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In traditional voting, the votes get counted by humans, supervised by other humans. If you want to spend the time and energy, you can be one of those humans. I
by tsimionescu 2y ago
In traditional voting, the votes get counted by humans, supervised by other humans. If you want to spend the time and energy, you can be one of those humans.
It's completely different from a machine count. Humans have human failure modes, which are easily accounted for. Machines have random failure modes, and complex ways of being attacked. And all of the machines can be wrong in one direction at the same time, which is impossible for human counters.
Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.
- gruez 2y ago>Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked. That's theoretically a possibility, but it's trivially defeated by choosing which ballot boxes to spot check after the machines have finished counting.
- tsimionescu 2y agoFair enough, but there is also another problem. What happens if you detect a discrepancy in one or two places, but good results in many others? Do you still issue a full recount of all places that the machine was used? If not, then an adversary can still subtly modify the results of the election, at least probabilistically.