Belenios: Verifiable online voting system

Do you feel the need to audit the ballot process when casting a vote? Do you wait until the station is closed and watch the people count the votes? Do you know what to look for in regards to ballot tampering? Do you know who is allowed to count the votes?

I think that the details of the vote will indeed be opaque to most voters, but I think that's the case right now for most of us. As a voter you must have some trust in the process and in the fact that the correct auditors have vetted it. Hopefully it's going to get there for electronic voting some day.

I think you are severely overestimating the turnover for ballots. Yes, presidential elections might get ~50%, but anything else does not. The capability of having ballots cast from your own device would allow for more in depth participation into issues which currently are mostly ignored: local politics and even exercising the democratic process at national legislature level. When everyone can vote easily, they hardly need a bunch of corrupt old men in parliament to vote for them.

No, that's wrong. Democracy is a process involving the entire population of a country. A vote must be a process carried out by individual citizens to be trustworthy; if we delegate that to machines maintained by the government—because nobody else would be able to do so both trustable and professional—we'd create an incentive for the government to manipulate the system to stay in power.

If, in turn, elections are organised as distributed, local, and highly public countings, that get aggregated up to the final tally, citizens stay in control of their votes. Poll workers in a county may not count the votes of another county themselves, but they know there will be other volunteers all over the country doing so. It is extremely hard to manipulate a large-scale movement of politically inclined volunteers, and they can rely on that.

We cannot hand control over the vote to the government we possibly want to vote out. By reducing the massively distributed trust to a handful of computer wizards, we remove transparency from voting, turning it into a sham event that can be orchestrated by those in power to their liking.

>in person voting appears to have least drawbacks

Citation needed.

Specifically, what are the drawbacks of mail-in voting compared to in-person voting?

>Mail-in system is used in some countries

The US is one of those some countries.

And in the US, with a long history of voter disenfranchisement and an abysmally low voter turnouts, where the election day is always a workday, mail-in voting is absolutely the best system currently in use, by a long shot.

Its benefit of being actually available and removing many of the artificial barriers to voting that exist across the US far outweighs any disadvantages it may have over in-person voting.

These barriers include:

-people having difficulty to vote on a workday

-difficulty getting to the polls

-lack of polling places in "undesirable" neighborhoods (and super long lines as a result)

-varied ID laws

-etc

Not coincidentally, the party that openly aims to decrease voter turnout for their benefit also opposes mail-in voting.

Nobody says that in-person voting should not be available. But it absolutely should not (and rarely is) the only option.

Unfortunately, its availability across the US is limited through the efforts of the aforementioned political party.

I think in your thesis you make some interesting points on how E-Voting systems differ. But I have critizism. Let me paraphrase your points:

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

2. Understanding these handwritten symbols is harder than understanding the electronic system, because of that ambiguity

3. People understand the paper ballot system, but there are some statistical checks and security measures that they don't understand or know of, so their knowledge of the paper system is superficial

4. Trust in voting systems does not primarily arise from understandability but from trust in other people. To quote: your grandmum doesn’t have to become an expert cryptographer in order to trust a system like X. She just has to believe that cryptography experts exist and at least one of them would speak out if this transparent voting system was not as secure as the election officials claim

I don't want to question your thesis here, but I teach electronics and programming at a University level and points 1 and 2 are ridiculous and maybe even disingenuous. Sure, I understand that for a certain type of mind a digital/electronic system feels less ambigous and more clear. But most people are not like that – not even among academics – not even among academics that involve themselves with technology.

Point 3 is a rethorical trick that – if applied equally to E-Voting would be a strong argument against it. Yeah sure people don't understand X completely so lets do Y which is one-thousand magnitudes more complex is not an argument in favour of Y even if phrased in such a way.

Point 4 is the actual thought we disagree about, but given the unscientific nature of the 3 arguments before I can't simply trust you that you did research here (there are no sources cited that strengthen your point either). So as it is you just stated the opinion, as I stated the opposite. Sure, paper ballot elections are not dead simple, but any living being with basic understanding of object permanence could veryify a ballot isn't manipulated by just standing next to it. Meanwhile with computers you have to delegate that trust. 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 important thing to understand about agreeable consent is that a person's willingness to subject themselves to the will of a democratically elected majority is directly linked to their trust into the process. Your voting system has to produce that trust even if voters don't want to trust the process. The surest way to do that is to get a part of them involved into the process – ideally not always the same people. If then a single poll watcher claims a thing and 400 others that have been present plus three trusted NGOs can claim otherwise the election is not in question. Someone will have to convince me this works for E-Voting with a bit more than rethorical tricks.

Note that I am not against E-Voting per se. I just don't think the highest stake elections which have the potential to shift political powers should be electronic/computerized.