5 ms·

I've never seen the need for voting machines, even if they were open source and not plagued by scandals constantly. Counting votes can be done mostly in paralle

I've never seen the need for voting machines, even if they were open source and not plagued by scandals constantly. Counting votes can be done mostly in parallel. If you can't get enough volunteers and auditors to watch them then you have other problems a machine would likely make worse. In Australia we rarely have to wait long for the result and our Senate voting is fairly complex. It's even crazier when people try to push the speed benefits for things like the US presidential election where those elected don't even take office for weeks after the polling day. Although the ancient Athenians were not Luddites - they had an elegant machine to randomise a large stratified sample of the population for jury duty and water clocks to time speeches - for the actual votes they just used pebbles or pieces of metal. That's because counting something up is simply not that complex and shouldn't be made complex unnecessarily just to pad the CV of some electoral commissioner or pad the wallet of the company making the machines.

serge2k 11y ago
accuracy is one reason. Would voting machines have solves Florida in 2000? You could (in theory) also get better accounting of votes and detect oddities.
- ajdlinux 11y ago
  Didn't (mechanical) voting machines cause the Florida 2000 debacle?
speeder 11y ago
I am from Brazil... Here voting machines don't print the votes, only the machines can "count", and the source and hardware are not open to inspection. Also, recently the government started to rollout a system where you can only vote by using a biometric fingerprint scanner on the machine. To me the machine has a very clear purpose: do nefarious stuff, and NOT help the elections (Brazil electoral court always makes a point of expending money to PR about how great it is that we can count 99% of presidential election votes in 40 minutes after the end of the elections... but that is useless, here the elections, for all elected positions, happen MONTHS before anyone take office).
arkem 11y ago
As a fellow Australian I would love voting machines to encourage below the line senate voting and to allow even faster tabulation of results. I'd argue that we're stretching the limits of paper ballots with the current senate situation. There are significant chances for it to go wrong, like when the Western Australian senate election had to be rerun after the High Court voided the previous result due to lost ballots[1]. Even if machines had the same problems as paper they it could be faster and cheaper to recover from them.. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate_special_election_in_Western_Australia,_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate_special_elec...
- tacticus 11y ago
  Except voting machines have a huge collection of their own problems like being much easier to compromise and much lower security
  - arkem 11y ago
    I'd say that they have different security problems rather than more.
    - NickNameNick 11y ago
      They have unmanageable security problems rather than manageable ones. When I look at a ballot paper, I can see that it is what it is. When I stand in front of a voting machine, there is no was to validate that it's running the software that it's supposed to run. No way to validate it hasn't been tampered with, no way for the election scrutineers to validate it hasn't been tampered with before counting. With a paper ballot, the scrutineers can lock the ballot box, and ensure it remains unopened and untampered with, aside from depositing ballots in it, simply by watching it.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  To thin the herd on the Senate ballots they could just up the number of people required to register. They could also up the deposit a bit, although doing that by too much would be undemocratic. I personally don't have a problem with a large ballot, and nobody I've spoken to has one either. I understand Antony Green has a bee in his bonnet about it, but is there actual evidence that the large ballots are a problem? I haven't seen any. A machine approach to the Senate ballot would also be problematic as you'd also have to display the candidates across multiple views on an app. Should said app have a "next" button or should we swipe to the next "card"? Should it scroll? Will older people know how to scroll it? Is some "GUI rockstar" going to inflict a drag-and-drop candidate ordering on us? Which OS are we going to use? Is the nation where the hardware is made democratic or does it have to be made here? I can see it ballooning in complexity as many government run IT projects do. The paper ballot, perhaps with fewer parties via the mechanisms I highlight above, is solid and proven. Existing electronic voting systems provide a guide for what to expect. There have been US cases where the touch screen was so poorly calibrated it was selecting the wrong candidate, cases of election officials taking machines home (machines later proven to be hackable with that kind of access), in some places there weren't enough machines provisioned. The security question extends to the machines for weeks before the election, they have to be protected for all that time. And now you need the equivalent of IT support services at every polling booth, or a significant increase in the costs of training the volunteers. I can't see how all of that, on top of R&D and the cost of the machines, is going to cost less. Also how do you handle a power outage on polling day? Or do we need to add more complexity, and fork out even more money, to have batteries sufficient to handle a whole day power outage? What happens when someone pours some water into a machine with 10,000 votes in it near the end of the day? You can't say, as you did in your reply to someone else, voting machines have “different security problems rather than more”. They are more complex, more complex things can indeed have more security problems. A computer has more potential security problems than a piece of paper. That's why the Russian FSO, who know a thing or two about security, are buying typewriters.