of E-voting systems – especially if the fate of nations hinge on the fact that people trust it.