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No. Public trust demands no software or programmable hardware in the election process. • Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

• shadowgovt 1y ago
  Ironically, that results in worse count accuracy. Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Our eyes go glassy but we press on anyway. Machines are very good at doing that kind of tedious labor accurately. Whether human beings will put more trust in a system that we know will be wrong, but it's wrong for comfortable meat reasons, over a system that might be compromised but will be more accurate its more of a psychology question than a technical question though.
  • bkummel 1y ago
    You can introduce procedures to minimize the error to a point that it’s not significant anymore. Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    These system used for voting means that humans don't hand tally hundred of millions of votes. They tally those in a voting district only. Those them get aggregated with other districts and so on until the whole states and then the country is counted. The problem with the accuracy assumption of electronic voting is that a) its all coded without errors and b) someone hasn't deliberately but code into manipulate the vote numbers.
    • shadowgovt 1y ago
      We have good reason to believe a is true and b is false; the machines get tested to death before election day.
      • teddyh 1y ago
        As mentioned in the video, there is no amount of “testing” which could prove the absence of malicious software or hardware. None.
        • shadowgovt 1y ago
          That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing. If you're saying we should be writing voting machine code in ML and keeping the firmware in Fort Knox, I'm going to make the argument that it's a lot cheaper to do sampled hand-counts to check against machine error or tampering... Which we already do.
          • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
            > That pretty much undermines the entire concept of unit and integration testing. It doesn't because even with unit and integration testing, software still fails and get hacked/exploited on a regular basis. What's worse with software voting is that a single good exploit could affect all the votes.
            • shadowgovt 1y ago
              It really can't. What is the mechanism by which it could? Different states use different machines and each individual machine is airgapped. A general supply chain attack would show up in statistical sampling audits (i e. hand recounts of small numbers of ballots, which we already do).
  • teddyh 1y ago
    User name checks out.
    • jancsika 1y ago
      I mean, you left yourself open to that glib, low-effort criticism when you wrote this: > no software or programmable hardware That's obviously too stringent. Consider: 1. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet. 2. Precinct hand-counts every single paper ballot bubble sheet, then confirms the hand count by feeding all the ballots into an electronic bubble-sheet reader. Your claim is that #1 is more trustworthy than #2. That's an extraordinary claim that requires more evidence than two youtube links! Edit: to be clear, I want the requirement that all voting must be paper ballots like the human-readable bubble sheets mentioned above. But saying that no software or programmable hardware can be used "in the election process" is so extreme that it sounds like a parody of my own position.
      • shadowgovt 1y ago
        Indeed. That is what I was responding to; if I over-assumed the GP's position, my apologies. We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election). If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason alone) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception"). Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.
      • teddyh 1y ago
        If your proposed process is implemented, it will take about 5 seconds before the precinct realizes that they can just feed it all to the machine and sign whatever number which comes out as the “hand-counted” one. Especially as they will be dinged whenever their count differs from the machine, which will be assumed by their superiors to be more trustworthy. More seriously, even though some cars are programmable, I did not mean that nobody could use cars to transport ballot boxes. I obviously meant that the official results should be the manually-counted one; machines could conceivably be used to get interim results faster, and/or to double-check a count to see if it needs to be counted again. But I was serious about requiring absolutely no machines involved in the counting of the official results.
  • gmueckl 1y ago
    Human tallying is a source of errors, but it typically doesn't affect the outcome in major ways. This is more of an argument against large scale winner-takes-it-all election systems, as they have the least resilience against this kind of error. The main benefit of manual tallying is that election tampering at scale becomes a rather labor-intensive and physical process that is more likely to leave detectable traces. Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. If this was indeed caused by fraudulent voting software, it happened without leaving any other obvious traces of tampering.
    • lurk2 1y ago
      > Compare that to the the last US presidential election that has statistical oddities in machine-tallied voting results of kinds that have historically been shown to correlate with election fraud. When and where was this?