[1] Most times these arguments boil down to the machines having to print out a paper ballot or receipt to be credible, anyone who has dealt with computers and printing knows what a barrel of laughs it's going to be to have people dealing with jammed machines or machines that are out of paper. I can picture an irate voter having their ballot secrecy violated as their crumpled ballot is pulled out of the slot by some highly paid technician. And given the spacing of elections, the machines would become outdated quickly so we'd have to go through the whole rigmarole of designing or commissioning new ones every three or four electoral cycles. Finally, I don't think we should underestimate the benefits of getting large numbers of people involved in the counting. There is a social good in getting those volunteers to become knowledgeable about the process. They carry that civic knowledge around with them so it's available when someone needs the Senate voting explained to them at a weekend BBQ or someone wants to run an election for a role in a non-profit or a club. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23282308 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23282308
ajdlinux 11y ago
Note that in Australia, we do use electronic counting in the Senate. (cf http://easycount.mjec.net http://easycount.mjec.net)
- mrmincent 11y ago
  I voted online in the last nsw election as I had moved states and forgotten to update my details. To implement my civic duty while in underpants truly made me feel like I was living in the future.
_jgdh 11y ago
Worth remembering that although Athens was a large city, only 30-50k people had the right to vote (out of a total of 300k). Your other example of Australia has only 24 million people and I'm sure it suits the country's needs well. However, in larger countries like India(1200m) America(322m) and Brazil(202m) an electronic solution might be better. If implemented correctly (ie without fraud), there are huge potential benefits * Cost savings. India's general election cost the taxpayer $600m and state elections will cost a similar amount. If there are early elections, the cost is repeated. * Turnout. Right now certain sections of society in any country are more likely to turn out, to the detriment of democracy. A large part of election campaigning is getting people to turn up to the booths. This is so hard that rarely are the turnout percentages higher than 60%, which is a pitiful number. If we could make it simpler and quicker to vote, this would be less of an issue. To be honest I don't know how we would implement such a system. Certainly today's machines that rely on secrecy for security are a joke and should be replaced.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  Putting the Athenians aside, because their system is significantly different and different throughout the 500BC~338BC period as well, counting happens in parallel so there is no substantial difference between Australia's 24 million and India's 1.2 billion. The resources of the nation for counting, volunteers and money, scale with the population as well remember. The only difference is the final step, which is fairly trivial. Even if you had an election with a population equal to everyone on Earth it wouldn't be that different, there isn't any meaningful scaling problem. I don't think there will be cost savings, and these machines will need to be replaced regularly as well so it won't be a one-off cost. And the present system isn't really expensive as elections aren't held every year, so that $600m price tag for the Indian election has to be weighed against the GDP of an entire electoral cycle of five years. We are talking about a price tag of around $120m a year for India then, against a GDP per annum of almost two trillion (if not higher, I am just going by 1.87 trillion for 2013). Per capita that's something like just under 10 cents a year from each Indian. I somehow doubt an IT project, which also has to accommodate all of India's many languages and scripts, is going to make a significant saving on that. I am not aware of any research linking voting machines to turnout, have you got a source for that? I imagine some older people might even get frustrated and stay away. Australia has something like ~95% turnout through implementing a small fine for not voting (the tasty BBQs at many polling stations may also have an effect). There are also limited polling booths open before the election for those that expect to not be able to vote on the day. So the benefits just aren't there, and as you say yourself "I don't know how we would implement such a system".
sliverstorm 11y ago
We think/hope we can make a system that is impervious to fraud (or perhaps reduces the attack surface to easily manageable levels). Paper & human counting systems are always imperfect. I think that's the root of it, the combined desires to "solve it with technology" and the "strive for perfection". Whether we can actually do that, is not certain.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
