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Computers anywhere in the vote casting process introduce new, additional failure modes. These modes may be intentional (hacking) or unintentional (misconfiguri
by efitz 2y ago
Computers anywhere in the vote casting process introduce new, additional failure modes. These modes may be intentional (hacking) or unintentional (misconfiguring the paper size of the ballots). They may be mundane (power failure, out of ink) or esoteric (logic error). Even computerized counting has a nonzero error rate (so does human counting, but that can be challenged by human observers).
Computers add cost for acquiring the computers and training the staff. Computers add complexity and complexity usually reduces the reliability of a process. In a process like voting, that also reduces confidence in the process. This and the cost alone make it unclear why anyone would want to spend the money to electronicize vote casting and counting.
People have been voting without benefit of electronics for thousands of years.
In the vast majority of countries where paper ballots are used and counted by hand, the count is almost invariably completed the day of the election.
Conversely, in the US, where we spend lots of money to acquire, maintain and operate computers to “assist” in voting and vote counting, now we have many jurisdictions who say that they cannot complete counting on Election Day.
It boggles my mind that anyone still supports involving computers in vote casting and counting.
- pluto_modadic 2y agoscanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY more error prone than computers at counting.
- ethbr1 2y agoSeriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning and counting systems here is surprising. I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean all systems have to be incredibly complex. Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on electronic systems: something that's completely impossible with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or the people auditing them). If you're careful, you can be sure that only specific code is executing. I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized voting systems, from programming professionals, by programming speciality. I have a suspicion you'd get different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to pick a couple of examples.
- aesh2Xa1 2y ago> Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans. Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money. Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?
- vacuity 2y agoBecause the current implementations for ballots don't feel up to snuff, and I at least don't trust profit-driven companies to make "simple computerized systems" that are auditable and whatnot. Get a good solution in place for many election cycles and then we can all be happy.
- blibble 2y agoso then the attack becomes introducing enough error at critical counts such that it affects the result without being regarded as having been tampered with pretty easy if your company produced the machines
- Sparkle-san 2y agoHow would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?
- blibble 2y agowhat's the failure point? then you work inside that I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that produced food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign his entire job was to allow the company to push up as close to that line as possible without going over when checked randomly saving them tens of millions a year
- Sparkle-san 2y agoDepends on how many ballots you sample, but the number you could change would only matter in an extremely close election and in my state, if a vote is within 0.5%, it triggers an automatic recount. These systems have layers of auditing and validation to prevent these errors whether intentional or not.
- ninkendo 2y agoRandom audits can generally solve this. Take a random count from a random machine and validate that it matches the hand count. If I’m trying to rig an election I would have to be very reckless to just cross my fingers and hope that the systems I hacked aren’t audited. I’d have to bribe the auditors or something, and at that point it’s simpler to just bribe people anyway and not bother with the whole hacking part.
- irq-1 2y agoScanned paper ballots are changed all the time -- the manufacturer doesn't know that row 2 option 1 is a particular candidate. Authorities aren't stupid and know to change the ballots and test the machines. Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it has a lot of trust.
- joedevon 2y agoNot sure if this is a "thing" or if there's a problem with it, but why not live-stream video of every vote being counted so the entire population could validate at least the counting portion of voting.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoWith encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't we do some basic anti-fraud measures? Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be randomly generated. So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The ballot is scanned with a scantron.
- secabeen 2y agoIt's important to recognize that the US system involves many more races and questions on the ballot than in other (especially parliamentary) systems. Electronic-free counting in many states would significantly extend counting times; many voters have 20+ choices to make, and each of these choices would have to be counted and tracked, which introduces failure modes of their own. Counting by hand makes sense when each ballot paper has one race; when each ballot has 25 items, using robust optical scan systems common in testing makes sense. Electronic systems also open new options for improved accessibility, as long as all systems produce a physical record, ideally that is counted as itself, rather than a receipt for an electronic count.
- vlovich123 2y agoI would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out. And there’s too many elections - non presidential year elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is paying attention. Parliamentary systems are the only democratic systems I’m aware of that ever features more than 2 parties in a FPTP system as well.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoI find it interesting that all the countries that the US "helped" to democratize all end up with a parliamentary system instead of the US system. Unfortunately I suspect the US is just stuck with it.
- LtWorf 2y agoI find it very funny that in star trek, the orwell, star wars; the governing body has always 2 aliens per race because you have that weird 2 people from every state… so naturally the whole multiverse must be governed by the same absurd system :D
- rogerthis 2y agoWhy not use the Brazilian system? It's been working for a long time