      • shadowgovt 1y ago
        It's being litigated, but in general the answer is there is not yet evidence that machine voting systems were compromised. - in New York there is statistical anomaly correlated with a couple small-town polling stations. Those towns are small enough that they have a huge population of one religion, and one explanation is that the Democrat party's perceived "soft on Israel" stance tilted 100% of voters in those locations away from supporting the Democrat presidential candidate. - in Pennsylvania a standard statistical analysis tool used to detect vote disruption suggested disruption occurred. The form of the disruption could be fraud, but it can also be things like voter intimidation (which was observed and reported in Philadelphia) and sudden discontinuity in voter behavior (the aforementioned "soft on Palestine" issue). Correlation does not imply causation, and the lack of evidence of tampering of the machines in the audit logs is lack of evidence of tampering of the machines, not indication that the audit logs were compromised.
  • floweronthehill 1y ago
    I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country. People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember. To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on. So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.
    • mariusor 1y ago
      Yet there are many ways in which paper ballots can be taken advantage of. As an example do a search for Eastern European Carousel Voting[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
      • okanat 1y ago
        It is not the paper ballots that's taken advantage of. They have no general public participation and opposition. The public simply do not give a damn about polling stations in places where Carousel voting is possible. There is no opposition observers or they cannot be because the examples in the Wikipedia page are dictatorships, not democracies. You cannot turn a dictatorship into democracy by voting. Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.
        • mariusor 1y ago
          > Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters Yeah, do that by hand please, without relying on electronic means. Paper ballots with "honour" based out of circumscription participation is not secure. My country also suffered from this issue and it's not an authoritarian regime. They fixed it by adding and checking IDs on a ballot participation list. Nobody explained how that works to the average voter. What I was trying to underscore is that even for something that's presented as simple and fool proof as paper ballots one can find vulnerabilities, especially when you're dealing with nation level threats. So in my opinion we shouldn't ask electronic ballots to be more security than what is already in wide use. And in fairness, electronic ballots don't need to be more (or as) secure as paper ballots, but 'mail in' ballots. If we can come up with a method that's as secure as mail ballots I'd call it a success, despite what Tom Scott says.
  • constantcrying 1y ago
    >Humans are actually quite bad at hand-tallying hundreds of millions of datapoints. Humans just need to be able to separate a few hundreds of ballots into a couple of piles. When introducing double checking this makes an incredibly rigorous process, which can be open to the public. This is the case here in Germany. Everything after that can be done by computers as all the data after that is published.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ncr100 1y ago
  (META: Anyone want to summarize the 20 minutes of video, and make it more relevant to this conversation than simply, "No." ?)
  • indymike 1y ago
    Too easy to cheat.
  • pie_flavor 1y ago
    Haven't watched it, but to summarize what I imagine someone aligned with me would say: A ballot's entire lifecycle can be watched as it goes from the stack to the booth to the dropbox to the counting pile. Poll watchers are vestigial as soon as voting machines are involved; it becomes the honor system, which is not trustworthy enough in a system where the parties do not trust each other. The best you have is 'we have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud', a carefully couched statement from media organs you don't necessarily trust either. You, a (Democrat/Republican), can trust a system with paper ballots, because people from your party will observe all relevant details of the process everywhere the process occurs.
    • babyshake 1y ago
      The thing is, a software based voting system with a sufficient number of checks and balances preventing tampering seems to be a lot more trustworthy to me than human poll watchers and workers. It wouldn't surprise me at this point that there may be moles in parties that are secretly from the other party. And the other related issue is that in 2025, it simply should be possible to vote from your phone in a way that verifies your identity, if you'd like, using the faceId/fingerprint biometrics that most smartphones from recent years have.