There simply are no valid arguments for voting machines. Speed is irrelevant, there's no reason why tallying the votes desperately needs to take a few hours less. There are only two motives for voting machines: commercial interests and the desire to obscure the voting process. Neither of these should be trusted with foundations of the democratic vote. On the latter subject: because the transparency of the voting process is so fundamental to democracy, most countries had laws in place that first needed to be scrapped or mutilated to allow voting machines in the first place. The people who wrote these laws were neither stupid nor Luddites. Ironically, we've always send observers to third world countries and former dictatorships to judge whether their elections are truly free and democratic, using criteria that would never allow for voting machines to obfuscate the process. For starter, it would make such neutral observation pointless. I'm lucky I live in country (Netherlands) that has abolished voting machines years ago. (After a campaign against them led by by old school hackers.) (There's one movement in the Netherlands that openly advocates a return to voting machines. This movement is lead by Dutch mayors. The Netherlands is rather unique in the fact that mayors are not elected but appointed by political manoeuvring, which has been subject of debate for a long time. I do not believe these things to be a coincidence.)
ghoul2 11y ago
I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to count of the order of 600 million(!) votes. Each with potential challenge from a partisan, validation, security. The costs and logistics were a nightmare. After polling, it used to take days just to get all the ballot boxes to centralized counting arenas. The machinery for the counting alone endedup involving about a million people! India has very strict election codes - how many voters to a booth (few hundreds), how far a voter can be required from his place of residence to polling station (3 miles max), etc. We also do not require "registration" before polling like in the US for example. Once you are 18 and have obtained a voter ID, you can simply walk into a polling booth on the day and vote. Indian Election Commission took a pioneering lead in using technology for polling - We have had near-universal electronic polling for 25+ years now. The trouble with the "moderm" voting machines is that they are way to complex and try to do too much. Indian design went the other way. Security of paper ballots was already an understood and mostly solved problem. The machines are simple - more in the league of a 8-bit microcontroller with 16 push buttons and 4x7 segment LED display. very old school. The machines rely on physical security. They cannot be opened without breakage, physical seals can be applied to their "reset" and "count" buttons, and access to them is controlled the same way as access to paper ballots and boxes would have been controlled. This allows even a poor country to deploy the order of half a million voting machines! There are of course issues - there is no paper trail for example, which as a concept has never even arisen in Indian electoral design debates. I am not sure I am myself sold on the need for them - I do see the importance, but its not an absolute. EVMs built on top for high end PCs, with Windows and millions of lines of custom code, manufactured by people who also build Slot machines (in the US atleast) is at least to my mind - simply another case of overdesign and overspending - typical of defence and government contracts. When security, reliability, are concerned, simplicity and even non-technical solutions combined with technology work better than compicated technology.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  "I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to could of the order of 600 million(!) votes." This scale argument is totally spurious. Australia is one of the older continuous democracies so we have had a lot of population growth since federation, vote counting hasn't slowed down each time the population has doubled (indeed I'd suspect it's gotten faster as people have telephones and over 100 years of institutional experience at the federal level). Counting votes scales because as the population scales you have more money and more people to count votes. Let's say you have two paid electoral officials and 100 volunteers for each 10,000 voters. A country with 20,000 people would have four paid electoral officials and 200 volunteers, a country with 1 million people would have 200 paid officials and 10,000 volunteers. Australia also has some of the most spread out and remote polling stations in the world due to our being much larger geographically than India so there goes that argument as well. Additionally it's far easier to get a cardboard ballot booth and paper ballots to various remote places than it is to get machines there. Not only do you have to lug machines around they need electricity and maintenance personnel. The Indian machines run on batteries, but how long until they need replacing if they are in storage for 5 years between each use? A more complex machine would need a lot more power than batteries could provide as well, and more complex machines would be needed. The Indian voting machines are having to add a printed validation, at great cost and adding complexity, so they are acknowledged as being flawed in their current state.
Arnt 11y ago
Depends on the threat model. In India, the threats were things like the ability to print enough forms without leaks to counterfeiters, transport them on Indian roads, store them until polling day in villages where no doors have locks, and so on. And while the counting was highly parallel and scrutinised by auditors, it was also painful, because here was a rule along the lines of "both vote forms and counters' hands must remain visible from when votes are unsealed until counting is complete". Sometimes the counters went for more than 24h without a bathroom break, so would you volunteer to count? I wrote a blog posting about it, http://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/indian-election-machines http://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/indian-election-machines, but the most relevant point here is: When you consider security issues, START WITH THE THREAT MODEL. Always. And it's not the same threat model everywhere.
- gphilip 11y ago
  You forgot Booth Capturing, the most blatant threat of all [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing
  - Arnt 11y ago
    I didn't mention it here. I did in the blog post, which can be a bit longer than a HN comment.

