Public trust demands open-source voting systems • Hacker News Board

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#51

Post by dogleash » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #18

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #2

Is paper considered open source?

These kinds of comments always annoy me a bit. It's 2025. 155,238,302 people voted in the most recent US presidential election. It is entirely silly that we expect people to manually count that many ballots in this day and age. And count them without errors! (And yes, we can make those paper ballots machine-readable, but you still need software to count them.) Yes, I know: before computers and other mechanical system…

> I don't think those problems are insurmountable.

As soon as you try to be more clever than electronic counting of paper ballots, yes they are.

You can either audit the count by replaying the input event stream, or you can't.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#52

Post by fabian2k » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

Yizahi wrote: post #43

jcarrano wrote: post #20

Just use paper, count by hand, and abolish mail-in ballots and you should be fine.

And enforce national photo ID finally, like all other countries. I know this is a REP take, but they are absolutely correct in this particular issue.

In other countries everyone has an ID automatically. That is a requirement to use IDs for voting. You need a proper national ID system, not the hodgepodge of random identity documents the US uses.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#53

Post by pie_flavor » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

ncr100 wrote: post #24

teddyh wrote: post #13

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=w3_0x6oaDmI > • Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs >

(META: Anyone want to summarize the 20 minutes of video, and make it more relevant to this conversation than simply, "No." ?)

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.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#54

Post by teddyh » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #14

teddyh wrote: post #13

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=w3_0x6oaDmI > • Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs >

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 wi…

User name checks out.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#55

Post by fabian2k » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

bkummel wrote: post #50

fabian2k wrote: post #9

The software doesn't matter that much. If you want to use voting machines, you need to create a paper trail with them that can be audited. Auditing the software isn't enough if you can't reliably verify that this is actually what's running on the machines, or if the machines weren't otherwise tampered with in some way.

Why go through all of that? If you vote on paper ballots, the paper trail is baked in.

I prefer paper ballots. I'm in a country that uses paper ballots exclusively. I didn't make that argument here because the topic was voting machines.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#56

Post by gmueckl » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #14

teddyh wrote: post #13

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=w3_0x6oaDmI > • Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs >

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 wi…

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.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#57

Post by hannofcart » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

bkummel wrote: post #48

okanat wrote: post #23

Public trust cannot exist if the voting system requires *any* expertise. Voting systems should be idiot-proof. If you cannot explain how voting system is manipulation-proof to a 7 year old, your voting system is untrustworthy. This means anything more complex than a pen or a stamp on an approved paper is too complex.

True! In The Netherlands, where I live, we still vote on paper ballots. The ballots are counted by hand. The counting is public, anyone can go and observe the counting.

This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#58

Post by oivey » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

I don’t really understand the blind trust in paper in person ballots. Historically and currently, elections are stolen all the time whether paper or not. Off the top of my head some recent ones: election irregularities in Venezuela and the Russian referendums in Crimea.

If people in power want to cheat, they will. Shuffling around the tech isn’t going to do all that much to change things.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#59

Post by ether3ric » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

I've been saying it for years. We are more than capable of creating an official USA app that every American can download, test their knowledge on a topic, and vote. If X.com can implement polling, why can't the US Gov? In my opinion, they want to portray the illusion of democracy, not actually implement it.

Re: Public trust demands open-source voting systems

#60

Post by ndiddy » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

Areibman wrote: post #26

From a process perspective, how can a constituent know with absolute certainty that their vote was counted, every voter in the system was legal, and the final tally was authentic? Especially when there's no way to even audit what you voted for after the fact? Every time I try to get to the bottom of this, it always boils down to "trust the system" which makes me uneasy.

Not being able to audit what you voted for after the fact is by design. Otherwise, it would make buying votes a viable strategy since you'd be able to show them who you voted for. Yes, taking a picture of the ballot is an option, but you can always ask for another ballot paper after you take the photo. Where I live, you're not even allowed to have a camera out in the same room as a voting booth for this exact reason.

IMO the best solution here is to have electronic counting with an auditable and traceable paper trail as a backup. Every time I've voted for the past 10 years has been like this. First, I get a ballot paper from the front desk and stick it into an airgapped ballot marking machine. I then make my choices and the machine prints them onto the ballot paper. I'm able to read the paper and verify that it matches the choices I made. I then stick it into a separate airgapped ballot counting machine, which scans my ballot and deposits the paper copy into a sealed box. The entire process of setting up the machines, transporting the paper ballots, and reading the results from the machines is cross-checked and signed off on by volunteer poll workers from both parties.