      • fmbb 1y ago
        An election needs to be trusted by everyone, and explainable to all voters. It does not help that you believe it is safe. You have to trust the compiler, and the chips, and everything, and convince all voters it works. Paper ballots are fine. It is not complicated at all and an election is the one thing you just cannot get wrong in a representative democracy. It can cost a bit and you only do it once every few years.
• bogwog 1y ago
  I agree that paper ballots are better, but also agree that electronic voting, when used, should be open source.
  • lucideer 1y ago
    I agree insofar as ensuring all e-voting implementation attempts are open source will enable us to more comprehensively prove that it is a fundamentally bad idea.
  • jonathanstrange 1y ago
    I wouldn't trust any democracy that uses electronic voting. It is not possible to secure voting machines and make them democratically accountable.
    • ItsHarper 1y ago
      Particularly where the machines are all of the same type or connected to the Internet. If
    • ElevenLathe 1y ago
      I agree but worry about what this implies for accounting and other financial systems. If we can't trust the voting machines to tell us what the vote totals are, how can we trust the bank computers to tell us who owns what?
      • salawat 1y ago
        Now you're getting it. Trust is the overriding problem, and it is a people problem, not a tech one.
        • jonathanstrange 1y ago
          For clarification, my position is that electronic voting is not secure and cannot be made sufficiently secure to safeguard against catastrophic failure and abuse. That's orthogonal to the issue whether voters trust in the voting mechanism, which is also important.
• oceansky 1y ago
  Brazil and India are doing fine
  • teddyh 1y ago
    Placed 56 and 41, respectively, on the Democracy Index.
    • cies 1y ago
      US and France are marked as "Flawed democracy" (nr. 28 and 26 respectively). Enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
      • yunnpp 1y ago
        I did certainly enjoy, thank you.
        • cies 1y ago
          Most welcome. :)
  • fmbb 1y ago
    How do you know? How can their citizens know? They don’t have stellar democracy grades from The Economist’s index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index and both seem worse off in the last ten years than the ten years before.
  • gus_massa 1y ago
    Are they using only the electronic version or the mixed version? We used the mixed version in some elections here in Argentina. The paper trail is harder to fake, and the electronic part close a few problems of theonly paper version.
  • matheusmoreira 1y ago
    Haha no. Voting machines caused absurd amounts of political instability here in Brazil. It's essentially become wrongthink to question the system. Our elected representatives have tried to add a paper trail to the machines twice now and it was ruled unconstitutional for total bullshit reasons. Our former president was banned from future presidential races because he questioned the machines. We have a judge loudly proclaiming that the machines are UNQUESTIONABLE with such unwavering pride you'd think he'd have the balls to start a billion dollar bug bounty and post it here on HN. He only allows you to "audit" the system by appointment behind closed doors and the only tools you're allowed to bring with you is a pen and a piece of paper. People found issues even with these restrictions. There are people protesting to this day, laymen asking for source code, completely unaware of the existence of supply chain attacks and the fact the source code would prove nothing and serve only to humiliate them. We have former US president Biden's top CIA guy telling our former president to stop questioning the machines, wouldn't be surprised if they had access to this shit. Germany did it right: voting machines are unconstitutional because citizens do not understand it. Elections must be fully auditable by the average person. This is the correct stance.
• estimator7292 1y ago
  Aren't most paper ballots processed by machine anyway? Every ballot I've ever cast has gone through something akin to a Scantron machine. The cost of human labor to count all ballots by hand will be enormous. Probably worth it I suppose, but this really is something that should be primarily automated. But again, trust in software. Sigh, why can't we just have nice things?
  • jerojero 1y ago
    Chile has a very good election system and there's basically no machine input in the process. What's important is being able to segment the population in enough voting places so that each voting place is maneaganle just by a small number of people. The Chilean system is scalable because you can always just add more voting places as the population grows. Usually these voting places are civic centres, stadiums, schools. It's a good system and generally for a presidential election we get the results in about 4 hours after voting ends.