serge2k 11y ago

accuracy is one reason. Would voting machines have solves Florida in 2000? You could (in theory) also get better accounting of votes and detect oddities.

ajdlinux 11y ago
Didn't (mechanical) voting machines cause the Florida 2000 debacle?

speeder 11y ago

I am from Brazil... Here voting machines don't print the votes, only the machines can "count", and the source and hardware are not open to inspection. Also, recently the government started to rollout a system where you can only vote by using a biometric fingerprint scanner on the machine. To me the machine has a very clear purpose: do nefarious stuff, and NOT help the elections (Brazil electoral court always makes a point of expending money to PR about how great it is that we can count 99% of presidential election votes in 40 minutes after the end of the elections... but that is useless, here the elections, for all elected positions, happen MONTHS before anyone take office).

arkem 11y ago

As a fellow Australian I would love voting machines to encourage below the line senate voting and to allow even faster tabulation of results. I'd argue that we're stretching the limits of paper ballots with the current senate situation. There are significant chances for it to go wrong, like when the Western Australian senate election had to be rerun after the High Court voided the previous result due to lost ballots[1]. Even if machines had the same problems as paper they it could be faster and cheaper to recover from them.. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate_special_election_in_Western_Australia,_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate_special_elec...

tacticus 11y ago
Except voting machines have a huge collection of their own problems like being much easier to compromise and much lower security
- arkem 11y ago
  I'd say that they have different security problems rather than more.
  - NickNameNick 11y ago
    They have unmanageable security problems rather than manageable ones. When I look at a ballot paper, I can see that it is what it is. When I stand in front of a voting machine, there is no was to validate that it's running the software that it's supposed to run. No way to validate it hasn't been tampered with, no way for the election scrutineers to validate it hasn't been tampered with before counting. With a paper ballot, the scrutineers can lock the ballot box, and ensure it remains unopened and untampered with, aside from depositing ballots in it, simply by watching it.
jkldotio 11y ago
To thin the herd on the Senate ballots they could just up the number of people required to register. They could also up the deposit a bit, although doing that by too much would be undemocratic. I personally don't have a problem with a large ballot, and nobody I've spoken to has one either. I understand Antony Green has a bee in his bonnet about it, but is there actual evidence that the large ballots are a problem? I haven't seen any. A machine approach to the Senate ballot would also be problematic as you'd also have to display the candidates across multiple views on an app. Should said app have a "next" button or should we swipe to the next "card"? Should it scroll? Will older people know how to scroll it? Is some "GUI rockstar" going to inflict a drag-and-drop candidate ordering on us? Which OS are we going to use? Is the nation where the hardware is made democratic or does it have to be made here? I can see it ballooning in complexity as many government run IT projects do. The paper ballot, perhaps with fewer parties via the mechanisms I highlight above, is solid and proven. Existing electronic voting systems provide a guide for what to expect. There have been US cases where the touch screen was so poorly calibrated it was selecting the wrong candidate, cases of election officials taking machines home (machines later proven to be hackable with that kind of access), in some places there weren't enough machines provisioned. The security question extends to the machines for weeks before the election, they have to be protected for all that time. And now you need the equivalent of IT support services at every polling booth, or a significant increase in the costs of training the volunteers. I can't see how all of that, on top of R&D and the cost of the machines, is going to cost less. Also how do you handle a power outage on polling day? Or do we need to add more complexity, and fork out even more money, to have batteries sufficient to handle a whole day power outage? What happens when someone pours some water into a machine with 10,000 votes in it near the end of the day? You can't say, as you did in your reply to someone else, voting machines have “different security problems rather than more”. They are more complex, more complex things can indeed have more security problems. A computer has more potential security problems than a piece of paper. That's why the Russian FSO, who know a thing or two about security, are buying typewriters.[1] Most times these arguments boil down to the machines having to print out a paper ballot or receipt to be credible, anyone who has dealt with computers and printing knows what a barrel of laughs it's going to be to have people dealing with jammed machines or machines that are out of paper. I can picture an irate voter having their ballot secrecy violated as their crumpled ballot is pulled out of the slot by some highly paid technician. And given the spacing of elections, the machines would become outdated quickly so we'd have to go through the whole rigmarole of designing or commissioning new ones every three or four electoral cycles. Finally, I don't think we should underestimate the benefits of getting large numbers of people involved in the counting. There is a social good in getting those volunteers to become knowledgeable about the process. They carry that civic knowledge around with them so it's available when someone needs the Senate voting explained to them at a weekend BBQ or someone wants to run an election for a role in a non-profit or a club. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23282308 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23282308

