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Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

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Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#121

Post by creata »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #75
maxerickson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US overwhelmingly uses paper voting (often paired with electronic tabulation). We can't "move back", it's where we are. Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper.

>Electronic tabulation introduces little risk when the ballots are paper. Do European and other first world countries favor electronic tabulation? Is it possible that introduction of all electronic factors reduce trust?

For their upper house elections (which can have giant ballots), Australia uses computers in its counting, but there are humans in the process. [Here's a video from the Austalian Electoral Commission.](https://youtu.be/9AqN-Y25qQo)

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#123

Post by p-e-w »

dstroot wrote: post #107
gpt5 wrote: post #5

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter. Moving to internet voting will further…

I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, audi…

Elections in most countries involve tens of thousands of volunteers for running ballot stations and counting votes.

That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level.

Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system is perfectly secure in a technological sense.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#124

Post by boredatoms »

robomartin wrote: post #112
piou wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the U.S. votes on paper: https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ . Most of the rest of the country votes using Ballot Marking Devices that produce paper ballots; less than 5% of the population lives somewhere where the only or default choice is electronic voting.

[flagged]

We’re less worried about a low-scale low impact fraud my many people that is unlikely to alter results, than a systematic mass fraud by few people who can choose a result

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#126

Post by golem14 »

liveoneggs wrote: post #37
gpt5 wrote: post #5

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter. Moving to internet voting will further…

Just do both like we do here in GA. You vote on a computer, it prints out a piece of paper, you walk the paper over to some kind of scanner, and then it is deposited into a giant trash can. (maybe they keep the paper records, idk) - these are the dominion systems. (memories..) When I lived in NYC there was a giant lever you got to use - it was pretty fun - but positioning the actual paper was kind of tricky. I think…

These "ads" are hilarious:

https://rcareaga.com/dieboldvar/adworks.htm

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#127

Post by Vecr »

tamimio wrote: post #53

I think this relies on the old argument that anything connected to the internet is potentially insecure. While it might have some truth, practically we all do very sensitive stuff securely while connected to the internet. The risk is there, always, but you put all the measures to mitigate it and even prevent it. The idea that a malware could be on a phone “altering things automatically” feels like a 90s FUD cliche. I…

Why is it FUD? It's a real thing any competent programming team could implement.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#128

Post by droopyEyelids »

dstroot wrote: post #107
gpt5 wrote: post #5

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature. When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter. Moving to internet voting will further…

I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, audi…

You're not securing your banking details from the bank. The people running the elections are a probable adversary during elections, though.

That makes software really unsuitable.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#129

Post by dylan604 »

autoexec wrote: post #101
velcrovan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minnesota has a better system. You fill in a paper ballot using a pen, and the paper ballot gets optically scanned. Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens, it makes it extremely cheap to stand up more polling places with more booths, since only one tabulator is needed; the booths themselves can just be little standing tables with privacy protectors.

This really is the best way to do it. Scantron gives fast results and you get a paper physical record which shows the actual ballot exactly as it was presented to the voter along with what their vote was.

How many people spend time making their selections on the computer, then compare every single selection on the print out? Deniers could say the computer randomly prints votes to skew in certain candidate/party direction knowing not everyone would catch it.

all it would take is one person saying their printed ballot does not match their specific selection, and the whole thing would become chaos.

Re: Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

#130

Post by velcrovan »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #103
velcrovan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minnesota has a better system. You fill in a paper ballot using a pen, and the paper ballot gets optically scanned. Besides avoiding any issues (real or imagined) with touchscreens, it makes it extremely cheap to stand up more polling places with more booths, since only one tabulator is needed; the booths themselves can just be little standing tables with privacy protectors.

This was common in Texas, but becomes challenging when one polling place serves voters that might have different elections to vote for - say, at a polling place on the line between two school districts or something like that. You can't just print one sheet of paper, and it to everyone, and call it a day. Toss in a few different jurisdictions that don't directly overlay each other, and the number of combinations becom…

That just sounds like you don’t have enough polling places.
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