  • ItsHarper 1y ago
    I'm much less concerned about automated vote counters, as long as they are not connected to the Internet, enough ballots are hand-reviewed to make sure that the values from the machine don't seem way off, and the specific type of counting machine isn't uniform across the whole election.
  • bell-cot 1y ago
    If your paper ballot are counted by simple, airgapped machines - that's both a vastly reduced attack surface, and is easy (if laborious) to physically audit.
  • abdullahkhalids 1y ago
    A single polling station usually only has a few thousand voters. During the day, polling officers at the station processed (signed/stamped/tore/etc) every single ballot that went into the boxes. They also verified every person's ID. When polling closes, why is it enormous human labor to count the votes, but all the processing during the day is not?
  • 1y ago
• mariusor 1y ago
  Posting those links without any insight from your side is just quoting dogma and, to me, it shows that you haven't really spent any time to consider the arguments. In my opinion shows that you lack imagination. Every problem Tom mentions can be worked on and overcome. Maybe not today, maybe not by the next big election, but we should still start now, rather than later. We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process, especially for the demographics that are currently not very involved, which are also the demographics that are more likely to adopt electronic methods of voting.
  • cheeseomlit 1y ago
    >We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.
    • mariusor 1y ago
      That's what democracy is though. If only the right people are allowed to vote then you have a problem because their definition can change on a dime.
      • cheeseomlit 1y ago
        I'm not advocating that people not be allowed to vote, I'm just pushing back on the dogma of more voter participation = better, IE. just because you can vote doesn't mean you should if you dont understand what you're voting for and don't really care enough to learn. Seeing the constant barrage of campaign ads every couple years made me think about it- Why does campaign financing matter, how do they turn money into votes anyways? The answer apparently is ads, but I see these bottom-of-the-barrel slop political advertisements and wonder how that trash could possibly have a measurable effect on the outcome of an election. But it must work, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on it. And the fact that elections can be meaningfully influenced by the amount of ads a campaign can run is a signal to me that the democratic process is broken in some fundamental way. The votes of well-informed constituents are drowned out by the more numerous cohorts of partisans, reactionaries, and the apathetic just going through the motions to fulfill their 'civic duty', so it seems to me that increasing voter participation without changing anything else is only going to exacerbate the problem
• standardUser 1y ago
  Belgium has been doing it for 25 years, though not without some issues. I'm happy to let other countries lead the way on this since we have a perfectly viable alternative.
• vandyswa 1y ago
  A solid starting point, but it's easy to lose sight of the other critical part of the puzzle--integrity of the voting rolls. High quality vote tabulation needs to start from voters, where _only_ legitimate voters vote, and each only votes (at most) once, after which yes, their vote is accurately tabulated.
  • tadfisher 1y ago
    Voter rolls are public information in the US; there are several watchdog groups that perform verification services and have done so for decades; and to date, none have uncovered the kind of large-scale voter fraud that would necessitate doing anything differently from what we do now. In fact, I'd argue that having 50 different voting systems with 50 different ways to prove eligibility makes our elections more resilient to large-scale voter fraud, even if it makes it more difficult to verify voter rolls wholesale.
• didibus 1y ago
  Crypto could be argued similarly no? But it seems to have sustained trust.
  • ItsHarper 1y ago
    Cryptocurrencies don't need to do things like make sure that no human gets more than one vote, only humans (no bots) from a specific part of the world get a vote, and keep votes secret. Blockchain is not the solution.
    • didibus 1y ago
      > Cryptocurrencies don't need to do things like make sure that no human gets more than one vote That's pretty much the problem they were designed to solve no? It's called the double spend problem, and it's crypto's big comp-sci innovation. The whole paper was about it.
      • tadfisher 1y ago
        The secret ballot requirement foils this. Transaction identities are well-known and public; voter identities are secret and unverifiable. Any attempt to link ballots with identities to prevent double-voting also reveals how someone voted.
        • didibus 1y ago
          Crypto identities are anonymous. I don't see the issue?