ajdlinux 11y ago

Note that in Australia, we do use electronic counting in the Senate. (cf http://easycount.mjec.net http://easycount.mjec.net)

mrmincent 11y ago
I voted online in the last nsw election as I had moved states and forgotten to update my details. To implement my civic duty while in underpants truly made me feel like I was living in the future.

_jgdh 11y ago

Worth remembering that although Athens was a large city, only 30-50k people had the right to vote (out of a total of 300k). Your other example of Australia has only 24 million people and I'm sure it suits the country's needs well. However, in larger countries like India(1200m) America(322m) and Brazil(202m) an electronic solution might be better. If implemented correctly (ie without fraud), there are huge potential benefits * Cost savings. India's general election cost the taxpayer $600m and state elections will cost a similar amount. If there are early elections, the cost is repeated. * Turnout. Right now certain sections of society in any country are more likely to turn out, to the detriment of democracy. A large part of election campaigning is getting people to turn up to the booths. This is so hard that rarely are the turnout percentages higher than 60%, which is a pitiful number. If we could make it simpler and quicker to vote, this would be less of an issue. To be honest I don't know how we would implement such a system. Certainly today's machines that rely on secrecy for security are a joke and should be replaced.

jkldotio 11y ago
Putting the Athenians aside, because their system is significantly different and different throughout the 500BC~338BC period as well, counting happens in parallel so there is no substantial difference between Australia's 24 million and India's 1.2 billion. The resources of the nation for counting, volunteers and money, scale with the population as well remember. The only difference is the final step, which is fairly trivial. Even if you had an election with a population equal to everyone on Earth it wouldn't be that different, there isn't any meaningful scaling problem. I don't think there will be cost savings, and these machines will need to be replaced regularly as well so it won't be a one-off cost. And the present system isn't really expensive as elections aren't held every year, so that $600m price tag for the Indian election has to be weighed against the GDP of an entire electoral cycle of five years. We are talking about a price tag of around $120m a year for India then, against a GDP per annum of almost two trillion (if not higher, I am just going by 1.87 trillion for 2013). Per capita that's something like just under 10 cents a year from each Indian. I somehow doubt an IT project, which also has to accommodate all of India's many languages and scripts, is going to make a significant saving on that. I am not aware of any research linking voting machines to turnout, have you got a source for that? I imagine some older people might even get frustrated and stay away. Australia has something like ~95% turnout through implementing a small fine for not voting (the tasty BBQs at many polling stations may also have an effect). There are also limited polling booths open before the election for those that expect to not be able to vote on the day. So the benefits just aren't there, and as you say yourself "I don't know how we would implement such a system".

sliverstorm 11y ago

We think/hope we can make a system that is impervious to fraud (or perhaps reduces the attack surface to easily manageable levels). Paper & human counting systems are always imperfect. I think that's the root of it, the combined desires to "solve it with technology" and the "strive for perfection". Whether we can actually do that, is not certain.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

There simply are no valid arguments for voting machines. Speed is irrelevant, there's no reason why tallying the votes desperately needs to take a few hours less. There are only two motives for voting machines: commercial interests and the desire to obscure the voting process. Neither of these should be trusted with foundations of the democratic vote. On the latter subject: because the transparency of the voting process is so fundamental to democracy, most countries had laws in place that first needed to be scrapped or mutilated to allow voting machines in the first place. The people who wrote these laws were neither stupid nor Luddites. Ironically, we've always send observers to third world countries and former dictatorships to judge whether their elections are truly free and democratic, using criteria that would never allow for voting machines to obfuscate the process. For starter, it would make such neutral observation pointless. I'm lucky I live in country (Netherlands) that has abolished voting machines years ago. (After a campaign against them led by by old school hackers.) (There's one movement in the Netherlands that openly advocates a return to voting machines. This movement is lead by Dutch mayors. The Netherlands is rather unique in the fact that mayors are not elected but appointed by political manoeuvring, which has been subject of debate for a long time. I do not believe these things to be a coincidence.)

ghoul2 11y ago

I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to count of the order of 600 million(!) votes. Each with potential challenge from a partisan, validation, security. The costs and logistics were a nightmare. After polling, it used to take days just to get all the ballot boxes to centralized counting arenas. The machinery for the counting alone endedup involving about a million people! India has very strict election codes - how many voters to a booth (few hundreds), how far a voter can be required from his place of residence to polling station (3 miles max), etc. We also do not require "registration" before polling like in the US for example. Once you are 18 and have obtained a voter ID, you can simply walk into a polling booth on the day and vote. Indian Election Commission took a pioneering lead in using technology for polling - We have had near-universal electronic polling for 25+ years now. The trouble with the "moderm" voting machines is that they are way to complex and try to do too much. Indian design went the other way. Security of paper ballots was already an understood and mostly solved problem. The machines are simple - more in the league of a 8-bit microcontroller with 16 push buttons and 4x7 segment LED display. very old school. The machines rely on physical security. They cannot be opened without breakage, physical seals can be applied to their "reset" and "count" buttons, and access to them is controlled the same way as access to paper ballots and boxes would have been controlled. This allows even a poor country to deploy the order of half a million voting machines! There are of course issues - there is no paper trail for example, which as a concept has never even arisen in Indian electoral design debates. I am not sure I am myself sold on the need for them - I do see the importance, but its not an absolute. EVMs built on top for high end PCs, with Windows and millions of lines of custom code, manufactured by people who also build Slot machines (in the US atleast) is at least to my mind - simply another case of overdesign and overspending - typical of defence and government contracts. When security, reliability, are concerned, simplicity and even non-technical solutions combined with technology work better than compicated technology.

jkldotio 11y ago
"I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to could of the order of 600 million(!) votes." This scale argument is totally spurious. Australia is one of the older continuous democracies so we have had a lot of population growth since federation, vote counting hasn't slowed down each time the population has doubled (indeed I'd suspect it's gotten faster as people have telephones and over 100 years of institutional experience at the federal level). Counting votes scales because as the population scales you have more money and more people to count votes. Let's say you have two paid electoral officials and 100 volunteers for each 10,000 voters. A country with 20,000 people would have four paid electoral officials and 200 volunteers, a country with 1 million people would have 200 paid officials and 10,000 volunteers. Australia also has some of the most spread out and remote polling stations in the world due to our being much larger geographically than India so there goes that argument as well. Additionally it's far easier to get a cardboard ballot booth and paper ballots to various remote places than it is to get machines there. Not only do you have to lug machines around they need electricity and maintenance personnel. The Indian machines run on batteries, but how long until they need replacing if they are in storage for 5 years between each use? A more complex machine would need a lot more power than batteries could provide as well, and more complex machines would be needed. The Indian voting machines are having to add a printed validation, at great cost and adding complexity, so they are acknowledged as being flawed in their current state.

Arnt 11y ago

Depends on the threat model. In India, the threats were things like the ability to print enough forms without leaks to counterfeiters, transport them on Indian roads, store them until polling day in villages where no doors have locks, and so on. And while the counting was highly parallel and scrutinised by auditors, it was also painful, because here was a rule along the lines of "both vote forms and counters' hands must remain visible from when votes are unsealed until counting is complete". Sometimes the counters went for more than 24h without a bathroom break, so would you volunteer to count? I wrote a blog posting about it, http://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/indian-election-machines http://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/indian-election-machines, but the most relevant point here is: When you consider security issues, START WITH THE THREAT MODEL. Always. And it's not the same threat model everywhere.

gphilip 11y ago
You forgot Booth Capturing, the most blatant threat of all [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing
- Arnt 11y ago
  I didn't mention it here. I did in the blog post, which can be a bit longer than a HN comment.