          • tadfisher 1y ago
            Crypto identities are identities, as much as human names or Social Security numbers. If you know who the identity represents, then you know that human's transaction history for all time on that blockchain. Ballots do not have any identifying information, intentionally. There is no tracking number or possible mechanism to de-anonymize a ballot back to the human who cast it. Notably, there is not even a unique identifier for a single ballot that could potentially be used to identify a person. Most importantly, there is no value that is unique to the ballot that I can use to verify that I am indeed the person who filled it out, so some nefarious organization could threaten me or my family to produce proof of how I voted. Or pay me, or influence me based on the outcome. So there is no "identity" that you can record in a blockchain to prevent that identity from casting two ballots in the same election.
• throwaway48476 1y ago
  An optical hollerith machine would be useful. It would sort paper ballots into buckets based on selection. It's relatively easy to flip through a stack of ballots and ensure that every one has the same selection. Saves the effort of hand sorting which is not error free.
• nostrademons 1y ago
  I'm watching him talk about the two key ingredients of an election (anonymity and trust, for those not watching the video) and thinking "We don't have those in U.S. elections". I live in California, where the voting method is vote-by-mail and you sign your ballot. That breaks anonymity right there, plus there's a barcode that matches address and ballot for traceability, so in theory anyone involved in the election process could look at my ballot, cross-reference against address, and figure out how I voted. In practice I've never heard of anyone being pressured or confronted based on how they voted, so my default assumption is this doesn't happen much or at all. But even broader, in the U.S. your party registration is public information. That's why whenever there's a political shooting, the media always says "He was a registered Republican" or "registered Democrat" or "was not registered to vote". And this mechanism is actively and publicly being exploited to alter elections. Since the U.S. is a two-party system and party membership is public, you have a fairly good idea how each precinct is going to vote before they vote, and can gerrymander maps to get the outcomes you want. Plenty of trust issues in physical ballot transfer as well. California is vote-by-mail, but that assumes the postal service is a reliable carrier, while there was just a recent news story [1] about ballots being stolen. Before I lived in California, I was in Massachusetts, where we voted on 1930s-era lever voting machines where you hit a lever down and it marks a paper ballot without you ever seeing the real ballot. Between elections, these were stored backstage at the local middle school, so a mechanically-inclined middle schooler with knowledge of how an upcoming election's ballots would be formatted (and we did mock elections in middle school) could have rigged the machines to deliver the local precinct to their preferred candidate. The useful points in the video were basically that decentralization and redundancy are what make physical elections hard to rig: you have to hack multiple locations to influence the overall election, and at each point you have multiple eyes watching you. He sets up the contrast with software voting, where you have the same software running on each machine, and even if the software is open-source, you can't be sure that the rest of the stack it's running on is secure (an oblique reference to the Ken Thompson Hack [2]). But decentralization and redundancy are properties that you can introduce into software systems just as easily as real-wold systems. The KTH can be countered through Diverse Double-Compiling, for example [3]. zkStarks and digital signatures give you ability to prove that you authored something without revealing what that something is or who you are. The importance of client diversity for the security of the network as a whole has been well-known in the filesharing and crypto worlds. And anyone who has worked in Big Tech, aviation, or telecom could tell you that having multiple paths to success that are developed by independent teams is important for any computer system that is in a safety- or reliability-critical area. [1] https://www.almanacnews.com/election/2025/10/14/ballots-stolen-from-mailboxes-in-san-mateo-county/ https://www.almanacnews.com/election/2025/10/14/ballots-stol... [2] https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html [3] https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/ https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/
• jnxx 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ Here in Germany, the Pirate Party has discussed the topic at length, since they (1) love voting innovations, and (2) have generally good knowledge on CS stuff, and so far I think no real solution is known for anonymous, confidential, secure digital voting with verifiable results, which is easy to reach with paper ballots and public observers of the counting.